vivweb01

Editor's note: Herewith a reissue of an amusing aside I wrote in 2022 after experiencing a particularly perplexing series of announcements, most of which seemed to defy common sense.......enjoy ! --------------------------------------------------------- Pondering the recent article about the close down of the world’s largest online eBook library  by the US authorities earlier this year led me back to the question asked increasingly often nowadays:   “ Where has all our common sense gone ?” I thought this might be a good opportunity to take a light-hearted 'tongue-in cheek' look at the logic (or lack of it) underlying human behaviour. What is it ? First of all, what is ‘common sense’ – and how do we define it ? To start with, here's a bit of personal history to help 'set the scene'.... I can well remember from my early childhood the frequent exhortations I received from my parents in response to what I thought was perfectly reasonable behaviour: ‘…for g...

  Many of us find ourselves prescribed one or other of the Statins by our GPs nowadays, often as a result of a routine health check. But are they really necessary, and what are the risks of taking them ? In this article, we’ll try to explain exactly what the statins, as a group of pharmaceuticals, actually look like chemically, how they work, and why the medical profession are so keen on prescribing them for us ‘en masse’. I’ll jump ahead a bit and start with the ‘why’, to try to put the need for these key drugs into context…. Our modern diet is rich in carbohydrates and fats, and often takes the form of highly processed 'ready meals', which also contain a lot of salt. The problem is that this type of ‘challenge’ to our digestive systems and physiology on a continuous basis is an issue for us – our guts, brains and metabolism simply weren’t designed for it, and the excess salt that most of us consume in our modern diet is also likely to compromise our circulatory he...

‘Middle England’ is worried…and so it should be.... In his new role as our PM, Burnham has, in his own words, ‘hit the ground running’ in his project to 'Manchesterise' Britain (or at least the non-devolved English part of it). He is looking hard for new revenue-generating targets to fund his many and varied 'projects' to avoid spooking the markets with a lot of extra borrowing.   His left-leaning socialist ideology naturally points him towards across-the-board redistribution of the UK's wealth, and he represents a return to more traditional Labour aspirations from the Starmer 'aberration' as the hard-left Momentum group would view it.  Since most of the UK’s private money and assets are held by so-called 'Middle England', Burnham sees this large, disparate and normally compliant group of electors (particularly those over 50), as a potential soft-touch....and they are therefore firmly in his sights as a potential cash-cow. One of the problems the...