Real News

Outsourcing the recovery of NHS patients by paying private citizens to allow them to occupy their spare rooms - not something I've made up for The Sleaze, but a policy apparently considered (and rejected) by an NHS trust.   It's getting that you just can't make up political satire more bizarre than the kind of shit going on for real.  Where is it all going to end?  But, as Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Dr Watson, fact, by its very nature must always be stranger than fiction as it knows no bounds, whereas fiction is always bound by how far its audience is willing to suspend its disbelief.  It is easy to reject extravagant fiction as being ridiculous, but impossible to do so when something similar is actually occurring in front of us.  That said, reality seems to have been going out of its way to make us doubt what is going on around us for the past couple of years.  As if the Brexit vote and the election of Trump weren't unbelievable enough, we now have stuff like those NHS outsourcing proposals, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the sky turning yellow.

It's as if someone, or something, were running an experiment to test the credulity of the human race, trying to see how far they can go before our suspension of disbelief is shattered and we realise that reality isn't reality and that we're all living in a computer simulation.   Which seems to be a popular theory in some quarters.  I've even read some commentators claiming that this is, in fact, the most likely probability, that we're all a history project for our far future descendants.  Personally, I find it far more likely that we're living in the early twenty first century, for real.  But what do I know? Some seriously wealthy people seem to buy into this computer simulation nonsense.  Crazy man billionaire and Trump enabler Elon Musk, for instance.  I have a theory about why the rich and powerful are seemingly so attracted to this idea (other than the fact that they've obviously seen The Matrix too many times).  They are so used to being able to use their power to bend individuals, institutions and political processes to their will, that when they find that there are actually limits to their power, that there are things about the world they cannot change, they retreat into a fantasy about how it isn't real.  This is the only explanation they can countenance for not being able to manipulate the whole of reality: they are being constrained by externally imposed parameters, which could only happen if the world wasn't real, but just a computer programme.  Unbelievable, really