Memory: use it or lose it …
We’ve often mentioned the apparent lack of memory seen in Generation Smartphone, apparently incapable of remembering ‘events’ going back further than last week. Perhaps though they’re not as guilty of this as we thought. Scanning this morning’s headlines I noticed that this lack of memory seems to afflict the middle-aged as well, especially those who write in and for the MSM. It’s as if not remembering has become acceptable.
Let’s look at a few examples. There’s the annual ‘excitement’ about school grades and grade inflation. This year it’s so bad that the education minister is thinking about changing the system from letters to numbers. Well, every little helps – but why is it that none of the MSM writers recall that ‘grade inflation’ has been a staple of MSM editorial moans at least since the start of this millennium? Nobody wonders why suddenly over 50% of kids have A and A* results (link) – and that after the disruption to schooling thanks to covid, not to mention the intransigence of teachers unions scuppering classroom teaching!
Do we dare to ask what these kids have actually learned? No, “we” must be happy for the youngsters and blame the Education Minister for ‘grade inflation’ at the same time. Apparently, our clever MSM writers have already forgotten the battles a certain Mr Gove had to fight against his civil serpents in ‘the blob’. Ah well, that was ten years ago … a long time not just in politics but also in the MSM.
The beneficiaries of Blair’s ‘education policies’ are now writing in the MSM or are sitting in the HoC and Whitehall. It’s therefore not surprising that these functionally illiterate and innumerate people produce inane papers. As long as the political propaganda line is correct – who cares!
Well – we do! I’m sure it’s thanks to the many letter writers who send their thoughts to their MPs and to the MSM that some idiotic policies are being slowly withdrawn. I suspect that the MSM editor and MPs are also aware that thanks to social media these letters are finding a much wider audience and thus political consequences loom on the horizon.
Next, there’s the ‘Net Zero’ The proposal that gas boilers be scrapped by 2030, that home heating should be done by heat pumps and hydrogen boilers, seems to be facing the chop. Well, it’s being ‘reconsidered’, according to nameless ‘ministers’ chatting to The Times:
“Ministers could downgrade plans to ban the installation of new gas boilers from 2035 to an ambition to ensure that homeowners do not face significant costs […] The government was considering a ban on new gas boilers at that date to encourage people to buy more environmentally-friendly alternatives such as heat pumps and hydrogen boilers.” (link, paywalled)
You don’t say! Have some numerate Treasury officials given some ’ministers’ lectures in simple arithmetic? Have grandparents, numerate and literate well above the level of the current crop of ‘government’ officials, perhaps told some home truths to those ‘ministers’? However, I’m not holding my breath to watch if harsh reality is inflicting damage on green dreams, not when those who have declared themselves to be the ‘official opposition’ are incapable of even looking up what’s in their archives.
Take for example the reports on the wild fires currently raging in mediterranean countries at the moment. It never happened before … the devastating wild fires in e.g. Greece 15yers ago gets only a brief mention (paywalled link). It’s all ‘climate change’ – the reports from the USA or Australia documenting that these fires are due to both arson and ‘green’ mismanagement: forgotten.
We also have the daily ‘covid propaganda saga’. I don’t know if the shrunken memories of civil serpents or of MSM writers are the drivers. They don’t seem to have realised that we dumb plebs have got more and better information on covid than they do. Today we’re told that sadly, the covid experts believe that the Delta variant has scuppered all hopes of ‘herd immunity’. Funny that – weren’t we told that there’s no such thing but that it might be achieved if 75% of a population had been jabbed?
Well, “we” have achieved that, haven’t we (link) – or is that a lie pushed by the covid empire, propagated by the MSM? Nobody asks why ‘cases’ are rising again, for the first time in ten days (link). It must be very difficult for the innumerate covideologists in government and the MSM to wonder if just perhaps this number is rising because people are coming back from their holidays and have to produce tests?
The scandal that is the cost of those tests is slowly surfacing, but there’s also a glimmer of a SAGE recanting – just like the ‘ministers’ telling the Times that perhaps gas boilers won’t need to be replaced in 2035. We now read that perhaps testing of everything that moves might not be so clever after all:
“Scientists said it was time to accept that there was no way of stopping the virus spreading through the entire population, and monitoring people with mild symptoms was no longer helpful. Prof Andrew Pollard, who led the Oxford vaccine team, said it was clear that the delta variant could infect people who had been vaccinated, which made herd immunity impossible to reach even with high vaccine uptake. […] Experts said it [mass jabbing] would never be enough to stop Covid from spreading.” (paywalled link)
You don’t say! The war against the unjabbed, currently being waged by governments across the industrialised world, can now clearly seen to be nothing but governments trying to control and coerce their people. I doubt that one of their coercion instruments, the unspeakable test regime, will be reduced – it’s too good an earner for the PCR manufacturers and test centres.
However, there are two news items which our clever covid propagandists haven’t yet come to grips with. We remember (even if they don’t!) that the elderly are going to get a ‘booster jab’ from next month while our youngsters are being coerced to get their jabs as well, regardless. Just in time Pfizer has raised the price for their jab – because of ‘higher demand’ – what a surprise! Even so:
“Britain has ordered 35 million doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for next year’s autumn booster campaign at a significantly higher cost after the US drugmaker raised prices in response to demand […] The government is poised to announce a £1 billion deal for the doses this week after ministers were warned that the UK could run out of jabs in 2022, leading to further lockdowns.” (link, paywalled)
Well – lookit there: isn’t it lovely that we thus learn that this government is planning an annual booster-jab-feast! More worrying is that the covid emperors are ploughing ahead with their drive to jab our kids even in face of a study showing that boys are at a much higher risk of contracting myocarditis thanks to the Pfizer jab (link).
Why are all those clever MSM ‘educational’ writers, celebrating the latest A-level grade inflation, not up in arms, demanding that the covid tsars stop their drive to give ‘clotshots’ to our girls and heart-attack shots to our boys? Do they ever wonder what good these top A-level grades will be to their kids when they become seriously ill thanks to the relentless jab campaigns – which don’t even stop the spread of that delta variant? Has covid mushed their brains – or have their brains been underdeveloped because of their own ‘education’?
Never mind – everybody is still on holidays, jabbed, tested to perdition and happy not to have to think further than their own nose tip. Perhaps though the covid dictatorship can be surreptitiously dismantled behind the back of Vallance who now has the green blob pastures to play on.
KBO!
I’m still ploughing through Vernon Coleman’s ‘Bloodless Revolution’ and I must admit he does explain how a government could be formed from a HoC with majority Independents.
He suggested the idea way back and it is not even started yet.
I’m afraid we need a quicker way but what.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-five-key-covid-truths-that-could-have-saved-us-from-self-destruction/
This article appeared in TCW today but don’t expect any politicians or sheep to read it.
Superb edition, Viv. So many nails on their head.
Something else that seems to be forgotten is that the WHO changed the inconvenient genuine and immutable (to any sane person) meaning of both ‘herd immunity’ and ‘vaccine’ to fit ‘their truth’ (for which read ‘their lies’), which, as in pretty much all leftie posturing, means their false narrative.
My son sent me the following earlier today because he knows how I feel about education!!!
“Friend of mine posted this on Facebook today. Though it might hit a cord:
A level have changed to a system where students are taught intensively for two years. After two years they are subjected to 5-10 hours of exams, their results are in most cases based entirely on their ability to regurgitate information from up to 24 months ago accurately.
In the days of the Internet and a calculator in literally everyones pocket we should not be basing a measure of intelligence on ability to recall, we should be measuring it on reasoning. In fact when young people go on to higher education this is what they need and universities are increasingly keen on assessments which contain coursework elements or are entirely course work.
I would postulate that the only reason to continue with this charade is to avoid teaching young people to think because if they did they might apply that thought to the political system and try to change it.”
I mentally awarded a gold star to the person who posted that comment. I don’t do Facebook myself but I sincerely hope that this comment will ‘go viral’ (as I believe the saying goes!)
Bliar set out to destroy the ‘educashun’ system in Britain. He has almost succeeded because his policies have been enthusiastically embraced by all the following CONservative governments! The current Education Secretary refuses to say what his own grades were (or the subjects that he sat exams for), He says he “can’t remember”!!!! Well now isn’t this memory thing exactly what Viv has been writing about today????
Herd Immunity really does work, though it is too brutal to be acceptable to the wishy-washy “modern” mindset.
When faced with a new “challenge”, which can be anything between a virus,or “climate”. those herd members who cannot cope DIE.
It starts with the elderly (That’s me, and though I’ve had the covid I refused to become a statistic and drop off my perch)
Next come those with some serious underlying medical condition.
The last group are those who have some genetic difference that renders them incapable of responding to that particular challenge.
The survivors are the ones that the HERD needs to continue the line. The fate of the individual is immaterial.
* * *
In the spring of 1958 I was given a number:- 23662261 That changed in July 1960 to:- 465561
…But I cannot remember what I had for lunch last Sunday.
Some stuff I try to recall to the Greenies :
With all the rain my rhubarb has replaced the Amazon rain forest as a carbon sink.
bet thats not in the Covid/climate doom models .
I recall the boss of Shell no less forecasting in the 1970s that oil would run out by about year 2000.
Then there was the hole in the ozo layer.
Who filled it in ?
Then the South of the UK was going to turn into the Sahara.. was that about 2005?
The BBC was telling us to pee and not flush , share our toothbrush water etc.
The flooding did not happen because its not in the Stalinist plan .
Oh remember petrol bad , diesel good ?
Veggie diesel ?
LPG ?
as for the no light lightbulbs.. well I do like LEDs until they blow .
So we are left with teslas for the rich , sod the working poor.
Please add your own failed forecast of doom
Remember Fred Hoyle’s book in the 80s about the threat of an impending ice age? The cover of a colour supplement about it showed the top of the Houses of Parliament sticking up out of a waste of snow. This caught my imagination and much later I wrote a novel about a small group of people in a future London under six metres of snow, ‘Ice Diaries’.
Fred Hoyle’s argument was that we must do something to counter global freezing before it was too late.
In the same way that no actual pandemic was ever visible, no climate emergency is visible. Neither exists, yet people evidently believe it ‘cos the telly screams it at them endlessly. Tell a lie big enough and often enough, etc.
Far from demonising the natural gentle warming that would actually benefit the world, and the naturally rising CO2 that helps plants grow and allows cultivation in formerly arid regions to feed the ever growing population, the world, from all I have learned, has not warmed for a decade at least and is beginning a slide into a much colder period until about 2050. That is not an emergency either but it would make sense to anticipate and prepare small scale. Those fossil fuels that have driven prosperity will be badly needed, for example.
The Milankovitch cycles drive the regular mega scale, aeons-long changes (snowball/fireball Earth) in Earth’s climate, but sunspot activity on a much shorter time scale drives ripples within the major sweep. We are heading for a grand solar minimum (sunspots) which has historically lead to much cooler conditions. Devotees of Heller and Homewood, to name but two as mentioned yesterday, will know this, but there are many such sources. Rowan Dean’s Ice Age watch has presented countless examples of unseasonal and extreme cold weather around the globe that the MSM ignores in favour of fires and falsely claimed temperature extremes.
I will not be around to worry too much, but my children and grandchildren will be, and I worry for them. That is, if the world has not been driven into a reduced population, transhuman, stone-age-like existence (that’s AI-augmented humans not transsexual) by the WEF before then.
The green doomsday clock records 48 global warming and new ice age prophecies by 2021 that have spectacularly failed to happen. I am so tired and disenchanted with all the scaremongering bedwetters who are frightening our children to death. Look at the Greta doom goblin, for instance. Hardly a ray of sunshine, is she?
Not just illiterate but STEM – illiterate, which in a technological world is dangerous.
JF
Another link re no jab no job
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/what-to-do-if-your-employer-school-or-parish-demands-you-get-the-coronavirus-vaccine/
PS I know it’s in US but we can still pick up snippets of wisdom from it.
‘Never mind – everybody is still on holidays, jabbed, tested to perdition and happy not to have to think further than their own nose tip’
Yes, that just about sums it up Viv.