LEARNING LANES

Until now, just about all of the people driving on British motorways have not been specifically trained for the purpose. As of now, the plan is that ‘learners’ will be allowed access to the motorway system, so their first venture down a sliproad won’t be a journey into the unknown.

Interest groups have been campaigning for this for decades, so the decision must be good news, mustn’t it?

I’m not so sure.

There’s a hell of a lot of theory involved in getting a licence to drive these days. Theory is all very well in theory, but believing what should occur theoretically is the quickest way to wind up in the soup.

A woman in a white Kia ahead of me on the M25 yesterday knew the theory of mirror, signal, manoeuvre, but she didn’t know the law of physics that says two white Kias cannot occupy the same space, so almost collided with the one passing her at  the time.

Another one in a Honda Jazz doggedly held on to the inside lane despite the fact that a homicidal lunatic in an articulated low loader was driving less than a car length behind her.

A bloke in a Toyota Land Cruiser simply stopped dead in front of me on the M20 slip road. A BMW made all its lane changes at forty-five degrees to the carriagway and a self-righteous dolt in a Mondeo cut across me to prove that I have no right to decide which lane to be in, before braking sharply to avoid running up the back of the lorry the rest of us knew was there.

Somebody told him you should always hew to the left hand lane and return to it as soon as you have passed something slower moving. This is largely nonsensical, and also dangerous.

The principle of motorways and dual carriageways is that everything is oriented in the same direction. If everyone is going forward at a similar rate, nothing too serious can occur.

But, if someone stops and those behind him or her have not left sufficient reaction space, the principle falls down.

And it doesn’t apply at all in lane changing, when the vehicle is moving at an angle to the direction of flow, and this is by far the most potentially dangerous factor in motorway driving.

Which is why you should keep lane changes to a minimum. If you can see that you will need to come out to pass another lorry a few hundred yards ahead, stay where you are until you can safely move back into the left hand lane and stay there.

It’s also why lane changing should be gradual, keeping the vehicle as close to the straight-ahead as possible, so that you flow with the traffic and maintain your space on the road.

It seems to have eluded the self-righteous that all the vehicles on the motorway at any one time will not fit in a single lane. That’s why the roads have several of them.

As it is, the nearside lane gets by far the most punishment because it is full of lorries.

If there are general rules for safety and good order, they are:

1. If a police car, an ambulance or a Belgian is coming up behind you at high velocity, get out of their way. If there’s no one anywhere behind you and the left lane is full of lorries, pick a lane you like and use that one.

2. Don’t leave it too late to overtake. If you know you’re going to have to do it, do it smoothly and early, and allow for those who habitually do leave it too late, so you can let them out or move out to another lane until they have passed and you can safely return.

It’s also no help to anyone if you’re in the nearside lane at a junction. Where the cost is justified, the Highways people designate the nearside lane as a sliproad extension. That’s because it’s a good idea and helps keep the flow going. If everyone who isn’t getting off moves out to lane two until both the off and on sliproads are cleared, it is best for all.

Yes, it’s important that drivers should experience the workings of motorways, but I would suggest that someone already experienced should take them out the first few times, so they can see the reality of what can happen, rather than someone’s theory of what should.

NHS Crisis: Patients is a Virtue

Every investigation into Britain’s embattled National Health Service asks us individually how much we have ‘cost’ the service from the cradle to the grave situation it now finds itself in.

Nobody seems to find this odd.

I don’t see any shock horror probes into how much tourists are costing the travel industry. When a tour operator collapses it blames everything from the value of the zloty to acts of God, but I never yet heard one blame its customers.

Customers are as much the life-blood of the NHS as they are in any other enterprise. The responsibility of the health service is to deliver what it promised. Any failure to do that is not, by any stretch of the imagination,  the fault of those customers.

No enterprise could have been more successful in amassing a customer base. Who else started out offering magic chemical cures for everything? Who else was legally allowed to?

Stuffed surgeries the length and breadth of the country and mammoth hospitals buzzing with high-tech machinery are testaments to the popularity of the product.

The system should never have been a drain on anyone’s resources. It was never ‘free’ as is often suggested. It was financed by contributions taken from every employed person. In other words, it depended as much on ‘health insurance’ as any private scheme

.

It wasn’t smokers or people who eat junk food who placed an excessive burden upon the service. As a service it was constituted to treat all alike. If it didn’t do that, it became something else, some kind of branch of eugenics, in which the smokers who had worked and paid their dues all their lives were left to die on a gurney somewhere while their contributions were used to improve the quality of life of out of work actresses.

At the same time, the medico-pharmaceutical fraternity for whom the system was the real cash cow relentlessly promoted products and procedures that would attract more customers than the NHS could reasonably be expected to service - people with wants rather than needs.

The situation was further exacerbated by taking on legions of ‘managers’ who cost more money and delivered none of the services the punters needed or wanted.

Unlike the visionaries who imagined the whole thing into existence, successions of mediocrities, in parliament and within the edifice itself, tinkered and bodged and finally broke the golden thread between the vision and the reality.

The only people who really ‘got’ what a bonanza there was for the taking were the medical equipment suppliers and big Pharma.

Here was the single largest and ever-growing market for their regularly questionable, frequently useless, and all too commonly dangerous products. A single negotiating authority could provide the whole network to them and that authority had no commercial basis or interest in protecting the funds it was lavishing. As a result, it seems, its negotiators never pulled the drug barons aside and said, ‘I’m delivering you the means to supranational wealth beyond imagining; the biggest and fastest gravy train you could possibly conceive of; not just all these hospitals, but a direct line to brainwash all our doctors and students into the belief that what you cook up in your cauldrons is doing anybody any good - any chance of a bit of a discount?’

If there is a real challenge to the future of the NHS, it comes from a combination of lack of will, lack of vision, the lack of a contracted working population to pay the health insurance and the underlying corruption that has seen it transformed from a health service, serving its intended customers to a marketing wing of the ‘keep them sick and keep them coming’ pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries.

The visionaries who founded it didn’t see that one coming. It would never have occurred to them that the very patients it was designed for would, in some dystopic future, be held up as a justification for selling it out to the parasites who have sucked it dry.

BBC WILDLIFE MAKING A PIG'S EAR OUT OF PALEONTOLOGY

Tempus fugit, and not always in a good way.

When I wrote Blinded with Science, I thought most of the depths of scientific hogwash had been plumbed. But, until its present re-run on BBC2, I had been spared one of the most blatant packs of palaeontological porkies ever assembled for the bamboozlement of Big Science’s adoring and devout congregations: the excruciatingly idiotic Planet Dinosaur.

Like many other young folk, I was knee-high to a micropachycephalosaurus when I fell under the spell of the reptilian leviathans who allegedly ruled this planet in the Mesozoic era.

If you want to capture young minds and indoctrinate them into bogus dogma, dinosaurs are the way to go, and this thing goes there big time.

Using mediocre CGi animations and frequent repetitions of the word ‘incredible’, this infantile confection of grisly set-ups and speculation pits ever more ludicrously named reptilians against each other to the accompaniment of various grunts and squawks, while the voice-over merchant describes the action in the present tense to try and reinforce the delusion that it ever happened in the past.

In the only episode I ever want to have seen, new discoveries are purported to have strengthened the shaky, if not structurally unsafe, proposition that these superannuated lizards evolved into modern birds. If evolution in the Darwinian sense ever occurred at all, this transformation would require a staggering number of coordinated skeletal and muscular upheavals, during which the changeling would not be much good for anything other than fast food.

We are told that some of the newly-discovered fossil dinosaurs came complete with feathers. Birds have feathers, so that makes them part-bird, apparently. Tarantulas have hair, so I guess that makes them part-human.

The narration goes on to report that the favoured dinos used their bonus plumage for one of two reasons, the main one being to ‘keep warm’.

Unless some other scientific sleight of hand has deceived the eye, dinosaurs, if they were dinosaurs, as in reptiles, would have been cold-blooded - i.e., they would gain whatever heat they had from the environment. So there was no warm to ‘keep’. Feathers would have had the opposite effect, and might well have been useful rather in protecting the wearer from intense heat - dissipating it in the manner of modern day lizards, who hold one leg at a time in the air as a heat-exchanger in desert conditions.

The second reported use was to shake a tail feather at some cretacean cutie with a view to intimacy.

T-Rexes and allosauri must, we imagine, have got it together from time to time, but it’s not easy to picture quite that degree of delicacy playing a big part in their amorous encounters, especially as anything that stays still for any length of time on Planet D seems to become a ready meal for something bigger and even uglier.

The only real educational value of this digital débacle is to demonstrate the process of finding a few bits of bone (and the occasional feather), creating a fiction for it, assigning it a dog Graeco-Latin taxonomy based on a minor aspect of its appearance, and then insisting that it lives up to its new name in thought and deed, that constitutes the cutting edge of learnèd classification.

Otherwise, such cynical rubbish is not just doing prehistory a disservice; it has the more sinister purpose of trying to confer omniscience on a science in its infancy.

I watched to the end in the vain hope that a porkypigosaurus would come on and squawk: ‘Th-th-that’s all folks.’

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

GREAT BRITISH FAKE-OFF

There’s a lot of noise going on these days about so-called ‘fake news’. It’s one of those self-satisfied mantras like ‘conspiracy theory’ that are simply designed to silence alternative opinion.

A little thought reveals the fact that almost everything that gets done begins with a conspiracy, whether it be planning the shopping list or an advertising campaign.

What might take a bit more recognition is that all news is fake news. It is always delivered with an opinion or a stress, it is subject to multiple filters, from its likely impact to available space and availability of pictorial material.

A newspaper that simply reported everything new that happened in a single county would come in a dozen Britannica-sized volumes daily, so even News 24 simply repeats the same few stories with magazine style puff to keep them apart.

Radio and newspapers can’t really give you much subjective reality on what’s going on because they can’t ‘show’ it to you like television can. When you watch something on television, you think you actually saw it, but all you saw - no matter who the manipulator might have been - was a manipulated image with a slanted (even if only as a cause of limited information) commentary.

The core business of television is to give the impression that something that happened didn’t and something that didn’t happen did.

This has never been otherwise. It’s as true in wildlife programmes in which mountains of archive footage are connected to form a narrative about an iguana being chased by snakes and spectacular visuals are used to mask the subliminal repetition of doubtful scientific key words, as it is in Panorama and other ‘start off with an angle and then make it appear to be true’ ‘documentaries’.

When I was working as a TV reviewer, I was told a story that might not be true either, but is certainly possible.

There was a lot going on and only the rookiest rookie reporter was in the studio. A message came to say that Mother Thatcher was about to manifest herself outside Number 10 and whinge an important announcement. There was no one else to go, so the rookie was put together with the second deputy standby crew and despatched to the locus in quo.

Thatcher pronounced and the crew gave the thumbs up that all words of wisdom had been duly recorded along with a decent close up smudge of the glorious wossname.

The iron one retreated to hearth, Dennis and home and the various media types were on their phones or skulking somewhere with a decent and recognisable background to do their pieces to camera.

No fool, our rookie took the opportunity to pose a searching question to which Mrs T had just provided the response. Back at the studio, the question was cut and pasted to the beginning, so that the impression was that what he or she had asked had been the first question to which she had ever given a straight answer.

Simple, basic, convincing and completely false.

The individual probably never got to do anything like that again. Normally dealings with the high and the mighty are done by a select few with the right ‘credentials’ issued to them by the great and the good, and the ever present threat of withdrawal following any indiscretions. Being barred from the gin palace is not a career booster for a political newshound.

Faking the news comes naturally to a medium that grew out of illusion. It fakes history, it fakes documentaries, it even had to do retakes on Surprise, Surprise when the victims weren’t surprised enough.

It cuts down our perception until we have only sound and vision - the sound often dubbed, and the vision kept within a frame. In most drama and large-scale production - even quiz shows and soaps - there are more people doing more things outside the purview of the chosen camera than there are in front of it.

In some footage from a couple of years ago that most broadcasters other than the BBC admitted was fake, the reporter in the shot was saying more shooting was being heard from somewhere off in the desert, while, out of shot, a geezer with a ghetto blaster was providing the sounds.

It’s all too easy, and the more material is syndicated, the more the winning story is the cheapest and most easily available. Turkish TV does a good line in chroma-key desert events.

I love television, even in its present dotage.

I thoroughly enjoy the ability to choose when and what I watch.

But I don’t believe anything on it and have developed a pretty good nose for what’s being done to fool me, and when to be willingly fooled for an hour or two, and when not. 

WHAT IS ‘ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE’?

Labelling individuals with a handy catch-all ‘condition’ is rife across all branches of pharmaceutical medicine.

Any such labelling settles the ‘diagnosis’ for the practitioner and establishes a text-book character for the person so-labelled.

It does not assist in understanding the problems of the individual, since, in a single move, it dispenses with individuality. A person with blood sugar irregularities becomes a representative ‘diabetic’ and joins the treadmill of prescribed drugs and activities regardless of personality or humanity.

An individual’s health issues are a tiny part of them - in fact are something other than them altogether. Medical ‘health professionals’ put people in a box which suggests it is all they are.

If someone has a psychotic event and is taken in a plain van to a facility that claims to deal with schizophrenia, he or she will be labelled a ‘schizophrenic’. Like other psychiatric ‘conditions’, there is no real definition or test for the application of this or any other label.

Because psychiatry is a vacuous pretend-science whose origins are in control and violence, it has no understanding of the mind and life and no cures, even for its own made-up conditions.

Alzheimer’s ‘disease’ was named after a psychiatrist. Alois Alzheimer observed what he believed to be ‘pre-senile dementia’ in one of his ‘patients’

.

Dementia, as the word suggests, refers to the idea of losing mental capacity, although it doesn’t involve any reference to the increase or maintenance of mental capacity that must have preceded it, and could, theoretically, succeed it. Actually, it breaks down to just another label with no consistent definition or diagnosis, if only because you can’t diagnose the mind by physical means. So the application of the damning label can be based on failing to satisfy questions to which the person never knew the answer anyway.

Alzheimer’s ‘disease’ was named after him by his psychiatric colleague, Kraepelin, the king of labellers who invented psychiatric conditions for a living, and set the scene for the poisonous collusion between psychiatry and pharma that blights us today.

What Alzheimer did with his unique patient was to cut her body up after her passing and find some features of her brain that he could correlate with the woman’s eccentric behaviour. In this kind of ‘science’, correlation and cause are pretty much interchangeable.

Essentially, the term ‘Alzheimer’s’ refers to ‘dementia’ occurring prior to ‘senility’, and is especially misused when referring to those deemed old enough to become demented anyway(!). ‘Old’, ‘not so old’, and ‘old enough’ are all vague and indefinable, of course, unless they, too, are arbitrarily classified.

Since psychiatry has no understanding of the cause or cure for anything, there is no positive value in the labelling process, while a serious negative aspect is that friends and relatives of the labelled begin to see them as a ‘condition’ rather than a person.

One of the main signs people look out for in themselves and others of the onset of this mysterious and ill-defined affliction is the inability to find the word for things. This is described as memory loss, but I have asked people who have been labelled with the condition whether they can visualise the thing they can’t name. This was hardly a scientific study, but on each occasion they said they could do so. So there was no memory problem involved, merely a difficulty in accessing the correct  word or ‘symbol’ to communicate it to others.

Another ‘symptom’ is what is described as no ‘short term memory’ in people who can recall every moment of their young lives.

It seems to me that people are aware and interested in things around them in their youth and middle age, but gradually (as a generality) take less notice as they become ‘set in their ways’ and take their surroundings for granted. Why, then, would earlier memories be more vivid? Because they were more ‘there’ to record them. Can’t remember breakfast? Did you notice it at the time? If you didn’t record it, you can’t replay it.

Try some exercises in doing what you’re doing when you’re doing it, rather than thinking about something else or dwelling in some past time. I suggest you will be able to recall it later. The more you are there in the present, the better able you will be to recall the recent past.

It’s a full time job believing in the ‘reality’ we all share. ‘Demented’ people lose the power to participate before their bodies wear out. In an effort to ‘hold on’ to that reality, they will regress to a time when it was more real.

If people are having difficulty with perception, the single worst thing you can do is to drug them into a stupor. The confusion can only be magnified and the ability to hold on to the illusion shared by the rest of us further reduced. The only, albeit understandable, reason for drugging people is for the relief of others. It saves some inconvenience and embarrassment, and it also gives the illusion that they are ‘at peace’.

Again, from my limited experience, agitation comes from the sense of needing to live up to a standard that is no longer applicable. Relatives want their old mum back. Others are testing for signs of  ‘forgetting’ and weirdness. If the changes are accepted with good humour and inabilities glossed over, the atmosphere can be light and the affected person can even find it all funny rather than tragic. It doesn’t matter at all if what the person says is non sequitur, or a different version than everyone else remembers. If you need reassurance that you’re right, the problem is yours rather than theirs.

All generalities are false, including any I have used here. The ‘disease’ is a catch-all. No two people are alike and, convenient as it would be for practitioners, no two people have the same symptoms or reactions. A statement I have heard that ‘they don’t know who you are’ is based on no practical reality. Individuals sometimes recognise friends and relatives and sometimes don’t show any evidence of having done so. The presence of somebody who cares about them and touches them kindly can only help and any emotion that comes to the surface, such as grief, is better out than in, especially while no one can gauge what emotions are taking place without external demonstration. Crying and laughter are both emotional releases.

People of previous generations lived with a lot of different challenges than those facing us today. While the major threats that assail our bodies these days are chemicals and electrical disturbances, they were better suited to handling now eradicated germs and diseases. Their nutrition, despite the presence of sugar and (much less chemicalised) cigarette smoke, was more healthy and natural, as well as being seasonal and local.

Society now, in general, and especially as regards the ‘elderly’ is more medicalised than at any time in history. Vast numbers of people are on repeat prescriptions for cocktails of, often conflicting, medical concoctions, all of which place demands on the body and perception of their users.

If there is one likely cause to be identified for the epidemic increase in so-called ‘dementia’ - or whatever you want to call the phenomenon - it is this monumental escalation of drug use, which had its origins in the early part of the twentieth century and whose emergence correlates in a way that would convince anyone, other than the drug combines who have reaped the spectacular financial benefits, that numbing and dumbing symptoms must have the cumulative effect of obliterating consciousness.

NOT TERRIBLY UPLIFTING

CONSUMER REPORT: Handicare Stairlifts and Ikano Bank

In May of 2017, it became apparent that a stairlift would make life a lot easier for madame, so we began to look into possibilities. Stannah, of course, is the biggest name, being almost synonymous with the contraptions. But Age UK recommends Handicare.

We picked an appropriate model from their brochure and they told us a surveying engineer would arrive on the thirteenth of June to check out the location and measure up.

We waited in for him, but he didn’t arrive, and a series of phone calls revealed the fact that he was sitting comfortably at home, having not been informed of the appointment.

A second arrangement was made and he arrived on the nineteenth. He was polite and meticulous in his work, not only planning the course of the stairlift from the downstairs passage, a one-eighty at the bottom of the stairs and another one of the same to come to rest on the landing, but providing us with a CAD graphic, which he said had already been transferred to the factory to initiate production.

One of the attractions of the offer from Handicare was a claimed six months’ payment holiday from fitting, which would mean that if, as expected, the fitting was undertaken in June, the first payment would become due in January 2018.

Handicare’s ‘arrangement’ is with the Ikano bank - an offshoot of Ikea - and the idea is that you, as a punter, don’t pay the full amount all at once, so Ikano pay Handicare a sum that covers the product, plus an acceptable little earner. That way Handicare stays in profit, and Ikano can charge the punter an inflated price that covers Handicare’s loan plus interest.

Although the customer signs the agreement as part of the paperwork, the loan from Ikano is to Handicare.

Servicing the expanded loan amount is down to you, and is not dependent on Handicare’s ability to deliver.

The initial installation occured on the twenty-seventh of June. The double rails were fitted to the staircase and the chair unit attached and demonstrated. We signed for it accordingly.

Unfortunately, the foldaway step soon ceased to fold away. Then the unit began to emit a fearful juddering noise, going on to split the baked-on paint on the rails.

We complained about these issues to Handicare and an engineer arrived a month later to discover that the step had been wrongly fitted, that there was no oil in the part of the unit that ran on the rail, so its little wheels weren’t going round - hence the juddering and the splitting of the paint. There was no alternative, according to him, to starting with a complete new set up and junking the old one.

An appointment for the refitting was made for the nineteenth of October. I rearranged my schedule to be at home on that day, and was away when the engineers came two days before the appointment, stranding madame downstairs for the whole day.

We wrote again to Handicare to complain about yet another inconvenience and to get them to acknowledge that they had failed to supply the product and service for which we had agreed to pay, and that we felt the warranty should begin from the date of actually delivery of a working product. 

Also that the six month’s payment holiday should commence from that same date.

The letter wasn’t answered until after Ikano bank was intending to take a December payment, so we cancelled the debit with the bank to be on the safe side.

Eventually Handicare did get in touch. They acknowledged things had not gone well and unhesitatingly revised the warranty to run from the time the replacement unit wads fitted.

But they failed to report the problems and delays to Ikano, so they (Ikano) claimed we were in breach of the agreement to start paying back.

Ikano promotes a friendly modern image for a bank. However, like increasing numbers of such organisations, it is almost impossible to reach, either by email or telephone. There is a phone number, but if you attempt to use it, you can let yourself in for forty minutes’ worth of replays of Sly and the Family Stone’s Everyday People, a record I used to like, but now never wish to hear again, before either being cut off (normal) or being told you are being transferred and getting another dose of Sly Stone.

Ikano’s small print says you can’t start paying at a different date, mainly because they will charge you a fee every month until the end of the (dis)agreement, as well as bombarding you with threatening letters.

So here we are, a year on. The stairlift is once again rumbling and juddering. A black line has appeared on the rail where the paint split on the previous setup. Ikano bank sends us incomprehensible text messages vocalised by a robot on the home phone. I make it a practice not to talk to inanimate objects, as it avails us not at all. If it has a message it is another attempt to put us in touch with Sly and the family.

I also don’t answer calls from unidentified callers, but madame has picked up the phone once or twice while I’ve been out and been railed at by a belligerent oaf.

Two weeks ago, I put all the facts of the case into a letter to Ikano.

A week ago the oaf admitted he had not seen the letter.

As of now, no one has answered, or even acknowledged it.

Age UK might feel itself able to recommend these people; I do not.

• Incidentally, I cannot claim that Ikano Bank have not made the effort to call us. In fact, they do so repeatedly and annoyingly -  and not just us: https://who-called.co.uk/Number/01156920133

IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?

 Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time; but now that it’s the opposite, it’s twice upon a time. – Moondog.

It is a natural and vital human activity to invest human qualities and ‘personalities’ in the things with which we are surrounded.

We endow objects and creatures with characteristics and motives wholly of our own making. We give boats, steam engines and cars human names like Betsy or Hortense and, like Basil Fawlty, attempt to debate and reason with them, man to machine.

Discussing the meaning of life with a three piece suite or a lawnmower might win you a ticket to Happy Acres. But nobody is surprised if you assign humanoid motives to them for not fitting through a door or for cutting through their own power cable.

In fact, we are so desirous of human interaction that anything that shows the slightest sign of being self-animated or self-directing is sure to acquire a synthetic personality not independently present.

With the coming of the home computer, new scientific rationality has taken away the cosy teddy-bear tendency to call the thing Aloysius, but the personification itself rises to new heights: ‘It’s being a real pain…’, ‘It won’t let me…’, ‘It’s decided…’, ‘It tells me…’.

Complex and impenetrable as its functions might appear, it’s a bloody machine, no more capable of thought or independent action than a clothes peg. It has been equipped by humans to sort through a large number of options, programmed into it by humans, and try to find a match for the thing you have asked of it.

It becomes ever more sophisticated and efficient at this, but that is still all it is doing. It has few or many options from which to select by Boolean algebra or fuzzy logic one that approximates the desired result. These options are supplied by humans, just as they would be in a ready-reckoner or some other printed book. The processor cannot ‘think’. It has no capacity that vaguely resembles intellect.

Those who programme it can exponentially increase its inherent choices, or they can limit them as in surveys or the burgeoning art of customer disservice.

Our satnav – Flossie – is often very helpful, and just as often wrong. ‘She’ neither knows or cares either way. Pre-programmed recordings are shuffled to synthesise speech. We endow her with a slightly ratty personality, and dignify that ‘personality’ by telling ‘her’ to shut up, or not be silly.  Her catchphrase is ‘Turn around when possible’, which, though usually ignored, is at least useful advice.

Through the miracle of ‘predictive text’, if I type ‘shrivel’ into my tablet, it will substitute the word ‘survive’. It has no notion of the meaning of either – even that they are words, never mind that they are supposed to express opposing ideas.

Your credibility, career or the balance of power could depend on it, but it is merely a substitution based on a shabby and doomed attempt to parody intelligence with mechanics.

So-called ‘voice recognition’ has made matters ten times worse, the synthesis of jolly humanoid voices further increasing the illusion of intelligence while also further exacerbating the stress that comes from the failure to satisfy natural human expectations.

If you are fortunate enough to speak to a real person, even if they greet you with the perennially annoying, ‘How are you today?’, you can tell them, ‘Not too good; my dog died’, and expect some change in tone. The machine is blind and deaf to all perception and continues its manic grotesquery unperturbed.

Being greeted by a mechanically gleeful travesty of a human being – ‘Thank you for calling the Cooperative Bank’ – immediately sets your blood pressure on the rise. Don’t get excited; simply put the phone down and change banks.

Where we live, we have had the same telephone number for fifteen years. Lately we have received a series of nuisance calls from something called ‘SRJ’, in which an electronic voice simulator instructs the reluctant listener to ask someone we have never heard of to phone one of those extortionate ‘premium’ numbers. The device is, of course, too stupid to know anything, least of all that it is supplying that individual’s personal information to strangers.

On another recent occasion, I nearly made the error of changing my telephone service to BT. When my supplier for the last ten years (One Bill) found out, they offered me a vastly improved deal to stay with them (they have a human with the capacity to think – at time of writing), so the BT set-up was cancelled, both by myself and One Bill.

A few days later, in the same post, I received ‘letters’ from computers at One Bill, one welcoming me to the new service, the other screaming that I owed them ‘at least £299.00 for leaving them – although the above-instanced actual person had acknowledged that my previous contract had expired and this was not the case.

As part of the package, he had offered a free router, which arrived at the same time as the confirmation from BT that my order with them had been cancelled.

The following day the computer at One Bill sent me a bill for forty quid for the free router. Once again the indispensable human assured me this should not have happened.

Another day and an email from BT to tell me to expect a delivery of the cancelled equipment. That’s when I rediscovered that, as a telecommunication company, BT takes the lead in preventing communication. It is not possible to reply to the email, but you can go to the BT website and choose from a range of useless and inappropriate ‘options’. If you chance to come upon anything remotely similar to the subject you are searching for, an electronic voice synthesiser tells you even more things you don’t want to know.

By now having difficulty remaining my usual good-humoured self, I finally reached a recording that wanted to know my actual problem. Would I state it in as few words as possible?

I shouted various possibilities, such as ‘wrong delivery’ and ‘cancellation’.

‘I’m getting “wiring difficulties”,’ said the machine, ‘Is this correct?’

I tried shouting ‘equipment’, and this was recognised. The machine assured me the items I wasn’t waiting for were on their way. Something in my anguished scream brought me through the barrier to a lurking person.

Fortunately, in this case, apart from the lucky escape from signing up for more of this from BT, the idiocy was merely frustrating. In another time and place, attempting to shout ‘Petersfield’ to such a contraption could bring someone to the front door with a Kevlar suit and an offer to rearrange your molecules.

Smart phones are not smart and, despite claims or apparencies, computers are not, and never will be, intelligent. They can manage enough of a mockery of it to fool some of the people some of the time, and their usefulness in preventing direct communication has led to their proliferation in the customer disservice field.

Our credulity is what has allowed it to happen and, unless we call a halt soon, we will be inflicted with self-driving cars that don’t know where they are or what is going on around them – won’t even know they are cars – and a whole panoply of other idiocies – maybe self-watching televisions – while banks, utility companies and other corporations complete their already well-advanced disconnection from us.

In the meantime, the myth that what these glorified tombola bins do is analogous to intelligence allows those without our best interests at heart to perpetuate and expand their reduction of humanity to doltish mechanics

.

When George III shared his thoughts with a tree, he was declared mad, but a tree can be shown to be aware of and responsive to its environment; to be that thing dreaded of totalitarianism: conscious.

How brainwashed and off the rails must we be to consider it normal to converse with a tin box?

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

REALMS OF THE PEER

One of the fundamental principles of science as we believe we know it is that it should boldly go where no man has gone before; that it is fearless and imaginative and unhampered by old ideas and beliefs.

The reality today is the complete reverse. Systems, institutions, faculties and self-interest conspire to prevent and resist any advancement, any discovery that doesn’t accord with the interests of the scientific establishment and its paymasters.

Actors come on as GPs in TV dramas to advise the viewing punter not to stray outside the church: ‘Alternative treatments may sometimes be useful, but always consult your medical practitioner.’

Although, despite its monopoly and enormous numbers of dedicated followers, pharmaceutical medicine is no more a science than palm reading it keeps up the illusion, and its entrenched position, by adopting the trappings of the central scientific religion.

First among these is ‘peer review’ – a sort of college of cardinals who protect the faith and formulate the dogma.

Thirty years ago, I ‘put my back out’ in an industrial accident. Thereafter, even in dry weather, I could only hobble about like Richard III – ‘Now is the winter of our discontent…’

And so it was. Every winter for four years I was laid up and off work.

The quack told me he could find nothing wrong and prescribed something called Ponstan – pills that were designed to make you too stupid to feel the pain, but which actually spread it all over your body.

At about this time, my mother fell down an unprotected manhole, so was in a worse state than me.

Fortunately, a friend of hers (not a doctor) suggested a chiropractor in Newton Abbot. After a couple of treatments, mother recommended him to me.

By then, I had been invalided out of my gardening job and was having to do lighter work.

Mr Sykes (the chiro) was the first to X-ray my back. He called me in to see the result a couple of days later and anyone, ‘qualified’ or not, could immediately have seen what was wrong. My entire pelvic girdle had been pushed up on one side and remained jammed there for the four years following the initial trauma.

By judicious positioning of my body and exerting the precise amount of pressure, Mr S resolved the situation at once. Had he done so four years earlier, that would have been more or less that, but because the problem had been permitted to persist all those years, it had acquired a tendency to maintain the faulty position.

As a result, it took about two years of weekly treatments to convince the thing to go back into place and stay put.

Thirty years on, instead of hobbling about with a stick, or trundling about on an electric scooter, I can still do everything I could do before the accident, including furniture shifting and digging.

I meet people on a regular basis who are holding on to back, neck and other bodily pains and difficulties in the touching belief that the doctor is doing all that can be done – mainly drugs and tiresome physiotherapy exercises.

They don’t get, or don’t want to get, that the doctor is not there to make you well by any means available. He is duty bound to push pharmaceutical drugs and do his bit for the maintenance of the monopoly.

He is not really to blame for this. A combination of relentless propaganda and an unsurprising public hunger for the ‘magic bullet’ cures for all ills that pharma’s charlatan ancestors have been promising since the days of Buffalo Bill keep the gullible doing what the gullible do – swallowing things, both metaphorically and in fact.

There is nothing, by any reasonable criteria, ‘unscientific’ about chiropractic. The body’s skeleton will clearly work best in its intended arrangement, and signals to and from its control centre need to travel up and down the spine with as little interruption as possible.

But, if you look it – and any number of other ‘alternative’ treatments – up in reference books or online, you will read that they are ‘unscientific’ or do not accord with medical opinion.

This sounds in some way damning, but what does it mean? Is it any different from saying: ‘Giving a back-sufferer indifferently effective drugs and telling him to go away and lie down is unchiropractic?’

Chiropractors, osteopaths, kinesiologists and the like (and unlike) do not control the media. They have no power to invoke the anti-trust or monopoly laws that protect people in other, generally less worthy, endeavours.

No one other than conventional medicos is even allowed to say they have cured anyone, or that they might be able to, even when those medicos have admitted failure by declaring conditions ‘chronic’ or ‘incurable’.

When a bronze implement was first submitted to a Neolithic panel for ‘peer review’ it was probably declared a hoax. Scientific ‘peers’ long held the consensus view that the Earth was flat. Anyone who dared suggest otherwise was vilified and shunned.

BBC astronomy programmes have been pronouncing upon the unscientific naïvety of believing there is life elsewhere in the universe since I was a child.

Now there is growing evidence that smugness and authoritative pronouncements do not make it so.

No one employed in the scientific juggernaut wants to see its shibboleths, its myths and its foundations questioned or undermined. The ferocity with which the medical establishment has attacked homeopathy underlines the absurd lengths to which such protectionism can go with spokespeople branding it as ‘dangerous’. If it is anything other than effective, it is harmless. Coming from representatives of a business that is the third greatest cause of death in the US, such name-calling is all the more idiotic.

It’s an understandable human reaction to want to hold on to what you’ve got, but it does not serve to advance us toward knowledge or understanding. The old pals don’t want to let each other down, but ‘peer review’ necessarily keeps it in the family and ensures that no radically new ideas, processes or thinkers upset the apple cart.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

DON’T COUNT ON IT

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality – Albert Einstein.

Mathematics is extremely useful and endlessly fascinating. In the right hands, it can predict and explain almost everything in the universe, and is the foundation of engineering, architecture, science and technology. It can even be used to dissect musical harmonies and to lend ‘scientific’ credibility to spurious statistics and correlations.

Speaking as someone who failed his maths O-level twice (or was it three times?), I came into this world as ripe for bamboozling as anyone, and bamboozled I was – we all were – from the moment we were taught to recite the one-times table (I kid you not) at Foxhole infants’ school:

‘One times one is one.’

With you so far.

‘Two times one is two.’

Ah, here is where we run into trouble. We’re back to the old problem of applied blanket nomenclature that undermines taxonomy.

We look out at the car park and see two cars. Two ones are two. But is the second car an exact duplicate of the first?

‘No. One car is blue and the other black.’

One is also a Citroën and the other a SEAT.

‘To me, a car is a car.’

Then you have a future as a statistician, or a conductor of bogus studies, but don’t go alone into a car showroom or the witness box.

‘A chair is still a chair,’ says legendary lyricist Hal David, ‘even when there’s no one sitting there.’ And, lexicographically, he is correct. Both the chair’s persistence and the metamorphosis of his house into a home occur without major structural alteration.

But the chair is not any chair or every chair. It is only a chair at all because ‘chair’ is the convenient English code for communicating its general use and characteristics to others. In reality, it is billions of tiny particles and impulses moving in an area restricted by an imposed form. None of these impulses or particles is present in another chair, and no two of them are identical in the present one.

What’s worse is that the chair that was once one is no longer the one it was, because its constituent atoms, molecules and little spinning and sparking things are never static, even in the apparent equilibrium of chairdom.

Ergo, not only is once two not really two, but once one is no longer one. You could chant, ‘Once one was one,’ but both the incantation and its uses would be limited.

So what are we left with?

‘Nothing.’

Not exactly. The old alma mater didn’t dwell on the zero end of things. ‘One times nothing is nothing.’ ‘Two times nothing is still nothing.’

‘There’s nothing in the paper; nothing on the telly.’ But the paper is never blank and the TV never silent, so these are specialised forms of nothing – the absence of something specific.

An absolute zero cannot exist as part of the material universe. If it did, guess what – schlonk, no universe!

One day, in our remedial maths class at Torquay Grammar, the harassed master was explaining a method of solving what I think were quadratic equations (I’ve never since found much call for them).

‘So we call this one zero,’ quoth he. ‘Yes, Randle?’

‘Why, sir?’

‘Why?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He pondered for a while, searching the musty corners of the magisterial cranium for inspiration, and at length resolved to let me know on Monday.

I still feel slightly guilty at the thought of him spending an entire weekend poring over mathematical tomes and scratching algebraic formulæ on the walls of his cave, but, true to his word, he came back to me at the start of the next school week, chalk spattered, an even more faraway look in his good eye, brandishing a sheaf of inscrutable foolscap, to deliver his findings.

‘We’ve always done it that way,’ he announced.

Although it hardly kept me awake at night, this conundrum continued to puzzle me for an improper fraction of my life, until it dawned on me that it’s not really zero in any absolute sense that we’re looking at – not nothing – but an absence of mathematical value – the arbitrary baseline where the positive value ceases, or runs out. You could call it ‘not-one’.

Rather than making one of the equations equal zero, you are reducing it to its starting point and, by so doing, you are able to solve the x or y of the other (if you happen to know what you’re doing).

Absolute zero is not approached. Instead we have a theoretical zero of mathematics, something of which I would be very much in favour.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

BANG TO RIGHTS

It seems Sherlock Holmes never actually said, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’

It’s a case of misattribution, like: ‘Alas, poor Yorrick, I knew him well’, ‘Come up and see me sometime’, ‘Play it again, Sam’, and ‘I believe Iraq has weapons of mass destruction’ – part of the collective memory, but never uttered in fact.

Not long after Sherlock’s time, however, identifying villains became a lot more elementary, thanks to the introduction of fingerprints.

As long as the miscreant’s dabs were taken, and the fingerprints officer wasn’t otherwise influenced in the largely interpretive art of cross-matching by other little hints and suggestions, this was a fair way of putting Chummy where he said he wasn’t.

Bequeathing the method to the police forces of the world, Home Secretary E.R. Henry boasted of its foolproofness on the grounds that ‘everyone’s fingerprints are different’.

Most of us know this as a scientific fact, though it’s never really been proved. Certainly the indications are that it is a high probability – and the chances that the statement applies to the comparatively minimal sample of known criminals is very much higher.

But, even assuming uniqueness, as records increase, differentiation becomes more problematical, with the potential of being overtaken by the inherent margin for error.

As more and more prints were amassed, the forces of the law were forced back again on hunches and hogwash such as psychological profiling, which at least seemed to work on television.

But cometh the hour, cometh the men.

Crick and Watson let the gene genie out of the bottle and the jig was up.

Everyone’s genetic fingerprint is different. It’s a known scientific fact – so you can now be banged up for things you got away with the first time because your finger type fingerprints were smudged or a psychological profiler was looking for Hannibal Lecter.

Genetics is more scientific because it’s got so many billions of little peculiarities that only  computers and algorithms can tell one from the other. ‘Spot the difference’ for the digital age. Perhaps ‘spot the similarity’ is more to the point.

So how many of those billions of peculiarities are found at the average crime scene? A dozen? How stable, how reliable, are the dozen? Pass.

But it’s all very scientific. They scrape up what’s there, set the computer running, and Bob’s your uncle. Or possibly the Avon Lady.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

THE DESCENT OF MAN

Although enthusiastically supported by a scientific clique, on their original publication Darwin’s theories of evolution were largely dismissed and ridiculed.

The catchy and pivotal slogan, ‘survival of the fittest’, was recognised as empty tautology. That which survives in a milieu ‘red in tooth and claw’ is clearly that which was best fitted so to do.

Where it gets more complicated is in discovering or defining what makes those things which survive do so, and whether they are in fact operating in a mindless dog-eat-dog environment.

Not only current popular science but the entire political and economic system of the Western World is predicated on the rather simple-minded proposition that all things come down to this half-baked formula.

Yet Darwin himself regarded cooperation between life forms as infinitely more successful than doing in all your competitors. That way, as is more than clear when we look at post-1980s Europe and the US, lies oblivion.

Darwin’s theories are now so embedded in the scientific mind (or brain) that no other thought can be countenanced, and no other model is to be taught in schools, lest the young folk should be corrupted by independent thought.

But Darwinism isn’t science at all, just one of a number of articles of faith which, being part of the fundamental scriptures laid down by the ancient prophets, are beyond question or observation.

Today’s priesthood tells us this evolved and that evolved without the slightest evidence. Messrs Attenborough and Cox don’t even wonder about it before passing it on as holy writ.

Although the very fact of this belief has unleashed many of the most contra-survival idiocies upon the world: eugenics, fascism, racism, monetarism, scapegoating, intolerance, politico-economic short-termism and megalomania, statism and suppression – all depend on the shaky grasp of a dogma not properly inspected or comprehended – the Darwinian model is still held up, not only as some kind of universal revelation, but as an ‘explanation’ both of the ‘natural’ selection of life forms and life itself!

In fact it fails in both endeavours, most spectacularly in the latter, in which it is not merely unsuited to purpose, acting instead, in the way of all dogma, as a more or less impenetrable barrier to perception and real understanding.

We’ve all seen the familiar graphic of a monkey getting up on his hind legs and metamorphosing, through dubious pictorial sleight of hand, into a man, yet few of us seem to have noticed that the monkey was far better fitted to survive the challenges of this planet at that time than the bloke into which he has ‘evolved’.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository