Essays in Idleness

Gentlemen! A word of warning! “Carrying on” (i.e. fornicating) with a married woman other than your wife (i.e. adultery) could still cost you your job! For you might be in violation of social distancing rules.

Let’s make the disapproval stronger. You will certainly be in violation, and not only of her chastity. For there are some things that can’t be done by Zoom or Skype, as even progressives will admit, until they have reconsidered the matter, as they have with the distinction between female and male.

The man I think of as the father of our lockdowns — Professor Neil Ferguson, who persuaded the world that the Batflu would kill millions, with his computer model at Imperial College London — has now discovered that the revolution eats its own. His “squeeze,” a meejah environmentalist performer — who is “committed to an open marriage” — had been “visiting” him, as it were. By doing so she was leaving one house, and entering another. Someone must have snitched. So now we have a holiday from them both.

Prof Ferguson, famed “mathematical biologist,” could, to my mind, have been classified as an infectious disease in his own right. The curious may find that he has been behind a succession of wildly exaggerated epidemiological prognostications: from Mad Cow, to Swine Flu, Ebola, Zika, Dengue, the last SARS. Check them out. I don’t mean a little on the high side, but consistently orders of magnitude over the top. He has cost British and foreign taxpayers many, many millions thereby, but would have cost much more had any previous government taken his advice more seriously. For he habitually recommends nationwide lockdowns.

At last they have listened! (Yes, that was sarcasm.) His thoughts on “global warming” are of a piece: simply close everything down.

But while incredibly influential, Prof Ferguson was never unique. Since January, my respect for epidemiologists may have dropped lower than my respect for leftwing journalists. If gentle reader is aware of one who ever failed to increase the sum of human misery, he may reach me by email.

Dr Fauci, on this side of Lake Atlantic, has my attention again since I learnt that he was instrumental within the Obama administration, in directing huge American grants to the Batflu incubator at Wuhan in Red China. That he now denies our pandemic could possibly have spread from there, thus strikes me as uninteresting. President Obama was the genius who shut down potentially lethal American “gain-of-function” research, which was then redoubled in China with American help.

It is hard to find this stuff in Google, because it is being actively censored. This is another feature of the progressive rhetorical approach. My Idleposts themselves would be banned, I suspect, if anyone ever read them. This is my principal advantage: so long as no one hears us, we have free speech. And my pleasure lately is to be the sort of paranoid schizophrenic dog, who was trained to smell out rats, in labcoats.