Revival: what horses can teach us

 A marvellous video tells how China is reversing the progress of a desert that was heading towards Beijing.

At first they planted great numbers of trees, which sucked water out of the ground until the water table sank so far the roots couldn’t reach and the trees died.

Then they tried introducing an ancient wild breed of horse - Przewalski’s. This stocky creature broke the barren crust of topsoil with its hooves, allowing rainwater to gather in puddles and seep into the lower ground. Plants came out of suspended animation. As the horses roamed they spread seeds carried on their hooves and in their dung. Insects colonised the greening area and a complex ecosystem began to re-form.

Isn’t this a metaphor for the failure of top-down bureaucratic planning of a command economy and the success, allowed the opportunity, of the “animal spirits” of private enterprise?

The vote-rigging that never was? (Birmingham)

 The final ward to declare its result in last Thursday’s local elections in Birmingham was Glebe Farm and Tile Cross. At stake were two council seats.

The Labour leader of Birmingham Council, John Cotton, was ousted. The two new councillors were Jess Ankrett (Reform UK) and Shehryar Kayani (Workers Party of Britain.)

It was close. There were two recounts on Saturday (no change announced) but on Monday (it is said) seven new ballots were discovered. Rumour had it that the margin between Kayani and Cotton was only six votes and the extra seven were all for Labour and would have returned Cotton. Here is the controversial former diplomat Craig Murray jumping on the bandwagon:

A Birmingham seat is being recounted for the third time.

The Workers Party won the first count by 6 votes. They won the second count by 6 votes.

Then the Returning Officer - who is of course an employee of Labour run Birmingham City Council - “Found” seven Labour votes that had gone astray.

Here is former Labour MP and now Workers Party leader George Galloway furiously responding to the allegation by “Losrafascartel”:

If we are cheated of this famous victory Legal Action will follow immediately @WorkersPartyGB

But the official return shows that although there was (ultimately, if not before the recounts) a six-vote gap it was between Kayani of the Workers Party and (third in the list) Satnam Tank of Reform. Had the new seven ballots all been for one or both Labour candidates it would not have made the slightest difference to the outcome:

It’s not been established who asked for the recount, but given the results it could easily have been on behalf of Reform.

These are feverish times. As I write we still don’t know whether the Prime Minister himself will stay or go.

It's not just about Starmer

Even veteran journalists can get things hopelessly wrong: “In a democracy we get the politicians we deserve,” said the Daily Mail’s Andrew Neil last week.

This is not a democracy, it’s a constitutional monarchy. The franchise was extended in 1918 to prevent Communist revolution and since then there has been intense effort to misguide and distract the public via mass media.

“The people have spoken—the bastards” said a US Senate hopeful 60 years ago and when much later they spoke for Trump - twice - all hell was let loose. They simply don’t know what’s good for them. They have to be managed.

Early results from yesterday’s UK elections suggest that the Greens have split off votes from Labour and let Reform come through on the First Past The Post system. “But why don’t Labour enact electoral reform to stop this from happening?” asked the Guardian’s Owen Jones, but he opposed the Alternative Vote in the 2011 referendum because it might help a third party.

What matters to him and so many others is the outcome, not the process.

And if the outcome is the wrong one, the apparatchiks have to put it right. The country voted for Brexit; the politicians undermined it. There was a General Election to break the logjam. The Bill was passed perforce but the subversion continued. Now we have Labour pursuing a damaging “dynamic alignment” with the EU’s laws; if that follows the trajectory of our membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism we could all end up singing in the bath.

Some commentators think Starmer stands for nothing. Again this is completely wrong and misleads people into believing that getting rid of Sir Keir will solve our problems. He does have an agenda and it’s not just his; it is a continuation of the Left’s long-running program to destroy our “democracy” so completely that a Conservative government can never return. He has said so in terms:

“We’re trying not just to defeat the Tories, but to defeat their entire way of doing politics.”

In that same speech he then proposes to unite the country!

Starmer has picked up the baton from his mentor Blair. Emasculate the House of Lords, devolve power away from Westminster via a forest of quangos and surrender to EU rule-making, split the country into sub-nations and regions, amalgamate local councils into entities so large that they mean nothing much to the voters (especially when local TV and papers report so little.) Use mass immigration to promote “diversity” but not so much because diversity per se is valuable as it is a weapon to smash the British cultural unity that has taken centuries and blood-sodden fields to develop.

And of course abolish the monarchy, the obstacle identified at the end of the fiery right-on 1976 TV series “Bill Brand”; our unifying symbols must be destroyed, as before when Cromwell sold broke and melted the royal regalia. The first muted trumpet call of the current battle was on 17 July 2024 when the Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood turned her back on the Monarch after handing him his speech; that deliberate discourtesy was introduced by the Blair government back in 1998. The King blinked: he had not missed its import.

Everybody hates democracy. In the 1980s the Tory leader of Westminster Council introduced a scheme to sell off its council houses to build Labour out of the area. In the US there has long been gerrymandering by both sides to game the voting in their favour and the competition is intensifying, as Lionel Shriver discusses in this week’s Spectator magazine.

National harmony does not depend on unity of opinion. Every time someone says “hey gang, let’s all…” a fight begins. There is no “all”; peace is founded on a great number of issues where we agree to disagree. Unless we can get political and religious militants (of various kinds) to accept that then the “diversity” project will backfire dramatically.

Most of human happiness does not come out of debating rooms. It lies in personal relationships, work that does not smash them up with its demands, adequate comfort and security and if desired the opportunity to better oneself or one’s offspring through additional striving.

Where is a gardener government wise enough to plant, weed and stand back?

FRIDAY MUSIC: Duke Ellington, by JD

 “Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American pianist who was the greatest jazz composer and bandleader of his time. One of the originators of big-band jazz, Ellington led his band for more than half a century, composed thousands of scores, and created one of the most distinctive ensemble sounds in all of Western music.”

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Duke-Ellington

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn - Take the “A” Train

Duke Ellington - Caravan

Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”

Rockin In Rhythm

Duke Ellington Diminuendo And Crescendo In Blue

With those last two numbers you could almost say he helped to invent -rock and roll.

Will AI take over? by JD

 In this post JD argues that the threat of AI is overstated - but we wonder whether it may narrow the gap between the blue collar and the white?

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
- from The Rock by T.S.Eliot
https://www.wisdomportal.com/Technology/TSEliot-TheRock.html

Where indeed? Were he alive today Eliot might have continued “and where is the information swallowed up by AI; Artificial Intelligence?”

AI is all over the news media. Huge amounts of money being invested (gambled?) on its potential.

We have been here before of course. In the 1930s Alan Turing was working on what he called Machine Intelligence. Continuing with that work he eventually came up with what became the Enigma machine. We have all heard of that because it was able to decipher the German secret communication codes and helped to bring an end to the second world war.
https://www.vectra.ai/blog/alan-turing-and-the-birth-of-machine-intelligence

AI consists of pure information which it is able to transfer between machines/computers. What it cannot do is perform physical tasks. All the speculation about AI taking over everybody’s job is just that, speculation or scaremongering.
As an example, let us suppose you are driving along and get a puncture in one of your tyres. How is AI going to help you get the spare wheel out of the boot and replace the wheel with the puncture? It can’t. Or when your car needs its annual service, is AI going to change the oil or the spark plugs? No of course not. So the motor mechanic’s job is safe, he will never be replaced by AI.

Another example is my garden fence which is leaning at a perilous angle after some high winds. What will AI’s contribution be to restoring my fence to the vertical? None whatsoever. So the fencing contractor’s job is not going to disappear any time soon.
I’m sure you can readily think of many examples of your own.

Iain McGilchrist FRSA is a British psychiatrist, philosopher and neuroscientist who wrote the 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In this video he explains how and why AI cannot become conscious because it is entirely parasitic. In other words it is dependent on information created by others. It has access to all of that information. AI will search and retrieve information according to what it is asked to retrieve. It will then display such information in the way it is asked to display or use it. But it will always require people to make use of the information. The machine that is AI cannot do anything without instructions from whoever is operating the machine; it cannot carry out any physical function. It is humans and only humans who are able to do that. Iain McGilchrist explains it much better than I can in this video.

Iain McGilchrist - Can AI Become Conscious?

There is another aspect to AI which is usually ignored by commentaters and that is the idea of computer chips being implanted into the brain in order to ‘enhance’ the brain’s capacity. I have already read about people who have done just that but I have seen no ‘progress reports’ telling us whether these implants have been successful or not.

The following video comes from Gregg Braden who was for a number of years a software designer working for the US government as well as for Cisco Systems and others. He explains the current situation and the pitfalls which lie ahead.

Artificial Intelligence vs Human Awareness | Gregg Braden

How top-down, big-picture political schemes ruin us

 Birmingham used to be called the City of a Thousand Trades. It had a large skilled workforce and a diversified industrial base, with many small businesses so that if one failed there were nearby competitors to take over.

In 1945 a new Government came in with Big Ideas. One was to provide more employment around the regions by restricting growth in areas that were already successful. The Distribution of Industry Act required central government permission to build or expand a factory by more than 5,000 square feet (465 square metres.) This forced development to be sited elsewhere.

The big-picture intention may have been good, but one consequence was that Birmingham was handicapped like a horse that wins too many races. The city where I live became over-dependent on a limited number of enterprises, especially car manufacture, and when global competition and economic recession hit we suffered.

China has learned from our ivory-tower political stupidity. Its industry clusters with their synergy have made the country a world-beater.

Now Britain has another high-handed grand-plan national administration determined to distribute wealth production, diluting and weakening our productive capacity. Add to that the back-to-Eden fantasy of high-cost and unreliable “sustainable” energy creation and we have a whole nation headed for the doldrums.

Like schools, Parliament need to send its Members on “work experience” before they presume to run the economy.

For more about the introduction and effects of Industrial Development Certificates please read this excellent article in the Birmingham Dispatch and/or watch the video below:

FRIDAY MUSIC: Skiffle, by JD

Skiffle is a DIY, high-energy music genre blending folk, blues, and jazz, originating in 1920s America but surging in 1950s Britain. Popularized by Lonnie Donegan, it used inexpensive or homemade instruments like washboards and tea-chest bases, sparking a youth music craze that laid the foundation for the British Invasion and rock ‘n’ roll.

Originating as a form in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, it became extremely popular in the United Kingdom in the 1950s, where it was played by such artists as Lonnie Donegan, the Vipers Skiffle Group, Ken Colyer, and Chas McDevitt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiffle

Charles McDevitt Skiffle Group Featuring Nancy Whiskey - Freight Train

VIPERS SKIFFLE GROUP (Live 1957) Rare / Song: PICK A BALE OF COTTON

Skiffle City Ramblers - Dr. Jazz

The Jive Aces Skiffle Combo presents: “Mama Don’t Allow”

Knobtown Skiffle Band: Knobtown Rag

Lonnie Donegan - Rock Island Line (Rockpop 1.4.1978)

This is good happy and impromptu music and cheers everyone up!