Author: Ophelia Benson

Good old Charles, always stirring the pot, and doing it in such a grand aristocratic irresponsible way.

“I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment,” he told a conference at St James’s Palace. “I felt proud of that.”

Ah did you, you darling wee man. Well it’s easy for you, isn’t it, because if all the lights go out you can just get a lot of servants to hold the candles for you.

The Prince, who was talking at the annual conference of The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment , went on: “I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago.”

He’s been studying Madeleine Bunting!

It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it. We cannot go on like this, just imagining that the principles of the Enlightenment still apply now. I don’t believe they do. But if you challenge people who hold the Enlightenment as the ultimate answer to everything, you do really upset them.

That would be partly because nobody holds that and people who do hold Enlightenment values get very stinking tired of being characterized in that stupid way. Nobody nobody nobody ‘holds the Enlightenment as the ultimate answer to everything’ you ignorant git so why don’t you get it right if you want to say something?

Not to mention of course the absurdity of assuming that just because an idea is 200 years old therefore ‘we have to do something about it’ i.e. get rid of it. The monarchy is a good deal older than that but we don’t hear Chuck saying we have to do something about it, do we!

Instead, the Prince advocated a holistic approach to the world’s problems…“What is the point of all this clever technology if at the end of the day we lose our souls, and the soul of nature of which we are a part?”…The Prince also made an impassioned call for houses to be built so that birds, such as swallows and swifts, could make their nests there.

Holistic approach; souls; birds’ nests. For that he thinks he has to do something about the Enlightenment? I don’t see the necessity, myself.

The Lancet has retracted Andrew Wakefield’s article that suggested that vaccines could cause autism. Therefore…

Jim Moody, a director of SafeMinds, a parents’ group that advances the notion the vaccines cause autism, said the retraction would strengthen Dr. Wakefield’s credibility with many parents.

I see. Years of investigation that turned up conflicts of interest and ‘the overwhelming body of research by the world’s leading scientists that concludes there is no link between M.M.R. vaccine and autism’ will strengthen Wakefield’s credibility with many parents. What kind of thing would weaken it then?

…an investigation by a British journalist found financial and scientific conflicts that Dr. Wakefield did not reveal in his paper. For instance, part of the costs of Dr. Wakefield’s research were paid by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages. Dr. Wakefield was also found to have patented in 1997 a measles vaccine that would succeed if the combined vaccine were withdrawn or discredited.

Would that do it? No? I suppose it would take a shaman and Tom Cruise doing a joint press conference saying no it’s not vaccines it’s the anger of The World Spirit. Or something.