Flushing it all away

A large plume. Dear Father in Heaven protect us from large plumes. Although I think I’d be more worried about other large plumes - maybe as a result of trying to hold in last night’s bean casserole for too long.

Here’s a distressed couple waiting until the plume from the public loo has died down a bit

Or maybe that’s what they usually wear after a vindaloo the night before.

The official covid narrative might be an ex-narrative, a narrative that wouldn’t voom if you put 4 million volts through it, but we can stand back and admire the beautiful plumage.

It’s hard to comprehend exactly how it all happened. People who, back in 2019, we would have had no problem describing as intelligent and reasonable (probably), went all a bit doo-lally. Of the many things we flushed away, any sense of proportionality, balance, or just plain good old-fashioned common sense went hurtling round the Great U-Bend of Destiny.

How can we even begin to comprehend such stunning examples of human behaviour as this?

This looks like some meeting of a local government and, presumably, these people would probably not have been described as complete imbeciles back in 2019. Maybe if you didn’t like their politics perhaps. But there’s no doubt that wearing a mask for a zoom meeting is objectively imbecilic.

Even if you’re trying to promote mask-wearing with this kind of virtue signalling extraordinaire, it’s still extraordinarily dumb. So many people I have spoken to knew that masks were a farce when they had to do the old sit-down stand-up mask-off mask-on routine in restaurants and pubs. Only the dimmest light bulbs, the bluntest knives in the drawer, the least-sharp tools in the toolbox, thought that it made sense. It became clear to all but the terminally stupid that masking was a performative act.

Lots of people still went along with the pantomime though. It’s as if we flushed away our backbones. All it took, in the UK at least, was the utterance of 3 syllables :
I’m exempt
It worked like a charm for me and I was never challenged - except in the opticians where I had a bit of fun winding them up. The part where I was made to hold a mask a few inches from my face just had me giggling uncontrollably. The sanctimonious farts in the goggle shop were quite annoyed with me - until they asked for title and name. I was able to pull the old “actually I’m a doctor” routine - and it was a joy to witness their eyes widen in surprise.

But we flushed away so much, didn’t we?

• we flushed away something like 400 billion pounds in the UK, ostensibly to ‘save lives’, and yet there’s very little evidence to suggest we ‘saved’ any lives at all. We may have prevented a few from dying of covid - but we also killed a lot of people who needed other life-saving diagnoses and treatments.

• we flushed away a century of scientific advice and experience in dealing with respiratory disease outbreaks.

• we flushed away a whole bunch of rights and ended up in a situation where a government could determine what we could buy, where we could buy it, who could work, and who we could have in our own homes. They even told us who we could hug. It’s kind of hard to imagine any government issuing advice on sexual positions - but this they did. Good doggy. Bad missionary. I wonder if they did an edit on the Kama Sutra to make it “covid safe”? I’m pretty sure I saw some advice that said you should keep a distance of 1.5 metres during sex. That’s quite a feat - and one would have to be somewhat exceptional in the trouser department to pull that one off.

• we flushed away our kid’s education.

• worse than this, we flushed away our adult responsibilities when we treated kids as protective barriers for adults. You can bring your gender reassignment homework back home with you, but for God’s sake don’t bring covid back - you’ll kill Granny.

• and just to prove I can use Google to sound smarter than I am, we flushed away ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies). We saw this in all sorts of ways - so many things were simply declared to be “true” and deniers, who actually provided the evidence to show these things were untrue, were cast into media limbo and castigated. We were the walking guilty - condemned without proof - for the crime of breathing our asymptomatic virions everywhere.

• we flushed away any pretence of actually following the scientific method.

• we flushed away the last remaining vestiges of trust in our public health institutions that had been floating about.

• we flushed away many of our “non-essential” small businesses. They were forced to make a sacrifice - ostensibly on behalf of others.

• we flushed away our entire social contract and it has been built back bitter indeed. Governments took it upon themselves to keep us “safe”, whatever the cost, whatever the consequence, whatever the actual data and evidence said. New laws and mandates were written with gay abandon, without any cost-benefit analysis whatsoever. In a veritable diarrhoea of derangement we were pebble-dashed with a bewildering plethora of inconsistent and nonsensical rules that up-ended our way of life. Instead of a principle of things being legal unless expressly forbidden we had things being illegal unless expressly allowed.

I won’t go on - there are many more things we wantonly flushed away because of a moderately serious disease (statistically speaking) - certainly not significantly worse than any of the prior outbreaks of disease we have suffered for which we did nothing at all (other than sensible stuff like isolate if you have symptoms). We certainly didn’t stop the world and try to break it over previous pandemics.

The thing is, we would have been so much better off if we had done nothing at all

I cannot stress this enough. Nothing we have done has actually ‘worked’ in any meaningful sense - it’s all been cost and very little discernible benefit. We’ve just shafted ourselves beyond belief. Or rather we are the shaftees. Government said ‘bend over’ and boy oh boy did we bend.

I’d like to flush the last 2 years away. We need to flush them away.

But even if we do succeed in this I suspect the resultant magnificent plume will be with us for very many years to come.

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