As good as a rest

Barometric pressure

Change, be it geologically imperceptible or earth shatteringly violent, shares the inevitability of both death and taxation. Time moves on, things alter, stuff happens; deal with it. When he wasn`t corrupting the youth of ancient Athens, wise old Socrates said: “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” He might have been a lovely little thinker but it`s obvious on so many levels that Socrates did not own and did not use a computer.

Reality and illusion

M C Escher (1898 – 1972)

Even after thousands and thousands of years during which lots and lots of very, very clever people tried to define reality, we are still no closer to a universal proof of anything; the only certainty is that nothing is certain.

Since the days of Plato, successive governments have understood that everything is open to interpretation and have carefully exploited the benefits of chaos theory whist simultaneously denying that chaos actually exists. Our current bunch of self-appointed masters having ditched any notion of logic applied to economic policy are now systematically working their way through the sum of human knowledge discarding most of it as being irrelevant.

The rules of valid reasoning, logical argument and proof based analysis no longer seem to apply and we now enter a period of history when reverse logic takes the place of actual fact. So when an A and E department in Belfast declares a major incident because it cannot cope with the numbers of people who require treatment, it is described by some talking head in a suit from the Northern Ireland Assembly as a “one off” and nothing to worry about. A major incident usually involves some traumatic event such as an aircraft no longer being an aircraft, a train that has decided not to be a train anymore or, given that particular part of the world`s unhappy history, a bloody big bomb going off.