ECONOMICAL WITH THE TRUTH

 

Dave Randle

The first time I heard the weasel term ‘economic migrant’ it was being used by Charlie Elphicke, Conservative weasel for Dover, as a PR tool to tar everyone trying to get into the port with the same broad brush, be they refugees or workers; a rebranding exercise for political purposes.

Classification is the bedrock of ‘divide and rule’ and the cornerstone of hatred. It overwhelms the diversity of reality with a solid one-dimensional symbol, so an individual ceases to be an individual and becomes a representative of a fictional undifferentiated mass.

Some people even feel the need to ‘identify’ themselves as something or other: ‘I’m a vegan’, ‘I’m a diabetic’. Actually and above all, you are a rounded and unique human being, who incidentally eats certain foods, or one that has a certain difficulty. You are not defined by your diet or what is wrong with a couple of internal organs, any more than you should be defined by race, creed or colour.

If it wasn’t a topical politically motivated PR term, economic migrant could apply to almost everybody who ever got up off their arse and went looking for work or a better standard of living for their partners and families; in the case of those in miserable, impoverished and war-torn places, the standard of living anywhere else would seem to be better.

It would apply to all the Irish and Jews who settled in America, and all the Europeans who got there before them. It would apply to all the Cornish miners who took their expertise to all parts of the world where it would be valued and rewarded, and it applied to the Auf Wiedersehn Pet type jobbing builders who set off to use their skills in the vital job of rebuilding Germany when the trade in the UK was in serious recession.

It applied during the popular music boom in the sixties, when top entertainers in Britain were paying 90% of their income in tax theft, so headed across the pond to where income was better and the tax was in more reasonable bounds. The ‘brain drain’ from the UK to the States was economic migration from the poverty of slaving for the NHS to gravy from sponsored US faculties.

In an earlier ‘brain drain’, Werner von Braun and a whole boiling of nasty Nazis grabbed America’s get-out-of-jail-cards with both hands and economically migrated from slopping out and smuggling smokes to palatial offices and fancy salaries, building up the arsenals of their ex-enemies, while living off the fat of the administration’s heads.

Britain economically migrated to all the once-pink areas of the globe and America has been doing it ever since to ensure that fuel migrates in the opposite direction and ‘regime change’ can keep the world safe for Macdonald’s and Microsoft.

These lines by Emma Lazarus adorned the Statue of Liberty when it was erected:

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she
With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

Does it still say that now?

PAPERING OVER THE CRACKS

Dave Randle

As soon as you see the vacuous buzzwords on the wall of the meeting room at Whorlton Hall, you know the whole setup is a fraud.

Even supposing the place was run for any of the purposes trumpeted, none of them forms part of any of the statistics by which its torture chambers, revealed by the BBC’s Panorama, are actually judged.

The private company, which acquired it and others when previous private companies were found out, takes public money, theoretically earmarked for healthcare and the not-for-profit National Health Service, and converts it into profits for its own shareholders. That profit alone is its product and only something that endangers that product is sufficient to result in remedial action.

Its victims are muzzled and automatically denied credibility and many of its staff are, at least in that environment, sub human cretins.

But to find the real why on this kind of hellish enterprise, we need to go deeper.

Why is it that the best answer we have to people in distress or unable to conform to arbitrary norms is restraint, drugging and ridicule?

The short answer is because we and our lords and masters have bought a pig in a poke and, rather than be proved wrong, we go on supporting the pig. We believe anything wearing the poke bonnet of ‘science’ regardless of what kind of head the ornament is resting on.

So far, this has enabled much of the world to be poisoned and controlled by the very people who established and ran the concentration camps of the second world war to maintain fake and poisonous ‘healthcare’ scams on a colossal scale: scams which are so close to being found out that they are now being enforced upon well individuals by their venal profiteers.

But, if the medico-pharmaceutical monopoly is a top practical joke, it has nothing on psychiatry.

Medical goings on at least have a basis in some kind of scientific data, even if those data belong in an earlier century. The science moved on, although the practice remained largely barbaric.

Psychiatry never had any science. None whatsoever, unless you count classifying, generalising about and labelling certain behaviours to no good purpose.

Its history goes back to exorcising demons and locking people who were distressed and or a nuisance up somewhere where they could be observed and ridiculed for money. For Bedlam read Whorlton Hall. Their only technology was restraint and torture. See a pattern emerging?

They soon became popular with relatives of the well-off, for whom their meaningless drivel and labels could do the service of neutering the well-off and transferring their dosh to the happy customers for a small contribution to the foundation.

Then the medical fraternity realised it had no knowledge, no speciality in mental (mind-related) matters. Psychiatry claimed some kind of knowledge about the brain - a bit like knowing how to drive a car by tripping over an exhaust manifold - and that was good enough for the pharmaceutical industry.

With a little massaging from the drug pushers a cottage industry could be turned into a mammoth combine with spurious credibility and the potential for unlimited profits. Forget dementia praecox and arachnophobia, let’s make everything a disorder! Then we can claim the same few drugs or the same many volts - modified violence and ridicule for the new technological age - are good for them.

The sickest suckers are, of course, the ones who believe any of this shit. But then, if it’s dressed up by the media and made to look real in soap operas and ‘medical dramas’ (the clue is in the classification), there is no shortage of suckers out there.

And no shortage of people and organisations ready to ride the gravy train. ‘Mental health’ is one of the biggest current buzz terms, especially among charity fund managers. Think about it. The ‘conditions’ can be made up, or selected from the ever-expanding ‘Diagnostic’ manual and some of the leavings from the monstrous profits from unscientific and often ‘off-label’ drugs will come their way.

So, if we go back to Whorlton Hall, the commercial management and the moronic staff are two sides of an empty enterprise. No wonder the staff go off their heads working in an unethical and unfocussed environment with no known purpose and no possible job satisfaction.

Like the industry they are part of, they take out their inability to help on the people they are covertly pretending to help. They can’t live with the institutional fraud. They can’t share the reality of the inmates or empathise with them, because  they think they don’t know the esoteric science of ‘mental health’.

Unable to do anything about the ‘madness’ of their charges, they go mad themselves.

If we had a government in anything but name, money intended to protect and help our citizens would not be given to a private concern to make the problem go away. If it has to be run privately or otherwise the process must be rewarded for positive outcomes only. It and its staff need clearly defined statistics regularly reported and reviewed, and those statistics would be based on the person getting well, or able to live more successfully, as well as pointing up any use of restraint, physically or chemically, or any signs of deterioration or distress. Both the company and its employees should be paid on the basis of positive results over and above a basic payment for turning up.

Like the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ or wallpapering a cracked wall, psychiatry’s ‘science’ is the genius of hiding nothing. It has no technology, no understanding and no science, but it’s done very nicely out of hiding the fact.

GETTING THE POINT

Why the all-fired rush to enforce vaccinations?

Dave Randle

The short, and encouraging, answer is that the jig is up. More and more people are getting wise to the fake science that has maintained the cash cow delivering millions to dishonest pharmaceutical racketeers for decades.

It’s clearly not in the interests of public health.

If the things worked, the vaccinated would be at no risk from the unvaccinated, so would be able to pass through them or play among them with confidence and self-satisfaction. But no, says Pharma, the unvaccinated are putting the vaccinated at risk. Ergo their products don’t do what they are claimed to do.

Once upon a time, there was, perhaps, a sort of logic to introducing something into a body in order to stimulate the production of antibodies that would proof the organism against an existing or possible threat. Now actual science knows better.

There are two ways to proof your child against childhood diseases. The first is to wait for an hour or so after birth before cutting or clamping the umbilical cord, so that the baby can download its mother’s immunity, especially if breastfeeding is not going to follow. And the other one is to let them catch them.

The worst thing you can do is pump them full of chemicals and bits of monkeys, pigs and human foetuses.

In the real world, the immune system does what it can to get the injected crud out of the organism, including by what is  known as viral shedding, in which the toxins are exuded through the skin, posing a greater risk of infection to others.

Even a healthy immune system has a hard job dealing with lead, mercury and other  ‘adjuvants’ added to force the product past it.

As ever increasing numbers get hip to the fraud and propaganda that enables more than half of their products to be used off-label - i.e. for other ‘conditions’ that they were never intended for - many of which were approved on the basis of made up reports in the first place, Pharma and its shareholders are undoubtedly getting a bit twitchy.

So they’re ramping up the assault with the collusion of legislators, eugenicist population loonies, bought and paid for politicos and gullible victims.

These people have been sticking it to us for long enough, already.

The organism that is Planet Earth needs to develop a healthy immune system that will ultimately rid it of the cancer in its midst.

MOTORING: 

TRUMPED UP CHARGES

Dave Randle

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a lover of electric cars, either in principle or practice.

I’m old enough to remember milk floats and trolleybuses, both of which worked remarkably well in their dedicated urban environments, despite technology and infrastructure that was antedeluvian compared to today’s possibilities.

And I’ve driven Teslas and experienced the gods’ quantities of torque and acceleration on offer.

Trolley buses picked up their electricity from overhead cables. Milk floats returned to base at the end of the round and charged their batteries overnight.

But private cars don’t follow a fixed route or a daily routine. You might need yours to collect a takeaway or rush to the side of relatives across the country. How long will you have to wait for the thing to charge up sufficiently? And will the infrastructure exist on Dartmoor, the Lake District or the Highlands to get home again.

I don’t know about you, but the prospect of stopping even for half an hour at a time in today’s mostly ghastly and poisonous motorway service stations appeals to me not at all.

For all that - and regardless of my personal feelings - I feel it is right to get the situation with regard to the purported cleanliness and ‘zero emission’ claims for electric vehicles into proportion.

There has been a lot of comment on and sharing of the conclusions of Munich’s Department of Economic Research study that electric vehicles are more polluting than diesels. These results do not seem to be based on like for like.

The research takes into account the fossil fuels that produce most of the energy used to recharge electric cars, the toxicity of battery production and chemicals, and the environmental impact of the manufacturing process, in all cases set against the emission of CO2, which is not actually a pollutant, but the gas that feeds plants and thereby provides the oxygen people and animals need to survive.

The diesels on the other hand are reckoned only on emissions of CO2 from the cars themselves in use. But they, too, must be manufactured using power from coal fired power stations, their workforce has to drive to and from work, the paint shops, body presses, plastic formers and robots are also part of the entire environmental picture.

The greatest single diesel pollution event was engendered by legislators when huge numbers of cars with much of their useful life before them were prematurely scrapped, completely unbalancing the equation between manufacture and return and causing a spike in the inevitable emissions from destruction.

What the effects on the atmosphere of scrapping a Tesla and its batteries might be, I leave to your imagination.

What this study should have been based on is actual pollutants - hydrocarbons and electricity itself. We are ever more surrounded by electrical devices, wifi, ‘smart’ meters, microwaves, 5G - even common or garden electricity arcs through our lives - behold the flashes along the tunnel when the tube train is coming.

Ignored by the medical profession, power companies and regulators, electricity is a much more serious pollutant than carbon dioxide, and implicated in numerous health problems currently (pun intended) suppressed by drugs.

The Munich study is not a ‘science bombshell’ as some are claiming. The conclusion may well be correct, but too much of the ‘science’ is missing.

SUPERFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Dave Randle

Putting a lower case ‘i’ in front of something or labelling it as ‘smart’ doesn’t really denote the presence of actual intelligence.

That commodity isn’t limited to the shuffling of figures and data of which the contraption might be capable. It involves perception, consciousness, evaluation and understanding.

No machine is capable of any of these human attributes. If it ever seems to be, it is because we are endowing it with our own characteristics.

It is generally easier to recognise this in the written word than in voice synthesisers, satnavs, automated telephone messages and the frightful Alexa, in which we anthropomorphise anything that speaks our language.

I was on a car launch on which the route had been fed into satnavs. Although ours was triggered by the various road going stimuli which would normally cause it to say useful satnavvy things such as ‘turn half left,’ ‘follow the road,’ or ‘leave by the exit’, it said total non-sequiturs such as ‘The Quartermaster’s sergeant will accept delivery.’

Our own satnav has been updated a number of times since a new estate was built, but still doesn’t ‘know’ it’s there. A self driving, so called autonomous, car would have to be overridden by anyone living there who wanted to go home.

Such cars are not autonomous of course. The proprietor has merely abandoned his own autonomy to a programmer who has never driven in that place at that specific time.

The nearest analogy would be a headless cockroach, which continues to obey the last command given before it lost its head until it finally runs out of fuel.

In the course of a day’s real world driving, a person can spot when a child, a dog or a deer might run into the road. He or she can make allowances for foreign registered left hand drive lorries and cars, can make way for ambulances and other emergency vehicles, negotiate cyclists and motorcyclists, funeral cortèges, tractors, buggies, hedge-cutters and roadworks. His or her modern car might be bristling with sensors and processors, but the only awareness or intelligence present resides with the person.

He or she is able to perceive a problem right then in the present and conceive a solution to it. The machine can only respond to exigencies already programmed into it.

The same goes for ‘diagnostic’ machines, which electronically ‘pick a card’ from an available menu, where once a skilled doctor would use his or her experience.

Computers are great at a lot of things. Their main advantage is their variability. Where once Henry Ford had lines of identical black Model Ts coming off the production line, now different models can be programmed to come off the same line, one after the other, left or right hand drive, petrol or diesel, with just-in-time supply chains and stock control all communicating with each other. Robots can be trained by technicians to repeat certain tasks ad infinitum, until the last skilled trainers are gone.

But a lot of the impetus to do away with intelligence and humanity has to do with self-appointed people playing god. All around us are comic books, movies and TV shows showing weakly humans being terrorised by idiot machines, yet we seem to bow down before them and consent to being dumbed further down and made increasingly irrelevant in our own scheme of things.

The size of a brain is not a measure of intelligence. The brain is a router that passes stuff one way or the other, but it doesn’t need to know what it is.

People say things like ‘my brain is telling me’ this, that or the other. What they mean is they are telling themselves what they already know but going around the houses to do it.

So called ‘artificial intelligence’ is nothing more than sleight of hand. There is no intelligence in the true sense of the word. Just a superficial illusion of some other ‘entity’ than can be blamed.

CLIMATE OF FEAR

Dave Randle

Climate Change: The Facts (BBC1)

I’m always suspicious of ‘facts’.

A fact is a sort of congealed opinion; a conclusion designed to prevent further consideration or discussion.

If the purveyor of the fact feels the need to reinforce it with ‘science proves’ or ‘thousands of scientists all over the world say’ there is even more cause for suspicion. All these imagined authoritative entities are summoned to overwhelm and outrank you.

Mr Attenborough has plenty of authority all by himself. He tells people all sorts of stuff and adoring millions of them believe it without question. He’s even convinced half of his audience that there are too many of them and humanity should be culled to save the ‘natural world’

.

While we’re being ironic, without climate change, there would be no life on Earth.

The climate was changing long before the arrival of television - a medium specialising in illusion - and also long before there was machinery to monitor and record it.

‘Climate scientists’ didn’t exist until there was machinery to tell them what to find and what to conclude, so their ‘we’re all doomed’ prognostications are based on their subjugation to algorithms and digits, themselves based on little more than a century of records and projected into a future in which a billion possible variables are ignored.

The advent of television means that people all over the world can witness hurricanes, natural disasters, plagues and famines right there on the screen. The absence of mass media in previous eras doesn’t mean they weren’t occurring. Charles Fort’s ‘Book of the Damned’ catalogues numerous examples from previous centuries culled from local newspaper reports, and there was even a time before newspapers.

Tectonic plates have been dispersing across the planet surface for donkeys’ years, and the ice has been freezing and melting in cycles

.

Water is unusual in expanding when it turns from liquid to solid state - i.e. freezes. So, by my reckoning, if coastal ice melts, its volume will reduce and the coastline it was forming will recede, so the effect on global sea levels should be minimal. It will have gained some liquid water, but lost the weight of the iceberg. But, of course, I’m not a climate scientist.

Although any mention of the term intelligent design would cause his hair to stand on end, the great puppet master bandies others like ‘eco-system’ and ‘Mother Nature’ about like others of the Darwinian faith.

An eco-system is not merely a combination of scientific nomenclatures, but all life working toward persistence. There are already reported signs of brown areas of the planet ‘greening up’ to take advantage of the ready supply of CO2.

It was notable from this production that most of the climate science types believe that a stick rather than a carrot is the way to herd us cats. Penalise the punter for buying a super economical diesel and get him to stump up for an uncertain electric thing that charges up with power generated from fossil fuels.

The power industry is there to be an industry. That’s why nobody listened to Nikola Tesla.

A science that is ‘settled’ is a dead science or no science at all. When a science becomes an industry, it does so to serve itself, as in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, whose science was ‘settled’ before anyone found out about the immune system. They promised salvation and delivered ‘scientific’ crimes against humanity and life in general.

But the poison industries are already starting to feel it where it hurts and more people are communicating with each other across national and political boundaries than ever before. As this goes forward, the grip of the propagandist mainstream media loosens and peace might even eventually break out.

We must work for more understanding and become better custodians of our planet, but we can certainly achieve that without the doom and gloom and hogwash.

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’

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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

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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