When education forbids minority opinion, it's time to give up on Truth

As nobody seems to give a monkey's chuff about the grisly fate most of us face in the coming years, Armageddin' ouda here via my Time machine....back to those halcyon days when blogging was young, the Muskovite was more interested in Mars than Twitter, and The Slog ran regular features like.....

Good wine alert

The 2015 vintage of Felix Solis's Gran Seleccion Valdepenas is a terrific example of the way in which modern Northern Spanish wines are wiping the floor with French, Italian, South African, Australian and US reds these days....and this one is a corker from the Viva Albali House.

Here in the Gambia, you can buy a bottle for nine quid, but in rip-off Britain you'd probably have to pay twelve at least. Morrisons stock it for sure. In the US, I'd imagine El Tariffo del Trumpone could push the price up to twenty bucks or more.

Whatever: it's a joy to savour, and goes very well with everything from Bulgarian white cheese via corned beef hash to Caesar salad. It goes particularly well with nothing beyond a generous wine glass at the end of a frustrating day. Drink the entire bottle at one sitting, and it is guaranteed to reduce the pain of rising pavements.

Whatever happened to....

Val Edward Kilmer was born December 31 in California. He found fame in movies across a wide variety of genres, most notably Top Gun with Tom Cruise. He was box office gold: films in which Kilmer appeared grossed more than $3.85 billion worldwide, and in 1992, film critic Roge Ebert remarked, "If there is an award for the most unsung leading man of his generation, Kilmer should get it".

In 2015, he was disgnosed with throat cancer, and spent a decade fighting it. He lost the battle on April 1st 2025. He was a heavy cigarette smoker. He was widely known for being "difficult to work with", which in my experience means "a dedicated perfectionist". I thought he was a terrific bloke.

At the End of the Day

Many things in life can mislead you, but two activities in particular do that more often than most: political opinion polling, and consumer market research.

The chief reason for this is that the media elites dictate incessantly what responses shall be deemed Right and Wrong. So polls, focus groups and street interviews conducted by strangers inevitably attract what respondents feel is the correct intention or belief to express.

Most of the opinion poll research done on the eve of each Trumpian election predicted confidently that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris respectively would carry the day. This really was a case of the biased anti-Donald "bought" media falling on its own self-created sword: nobody wanted to admit to voting for DT, but in the privacy of the polling booth, that's exactly what most of them did.

Successfully interrogating witnesses, consumers and voters is really about learning how to spot when interviewees are telling what I call 'social lies'.

During my Adland days, I worked on a brand of Cyprus sherry called Emva Cream. Asking housewives [its consumption was heavily female biased] why they bought the sherry often evoked the response, "Because I like making trifle puddings". If you buy five bottles of Emva a week, that's lot of trifle. So we used to do dustbin checks to compare stated consumption with bin contents. It usually showed circa eight bottles rather than five. Talk to any gp, and they'll admit that when they ask patients how much alcohol they drink, by a rule of thumb the doc multiplies the claimed amount by three.

Once you start getting into international research, cultural differences are equally telling. Another brand I worked at JWT was Rolex.

Interviewing wealthy British Rolex Oyster owners about why they bought the product evoked responses like "it only loses one second a year" or "it's waterproof down to five thousand atmospheres". Trust me people, nobody needs to know the time that exactly...and if you were on the seabed without a bathyscape under 5000 atmos pressure, your head would explode.

However, asking the same question of upmarket Milanese Oyster devotees evoked a reply as follows: "I like-a de gold Rolex because it look mollto sportivo y brio onna ma wrist when ah play de tennis".....adding for good measure, "But when ah go to de opera at la Scala I weara de Patek Philippe because it più sobrio [more restrained]".

No prizes for guessing which answer is the more honest. (And the by the way, it's one of many reasons why I always adored working, eating and debating in Italy. I can honestly say that Al Fresco is a personal friend of mine.)

At the End of the Day, the golden rule applies: 'harken not unto what people say, but instead observe what they do'

In seeking an opinion, every researcher's open mind should be guided by this question: "Is there any such thing as a personal opinion....or is almost every human being on Earth simply a Hall-of-Mirrors reflection of propaganda?"

It's now thirty-six years since the Berlin Wall fell in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev's call for Glaznost - that is, "media openness".

Are the US, UK, EU, RF, Beijing, Islamic media more or less 'open' than they were in 1989? My answer would be an emphatic "NO". Truth has left the theatre. There will be no encore.