Author: CHRIS HEGAN

Let me tell you a story. I was 19 years old, in Sydney Australia and in a very bad way. What follows is an extract from my unpublished autobiography, Before I Forget. I was in the grips of a familiar but profound depression and had just found myself incapable of turning up for my soul-crushing job at the Redfern Mail Exchange.

…

We were drinking a cup of tea, talking about it all and what I could do, when there was an urgent knock on the door. They weren’t holding at the time so Gary just opened the door to let in a guy called Martin, sweating heavily and looking weird in a suit, white shirt and tie he had obviously scored from the Salvation Army shop. He was carrying a leather briefcase.

“Do you want some acid? As much as you want. I’ve got ten thousand trips in here and they’re all going into the harbour. The cops are on to me and I have to ditch them.”

Was he nuts? The cops were onto him, he said. We could hardly load up on his surplus acid. If he was right they might come barrelling through the door at any minute.

“Nah,” said Gary. But I wouldn’t mind a trip.”

“Me too,” followed Jill.

“Hell,” I said. “It can’t make things any worse than they already are. I’ll have one.”

And right there you have one of the most calamitous misjudgements of my entire life.

Before I get into what happened next, I have to ask you to believe this bit. I don’t know what you’ve thought of this account so far. Maybe you believe some of it, maybe other parts you take with a grain of salt. Take your pick, it’s a free world

I went mad. I lost contact with reality. I had already been turning over in my mind the profoundly unsatisfactory nature of mere verbal communication. The un-sameness of shared experience. When I taste that orange, do I have the same experience that you have when you taste the other half? How can we ever know? I knew I was strongly red-green colour blind, so what I called red or green had another meaning that others did not share. How much more of that was there? Maybe, I suspected, all of it, a horrifying thought.

When I use a word that word is imbued with a lifetime of associations, cultural and personal assumptions, connotations; the result is that in absolute terms that word, perhaps most of the words we speak, actually mean something different to me than they do to you. Communication is a rough approximation at best. We are alone, islands, stranded in our own unique take on experience. Separate. At least, that is what I believed at the time.

That concept crossed from abstraction to reality on that acid trip. Across a table from Gary and Jill that seemed as wide as the Sahara, I ceased to understand them. They showed worry as they looked at me. But what came out of their mouths was gibberish.

And it didn’t stop, not for days. Oh, I came to understand speech again, but I had fallen into psychosis. I had difficulty distinguishing between the animate and the inanimate. I heard voices. And of course, I thought someone was following me. Them. I didn’t know who they were, but they were shadowing me, scuttling my attempts to regain safe shores.

Here’s the interesting bit: I knew what I needed to turn it off. Opiates. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. It wasn’t the craving of the habit I didn’t yet have. I could feel inside my head that the place things had gone haywire was exactly where the opiates hit home.

Over the next couple of days I spent the last of my funds on taxis, calling on anyone who might be holding. A single shot would do it. Of course I looked like shit, spooked, was probably not making a lot of sense. No-one was going to give hard drugs to someone in that state even if they had them which they probably didn’t. Who knew what it might do? Maybe I wanted it to OD, to top myself. One guy, nervously, told me he had a bit of hash, maybe a toke would help.

Two tokes and I was right back in the worst of it. Hearing voices saying things I couldn’t understand. I started trying to call home from phone boxes. I would pick up the receiver, hear the dial tone, dial 0 and suddenly it would cut off. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t make toll calls from Sydney phone booths. Or maybe I needed to put money in first. I never got that far because I knew what was happening. They were watching and cutting the lines. I saw them moving out of the corners of my eyes but when I looked straight at them they were gone.

Finally a thought occurred to me: Kings Cross Post Office. They had phone booths inside the building! They wouldn’t be able to see me, know I was in one of them calling Mum. I knew the post office well, and they knew me, because we all used it as a Poste Restante mailing address.

I approached the counter to ask to use a phone for a collect international call. Yes, of course, the woman said. But you’re Mr Hegan, aren’t you? My antennae crackled. Oh shit! But there was no use denying it. Yes. Why?

We have a telegram for you. She gave me an envelope with a telegram in it. It read more or less as follows:

WHAT HAS HAPPENED STOP ARE YOU IN TROUBLE STOP CALL HOME AT ONCE STOP TERRIBLY WORRIED STOP MUM

If you believe nothing else, believe this. Elaine knew. From twelve hundred miles away, my mother knew I was in some serious trouble. Later I would ask her if Gary or Jill had called her, though I didn’t think they had her number. No. She just knew, woke up with the stone certainty that something really, really bad had happened to me.

This is not a new story. Ho hum. Sure, mothers sometimes know when their kids die or are seriously wounded on distant battlefields. And all that. But what does it mean? People tend to place such occurrences in the realm of the spiritual but I believe, no, I am certain, that it is down to an as yet unknown realm of physics. There is a whole level of interactivity going on in this world that we haven’t started to think about. Frankly, I think there exists something I call the Field of Influence. It would explain the Pauli Exclusion principle. This is what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ and refused to believe in but was demonstrated conclusively by Dr Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva and his colleagues in 1997 when they showed two photons seven kilometres apart acting instantly in concert. No energy loss. No information transfer. Not at the speed of light. Not faster than the speed of light. Instantly. Of course, if the two objects were connected, say by a piece of absolutely rigid string, you would get that instant response. Well, they are. It’s just that we have not yet divined what that string consists of. Apparently it can stretch all the way across the Tasman Sea.

Now here’s what bugs me. Ask physicists how this can be and they will look away and mumble about how busy they are. Science isn’t even dialling that number. When it does, and gets an answer, the world will change as dramatically as it did when Einstein scribbled Σ=mc2 on his notepad.

A field as ubiquitous, as universal as the electromagnetic spectrum, as gravity and the strong and weak forces. It might even lead to Hawking’s abandoned Grand Unified Theory. It might be a function of dark matter.

Hello? Anyone?

More than half a century later, now, they just might have found it.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/495563/scientists-at-fermilab-close-in-on-fifth-force-of-nature

Exciting times!

PS For the record, 24 hours later I was back in New Zealand where I knocked off a pharmacy on my first night. One shot of morphine and I was fine. Not high – just normal. It needed only the one. I had flipped the switch I knew was there all the time. They now know that the opioid receptors in the brain play a role in schizophrenia.

PPS I am looking for beta readers of my autobiography, covering the first quarter century of my life. The 50s, 60s and 70s. Shipwrecked. Jailed in Thailand. Smuggling drugs. I was a Buddhist monk for a while. A junkie. A stowaway. Santiram you say? Yawn …

Leave a comment and I’ll be in touch.

Question: Why is Covid 19 so infectious? Answer, because of the so-called ‘furin-like cleavage site’ on the spike. This consists of an amino acid sequence grouped arginine-arginine-alanine-arganine. When this contacts the mucus membrane of the human respiratory system it basically burns a hole in it and the virus is in. This is not present in the naturally evolved version of the virus which killed three shovellers of horseshoe bat guano who died from it but gave it to no-one. You virtually had to be swimming in it for it to infect you. The new, deadly spike was, according to a professor at National Taiwan University, Fang Chi-tai “unlikely to have four amino acids added all at once.” Natural mutations were smaller and more haphazard, he argued. “From an academic point of view, it is indeed possible that the amino acids were added to COVID-19 in the lab by humans.”

When his talk was publicised he recanted and the university removed it from its server for “certain reasons”. Academics who advance the thesis that Covid-19 could have been the result of a ‘gain of function’ experiment in China are likely to see their careers stall and lose grants, in spite of the fact that the Wuhan lab of world-wide fame was involved in gain of function experiments on horseshoe bat coronaviruses.

Consider this: the nearest horseshoe bats to Wuhan are seven hundred miles away. They are not, as we were first given to believe, sold in the Wuhan wet market. So for the natural origin theory to be true, the virus had to mutate in a bat population, infect someone and then instantly die out because no-one else in the vicinity caught it at that point. Then the infected person had to somehow get to Wuhan without spreading it along the way. How likely is that? But Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute, whom Scientific American dubbed ‘the bat woman’, regularly harvests viruses from that distance bat colony and transports them to her Wuhan lab.

Looked at objectively, the human-made hypothesis seems much more probable, but no-one wants to say so, indeed the chorus of denial is loud and global. Why all the academic fear?

Because the world is scared of China. Our politicians bend over backwards to avoid offending The Middle Kingdom, and with good reason. Although China’s fall to the condition of a broken victim state, walked all over first by Western Powers and then Japan in the two hundred years prior to the mid-20th Century had more to do with its inward-looking sclerotic administration than external influences, Chinese global policy is almost openly vengeful. The country lost its face and it wants it back. If a minor South American country, for instance, engaged in world-wide open theft of intellectual property and imprisoned and oppressed whole sectors of its ethnic minorities it would at the very least be ostracised on the world stage and quite likely corrected by force. Not China. No-one wants to step on the dragon’s tail, especially when that dragon produces so much of the manufactured products the rest of the world runs on. Not when it is a huge and growing market for almost every country’s products.

This is changing. Slowly the democratic powers are starting to face the fact that Russia and China are becoming increasingly dangerous and sooner or later we are going to have to do something about it. Preferably later, much later. As our attitude becomes more realistic the so-called ‘lab-leak hypothesis’ is starting to see some air. Note the nomenclature ‘lab-leak’. No-one except those who in the next breath will tell you about Bill Gates’ microchip in the vaccine will suggest that China might, just might, have deliberately released the virus. No scientist or politician who wants to keep their job will say such a thing. I have not seen the possibility mooted at all in any medium. Unfortunately, we have to at least consider it. If they did it, we need to know. Time to wheel in the old Latin tag Cui bono? It means ‘Who won something?’or more literally ‘For the good of whom?’ and is a time-honoured way of looking into a complex or obscure misdeed.

Under Xi Jinping, who is looking more like Mao Zedong every day, China wants grow stronger by weakening the rest. Look at its artificial islands in the South China Sea which it now claims as sovereign territory – military territory. A vast fleet of its factory ships plunder the oceans at the expense of everyone else and the planet. Now imagine how the Central Committee might have reacted to a proposal to release a killer respiratory virus that would cripple democratic economies around the world but inflict only minor damage on a country that did not have to bother with personal freedoms, that was able to track and trace with very high efficiency because of the absence of concern for individual liberties, that could throw a cordon around a whole city and enforce it, that could mass-disinfect whole suburbs. Can you see them nodding and smiling? I certainly can.

Covid-19 has been a body blow to the economies of countries that China smiles at but considers enemies, as well as serving as a demonstration to their own people that their system is inherently stronger and less vulnerable than the effete democracies of the West. If it was an accident, it is one that has served Xi Jinping’s agenda fulsomely. Cui bono? China.

Consider this, for a closer. When the outbreak occurred, Shi Zhengli, lead researcher on horseshoe bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab immediately suspected that the outbreak was the result of a leak of something made in her lab. She describes how, terrified, she “checked her records and found no exact matches.” Phew.

Well, no, actually. No ‘exact’ matches, for a start. So one of her colleagues might have given the virus the last tweak, acting under the orders of the most powerful people in the institute, which would not be the head scientist, Zhengli. Not in China. The real head honchos would be the party cadres charged with keeping everyone in line, as in every sensitive organisation in that country. Or, more simply, they told her what to say and she said it.

I believe, for reasons which seem to me obvious, that Covid 19 was produced in the Wuhan Institute. I am not saying and do not necessarily believe that the Chinese government deliberately released the virus. One argument against that is the location – a covert release for the purposes I suppose would have made more sense in the vicinity of the bat population. Deliberate release is simply a possibility we need to keep in mind and we sure as hell need to be prepared for the next one.

The indefatigable George Monbiot has run an article describing how an elderly acquaintance was scammed by a dodgy damp-proofing rort (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/12/laws-protect-scams-enforcement-gutted) and how, in spite of having all the evidence in hand, he was unable to provoke any action by the relevant trading standards authority. The dedicated police unit, Action Fraud he found to be similarly inert. In fact, in spite of fraud being by far the worst crime problem facing the community, funding for the bodies responsible for bringing scammers to justice has been cut so badly in recent years that the crooks have a virtually free run. The police have even quantified it: lose less than £100,000 and you’re on your own.

It got me wondering. It can’t just be about saving money – the public are much more concerned about fraud than they are about hate speech, but at last count there were six hundred staff working the specialised police hate crimes unit. This government has flung austerity out the window, spending money like water, but in yesterday’s Queen’s speech not a word about what is probably the worst crime wave ever to affect the general public.

It was in the first paragraph of Monbiot’s piece that I found what may be a clue. The scammer had a card machine with him and his victim paid up, in full, immediately. What impunity, to put the money straight into his own bank account. But what about that money? It must have been thousands of pounds, sitting in a bank account, doing nothing, frugally hoarded by the anxious pensioner. Where would it be now, had not Monbiot galloped in on his white horse and monstered the guy into a refund? Perhaps to an installment on the guy’s new electric Jag. Or a series of nights out on the town, nothing but the best for our scammer and his pals. Every pound of it clipped for the government’s share in VAT. Assuming the man paid his taxes, more of it off to the exchequer at the end of the year.

Can it be that the Tories actually think that this epidemic of defrauding pensioners is a good thing? I mean, we are not Bhutan. Our national accounts don’t have a column for communal happiness. We don’t have to look far to discern this government’s disregard for human misery. How many billions, I wonder, have all those millions of my coevals got salted away awaiting the stroke of a bank card across the fraudsters’ machines? Awaiting their liberation into the free-spending economy? Last year it totalled £193 billion. That’s right – £193,000,000,000. That is a massively significant amount of freed-up cash.

When this first occurred to me I thought of it as a piece of whimsy but having realised the scale and consequences I’m not so sure. Coming here from New Zealand I was struck by the simply appalling absence of consumer protections at every level. The BBC has a couple of astonishingly tame consumer issues radio shows, in which the smiling, agreeable presenters regularly let companies off the hook by not only parroting “Nobody from Company X was available to come on the programme” but actually then reading their press releases for them in which they invariably declare, unchallenged, that it was all just a regrettable mistake and won’t happen again. If the company reimburses the single individual it has ripped off the presenters seem to regard that as a happy outcome, leaving the company to go on doing the same thing to thousands of its customers. When I was on the air in NZ, balance was achieved in such situations by offering both sides of a conflict space on the programme to put their viewpoint. If they declined, then that viewpoint did not get put. End of. They usually showed up. Not here. Why should they when they can have the consumers’ champion do their work for them?

The UK is a rip-off artist’s paradise and absolutely nothing is being done about it. Well, it gets the money going round, doesn’t it? Got to be a good thing …

It’s not negligent. It’s deliberate. And, as Monbiot points out, whom do those angry victims vote for? The party that beats the law ‘n order drum loudest – the Tories, the very charmers letting the crooks off the hook.

Caveat emptor, as never before.

Please. Someone point out the flaws in the following argument. I desperately want to be wrong this time.

England’s economy is in the toilet because of coronavirus and a firm right hand is about to reach up out of the bowl and pull the chain for ever when the United Kingdom flushes itself out of the European Union without any agreement in place that might protect at least some of its all-important trade with the continent.

It is not hard to sheet this home to the final coming to roost of the karma of British colonialism, because the connection seems to me to be remarkably direct.

Why did so many people vote for Brexit in the face of every qualified agency warning that the economic consequences would be catastrophic? There are several threads to it but by far the prevailing influence was British exceptionalism. The idea, rooted in the public soul over two centuries of owning half the world, that Britain is the greatest country in the world. Great Britain. It’s even written into the name.

We saw its mischief at work throughout February and March this year in the confident assertion from on high that the UK was the best-prepared country in the world to deal with coronavirus. Not only was this very quickly shown to be almost the opposite of the truth, there was at the time not only no evidence to support the claim but plenty of information in the public domain showing how woefully ill-prepared the country actually was. The hubristic boast was entirely based on the old colonial belief that Britain was the best at everything so it followed automatically that the UK must be the best prepared for any eventuality, including a viral pandemic. Some 60,000 dead Britons later, the Prime Minister still blithely characterises the country’s response to the virus as ‘world-beating’, very significantly one of his favourite terms. That phrase is a conscious, direct appeal to British exceptionalism.

The other karmic thread is more obviously traceable cause and effect. From the late 60s onwards a fateful demographic trend kicked off, supported by well-intentioned laws mandating that a broken marriage should not be the economic disaster for mother and children that it had always been. This was eventually followed by Thatcher’s restructuring that threw millions out of their traditional unskilled jobs, creating poverty, stress and millions of broken marriages and single-mother pregnancies. All this gave an extra boost to the almost universal fact that the less education you have the more children you are likely to have.  Furthermore those children were now more likely to have only one parent – the uneducated mother – and to receive minimal education in turn. For decades a girl failing at school, with few prospects in the unskilled labour market, could make the choice to become a serial solo mum supported by the state.  Out they popped, one after the other. And it was not just solo mums. Educated, aspirational people tend to count the cost in time, money and opportunity of having a child and ration themselves accordingly. The less-educated, also more likely to have grown up in a larger family, make no such calculation. So, while the ever-increasingly-busy middle classes managed to reproduce at well below the rate of replacement, shrinking in numbers year on year, the uneducated classes grew and grew. These are of course sweeping generalisations but in the field of demographics generalisations not only have validity, they rule.

Ironically the only counter-trend was the arrival of thousands of highly aspirational low-skilled immigrants who made damn sure their children mobilised upwards. But it has not been enough to eclipse that fatal drift.

Cut to the picture today. Brexit, that economically suicidal move voted in on a great raft of transparent lies wrapped around a core of British exceptionalism and its associated xenophobia won more than half the votes cast. All those ill-educated hordes that had been swelling over the decades were steeped in exceptionalism. It’s like white trash racism; when you don’t have much going for you, you cling to belief in your superiority as birthright because even you can see you have not done anything that remotely qualifies you as superior any other way. I may be a poor, loud-mouthed knob-head but I’m a British poor, loud-mouthed knob-head so fuck you.

As predicted, dozens of major companies employing many thousands of British citizens pulled up their roots in the UK and moved off shore. That trend is, if anything, accelerating. Does the Brexit-at-any-cost multitude care? Not a whit. The government will not extend the negotiating deadline in spite of the fact that the pandemic has caused negotiations to slow to a crawl.  Bring it on. We just want to be shot of Europe at literally any cost.

This is mass stupidity.

Another snapshot: in spite of a deluge of public health messages making it inescapably clear that obesity is very, very bad for you, a third of British adults are now clinically obese and that fraction is growing not shrinking, as are the adults themselves and their increasingly fat children.  Among other issues obesity makes coronavirus much more likely to kill you. You’d think, wouldn’t you…? But no. Thanks, I’d love another pint and then we’ll all have an ice cream. This too is mass stupidity.

The hot weather spawns newspaper displays of pages of photos of hundreds of thousands of Brits, many of them visibly obese, packed shoulder to shoulder on the beaches and lakeshores. At a critical moment, when the decline of a pandemic hangs by a thread, they cast off the thing that is keeping them safe because, well, it’s such a nice day. Out they go, stuff their faces and leave unimaginable mountains of food-related rubbish behind, including Big Mac boxes containing the other product of stuffing your face. Stupid, ugly and entitled behaviour, not by a truculent and out-0f-order minority but by very large numbers of the public.

I could go on and on but I think the point is made. Most Brits, and it is probably a fairly narrow majority, are now stupid. So stupid they believe that Great Britain is intrinsically great, which makes them as individuals intrinsically superior, and that nothing they do or don’t do can possibly affect this status. No, not quite. It can be made even greater by expelling all the foreigners who are dragging it down by caring for them when they are sick or old, by serving them their endless lattes, by picking all their fruit and vegetables and by cleaning up their giant mountain of rubbish.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I live on an ordinary middle-class street in a leafy suburb. My neighbours and all my friends here in Bristol and London are reasonably clever, reasonably well-informed, hard working people who view the impending Brexit crashout with horror. They look on at a supposedly conservative government behaving like spoiled, dishonest and not very bright children with distaste and confusion. None of them would go to the beach and walk away leaving their rubbish strewn all over the sand. They – we – have an enduring sense that we are more or less like most people, we’re fairly ordinary, and that kind of behaviour is restricted to the ill-educated, insouciant few because until relatively recently it was. But the numbers have changed. The great demographic shift has turned democracy into a suicide note and my neighbours and friends haven’t quite clocked it. Or perhaps they have but are too polite to express it, always a possibility in England. The vast hordes of stupid people live elsewhere, in the Midlands and in the North, or in suburbs on the far side of the city where they rarely if ever venture. The people of the red wall. Do not believe those who say the great switch to Johnson’s lot happened because those people loathed Corbyn. Were that the whole story they would have simply stayed home on polling day and the numbers show that they did not. No, they actively like, trust and voted for Johnson because he tells them what they want to hear, which is that Britain is the greatest country in the world and will inevitably thrive once it has Europe off its neck. The appallingly bungled response to the pandemic has not caused the slightest visible revision of this conviction. Nothing can or will. It’s wired in.

Actually that’s not quite true. There is a tranche of the public whose opinion of Johnson and his Brexit chumocracy has flipped to loathing: readers of the Times, that shrinking population of people like my neighbours. The comments section of every Johnson story in the Times is filled with fear and loathing of the narcissistic, serial liar as he is most frequently characterised. Pity that they are an ever smaller percentage of the British mass.

What is the solution? There isn’t one. The future is an unwritten book but I can’t see any rising influence that is going to stop this from going on happening. Even if Johnson’s plentiful adipose tissue were to spontaneously combust tomorrow (there are cases on record, I believe) he and Trump have given political chancers everywhere an irrevocable masterclass in how to gain power by flattering the new majority of the stupid and pandering to their post-colonial exceptionalist vanity. This is our future and there is not one damn thing we can do about it. Short, perhaps, of abolishing the universal franchise and letting only those with four or more A-levels vote. Not going to happen. The sun set on the British empire quite a while ago. After a long twilight, now comes the darkness.

Reference.

Check this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_British_Class_Survey
48% of the population fall into the three lowest sectors – traditional working class, emergent service sector and precariat.
Look for ‘highbrow cultural capital’ and count that percentage – well below 50. My sense is that is the term that encapsulates the vanishing qualities once common throughout British society – a sense of decency and consideration for others, environmental consciousness (the non-litterers) etc.

PS

And now they’ve proved it. In https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/people-with-lower-cognitive-ability-more-likely-to-vote-for-brexit-6pvprrvm6 The Times reports that a long-running longitudinal study called Understanding Society interviewed 3,182 couples, including 463 heterosexual couples who voted on opposite sides but managed to avoid divorce over it. The Remain voters showed significant cognitive superiority over the Brexit voters. QED: Brexit was an act of mass stupidity.