Passing Observations 112

This is a long standing series of small items which have caught my eye or mind and which seem relevant, startling, amusing or all three. Occasionally, items which appear here may return as a longer piece. Mostly they will not.

1. The England football team seem confused by the fact that they get booed when they go down on one knee. They are surely booed because the gesture is self-indulgent, sanctimonious and irrelevant. It does absolutely nothing except give the players a dirty knee. If they want to be political why not campaign against important things – dangerous, experimental jabs; the global warming terrorists, and sanctions which are killing hundreds of millions in Africa. They’d be cheered for that. But it would take a lot of courage.
2. The UK Government boasts about low unemployment but ignores the 5.3 million who are on out of work benefits. But what can you expect from a government run by a malignant coterie of liars and cheats?
3. It’s about time one of the fact-checkers fact checked Wikipedia. But why would they? Most of the fact checkers are, like Wikipedia, tools of the conspirators.
4. Why don’t nurses put cages over patients’ legs when they are in a bed and have relevant lower limb problems? The cages protect, make life more comfortable and reduce the risk of deep vein thrombosis. They always used to do this but no longer seem to bother. Maybe they think it’s too much trouble and too much of a distraction from playing with the computer.
5. The Advertising Standards Authority likes to give the impression it has power and can ban ads. In fact it is a private body not a statutory body. It is largely financed by big advertisers. The ASA itself has been reported to the Office of Fair Trading.
6. There are two certainties. Whatever the Economist newspaper says about currencies or commodities will be wrong. And whatever the CIA says will always be wrong. Both are adept at backing the wrong horse.
7. I discovered an old paper I had read but forgotten about. It is rather depressing and supports the conclusions I made in my book Paper Doctors (which was published in 1977). Entitled ‘How evidence-based medicine (EBM) is failing due to biased trials and selective publication’, and published in the ‘Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice’, the paper is a damning one. Evidence-based medicine is defined as the ‘conscientious and judicious use of current best evidence in conjunction with clinical expertise and patient values to guide health care decisions’. In other words, the aim is to provide patients with care based on the best, most reliable and most appropriate knowledge. But it seems that although health care costs have continued to soar, there is a lack of evidence to suggest that EBM has resulted in health gains for patients. The paper suggests that the potential for improving health care has been thwarted by bias in the choice of hypotheses tested, by the manipulation of study design and by selective publication. In other words, journals are only publishing research work which is helpful to drug companies. The research which criticises new products is never published. ‘Evidence for these flaws is clearest in industry-funded studies,’ say the authors, who argue that the indiscriminate acceptance of `evidence’ produced by drug companies is ‘akin to letting politicians count their own votes’. The authors also point out that most studies are funded by drug companies and that `clinical decisions based on such evidence are likely to be misinformed, with patients given less effective, harmful or more expensive treatments.’ The authors call for more independent research, and for the formation of more informed and independent bodies to assess the available research. And they suggest that research which is biased should be downgraded in value. This paper was published in 2014. Nothing has changed. I am not surprised. I expressed similar concerns back in 1977 in my book Paper Doctors.
8. Reparations for slavery is one of the most idiotic grab-for-cash pieces of lunacy ever dreamt up. Where does it stop? Although he was in a protected job, my father signed up and joined the Navy in 1939. He was sunk three times by German U boats. (Or, rather, he was on three ships which were sunk.) Not surprisingly, his health never recovered. How much am I owed from the German Government for this?
9. Everyone has become too important to do what they are paid for. Doctors, nurses, teachers, policemen – the list goes on and on. They all want to be paid but they don’t want to do what they’re supposed to do. The country is full of divas.
10. Ten or twelve hour queues for essential medical attention are now commonplace in hospital Accident and Emergency Departments. This has happened because the rest of us (fortunate enough not to be in a ten or twelve hour queue for medical treatment) don’t speak out about it. The queues are a result of laziness, incompetence and a disregard for patients among the toxic mass of over-paid administrators running the NHS.
11. The conspirators aiming to take over the world want to eradicate the elderly because the elderly remember how things were, how they can be and how they should be. And the elderly understand words like ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’.
12. In the 1950s, Britons spent 30% of their wages on food. Today, they spend 10% on food and the rest on mobile phones and TV subscriptions.
13. Under Boris Johnson, the UK Government is now 55% bigger (and more expensive) than it was during the bloated Blair years. Not surprisingly, the UK tax burden is now the highest since the 1940s – when Britain was fighting the Second World War. Remember: these days, nothing happens by accident.
14. Only four of the top 30 companies from 1952 are still in existence: British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, Tate and Lyle and Rolls-Royce.
15. Landline phones are to be removed because the phone lines are now considered too dangerous. I have no idea why phone lines are considered dangerous. Perhaps, the problem is that millions of would-be tightrope walkers are using them for practice. Or maybe the conspirators want us to all use smart phones so that it is easier for them to keep track of everything we do and say. What’s your guess?
16. When the film ‘African Queen’ was made, the cast and crew all suffered terribly from diarrhoea and vomiting. It was the drinking water that caused the problem. Only two people were unaffected: Humphrey Bogart and John Huston – they both drank only whisky.
17. I have come to the conclusion that the sad and dreary and rather pathetic folk who believe in global warming are clinically insane, driven by hysteria into a cult religion which demands self-immolation and the abandonment of all science, logic and good sense. The net zero fanatics are a greater threat to humanity than any other group of terrorists.
18. Why is it that people working in the public sector are hardly ever sacked for egregious incompetence? Civil servants of all kinds seem to be immune from retribution – however potent and destructive their sins might be.
19. The UK now spends 20% of its GDP on health care (in 1952 it was 7%) and yet Britain now has no health care. GPs have disappeared and hospitals are widely regarded as death farms. Health care is worse than it was 70 years ago.
20. ‘The New Yorker’ magazine used to be good. No more. It referred to the covid fraud as a plague. The magazine actually used that word: ‘plague’! The only plague was a plague of stupidity.