To the familiar lie of ‘man-made global warming’ we have added the equally destructive lie of Covid as a killer disease on a biblical scale … thus producing a cocktail which, if you are already struggling, makes life almost unlivable …
As my readers throughout the world might have noticed, I have fallen silent recently. The housemove that I was obliged to undertake this last summer ripped my guts out. Not so much because it was in every way far worse even than I feared; though it was. The reason I could not cope with it lies deeper. It brought home to me my own inability to make a success of my life. Despite various indisputable achievements, and despite the considerable advantages that I have enjoyed, I am unmarried, childless, not far off penniless and not far from homeless. Something has gone badly wrong and I am incapable of putting it right.
All of which might perhaps, in normal times, have been addressed. But to these discreditable travails we must add far-reaching changes in the public arena which, on top of what I am trying to deal with on a personal level, make life close to unbearable.
I refer to the fact that in the course of a few short years, every moment of every waking day has become dominated by not just one hugely damaging lie, but two. These lies are closely related. Together they threaten the very fabric of our existence. And yet almost no-one seems to have noticed that on two fronts we are embracing self-destruction of a sort not previously contemplated; and that on both fronts the threat is illusory.
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The first enormous lie, which is now all but unchallengeable in public discourse, is so-called ‘man-made global warming’, whereby ‘man-made carbon emissions’ are heating up the world and will destroy it altogether. This is a classic millenarian scenario, seen at various stages throughout history: apocalypse now, unless we atone for our sins.
As I never tire of pointing out, the essential point about ‘man-made global warming’ is that it is not a proven fact. It is a thesis, a speculation, rejected by countless sober authorities throughout the world, but whose voices are never heard above the clamour. Why? Because ‘man-made global warming’ is no longer a theory to be debated. It is a dogma to be accepted. It belongs not to the world of science, but to the world of religion. And in religion, what counts is not fact, but belief.
Or look at it another way. Not even the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to believe in God any more. But like all belief systems, Christianity must be replaced by something else. As the clinical psychiatrist and public thinker Jordan Peterson has said, one must never underestimate people’s need to believe in something, however absurd that belief might be. Thus (and now this is my voice, not that of the excellent JP) Christianity has been replaced by a new religion, called ‘man-made global warming’.
In this new system, Our Heavenly Father, familiar to countless previous generations, is replaced by Nature, or the Environment. The Original Sin of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is replaced by the Industrial Revolution. The Word of God becomes the Message of Man-Made Apocalypse. And the prophets of old are replaced by the evidently deranged Thunberg girl and the ever-present Attenborough bore.
Wherever we look, the new dogma of ‘man-made global warming’ presents the attributes not of science, but of religion. If proper scientists are not sure about something, they research, they experiment, they exchange ideas, they embrace debate. And yet what do we see with those who believe in ‘man-made global warming’? In common with all religious zealots, the priests of the new order suppress non-belief, they force others to agree with them, they punish heretics. Bow before my faith, or I will destroy you.
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Nor has the public at large even begun to appreciate the cost of all this: both human and economic. Because whereas Christianity required one merely to refrain from murdering one’s neighbour, and to mouth an Ave Maria from time to time before going about one’s business, this new religion presumes not just to govern every part of one’s life, but also to shut down the whole world.
How can I not repeat myself? Do people not realise that the Johnson clown who is now our prime minister proposes to ban the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 (i.e. just round the corner)? That within a year or two he proposes to ban the installation of all new gas heating? That he proposes to make it mandatory for all households to rip out their existing heating systems and to install unproven and inefficient and noisy and vastly expensive ‘heat-pumps’ in their houses, at the same time as paying for new insulation too? (Estimated cost per household: £20,000 … and who will pay? No plans there.)
Those are just a few of the demented policies that lie just round the corner. But few appreciate that in the name of this new religion, whole swathes of our economy have already been closed down or made unviable. The steel industry hardly exists any more. The coal-fired power plants that served us so well for so long are now a thing of the past. This is all a direct result of government intervention in the name of ‘carbon-zero’.
Less dramatically, but equally tellingly: only a few months ago, when Lord R’s farm-manager was showing me round his estate in Northern Ireland, I was astounded to learn that as a direct result of the new religion, it is now illegal to dig up peat to burn on your fire. No, I am not joking: as the man repeatedly affirmed, and as Lord R confirmed, you cannot now lawfully dig up peat lying there on a hillside. Why? Because … um … that would release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing the immediate destruction of the world. The same farm manager also informed me that the government is doing everything it can to make cattle-farming unviable. Why? Because cow-farts are causing global warming. Chicken-farts are to be preferred.
That’s it: we have got to such a stage of absurdity that grown men honestly believe that the farts coming from the backsides of animals are causing the world to burn up. And in the name of this religion, the mendacious fool who rules over us and his bonkers wife are taking us back to the early Middle Ages.
Indeed, I understate my case. An Essex landowner tells me that in his part of the country, bonfires are already illegal. I am talking about burning leaves in one’s garden. But the Gove creature wants – or wanted – to go further. He wants – or wanted – to make it illegal to enjoy a wood fire in one’s own house of a winter evening. So this government does not want to take us back to the Middle Ages. It is more ambitious than that … it will take us back to the pre-Neolithic age.
In the meantime, the Chinese are laughing themselves sick. They can’t believe their luck. And when we have done everything possible to reduce ourselves to nothing, they will make their move.
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But just when one thinks that the madness can’t get any worse, and just when one is already operating at the very borders of one’s sanity, along comes a second wild superstition, to which we all have to pay obeisance.
I refer, of course, to Covid 19. Here, demonstrably, what matters is not fact, but belief. A religion, again. In the name of a new virus hailing from China, the whole country is locked down – or locked up – for the better part of two years; millions of lives and livelihoods are needlessly destroyed; the whole country must endure the previously unimaginable indignity of wearing masks in every public space; unprecedented pressure is applied on every single person to be vaccinated … not once, but twice, then three times … and then, what?, four or five or six times?
All this because, as the sensation-hungry media inform us on an hourly basis, the new virus is the worse thing to happen since the Black Death, which back in 1348 killed about one third of the population of England. And yet after two years of scaremongering and of superstition run wild, it is impossible not to observe the less spectacular reality.
This is as follows:
Fatality rate: As was established quite soon after the virus appeared, its fatality rate (that is to say the proportion of people infected with it who then die of it) is only marginally higher than the fatality rate of the standard winter flu that mankind has lived with since the dawn of history.
Covid ‘victims’: Overwhelmingly and with very few exceptions, this virus affects the very old and those with serious previously existing health problems. As the Cambridge statistician Prof. Sir David Spiegelhalter pointed out early on, the chances of a healthy young or youngish person dying from Covid are roughly the same as the chances of being struck by lightning. In other words, statistically negligible.
Lockdowns: Sold to us as the way to avoid the end of the world, lockdowns are demonstrably useless. Two things. Firstly: data collected from around the world now demonstate that there is no correlation between the strictness or otherwise of lockdowns, and the spread of Covid. Ergo: lockdowns don’t work. Secondly (and more mundanely), if lockdowns work, why did the first one not work? Or the second? Or the third? Ergo: Lockdowns don’t work. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand this. And a further thought (here speaks PoT, the world-famous epidemiologist): I’d say that this virus spreads in ways that we just don’t understand. I also suggest that if we had let it work its way through the system in the normal way of viruses, it would have gone away a long time ago; and that our endless tinkering has made matters worse, not better.
Facemasks: Nor do these inhuman facemasks work. This has been demonstrated by a number of academic studies, which I’m afraid I can’t quote off-hand (all my notes being in storage). But think of it in purely logical terms, thus: I put on a flimsy facemask, as the government dictates; but I am still breathing in and breathing out, through my mouth and nose; this infinitely tiny virus is still circulating; indeed, with me wearing a mask it is probably circulating more than before … because if I am breathing normally, the virus (if I have it) comes out of my mouth without much force … whereas if I am huffing and puffing behind my mask, the same virus comes out with some force from the side of the mask, and circulates more vigourously than it would otherwise do. Therefore, by the use of simple logic, I can demonstrate that masks are worse than useless. Which is what other people far better informed than myself have concluded.
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And yet we must pretend that this relatively trivial virus is the worst thing to happen, ever. No dissent from this belief will be brooked.
The media are all in favour of the scaremongering, because that is their business. The truth, with them, is neither here nor there. They want to sell a story. They want to frighten us all to bits. Nor do they care about the consequences. All that matters is tomorrow’s sensation.
Then the politicians. To the extent that our prime minister has any remaining grip on reality or any dim connection to any sort of honesty, he must realise by now that the Covid fiasco which has turned this country into a police state and brought us close to bankruptcy (estimated cost of our reaction to the virus: £400 billion, whatever that means) … he must now realise that the whole show has been a terrible mistake. He’s not stupid, after all. He is just deeply amoral.
But by now he is too invested in his own mistake to go back. Furthermore, what ‘Boris’ cares about a very great deal more than his country, is his own self. So rather than admit that the whole thing was a huge error, Johnson would carry on along the same course; and rather than receive one day’s unfavourable coverage in the ever-fickle media, he would happily destroy his own country.
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Which brings me back to where we started.
I now doubt for my sanity. It is not now enough to play the grand piano, and to work out the fingering on Bach preludes, as I did in the early stages of this madness. I am now seething with rage … not just against the government and the media and the politicians who have brought all this nonsense about; but, I am afraid, against my own country which has so willingly lapped up the lunacy and has so willingly embraced serfdom. And in the name of, what: nothing. Nothing at all. Just the illusory scares of ‘man-made global warming’ and of Covid … both of them championed by the blubbery-lipped tug who does exactly as his absurd ‘Carrie’ tells him.
Almost no-one sees what is happening. But soon enough they will. And by then it will be too late. I hope that with the help of what little ingenuity I have left, and with the few thousands I can muster, I will be in another country, far away from the mass hysteria that I can no longer bear.
Happy New Year …
