ALARMIST WHO-HAA

CLIMATE CHANGE AND SWINE FLU LOVERS will be bitterly disappointed this week in the wake of the distressing news that the alarmist hoo-haa surrounding these two momentous events in the life of the planet are nothing more than a little hot air and a cleverly-fabricated scam on the part of ailing medical giants Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, that loveable drugs producer founded in Bunnythorpe, New Zealand. When even the ineffectual Council of Europe sees its slumbering members awake from their dozing to produce a report questioning the veracity of the World Health Organization’s report on Swine Flu then we should see that the game is up, as policemen often say on television.


NOW WE KNOW THAT THE FIGURES underlying the statements made by Margaret Chan (see Sunday Morning, April 30th 2009) were “sexed up” in order to make governments panic and buy enormous quantities of useless medicines that no one is interested in having administered by injection into their fair and lily-white members. One wonders how Ban-ki “Slippery Eel” Moon feels after having stated that “at least a third” of the world would be suffering, if not dead – and thus no longer suffering, one presumes – by last October.


NOW WE HAVE THE NEWS that Nobel-winning statuesque politician Al Gore lied about the numbers and statistics behind his claims that the Arctic Circle would be as ice-free as the Mediterranean in five years. He stated yesterday, after having been “shopped” by Dr Wieslaw Maslowski, that he had made “a mistake” over his predictions. Gore’s admission leaves only two “authorities” that still defend the alarming claims made in the nineties.


ONE OF THESE IS THE IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yesterday, however, we discovered that the Chairman of this august organ, Dr Rajendra “Big Thinker” Pachauri (pictured above), far from being a “climate change expert”, whatever that is, is a former railway engineer with no background in science whatsoever. And yesterday the IPCC itself admitted that it had “exaggerated” and “speculated on” available information. Science fiction, therefore. The worst exaggeration appears to have been the panel’s statement that all the hundreds of feet thick glaciers in the Himalayas would melt “within a few years” if the temperature increases by 1ºC. These people should come to my house and help me defrost my freezer sometime.


SO WE ARE BASICALLY LEFT WITH PRINCE CHARLES; and we know what that means. Personally, I am pleased to see that the world is coming round to my sensible point of view. Over the last few years there have been few people on my side. However, I would recommend one to read Joanne Nova, on www.joannenova.com.au She describes herself as a “professional skeptic”, but I have my doubts.

THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD

I CAN OFFER NO APOLOGY for my reneging on what has managed to become seen as my duties of late, but a tight schedule for getting a chapter ready for proof-reading before publication and an emergency at the college at which I am a sometime teacher, involving me having to help the Dean in his duties, managed to bog me down somewhat over this blisteringly cold yuletide season. One might also state that there has been precious little worth writing about in the field of politics of late.


ALL OF THIS SEEMS TO BE CHANGING now as the New Year starts to “kick in”. Seeing as elections in the UK are sneaking ever closer, nerves are a-starting a-jangling among our beloved leaders and honest representatives. Even the most optimistic polls published in the tidier newspapers suggest that one third to four fifths of the present occupants of the Mother of All Parliaments will be looking for alternative ways of earning a living after the suffrage. We even have scandals of a heterosexual nature emerging from Ireland, which is a pointer towards interesting developments in the future.


BUT THE BIG NEWS OF THE DAY has to be the long-awaited appearance of Alastair “I know where you live, you scumbag” Campbell before the goodly gentlemen and refined ladies who make up the panel of the Iraq Inquiry in their laughable bid to find out the “truth” behind Britain’s – and particularly Tony Blair’s – decision to go to war against Iraq on the flimsiest of details.


IF ANYONE THOUGHT THAT CAMPBELL would play the game of these effete dullards and break down in tears after a soft rating then this is because they have never been to Burnley. Campbell stood his ground, stuck to his guns and stiffed the panel up for its arrogance. Leaving them all “stymied” at best. We all know that Tony Blair went to war in Iraq in order to get his name written down as a war hero on the pages of history, and that he needed someone smart, sleek and intelligent to present and sell his image – and there was no way he would find anyone fitting this description among the elected anoraks of the Labour Party. I think today’s performance is a hats off and trebles all round day for Blair and co., and Campbell did not leave without a fairly stiff digit being pointed in the direction of the hapless Gordon Brown.

THE FUTURE NOW

I MUST FIRST ESTABLISH THE TONE FOR THE NEXT few weeks of badinage by wishing all the good people who assume themselves as being kept under some kind of umbrella term meaning my “friends” the very best for the coming year. As miserably as most of them seem to have done in 2009, unless the planet is invaded by some money-eating bug, the year 2010 ought to be better.


YET I AM AMUSED TODAY as I loll on my four-poster bed in a manor house hotel in the charming city of Évora, in southern Portugal, flipping through the TV channels, by the insight set forth by one Watts Wacker, an apparent “futurist”, no doubt from California, who is so confident about what he knows the future will be that he doesn’t have to appear even semi-respectable today.


MR WATTS WACKER has been telling the obviously face-lifted presenter of CNN Today that the “next decade” will “see us living a future that we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago”. Of course one, at a stretch, can in fact glean some intelligence out of this absurd construction, but my point is that this could have been stated at any time in history by anyone.

FUTURISTS, GOD BLESS THEM, TEND TO OVEREGG THE PUDDING in their predictions, as was made clear in the little vignette presented by CNN about how different generations in the past have imagined what life would be like in 2010. Most of these predictions have seen us dressed in bright-coloured, tight-fitting nylon suits, with no sign of genitalia or mammaries, speaking in clipped monotones, riding around through space on sparkling, dildo-shaped devices, with cute little vacuum-cleaner size robots with names like UB40 or R2FU quacking as they buzz around flashing lights while we just look out the window at the candy-floss of the universe floating by to the sound of music by Strauss, and then we have our weekly 30 seconds of sex over the phone in a little egg-shaped cubicle.


WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF THE SEX OVER THE PHONE prediction, none of this has come true. Yet we persist in our desire to predict. My own view of the future. which is obviously not as inspired as Wacker’s, is that if we continue to allow ourselves to be governed by the half-wits and outright, bare-faced robbers who have been running the USA, the UK and the soi-disant EU for the last thirty years then we will end up not with JetPacs on out backs, flitting about from penthouse to heliport, but at each other’s throats over who gets to share the last potato in the pot. In homage to all “futurists”, I leave you with a little sketch by Van Gogh which shows us Gordon Brown's Britain in 2020.