tomo,
Yes, the working class seems to be copping it both ways. Supplanted politically by the new victim class, and economically by the new slave class. The latter is largely in China, but the UK and Australia seem to be adopting some of the US's long standing model of a local slave class made up of "irregular" immigrants. It's a bad thing, and the road ahead looks bumpy.

Some at Jo Nova's blame all the doctors who acquiesced in the COVID folly. I think that's unfair. Plenty of sceptical ordinary people (e.g. me) just kept their heads down. I plead clemency for GPs, etc., but blame does belong with the public health specialists who went along with lockdown and vaccination nonsense. And those TV doctors (with or without public health qualifications) deserve a lot of that blame.

It's a problem with our centralised systems that we see time and again. Each time the weakness comes down to a representative who stands in for a much larger whole; a few trinkets can win billions. When pharma buys people at FDA, TGA, MHRA, ... it's regulatory capture. I don't think there's a name for it when they buy "influencers" like TV doctors. And, at a political level, spy agencies have often enjoyed "owning" politicians, one way or another.

I doubt there's any blanket solution. I would lean towards a legal "entrapment". E.g. that a condition of employment in the TGA would be that, sometimes, you may be offered inducements, apparently from pharma, but really from us, and you face time in prison if you accept. That could work with the politician too (odds of them voting for it ~ 0). The TV doctor might also be a tough one to crack (cult of personality — think how many disgraced tele-evangelists continue to have a following).

Robert

I went down a few rabbit holes about pharma payments to TV doctors. At the very least they should wear logo'd-up baseball caps and T-shirts. The information seems scattered and sporadic, it being abundantly clear (to what's left of my mind) that the topic is a v.sensitive one :-(

A crashing silence out there....

https://twitter.com/libbyemmons/status/1790016630329598316

tomo,
Puts the "heroes of the NHS" into a fair perspective, doesn't it.

Listened to Brendan O'Neill interviewing Batya Ungar-Sargon whose stance is the (hardly new) idea that the woke people are trying to elbow out working class people as the new sufferers of great injustice. It was ok, but nothing too special. One part I did like was:

The manufacturing jobs: they *didn't* go the way of the horse and buggy; they went to China. Cars are still being made! It's just so wrong to think that our economy has somehow moved on from service industry jobs or manufacturing. All of that labour is still being done, it's just being done for pennies.

Thinking back to the Cold War days, the decadent West was something the Soviets liked to talk about. I thought they were wrong, but turns out they were just a bit premature.

tomo,
I like Homburg's delivery style too, though I'd not mind if he added a little Tony-Helleresque dry sarcasm.

As for the awards, they're getting to a Zimbabwe level of inflation. Like Obama's Nobel for not being George Bush, Mann getting a medal for most lurid internet abuse in support of The Cause means we'll look askance at all such gongs.

The Drax stuff — just such idiocy. A very lateral thinking way to save the environment.

The Pfizer payments to doctors might also be traceable in Pfizer tax returns (assuming they claimed it as a business expense). Should get straight to the figure (probably quite a large one). OTOH, maybe they're using the sort of accountants used by Disaster Area in Hitchhikers (chief accountant made a Professor of Neomathematics).

Looking in at Jo Nova's today, someone's posted a graph of the various estimates of ECS, showing how they're all over the place, lack of consensus, etc. One of the regulars didn't even recognise the term ECS. I was going to comment there on one of my usual gripes: the "C" stands for "climate", but for some reason the mean global surface temperature is all you need to know. I decided not to post there, instead to waffle on here on what might make something like ECS plausible. Mostly just thinking with mouth flapping, so reading is very optional.

I have two *big* objections to ECS. Firstly, surface temperature ignores the 3D atmosphere and oceans. How well does the mean surface temperature reflect the energy that actually drives the weather? Secondly, how is ECS nailed down to greenhouse gases *only*? Can we really ascribe any change in energy to a change in CO2 concentration?

Looking at the first objection...

*IF* surface temperature is a strong indicator of the energy contained in the Earth's weather systems, it should be a continuous value. It might go up and down during the daily cycle as ocean and land are variously exposed to the sun, but it won't take large jumps. Over time we might see the figure trending and ascribe causes to CO2 or whatever.

The current estimate of the mean surface temperature comes from averaging various surface stations in various ways. One that I'd like to see is an average of *instantaneous* values, say hourly, one-by-one through the day. IOW: longitude-based, so that we get the temporally closest sample right around the globe at the 2pm, 3pm,... GMT clock ticks.

If the climatologists are right, this should provide a very interesting picture of how the energy arrives on Earth as it presents various faces to the sun. If *my* hunch is right, it'll be pretty chaotic, as weather systems and clouds affect the absorption. Today's pattern will differ greatly from yesterday's and from the same day last year. But that's only my hunch.

It would be interesting to see. Something for a budding PhD to work at (who knows, maybe it'd help The Cause).

The picture I have of the current ways they arrive at global surface temperature is like averaging lotto numbers. You average the winners of the last 500 weeks and that group average will be very smooth and won't generally be too far off the average of any given week's numbers; its predictive value is zero. There will be "trends"; also meaningless.

As for my second objection — nailing down the drivers of weather — well, that's a toughie.

tomo,
That drag queen ... what to say? It's straight out of Flying Circus, with a very sober sounding Graham Chapman in completely over the top getup.

You were thinking of attending a special screening of Brazil a little while ago weren't you? It's a closer match to our dystopia than was Brave New World or 1984. Animal Farm might be second closest (the windmill!).

Gold medal for Mann eh? Definitive fool's gold.

From comments at Jo Nova's there was this address by Stefan Homburg (apparently at an AFD get-together). His thesis: the whole pandemic was pantomime. That's the way it always seemed to me; maybe more people will listen to him.