Outside of the scientific press this regurgitating of apparent facts to support whatever axe is currently being ground is sufficiently prevalent now that it is commonly considered as absurd. "Boffins say xxxx causes cancer shocker!" or "innoculation with xxx gives your kid nasty disease yyy instead".
It's no surprise then that we now hear that "if only the government had listened to the experts before Christmas and bought more Grit, we wouldn't be in this mess".
From the Daily Mail
Edmund King, president of the AA, said he had written to ministers on November 16 to warn about inadequate salt supplies, only to be accused of ' scaremongering'.
'I'm afraid what we predicted has come true and it is pretty scary on the roads out there and on the
pavements where people are getting injured.
Hey, I know, why didn't we create a European grit mountain in Surrey, then we'd have enough to make sure all the whinging daily mail readers were able to go to their Tuesday night whist drive. Oh, yeah that's it, we've got a European debt mountain to dwarf Everest!
What about all the other things people were saying before Christmas? If it hadn't have snowed and we'd spent £15 g'dzillion on grit mountains we'd have stories like "£15 g'dzillion wasted on grit, and pensioner starves" or "£15 g'dzillion wasted on grit, and immigrants still pouring in from Eastern Europe" or "£15 g'dzillion wasted on grit, and hard working tax payers don't get life-saving expensive drug".
I suggest that when it snows journalist should be forced to stop work and go and play in the snow like normal people - also it should be allowed to throw special snow balls with stones in the middle if the journalist is identifiably from the Daily Mail.
Rant over.
