Over the course of eight paragraphs today’s Times argues that the jab should be mandatory for all care workers.

It goes a little something like this (italics being The Times) :

The Times view on mandatory Covid vaccination for health and care workers: Taking Care

It is an unprecedented and controversial step. But ministers should press ahead

The Times goes on to say that the pandemic is without precedent so it is ok to also make vaccination switch from voluntary to compulsory – without precedent.

That :

In the context of a public health crisis, demanding inoculation against Covid is a minor incursion on personal liberty relative to restrictions that have been demanded by government and made without complaint by most Britons over the past year.

The US soldiers drafted to fight in Vietnam were a brilliant set of customers for the then heroin market.

And now having lost those customers, and with far fewer options when it comes to selling opium in China, the lovely chaps over at Wall Street and the City of London need to identify captive markets.

The British have always been known for selling weapons to both sides.

This time it’s vaccines to patients and caregivers.

Were there more money in the music and other divisions of the entertainment industry we might not have gone down this road.

Gangsters need easy money.

The US Management firm McKinsey and their multibillionaire opiate dealing client Purdue Pharma have had to enter agreements with various US states to pay hundreds of millions of dollars and never sell opiates again.

McKinsey has shaped NHS policy for decades.

This is from 2011. McKinsey have structured UK health in a way that is derived from their insights into US health.

Of course there is little chance of getting rid of them in the UK. But the yanks do appear to have done something about the Sackler billionaires that run Purdue with McKinsey. Perhaps there is hope. I really don’t know.

As you can possibly tell from my general tone, I am no longer even angry about this. I accept it. Not that humans are all by nature venal under all circumstances.

But yes, it happens, it happens a lot. And if you’re any good it then it’s hard to stop.

If cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money, what are other drugs telling us?

Meth is you are a really determined worker and will sacrifice your body to get the task done.

Opium is telling us there’s a radically changing socio-economic outlook while entering the 20th century.

Opiates are God’s way of telling us to push ourselves to the edge of death and enjoy the extreme euphoria but don’t kill ourselves by crossing that line.

I am about to read my friend and fellow musketeer Roger Lewis’ (Porthos) latest offering:

Intellectually speaking Roger wears more hats than Mr Benn. That’s not to say he doesn’t mean what he says or know what he means. But the connections he draws betweens different arguments made in supposedly different fields are cogent, illuminating and memorable.

This is KRS-ONE’s latest. Album number 23.