We have a ‘new logic’ where words can mean whatever you want them to mean, like in some Alice in Wonderland way.  This is not a woman.  It’s a man in a dress.  He still has a penis and testicles.  All that he has done is to put on an article of women’s clothing.  That does not make him a woman.  As obvious as it sounds, this is the logic you have to use, and not the absurd lack of thinking that is sadly prevalent, now.  To say that this is a woman is paradoxically flawed – because it renders the term ‘woman’ irrelevant.  If ‘woman’ can mean whatever you want it to mean (and not the dictionary definition) then there is no point to the word, and ‘women’ cease to exist – really!  So this man isn’t a woman even by this person’s own sense…because the word is meaningless!  Not only is he lying to you, he’s lying to himself.  If you say that the world is warming - since when?  Why choose that date?  Use logic and rationale in your thinking, be critical and cynical…because the world (the media and government) is out to fool you in a way that it never has before.  The ‘new logic’ is whatever you want it to be - they really do want your mind to think in this way.  Resist!  Truth is truth, facts are facts.

 

There is something you discover early in life…people lie.  This is very unfortunate.  In fact, lying is a HUGE part of your life.  Maybe you tell lies (maybe little ones), and you may tell big ones yourself.  You may tell them to your life partner, to your boss…and one day, to your kids.  The government lies – a lot!  Members of Parliament lie constantly.  They tell you that when they get into power, that they are going to do something about ‘that’…you know, that thing which bothers so many people, but they know full well that they won’t.  They know that to solve that thing would cost a lot of money (taxpayer’s money), or it might make them and their political party unpopular, so they won’t do it.  They will tell you to your face that they won’t do something about ‘that’…you know, that thing which people don’t want changed, but they will change it, and they know they will.  Another body of people who lie are journalists.  They lie almost as much as politicians.  Why do they do that?  They do it because they want their story to have an impact, that you’ll read it and thus agree with their ‘side’ of a story.  Journalists also ‘obfuscate’.  This is lying by another name – but it’s to confuse and skew your thinking.  It’s a deliberate attempt to make something unclear and confusing.

 

Let’s take a good example.  A few years ago, the government released figures showing that homelessness (people living on the streets) was down – the numbers had fallen.  This was good for a Conservative government, so they gleefully released it to the press.  It appeared in a number of ‘Conservative’ newspapers – papers who support the Conservative Party.  However, there are newspapers which oppose the Conservatives and are to the Left of politics, like the Guardian newspaper.  Oddly, their headline the next day was this:

 

“Homeless figures up”

 

If you dug deeper into the story, you would see that they did admit that “overall” homelessness was down, but inner-city homelessness was up.  So they deliberately ran with the darker side to the figures, that the number of city centre homeless people had risen…even though, overall, the numbers were indeed down.  The Guardian wasn’t lying, city centre homeless figures were up, but they didn’t want their readers to know that, so they went with the one bit of bad news, rather than the good news.  This is obfuscation – the dark art of not lying, but not being clear, either.  Other times, the Guardian just plain lie…as do all newspapers.  The Guardian lies about climate change, at least in as much as failing to provide a full and proper explanation.  “Scientists say…” is a favourite.  It usually doesn’t mention the scientist’s name/s and is almost always an alarmist idea of the future – a future which can even be unlikely in the extreme.

 

Sad, isn’t it?  You can’t read a newspaper and come away with being any more informed.  But that’s not what newspapers are for.  Newspapers are (or should be) to tell you the news – the clue is in the name.  But newspapers have writers who produce articles which aren’t news, they are their opinions on something.  And they write their opinions as though something is real and true.  Sometimes, they even say something which is totally untrue.  Don't take anything you read in a newspaper as anything even near the truth.  You can only rely on yourself for that.  You have to read different things about something, and use your own intelligence to see if what’s being said really is true.

 

Let’s go back a bit to politicians.  Imagine that you are an MP, and your political party is just about to win an election.  A voter, who hasn’t yet made up their mind who to vote for, asks you if you’re going to build more hospitals, as the country needs more hospitals.  But you know that the National Health Service is already stretched to breaking, with no money available.  Worse, you know that the country doesn’t have the doctors and nurses to staff any new hospitals, anyway.  Will you be honest with that person and tell them that you can’t build even one new hospital, let alone many?  Or will you lie and say that of course you will build many new hospitals?  Unfortunately, you are likely to lie.  You want that person’s vote – you want to win.

 

And so it is – people lie.  They do this because they want you to believe something that they believe in.  They want you to join them in that belief.  They may want something done about plastics in the sea, so they tell you something which they know isn’t true, or may have a slight truth to it, to get you on board with the ‘team’ of people campaigning against plastics in the sea.  Of course, it’s also very common that people tell you something only because they have heard it or read it…they don’t know whether it’s a truth or a lie, but they want you to know it, too.

 

You will have already experienced that the weather people ‘lie’.  Well, yes and no.  What they actually do is get it wrong…a lot!  You can carry out your own experiment to experience this for yourself.  Look at the weather forecast for your town for exactly a week ahead.  Next Monday, they say, it’s going to be cloudy with a chance of rain in the afternoon.  Hold them to that – check when that day comes around to see if they were right.  Now, Monday comes and it doesn’t rain in the afternoon at all.  They lied, right?  No, it’s just that their forecast wasn’t good enough, and they did say “a chance of rain”, not that it WOULD rain.  They cover themselves with such forecasts; they can’t really go wrong.  Someone, somewhere will get rain, while others won’t.  They are right…and wrong.

 

This is why, when you hear the weather forecast (something you may well listen to when you’re older, but couldn’t give a stuff about when you're young) you will hear…”maybe, could be, chances of, possibility of, in parts, for some”.  They are famous for this.  They are completely unsure because weather is VERY difficult to predict with any accuracy at all.  In fact, you wonder why they bother at all, and why we give them so much money to come up with a weather forecast which can turn out to be laughingly and pathetically wrong.

 

Remember this – weather forecasting is VERY difficult.  This is because winds can change direction, pressure systems (the weight of air) can change, and clouds can form and alter the temperature quite dramatically.  They most certainly can’t tell you what the weather WILL be 10 days ahead – even though they say that they can with some degree of accuracy.  They can’t!  You may find that they can’t even get it right about the very minute in time.  Listen to the weather forecast for the day, and they may say it’s not going to rain…as you look outside and see it’s pouring down.

 

More than a few days ahead and weather forecasters (meteorologists) struggle greatly.  Months ahead is out of the question entirely.  They have zero idea what the coming season will be like.  In large part, this is due to something called ‘The Jet Stream’.  This is a band of fast-moving air very high up.  It alters direction and can mean that we get a very bad winter or a mild one.  So expecting meteorologists to know what the climate will be in a few decades time is completely off the charts!  They are not informed or clever enough to know the weather for next Tuesday, so future climate is as known as the roll of six dice.

 

I should point out that weather and climate and not the same thing.  Weather is day to day meteorological events, while climate is at least 30 years of weather.  So if we had 30 years of mild winters, then we start getting very cold winters, we can say that the climate has ‘changed’.  Being human, we wonder why that change has happened.  What caused the climate to give us all those years of reasonable winters to suddenly start giving us very chilly ones with ice and snow?  We want to know.  This is how we, as a species, progress – we want to know.  Knowledge is a fantastic thing, as it equips you to better understand and adapt to the world.  We may even NEED to know it.  If winters are going to get colder, we will need to provide more power to homes, or to stock up on salt to de-ice the roads, or to ensure the country has enough food.

 

So that we can plan ahead, we need to be equipped with the knowledge of what’s coming.  We then require to understand WHY this change has occurred, as it will affect our plans.

 

Humans have one great thing which helps us…science.  Science is the explanation of nature itself.  For some, religion provides answers for the mind, but science EXPLAINS why something is, and why it isn’t.  It gives us answers to very complex questions…and sometimes it doesn’t.  But what is very important to always remember about science is that it shifts.  It provides the best answer we can have at any one moment (this moment) in time.  But that doesn’t mean that it’s unchanging, far from it.  Science moves – as we gain better knowledge of something.  It gives us the answers we need based ONLY on the best evidence we have.  As better evidence comes in, in the future, science changes from what was stated before.  It’s fluid, and is NEVER settled.

 

BUT…science itself can be wrong, and often actually is.  There are several reasons for this, and sadly, one of which is that sometimes scientists just don’t get it right.  As smart as they often are, they are human, and can get it wrong; sometimes very wrong!  Ideally, this shouldn’t happen, and scientists have a method to ensure that, for most of the time, what they are stating is real and true.

 

If you are a scientist, you might come up with an idea on something.  This is called an ‘hypothesis’.  It’s a fancy word for an idea!  Let’s say that your idea is that eating a tablet of salt & sugar helps people lose weight.  You then carry out experiments to see if this idea is even partly true.  To your delight, all the people you experimented on, by giving them your tablet, lost weight – this is the result of your experiments.  You’re going to be rich when you market this idea of giving people a salt & sugar tablet.  But your fellow scientists are waiting to hear what your tablet is all about and how it works.  So you have to go through something called ‘peer review’.  This is where your fellow scientists look at all your experiments and your results to try it for themselves.  They will do exactly what you did and see if your tablet works.  They will go further, and try the tablet on many more people.  To your misery, you find that far from people losing weight, your fellow scientists found that your tablet makes people gain weight!  But this is good (well, not for you, you’ve turned to drink) it ‘proves’ if something is true, or not.

 

Although this ‘peer review’ process is a very good idea, it doesn’t always work.  For one thing, you (the original person with the idea) may not even be able to carry out experiments on it to see if it’s true.  It just may not be possible.  Or the people who peer review your idea may not be clever enough to see that your idea is tosh – and they get fooled by the results of your experiments just as much as you did.  So what is stated as true and real can, later on, be found to be, in fact, untrue and not real at all.  But this is another great thing about science – the truth will always come out in the end.  The one sad thing is that scientists can act very ‘human’.  Not lying, as such, but also not being very good at telling the whole truth.  Some scientists, for example, may be getting a lot of money for saying that something is true, when they know it may not be.  But if they tell the truth, they won’t get paid, and they need to live, just like the rest of us…so dishonesty, unfortunately, yet again rears its head – even within the world of science.  And yes, people within science lie.

 

Not just scientists themselves, but also those reporting on science.  This is very sad because science should be above lying - it should be the truth as best we know it at any moment in time.  Here is phys.org (a well-known online science magazine) reporting recently on mini black holes...

"Scientists know that supermassive black holes reside in the centres of most galaxies."

No, they don't know that.  It's a theory, it isn't something which is an immutable fact in cosmology.  Indeed, there is evidence that black holes cannot exist.  Mathematics show that as a huge star collapses, it loses so much energy in Hawking Radiation that it doesn't have the mass to form a black hole with a singularity.  And yet the fairly-respected phys.org saw fit to write that we KNOW black holes exist; they lied.  I'm not saying that they don't exist, as the jury is still out on that one.  But why does a scientific journal lie?  It isn't something we yet 'know'.

 

So we’ve seen that governments lie, journalists lie, newspapers lie, and even scientists ‘lie’.  This is why we said earlier, that lying is a huge part of your life…even if you don’t do it!  Others will.

 

One such sad example is the difference between white people and black people.  It is NOT just skin colour!  Genetically, we are different, small though it may be.  The blood of white people is different to the blood of black people.  Here is the NHS's Give Blood:

"We need more people of Black heritage to grow the number of blood donors with well-matched blood to help those with sickle cell disorder.  In recent years, there has been a rise in demand for some rare blood types that are more common in people of Black heritage, including people of Black-African, Black-Caribbean and Mixed ethnicity.  The increased demand for some rare blood subtypes, such as Ro, that are more common in people of Black heritage means we need more Black people to become blood donors.  Donors from Black heritage communities provide better matched blood to those who need it.  Demand for these subtypes is growing as more people have regular transfusions to treat blood disorders such as sickle cell.  Subtypes are important when someone has regular transfusions as they need blood that closely matches their own."

 

We also know that the fingerprints of white people are different to those of black people.  Genetic differences are glossed over in an attempt to shout 'We're all the same'.  Yes, we're all humans, of course, but there are obvious differences in races.  In intelligence tests, Asian people scored higher than 'white' Western people, and they in turn scored higher than black people of African ancestry.  This is just how it is.  Similarly, black people tend to be more athletic than whites or Asians.  Even on that subject, 'Jewish' people (despite being prolific in most aspects of life) score poorly in athletics.

 

So we ARE different.  Stop lying, and saying that we're all the same.