I have failed to blog for the past month because the requisite research has been so depressing. The derangement of mankind is on particularly vivid display. There is all the normal news: a war, another war, another SSRI-fuelled mass shooting in America, an horrific story of child abuse, a royal person doing something twee and so on. Then there is the special news of our era of insanity: gender nonsense, race-baiting nonsense and net zero nonsense.

Meanwhile the national debt grows, public sector pensions remain unfunded and the NHS hires more bureaucrats. Joe Public is being screwed by inflation, taxation and traffic regulation. The birthrate falls, excess mortality rises and HS2 digs up the countryside to bury money.

Almost all our current problems are self-inflicted. Our leaders and academics are fixated on non-existent problems and wilfully blind to real ones. If they hadn’t fallen for the panicdemic, the phantom dangers of atmospheric CO2 variation and the whims of wokery we would be, comparatively speaking, in paradise. Watching this dangerous nonsense, it is easy to feel that we are reduced to simply waiting for our Governments to do the Next Stupid Thing.

We rarely have to wait long.

The situation is like an enormous game of Jenga. Midwits and ideologues remove the building blocks of our commonweal from the base of society one by one and then replace them, upside down, on the top of the tower. They penalize safe, efficient, cheap cars and promote heavy, expensive, self-incinerating electric vehicles. They stop promoting child safety and teach children about pornography and self-mutilation. They welcome unknown numbers of unknown people at our borders and send millions of pounds worth of equipment to defend the borders of another country, and so on …

There is a morbid fascination in waiting for the collapse. Perhaps one of the bad people will do something extra stupid, or will one of the stupid people do something extra bad? Or perhaps, and most likely, some random act of idiocy or evil such as the martyrdom of George Floyd will topple the tower and hundreds of thousands of innocent people will be impacted by the debris. When will that happen? And what will happen next?

No one knows. Maybe civilisation will implode spectacularly or perhaps it will just bumble on, crumbling day by day like a senior citizen settling gently into dementia.

The UK Covid Inquiry is a magnificent pantomime of denial. Will Baroness Whitewash finish it without ever touching on the possibility that the Government’s interventions were ineffective, unnecessary and damaging? Will she manage to get to the end before someone says out loud, “The Emperor is naked”?

It may well be that her world view is so securely rooted in the hypnotic myths of orthodoxy that she is unable to see that lockdowns and vaccines may have caused more harm than they prevented. Her extra-ordinary lack of curiosity looks like the literalism that was considered by Milton H. Erickson to be a marker of deep hypnosis. (Erickson has, of course, been debunked but that is a rabbit hole for another time.) Erickson claimed that if he asked a subject in deep trance, “Can you tell me your name?” they would typically answer, “Yes.”

Another, more telling example was an exchange like this:

Researcher: “What is in front of you?”

Hypnotic subject: “Nothing.”

Researcher: “And what is there beyond the nothing?”

Hypnotic subject: “A chair.”

Perhaps the great Baroness really cannot see beyond the end of her nose.

However although the Inquiry itself is a farrago of misdirection and duplicity, it has also given rise to some good news.

Good News #1

The Inquiry has prompted sceptical commentary in the mainstream which is critical of the lockdowns. Too little and sadly far too late for many, but a small, welcome indication that a few more people are beginning to see things differently.

And here’s the other piece of good news.

Good News #2

A friend asked me the other day, “So what is the problem with these vaccines?”

That honest, simple question constitutes grounds for hope.

He was genuinely curious.

"Well," I said, "let me send you a few links."

So, is that it? Civilisation totters on the brink of collapse and the good news is a little outbreak of mild scepticism and a question?

Yup. That’s as good as it gets today. But it may be grounds for optimism.

If you really want a third helping of good news you could make it happen by reading my book, The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it. On my website, write VOBES in the coupon box (before the end of November) for a £2 discount. It is also on Amazon as an ebook, audiobook and internationally.

Why should you read it?

Here's a professorial endorsement;

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Alternatively, as a reader told me the other day;

“I really like your book. It is easy to read but you are making me think.”