We are being told — not least by the naggers on the Today programme, and the wider BBC — that genetic screening is good for us and will shape the future for the better. We will live longer and healthier lives.

Such is the pressure behind this movement that the NHS and its political masters are discovering ways of reducing costs (read, “increasing costs”) by these methods. DNA tests are now routinely carried out by hospitals and the police, whether people want them or not.

There was a brief moment of clarity on Today last week when a doctor made the obvious point that the clearest genetic test for susceptibility to diseases is to examine the health of relatives, cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents, for what they caught, and what they died of.

Our genomes are right there before our eyes. No need to get an “expert” to do it for us. Actually, we are all naturally expert at reading genetics. We instinctively spot blood links in people’s faces, skin, bodies and other more subtle signals.

On a trip to northern Belgium more than 20 years ago, I was struck by how the faces on the streets resembled those in Cardiff, South Wales. The Belgae, a Celtic tribe, at one time settled in Wales before the Romans came. The genes are still visible. Or were until the mass migrations of the Labour years.

In Cork in Ireland, and all along the West coast, to this day you can see black-eyed Spanish people, descendants of the Armada wrecked on Irish beaches in Good Queen Bess’s time. And there are more than a few Vikings hanging out in Dublin.

We don’t need blood tests and a genome to work it out. Our genetic inheritance is fully visible and available to us without an array of medical interventions to tell us about ourselves, or others.

In some older American films, when two people decide to get married they go for blood tests to discover if they are compatible to have children. This was a legal requirement in many states, no doubt a hangover from the eugenics movement that swept the West before the Second World War, and was a factor in bringing Hitler to power. It had its origin in Darwinian determinism. Science does have a history of begetting totalitarianism.

Scientists often scorn astrology for its mechanical determinism, but much of science is built around similar assumptions. The new “science” of genometrics, as with cosmology and climate theory, are means of predicting the future by examining small slices of nature and converting the results into mathematical formulae. Even Nostrodamus might laugh.

What’s the difference after all between that and telling fortunes from the entrails of chickens, as the Greeks and Romans did?

Science is given respectability by the enormous amounts of public money spent on it. The Large Hadron Collider must be good because of its size and complexity, not to mention the £6 billion, and rising, it cost to build.

As the good doctor implied last week, the world is arrayed before us in all its glory, openly and honestly. But we choose to outsource our personal phenomenology to a bunch of hucksters and quacks, allied to credulous politicians, who spend our money like ocean swells trying to discover what we know — or should know — already.

We yearn for reassurance, even if it is arrogant nonsense.

Eugenics is making a comeback through genometrics. Who knows what horrors will return in its wake.

John Evans

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There’s a wonderfully dorkish bit in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol when a scientist attempts to prove the existence of the human soul by weighing a man’s body moments before and after his death. The difference must be the weight of the departing soul.

This begs a truckload of questions, of course, not least that the soul may not be physical at all. However, the author’s “noetic” scientist reports an infinitesimally small difference so, Eureka!

All great fun. The trouble is, something similar is happening across most of the conventional sciences. The recent swine flu pandemic scare is a good example of vested interests skewing the truth and driving massive public expenditure for no other reason than greed. So is “catastrophic man-made global warming” with its vast new global infrastructure, all paid for by you and me in the middle of a long and crippling recession.

I was thinking of that passage in Dan Brown’s book last week while watching someone blowing bubbles from washing-up liquid. The bubbles seemed to be weightless, even though they are made up of physical substances. But then that’s the nature of bubbles, they appear to be miraculous at first … then they come down to earth or just burst in the air. One should never invest hard coin in bubbles.

Unhappily, lots of people do, and go on doing so even when countless bubbles have burst down the centuries.

Human bubbles are made up of ideas and mental states composed of wishes and deceptions. They form into powerful psychological contagions as they mature, and even take on an apparently material basis as they grow, often posing as something different.

The two current global bubbles are, 1) the myth of catastrophic man-made global heating, and 2) the notion that global decisions are self-evidently better than local ones. Both are underpinned and given force by one of the most lumberingly under-performing institutions in history: the United Nations.

In the economic realm, there are the surpluses of cash built up by exporting countries, China and Japan, matched by the gaping deficits of the US, the UK and many European nations.

Bubbles define our world. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Trillions of our electronic banknotes are now being thrown at the global boiling hypothesis by unrepentant politicians, some well meaning, others self-promoting. The problem is, that bubble has burst.

Global warming by man-produced carbon in the atmosphere has been found not to exist, at least on any timescale we can measure or plan for. The data has been shown to be wrong, or deliberately tampered with. The politicians and their less-than respectable allies — hordes of anti-capitalists and unwashed any-cause hysterics — have gone too far down this road to pull back now. Most will retire to rewrite their personal histories, leaving a new generation to clean up the mess at huge further costs to us.

Here’s a proposition. All new ideas involving the spending of public money should be examined painstakingly for speculative (imaginary) content:

1. What do we actually know, and what are we being advised to believe?
2. Is there a real problem that we can see before our eyes?
3. If it becomes necessary to spend public money to avert an apparent threat in the future, let’s spend it on things that will be useful even if that threat is found to be baseless.

A good example from the past is London fog. In Victorian times, right up until the early 1950s, London was often draped in a pall of yellow smog caused by the burning of cheap sulphurous coal. Millions of lives were lost early from respiratory diseases, heart problems, and simple misery. China and India are still burning this stuff.

The solution was the appliance of science at its best: practical technology. The National Coal Board, then a nationalized industry, brought in two eminent philosopher-scientists: Dr Jacob Bronowski, best remembered for his stagey, but brilliant, BBC series, The Ascent of Man, and E.F. Schumacher, author of the evergreen Small is Beautiful, which was based on Burmese Buddhism. Polymaths both.

They developed the first smokeless fuel. Politicians did their bit and passed laws making it an offence to burn anything else in the big cities, and hey presto, problem all but solved.

The trillions now committed to various schemes for carbon reduction, dreamt up by naive politicians, including the fraudulent brokerage schemes and the “new industries” devoted to pulling wool over our eyes, should be re-evaluated by incoming hard-eyed administrations looking for real value, not notional empires in the stratosphere.

Once again, reducing smokey particulates in the air is worth spending money on for solid health reasons. But the vast array of wind farms and new French nuclear reactors, should be replaced by cheaper, simpler, and more reliable, home-grown alternatives: for example, natural gas derived from Britain’s own methane beds and oil shale deposits. While the Americans and others are pioneering this new technology, Britain — led by the proboscis by bureaucrats in Brussels — is prevented from doing so by self-inflicted barriers reaching as far ahead as 2050. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

By what natural right do these people boss future generations around? The answer lies in the feeble compliance of our lacklustre politicians.

Why not cut free from the whole ridiculous rigmarole and go our own way for our national interests alone. Everyone else is secretly doing this to some degree. If we succeed, you can be sure others will follow. That’s real influence, not the shadowy, pretend kind put forward by Gordon Brown.

Summary: Always be aware of bubbles as they form, and only ever spend public money on what is immediately apparent. Speculation on thinly-based science is rarely profitable. Nature is cyclical and comes and goes, rises and falls in roughly predictable ways. Mankind’s lives are too short to grasp the full picture. Some kind of trust in the future is essential. Most of it is unknowable. If we accept our limitations, we will be happier here and now.

Solution: Replace the top tier of government scientists with practical philosophers who can think any situation through without spending money.

John Evans

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I nodded off during Nick Clegg’s appearance on the Marr show this morning. It seemed preferable to listening to what he had to say … and how he said it.

I awoke with the distinct impression that he wants to import planeloads of African homosexuals and send them up to Scotland.

Why, I kept asking? Will they get a good reception in Glasgow’s Gorbals on a Saturday night? Have the fiercely nationalistic Scots asked for such bedfellows, especially as — Africa being Africa — most will be carrying the HIV virus? How will our bursting-at-the-seams hospitals cope?

It’s all very rum, if you ask me.

And then there’s his voice. It has a faintly hoarse piercing quality, without any light and shade for variation. He really should find a good Shakespearean actor to coach some depth into his delivery. With 270 minutes of the leaders’ debates coming up, watching even a short burst will be the short straw once you’ve thrown in Gordon Brown to boot.

Syntagma suggests Clegg make more use of that forever-boyish look, while developing a serene demeanour. He could also cultivate a long wispy beard, which would give him the appearance of a Chinese Taoist sage who has discovered the secret of eternal youth.

We might listen to him then.

The Conservatives promised us a furious fusillade of new policies during January. This week they have started to trickle through, topped by George Osborne’s welcome announcement that cuts in the deficit will begin soon after the election.

So, what about the NHS? Cuts in overmanning, perhaps? A new regime for the drugs companies? A major reorganization of management and unnecessary jobs? A determination to tackle the truculent trades unions?

None of the above, alas. Andrew Lansley has offered us a change in the way drinks are measured on bottle labels. Units of alcohol will be replaced by centilitres.

Is that the sound of general rejoicing I hear? Thank God for Lansley, I find myself muttering. [Heavy irony alert]. Give that man a drink!

Syntagma has a better idea. Why not boil Lansley down for soap, and distribute it free to hospitals?

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown Free Zone

This week has been a wretched one for British politics. All the main party leaders have performed badly and been made to look foolish and not up to the job.

It may be pre-election nerves, of course, but may also signal the truth. What if they are all dunces, destined to spend their careers on the naughty step? Gordon Brown has been on it for his entire premiership, let’s not forget.

Just look how quickly the saintly Obama has developed feet and legs of clay. How be it if no leader is capable of putting all our houses back in order?

Clegg wants more immigration because there are parts of the country where only sheep graze. Brown wants to go on playing with his toys in Number 10. Cameron has a political sushi policy where everything is sliced very thinly so it can be jettisoned without loss of face.

There are two very old traditions in Britain: “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” (or Margaret Thatcher); and the return of King Arthur to save the nation from dire peril.

It’s beginning to look as if the Arthurian option is the only one left.

Syntagma has been complaining about inaccurate official information since 2005 when we challenged the Met Office’s prediction that the approaching winter would be as bad as 1962/3. It was not, and we were much closer to the truth with our tongue-in-cheek forecast.

Now a weather presenter at the BBC is saying that the Met Office’s “supercomputer” has “a warm weather bias” and seems incapable of predicting cold snaps. Interestingly, the BBC’s Met Office contract runs out in April. The Sunday Times notes that it is looking very carefully at Metra, a private New Zealand forecaster that already provides it with TV weather graphics.

Much as I hate to see British institutions dumped in their own country, such is the general lack of confidence in the Exeter-based Met Office, it’s hard to see how it can survive as a serious predictor of our climate.

The BBC should not bottle this one, or move to protect another public body. The Beeb should be made to demonstrate it will not tolerate underperforming contributors.

Since the Met Office is the world’s principal progenitor of catastrophic, man-made global warming, what then will the politicians do with their hugely expensive projects for carbon reduction?

David Cameron could be the first to move against them. It would be popular among already hard-pressed taxpayers. It’s a good sign that prospective Tory candidate and eco-warrior, Zac Goldsmith, is currently sounding off bitterly at all politicians, even though he’s about to become one.

The berries are growing thick and fast on the holly bushes, as a Chinese sage might say.

Thank you to those who wrote to me about my book, The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face?. I’m delighted you found it “useful” — a word I particularly appreciate.

Readers may be interested to know that a follow-up volume is on the way. MYSTICS: The next step in human evolution?.

The Eternal Quest hinted at this strand of thought in references to “posthumans”, but didn’t go much beyond that as it was concerned solely with individuals.

It’s undoubtedly true that genuine mystics have expanded their consciousness beyond that of the vast bulk of humanity. My thesis in both books is that levels of consciousness determine evolutionary progress. It follows that mystics are the pioneers of the next step for mankind.

Humans are strangely incomplete beings, living largely in ignorance of their origins and future — neither gods nor creatures. Mystics point the way forward. They occupy a position mid-way between this world and the next, observing the passing pageant of life while knowing the seat of their own immortality.

While you are waiting, may I suggest you read The Eternal Quest as an opener, if you haven’t done so already.

Available at all good booksellers off- and online.

Swine flu is yet another case of government predictions crashing and costing us an estimated £1 billion, at the least.

It seems the drug companies have been behind the pandemic scare in recent months, prompting Gordon “any excuse to spend a billion or two” Brown to splurge our money on vast quantities of the vaccine … now useless.

Once again, he’s been shown to have made the wrong call. Is it also his idea to send this stuff to the “third world”? If the disease is not harmful, it makes you wonder what they are supposed to do with it.

Will UK.gov add dumping toxic waste in underdeveloped countries to its long list of socialist criminality?

John Evans

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There are two things every school child should be taught as the basis of their education:

1. Learn to do something
2. Learn to do nothing

Learning to do something is obviously important since most students will have to earn a living. Doing something well is a prerequisite of wealth at all times.

As far as I’m aware, learning to do nothing is not in the National Curriculum. It should be. I’ve spent most of my life perfecting the art of doing nothing, which is probably why I ended up as a writer. When you do nothing, you enter mysterious depths where the real treasure is to be found.

The Pre-Budget Report was so obviously written by someone who can only do “something”. If Gordon Brown had learned as a lad to do nothing, he wouldn’t have got us into this mess in the first place.

It’s like the phrase, “He thinks out of the box”, implying that most people are forever confined to their boxes — the Undead, perhaps. Well, Gordon Brown has given us a vivid impression of a vampire over the past decade, syphoning off the country’s life blood.

Only those who have learned how to do nothing, know there’s a third way. For them, there is no box. They can see far beyond the current consensus to a world of infinite possibilities.

Meanwhile, the climate change hysterics are trapped in their nightmare of tsunamis and things that go “crump” in the dark. Anything can happen, and probably will. They live in constant dread and feel impelled to force the rest of us to comply with the rules of their savage, preternatural world. Their antics could well draw down other kinds of disaster, but not the ones they fear.

There’s an old tale about the frog who lives in a well and his cousin who lives by the sea in the sand dunes. One day, the sea frog visits his relative in the well and, as happens on these occasions, the conversation turns to philosophy.

“The universe is infinite,” says the sea frog, “surrounded by blue seas and topped by a wonderful blue sky.”

“Don’t be daft,” replies the well frog. “The universe is tubular, about 10 feet across and bounded by a slimy brick wall.”

The difference between them is that the well frog is forever busying about making up for the deficiencies of the dank, slippery well, while the sea frog is quite happy to saunter about his magical landscape contemplating his good fortune. Eventually, however, the well frog’s activities will undermine the foundations of the well, causing it to collapse, depriving everyone in the neighbourhood of fresh water.

The Pre-Budget Report and all its predecessors after 1997 were made by a denizen of a deep, dark well. He is forever “in the box” unable to see how illusory it is and always destined to do “something” rather than nothing.

Learning to do nothing is just as important as learning to do something.

John Evans

HURRY: Last Chance to buy The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face by John Evans in time for Christmas.

Buy now by clicking on the discount button at the top of the sidebar, or from Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.com.

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In last week’s Saturday Ramble I castigated the so-called scientific community for spewing out baseless information across the board, especially in the area of supposed man-made global warming.

Today, I draw your attention to a fascinating post in Telegraph blogs by James Delingpole. His suggestions of blatant fraud at the Met Office’s weather lab are naturally hedged about by disclaimers, but worth reading in detail. No doubt we’ll be hearing more about this as days pass.

To add to that, this is what I wrote here on November 1, 2005:

It’s November the 1st, All Saints Day.

As I look out of my window here in southern England I can see girls going to work and college in T-shirts. Nobody’s wearing winter or, for that matter, autumn clothing. The temperature here is an almost balmy 67F (19C). So Global Warming is upon us.

Hah! All is never what it seems in this life. Summer has been particularly warm, though never hot. And it’s certainly nipped a whole month off winter … so far.

But, the long-range weather forecast predicts the bitterest winter since 1962/63 when the UK froze under 20ft snow drifts for three months from Christmas Day till March.

The word “predict” is relevant here. How different is this forecast from the Star Sign predictions in the tabloid newspapers? Well, it’s based on readings from scores of special submarine buoys out in the north Atlantic. Computer models show that the peculiar nature of this year’s data is only matched by those of 1962.

Except, the forecasters didn’t have the remarkable submarine buoys back then. So do the figures match as well as the meteorologists suppose? And, what if there are other factors not being looked at, and missed 40 years ago?

Humans make huge judgements based on narrow data and scattergun information. The wonderful intrusion of paradox is never taken into account by our boffins. Bless their cotton socks, but Syntagma predicts a remarkably warm and balmy winter here in northern Europe, and especially in southern England, where the girls will continue for some time to go to work and college in T-shirts. And an early spring will take us all by surprise. You heard it here first.

Was I right? Here’s the verdict from netweather.tv:

“This winter was widely close to average snow-wise … Not much snow to speak of during January and February (the late February ’06 easterly was even less potent than the Feb ’05 one) … A northerly airstream during first week March brought snow showers for many …”

In other words, a fairly typical British winter, with snowfall lasting only a day or two and with a late flurry in March. My early spring, though, was out by a week or two, but then I’m not paid out of the public purse to forecast the weather.

How long can we go on listening to authorities who seem always to get it wrong?

John Evans

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