There follows a guest post by David McGrogan, an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School.
With the so-called ‘pingdemic’ well underway, and showing no sign of abating, the question naturally arises: why are our politicians obsessed with finding technological ways out of the pandemic? What possessed them to imagine that ‘Test and Trace’ could ever be successful?
The proximate cause appears to have been an unholy alliance between Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings, who looked at what had happened in South Korea and Taiwan and came to the bizarre conclusion that what had apparently worked there – in societies and circumstances totally unlike ours – could just be transplanted here and deployed as effectively. Whether this should be more properly be described as hubris or stupidity is a question I will leave to the reader to decide.
The problem, though, has much deeper roots. The Hungarian-French thinker, Anthony de Jasay, once made the observation (which, like all great observations, is deceptively simple) that there is a natural bias among politicians towards doing things. It takes a very special kind of person to get elected to national office and then resist using the power available to them. In fact, such a person may not exist at all – it is impossible to identify a leader even remotely resembling that type on either side of the Atlantic since, perhaps, Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s. Why do people decide to become politicians, after all? Because they want to do things.
The idea, then, that Boris and his Cabinet would have been able to simply sit there, apparently passively, while the virus ‘let rip’, was pretty implausible once the Chinese and Italians had gone into lockdown. The urge to do things would have been overwhelming. And it remains to this day. Letting the immune systems and common sense of the public take care of matters is anathema to our leaders, because it doesn’t involve them taking bold action or, indeed, doing anything much at all. This goes against the grain of their very psyches: in their own minds, they envisage themselves ‘winning’ in the war against Covid through their brilliant decision-making and uber-competence, and being hoisted onto the shoulders of the grateful populace and paraded through the streets accordingly. They don’t want nature to take the credit which they believe is theirs. In fact, it is pretty clear that they don’t really want the virus to reach natural equilibrium at all – they want to defeat it, preferably through some fabulous scheme.
The theorist of management, Brent Flyvberg, seeking to explain the attraction of politicians towards costly mega-projects (HS2s, Olympic games, Millennium Domes, HMS Queen Elizabeths, etc.), ascribed it to what he called four ‘sublimes’: the technological, political, economic and aesthetic. The technological sublime describes the sense of rapture associated with creating some technical, never-seen-before marvel; the political sublime refers to the attention and gratitude that accrues to politicians who build big; the economic sublime describes the sense of sheer delight which comes from spending vast amounts of money; and the aesthetic sublime refers to the pleasure that washes over everybody in the aftermath.
These sublimes all seem to have been at work in ‘Test and `Trace’ (and, indeed, in lockdowns in general) – doing something that has never been done before, getting lots of attention and spending huge sums doing it, and basking in the beauty of the achievement afterwards. Indeed, thinking of what has been going on since 2020 as a ‘megaproject’ akin to HS2 gets us quite close to the heart of the matter. After all, is there a politician alive in the U.K, today who is more attracted to megaprojects than Boris Johnson? Has there been a Prime Minister in the last 50 years who took more pleasure from throwing money at railways, roads, tunnels, and the like? Put in that way, his addiction to ‘Test and Trace’ seems very much of a piece with his character.
The important point about megaprojects, of course, is that they are often ruinously expensive and generally a bit rubbish. £37 billion has been allocated to ‘Test and Trace’, and it appears to have no effect whatsoever on viral transmission. The analogy with failed white elephant schemes like the Millennium Dome and (probably) HS2 is so obvious it almost goes without saying – but at least those endeavours didn’t involve food shortages, ruined holidays and weddings, and the end of our civil liberties.
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“Techno-con”. Neat phrase. I’m going to use that. It will take off.
Because Clown World logic dictates that the likes of a total non-expert ( and extremely bloody irritating, while I’m at it ) called Greta gets to have all the limelight and spout all the blatant lies but on her elitist platform she will remain, because she’s talking complete garbage but is pro-narrative.
And speaking of the Peta Pan of the Garbage Pail Kid world and bloody annoying people, does anybody have photo evidence of her or her eco nutter acolytes ever getting their hands dirty? Because if any of them ever did anything useful to help the environment, as opposed to gluing themselves to things, walking like zombies in the road or chucking orange stuff everywhere, I might be a tad less scathing. People should be judged by their actions, after all;
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1685046948833673216
Hello, Westminster….Mr Sunak…..Parliament…….Uncle Tom Cobley……
‘I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.’
Dr J. F. Clauser
‘Dr. John F. Clauser, born 1942, is an American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics. Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.
Oh!
‘In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.’
‘A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming’ The European Physical Journal +, Jan 2022
Off-topic due to there being no articles about jabs today:
This new peer-reviewed study is significant because it demonstrates increased mortality in children <5yrs the more vaccinations they have. Conclusion;
”There are statistically significant positive correlations between neonatal, infant, and under age five mortality rates of developed nations and the number of early childhood vaccine doses that are routinely given. When developed nations require two versus zero neonatal vaccine doses, or many versus fewer infant vaccine doses, our study suggests there may be unintended consequences that increase all-cause mortality. Further investigations of the hypotheses generated by this study are recommended to confirm that current vaccination schedules are achieving their intended objectives.”
https://www.cureus.com/articles/164423-neonatal-infant-and-under-age-five-vaccine-doses-routinely-given-in-developed-nations-and-their-association-with-mortality-rates#!/
Jikky has a good thread about it here with some additional information;
https://twitter.com/Jikkyleaks/status/1685468279077244930
Thanks for the information.
Neil Z. Miller, referred to in the links also has a very interesting book – “Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies”.
Well worth a read.
Of course Obama live by the ocean, (or should that be oceans?) despite his warnings of the sea rising
Cancelled by the IMF.. now there’s a surprise.. another nasty little cabal of bankers who are responsible for sucking the life blood out of so many third world countries with their unpayable debt, and plunging them into despicable levels of poverty..
Anybody who believes the IMF are the slightest bit interested in ‘saving’ the planet needs a size 10 boot five lace-holes up their jacksy..
LOL! What the hell does he know? Is he famous? Is he on the telly?
Well then…proof positive, the ‘science is settled’ according to the omniscient BBC…
we have our true, bona fide Commander in Chief Greta, who absolutely knows better and we need to be listening to her!
If Clauser is cancelled then all of science needs cancelling as well because a “climate crisis” is NOT supported by any science.—— In matters of science you question EVERYTHING. But the thing that is different about climate science is that there is no way to conduct experiments. There maybe agreement about some basic facts, such as the earth has warmed in the last 150 years, and that CO2 has contributed in some way to that. But there are also serious doubts and uncertainties. (1) How much can the climate expect to change as a result of us adding CO2 to the atmosphere and (2) Is this dangerous? There is also the question over the role of natural variability of the climate compared to assumed changes caused by CO2. But assumptions are NOT science. Speculations about the effect CO2 will have on temperature and climate should be discussed and debated, and when there is this determination to halt any discussion and silence those asking pertinent questions then we are no longer dealing with science. But many on this website will know that already. Science is all the time sold to the public on this issue as FACT. No it isn’t. It is a PROCESS. ———- Yesterday on GB News we had the usual little debate with invited guests. One of those guests in a discussion about ULEZ was the Meteorologist Jim Dale. I found it astonishing that he could still be harping on about the manufactured consensus, the so called 97% of scientists all apparently agree on something. But in this so called consensus, what were the scientists asked, and what were there replies? 97% consensus of scientists is ABSURD. As Judith Curry has pointed out Consensus is NOT a proxy for truth. Consensus stops questions from being asked and investigations taking place. Consensus is also just an appeal to authority, but science is not a dictatorship where people with views not consistent with the political consensus masquerading as scientific truth are outlawed, ostracised and silenced, and those who question dogma are delegitimised. Is this what science has become? Clauser is certainly finding that out, and so are everyone else who challenges climate tyranny.
If they cancel an opposing or different point-of-view it means they don’t have the data to defend their own viewpoint.
They know their opinion will not stand up to scrutiny.