Unprecedented: The Age of “The Study”
by Asa Boxer
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So I’m reading the local rag and there’s a front page headline that says, “Senate committee report calls for action on degrading soils.” The article, which is clearly a political press release designed by Senator Rob Black’s team, explains that Canadian agricultural soils are degraded. After spending $140,000 of taxpayer money and travelling to the UK and Italy to chat with who exactly?. . . soil experts? I can only guess because the article doesn’t say. I mean maybe the committee just took a holiday and expensed it. In any event, we’re facing “unprecedented” challenges. The term unprecedented is poorly chosen since the headline on the inside page reads, “‘Critical Ground’ study comes 40 years after Senate first sounded alarm about Canada’s eroding soils.” So it’s hardly unprecedented. And part of the joke here is that we clearly didn’t need another inquiry. I mean, if a senate committee determined there was a problem in 1984 and no one did anything about it, then it didn’t just fix itself, right? I guess we need TheScience™ and a $140K vacation for politicos to figure out how to explain it to us or it isn’t real.
The article has zero explanation for why the soil is in bad shape or what’s required to fix it. But there is a link to the committee’s 25 recommendations here. As you’d expect, with a bill of a measly 140K, no “study” has actually been done. This is a set up for multiple studies and ongoing studies, which will cost taxpayers millions (if not billions). Recommendations 4 to 6 call for a lot of data collection, indeed “a national soils institute and database.” The 25 points are at times redundant calls to action; some of them (like points 8 and 9) don’t make sense; and you can tell from the language that implementation won’t really solve the problem because the actual underlying issue isn’t being addressed: massive, industrial farming for national distribution and export purposes. Politicians wouldn’t want to upset the food cartels any more than they have to by suggesting, heaven forfend, that we need to scrap the industry in favour of local agricultural projects. With food prices already skyrocketing, what do you think the impact of this boondoggle is going to be on the cost of groceries?
Today’s Barstool Bit isn’t about agriculture. I plan to address that subject another day. But I do want to point out that a large part of the problem with this “degraded soil” racket is that the priorities are all wrong. Taxpayer money ought to be used to improve things that impact citizens, not the future of corporate profits. Are soils the issue? or food security? Solving the latter will entail fixing the soils. And none of it would cost taxpayers the millions that are about to be dumped on this makework as it involves the Soils Institute of the People’s Republic of Canadia via which “data [will] be shared with provinces, territories, Indigenous governments, academia, and agricultural and forestry producers.” If food security were addressed, it would save Canadians money, not cost them money, and there’d be no need for some national soil institute along with all the red tape that will entail.
But the government is hungry for data. Without TheData™, how will we be able to follow TheScience™? Governments require studies replete with data to rationalise spending on projects. Whether the impacts on the ground are actually beneficial doesn’t matter. What matters is that a model of success is created by a study and that the Institute of Whositwhatsit can show books with positive data curves.
And this brings me to the point of today’s Bit: real reality and our models of reality. We are facing an age of complete insanity as data and studies trump reality. I look at my “smart” phone and I see a weather alert. Oooo. . . what’s going on? Extreme Heat Warning: replete with stats about how many die from extreme heat and what to do if you see someone who stops sweating or someone who passes out. We must protect the children and the elderly because climate change is contagious. It’s covid all over again. While the extreme heat comes in at temperatures of 27 to 32 degrees Celsius this week, we should hide under our beds. Implicit here, of course, is that this heat is unprecedented and a result of climate change. Apparently, we are to believe that the arrival of summer in mid-June is unprecedented, an “extreme weather event” that will go down in the books as such so some expert (and all the barstool experts who read an article quoting the expert) can refer to “the rise in extreme weather events” as evidence for global warming.
The term being used by The Weather Network is “the heat dome.” This isn’t the flat earth dome. No. This is mainstream meteorology, boys and girls. It leaves one wondering who the marketing folks are behind this new, so-very-scary terminology. “‘Heat wave’? C’mon guys, that’s so old hat. We can do better than that! Gimme something global warmy!”
I see headlines that state Calgary is suffering an unprecedented drought. Then a week later: Calgary declares a state of emergency. So I call my friend in Calgary and he says to me: “Yeah it’s a running joke here as we stand in the rain. The state of emergency is owing to a broken water main, which they need two weeks to fix.” According to the data, there’s a drought, but there’s been plenty of rain. Another extreme weather event for climate book cooking.
That’s the world we’re living in, folks. Just like last week’s Bit in which I talked about the ICU director at a Washington hospital during the covid scam who read a ridiculous and patently false article in the paper reporting that his ICU was haemorrhaging with patients and struggling to keep up. What did he do? Instead of calling the paper to inform them that his ICU was only at 30% capacity, he began panicking to react to the state of emergency.
I spend a lot of time here at analogy examining the metaphysics of this insanity. How does it manifest practically speaking? Well, this is it. None of what I’m pointing out is especially new. As implied in last week’s Bit, the eighteenth-century satirist, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), was all over this subject when he invented the airborne island of Laputa—an ungrounded place where academics and scientists work at extracting rainbows from cucumbers. This is hardly fiction, my friends. Just look at the hadron collider at Cern! The biggest BS magnet on earth, responsible for extracting “the God particle.” The Nobel Prize was awarded for that one. Once again, it leaves me wondering which marketing firm is responsible for “God particle.”
The reason I refer so often to the notions of inner and outer worlds is to get to the root cause of our problems. Those who reject the Humanities, literary fiction, mythology, fairy tales, and ancient histories as lies. . . those fact thumpers are the most likely to have trouble distinguishing phantasy from reality. Their imaginations are not trained and therefore they have no idea when they are activating the imagination. These are the follow-the-science types who project dreamt-up models on the world and unwittingly invent unreal worlds they insist are realities. In other words, they are delusional. And they’re designing hallucinating AIs to aid them in buffering and augmenting their false worlds. We now have delusional people running everything alongside their digital counterparts. Our public institutions, labs, and universities are loony bins. Hyperbole? Let me know in the comments.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
Hyperbole? No. Your latest bit reminds me of a line attributed to Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa: "In this mad world, only the mad are sane." It seems to me that liberal democracy has run its course and we live in a society of lunatics whose mental life is an abyss, who've lost all capacity for self-reliance and independent thought. We farm out our decision-making to the experts in every aspect of our lives, from our personal health to our personal beliefs to how we raise our own children. Can we still sink lower? How far away is rock bottom? I don't know, but it feels close, and while the future looks grim, I find a sense of hopeful enthusiasm and energy in the idea that when everything is lost, there's an opportunity to dive back into the plasma pool and recover our lost father, so to speak.
I think this is what you're doing for your readers every week, and for that I'm grateful.
Dear Asa, I'm going away on a long trip today and may not be reading your essays for a few weeks. But I do look forward to reconnecting with you toward the end of August. I hope you have a wonderful summer.