At the End of the World?

 Yes, it’s the grumpy face on show this time. Grumpy a little bit because I got clobbered by heat-stroke yesterday, and am still feeling a bit like a feather that spent the night in a tumble-drier. But Grumpy an awful lot because there are days – particularly if my resistance is low – when such reserves of tolerance as I have left (after reading what some stuffed parrakeet “thinks” about a topic) finally run out.

On days like these, I studiously avoid the temptation to visit the output of Owen Jones, Yasmin Alabai-Brown, Polly Toynbee, Jess Phillips, Dominic Grieve, Alastair Campbell and, well, all those ‘commentators’ one has come to view as predictably arch signallers of deranged mendacity masquerading as virtue.

At times, however, one can’t avoid such peddlers of piffle. They pop out from behind the next turning on some social media maze. On other occasions, someone sends me a research survey on the subject of Important Issues, and the one thoroughly reliable thing it proves is that some of the citizens they interview need a lot of help on the construction of an importance hierarchy.

The kind of help they need is not available on the NHS, on account of it involving the need for a brain transplant – possibly from a chimp, which would improve their performance immensely. But the NHS is always on their Importance Radar, which if nothing else proves that even those way down the food chain occasionally get something right.

This morning the following data chart popped into my gmail inbox. It is, in equal parts, intensely fascinating, hysterically funny, and appallingly tragic:

Table of the day:

Go first (if you don’t mind) to the bottom of the list, and see that only 1 in 8 of the electorate thinks the other nine screw-ups might be connected to No 10 – not Downing Street – but politicians and bureaucrats being akin to the average cobra in terms of genuine trust. This is not an encouraging start for any bloke who really does believe in direct democracy

Equally disturbing is that 3 in 5 of us think whether we quit the EU or stay is by far the most important issue we face. It is a by a million per cent the most important issue in deciding whether we become part of an evil corporate superstate, or branch out on our own with a revived faith in the Rule of Law. But in importance for the wellbeing of the average British family, it is a single snail on their lawn compared to the Fifty-foot high Tsunami of econo-financial disaster the entire human race is about to experience. In that context, Brexit is about as important to a Western citizen as what colour to paint the interior of the cellar’s electricity board cupboard.

Meander up the list a little: ‘the economy’ as a factor scores a mere 16%. Thanks to the Thatcherised financialisation of our now joke economy, there will be a special place under the Tsunami wave for the United Kingdom. I’d like to think it will include a special place for Donald Tusk, but of course it won’t.

No nation on Earth is going to be hit harder than Great Britain: we import far too much food, our manufacturing industry continues to shrink quarter by quarter, our farming has been ruined by EU twits and urban nutters, and a frightening percentage of our exports are to do with easily copyable financial services.

More than anything else, what this Ipsos Mori study shows is that – far from being a bumbling buffoon – the Prime Minister Boris Johnson is – as I’ve always maintained – a cynical and extremely cunning artist when it comes to the creation of a populist canvas. Over the last five days, his focus has been almost entirely on Brexit, Health, Crime and Education.

Meanwhile – at a level well beyond anything Bojo could (or might even want to) achieve – this too arrived in my inbox, and thus easily becomes….

Email title of the day:

Where would a person go today for online security – Web3? A personally hosted site based in Okinawa that not even a forensic virtual money-tracer could unravel? Perhaps.

But the very last place you’d go is Google. With Google under interrogation, the golden rule is, “The answer’s a lie, now what’s the question?” Of course, you could be our friend from earlier who lacks the chimp brain as a thinking mechanism, and is convinced that Facebook is a beacon of privacy and its owner should run for President.

Another of the things that both amaze and irritate me is the tendency corporate giants have to claim the credit for stuff that they’re doing purely in their own interests: “You told us you were worried about free plastic bags and their effect on the oceans, so we’ve switched to charging you for recycled paper bags”.

A fairly expensive supermarket chain here in France uses the slogan “United in the Fight against Price rises”. It is one of the most cynically profiteering chains in the country.

Such overt dishonesty is so brazen in its approach, you can almost forgive it. Almost, but not quite.

But I cannot find it within me on this, not one of my best days, to forgive the psychotic agitprop contained in this, easily the most….

Mad tweet of the day: 

Paul Mason – Leftist hardcase par excellence and often excremence – retweeted this drivel spawned by the lysergically acidic imaginings of a disturbed archetype unable to back anything he puts out with a single verifiable fact. The Christchurch atrocity to which he alludes was 1 of 2 fatal attacks on Muslims. Over the same 2018-19 period, Muslim extremists murdered 649 innocent worshippers of other religions.

Who are these White Supremacists? Can we identify the members? Do we know their nationality? Are they five million people or five nutjobs? Do we even know their f-king name?

Er….no.

David Osland has 11,600 Twitter followers. They probably all have the Vote.

Like I say, on days like these I lose it a little. And then go to bed with a book, secure in the knowledge that I won’t be around to witness the global civil war of Homo sapiens.