A cooling dollop of scepticism

But I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time

And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home ...

Long, long ago when that was but little tiny lad I started a course in biochemistry, at Liverpool University if you're interested which I'm sure you're not, anyhow the course involved much practical work in laboratories doing protein assays, carbohydrate assays, lipid assays, mineral assays. Measuring stuff, in short, answering that perennial question how much of what you claim to be there is actually there. Common to all these assays was preparing a calibration curve using purified protein or glucose, vitamin C, starch, NADH or whatever was on the mind of the lecturer that week. We always started with a bottle of known and measured our sample of unknown against that. It became ingrained, dinned into us: start with what you know and compare that against what you have in your hot little hand.
I relate this because it seems to me that a lot of so-called science, as reported today, skips that part of dealing with what is real and known and reaches for the computer model of how it is supposed to be, dogma has replaced experiment. This might not have been so important, reality will eventually catch up and bite these dreamers, except they have immunised themselves against reality by a wall of self-righteous indignation that reaches all the way up to and including the top levels of political and business power. The model is now emperor of all he surveys (not actually surveys since that would entail taking measurements and stuff, facts and data only get in the way)  and his clothes are a glorious array of flim-flammery and untested theory.
So with so-called man made climate change (seemingly now a way of browbeating folk into accepting expensive, windy, sunny, watery, willowy woody power generating schemes when nuclear is clearly the way to go and there's centuries' worth of nice coal under our feet) and so, more to the point with coronavirus testing.
When I read the protocol for this test back in March first thing I asked myself was where is the metaphorical bottle of purified virus that they are using for comparison, well it didn't exist then and, you know, it still doesn't these months and several million tests later. You might think that something as important as this test would at least have a so-called gold standard behind it. You'd be wrong. It has less behind it than the Wizard of Oz, it's basically an act of faith, believe in the dogma behind all this, believe in the method, in short believe in the very existence of Sars-Cov-2 or what? What is there left to believe in? It simply has to be true. This is the 'truth', the only possible 'truth' and nothing but the 'truth'.
Belief is, of course, basic to science but it has to be based on evidence, on repeatable demonstrable experience that can be refuted by experiment. In short it is based on a "bottle of known stuff" not on fanciful dogmatic delusion as seems to be the style these days.
So if you see me wandering around, too close for comfort, breaking that anti-social distancing claptrap, not wearing a silly face-nappy and laughing at poor saps who worry that their world is being ruined by alleged nanoscopic pieces of lipo-protein wrapped RNA ("that come all the way from China") that may or may not exist well now you know why. Three years of scientific training and three more years of postgraduate research (or paid fun as I recall) and years of watching that old handcart roll on down the path to who knows where have left me deeply scarred with what are now old man's doubts.