20 August: The Berlin crisis deepens. President Kennedy sends 1,500 troops to West Berlin to show support for the inhabitants. The soldiers are greeted there by Vice-President Lyndon Johnson.
22 August: soldiers at the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (the 'Anti-Fascist Protection Wall') are ordered to shoot people trying to flee East Berlin. The first such casualty comes two days later.
23 August: the USA launches its first 'space platform', Ranger 1, as the start of a Moonshot program. A rocket fails and the machine fails to reach high orbit; it falls back to Earth a week later, burning in the air.
The military later stages a socialist coup d'état in March 1962 and rules directly or indirectly from then on, with a new Constitution from 1974.
From 1988 the situation becomes more fluid, with pro-democracy movements combating State repression.
The military junta dissolves in 2011 but in January 2021 there is another military coup d'état,overturning the rule of Aung San Suu Kyi'sNational League for Democracy (NLD), which won by a landslide (again) in the 2020 general election.
My bank currently offers
0.01% interest on my balance with them. That is to say, if my bank borrows
£10,000 off me then in return I get £1 interest at the end of the year. Does
this even cover the default risk? (Yes, there is the FSCS, and thereby hangs a
tale https://www.fscs.org.uk/globalassets/press-releases/20170908-fscs-northern-rock-release_final3.pdf
.) In the meantime, the price of £10,000-worth of goods and services is expected
– is targeted – to increase by £200 ! Where is my incentive to save?
Today our financial house
of cards seems to be sustained by Modern Monetary Theory https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588060
. Under this scheme, governments can forge as much cash as they like to pump
into the economy, and will of course know exactly when and how to suck it back
in interest rates and taxes. This power will never be abused, or misused by
some incompetent Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go
wrong.
There was a time when forgery
was high treason and forgers were hanged, and even also drawn and quartered;
female coiners, slightly less dreadfully, burned at the stake (the last in 1789
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Murphy_(counterfeiter)
.) Now, the State can do as it wishes with ‘the pound in your pocket’ (to quote
the condescending Harold Wilson.)
There was a time when
Parliaments had power, because the monarch needed the people’s money for wars
and other expensive diversions. The request had its risks: calling the assembly
ultimately cost Louis XVI his head. Now, it magics up whatever it requires; who
needs the people? And why should the people need money, independently of the
State? ‘You will own nothing and be happy’ – though I think that when that
happens, it will be only half right.
For if we live at the
pleasure of the State we are like household pets; and like them, perhaps, may one
day be euthanised when inconvenient to our masters (what else are DNR notices,
like the ones given during the Covid epidemic to British patients with learning
difficulties https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/13/new-do-not-resuscitate-orders-imposed-on-covid-19-patients-with-learning-difficulties
?). If we are not employed by some agency working on behalf of the government, many
of us survive on allowances and income top-ups, unfunded final salary pensions,
and the State Pension Scheme (at whatever receding qualifying age.) We are not
free, because we are not independent.
By the way, technically,
even if your income was boosted every year exactly in line with a single measure
of inflation, you would lose out. This is because the revisions come once a
year and are then fixed, whereas prices continue to go up in the interim. The
faster inflation goes, the greater the cumulative loss – for those who are interested
I attach a spreadsheet to show how.
Also, the inflation index
you use is so important in determining whether and how badly you are being bilked.
You may remember that almost the first act of the incoming 2010 Government was
to stop issuing NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates. For existing certificate-holders,
NS&I have changed the index used from RPI to CPI, in the expectation that
savers’ returns will drop by 0.6% per annum. https://www.hl.co.uk/news/articles/archive/ns-and-i-index-linked-savings-certificates-should-you-renew-them
There was a time when
money was gold and silver – indeed, to some extent it is a requirement of the
US Constitution https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI_S10_C1_2_2_1/
. It kept governments in check and safeguarded the people’s freedom. What you
saved was yours, taxation apart; and you resisted taxation, and they had to ask
nicely for your money, via your representatives; but now the money system is
rotten.
The money system
stabilised again by the late 17th century. The Bank of England's website used
to have a page that let you calculate cumulative inflation for any period from
1750 onwards. According to them, a basket of goods and services costing £1 in
1750 would have cost (the equivalent of) £1.80 in 1900 - an average annual
inflation rate of 0.3%. That period covers the tremendous increase in
productivity introduced by the Industrial Revolution and further late-nineteenth-century
scientific and technological developments, so inflation is not needed for
business and prosperity.
An 80% increase in prices
took 150 years to develop.
Yet the same database
showed that a very similar increase (£1 to £1.81) occurred in the space of four
years in the 20th century between 1974 and 1978. And since 1900, we have seen
an overall increase of over 10,000%. That's not a typing mistake: £1 in 1900
was worth the same as £104.08 in 2012.
All caused by a seemingly
gentle average inflation rate of 4.2% per year. The Bank of England's
"target" for annual inflation is now 2%, which means that it is now
official policy for us to suffer an 80% increase in prices over 30 years
instead of 150 years - in one generation, instead of five or six.
Liberty depends on private
property, and sound money. Rattle your chains, pocketless serfs.
I started teaching Mathematics in the US higher education system in 1978, and retired in 2017. Throughout my career, I spent a lot of time reading about the latest trends in Mathematics Education, including participating in several grants.
The basic problem has not changed since Euclid. To understand Science, you must speak its language, which appears to be Mathematics. And it isn't just the hard Sciences. Every study on college success indicates that grades in Mathematics courses are the most robust predictor of graduation.
Despite multiple major revisions of technique and content of teaching, the success levels have not changed since I started teaching. My personal observation is that the overall mastery has declined, as the system now forces students through who would otherwise not succeed. In turn, this grade inflation means that the upper tier of students are often not challenged to work very hard, and so arrive at higher education with an inflated sense of their capacities, and an inability to rectify their deficiencies.
This slight gain through grade inflation, of course, does not satisfy administrators in education, and politicians. They know that the relatively high level of Mathematics failure is because the subject is “too abstract” (ignoring the evidence that this is precisely why it makes people think more precisely), and that Mathematics teachers are universally incompetent.
There have been several efforts of reform in this particular direction, including the English GCSE system, starting in about 1980. The entire curriculum was changed to make it project- and problem-based, using all available technology, starting with extensive calculator use (as opposed to the slide rules and log tables that we had), and moving into computer Algebra systems.
After 20 years, the results came in. Universities reported that students arrived unprepared for coursework that had previously been standard, and even had to emulate US institutions in including remediation. Companies that had hired people with A-levels in the subject reported that they did not have enough skills to learn what was needed for their jobs.
It was a disaster, but as always, no-one would admit that and simply move back to the 'old way' of doing things. Consequently, they had to introduce huge curriculum revisions and claim that they were 'new' ideas.
Yvette Cooper - I always thought with that name she was a cross between a cheap Vauxhall and a Mini Cooper - was reliably typical as she implored the government to include everyone in Afghanistan who want to come here to be allowed to, as she has on every other occasion there has trouble in the Middle East and elsewhere. She did this with her best impression of a wronged-woman-face on. This comes after a day of word soup from our? representatives who would welcome anyone without checks into this country. This has been one of the worst displays of faux concern from a bunch of people that in the main are not fit to run a bath.
Why it is thought necessary to have a full day of these endless speeches, most of which as I said just repeat endlessly on the virtue theme, is a mystery. Is it a type of mutual- and self-flagellation - 'we were all so wrong but that lot were more wrong' or is it the case that if they all gather and repeat the same thing they somehow believe that the outside world will see them in a different light? The irony is that hardly anyone watches these parliamentary debates, so in reality they are virtue-signalling to themselves.
Up to our ears in debt, policies on almost everything that will impoverish the nation further, a health service no longer fit for purpose, laws being put in place at the bequest of minority woke lunatics, minorities of all colours being given preference on all things ahead of the indigenous tax paying population, law and order collapsing among the untouchable minorities etc etc, yet they spend a day scoring political points in an attempt to appear virtuous.
The only certainty from their day in the spotlight is the guarantee we will add untold thousands to the welfare bill and they will be fighting for hotel rooms with the dinghy people. When you add the dependants that will follow and the others who will follow the dinghy route, we will be filling small? towns up or the equivalent on a monthly basis. Yvette of course is well known for her generosity in taking in refugees (sarc) so we shouldn’t feel we are not all in this together the next time one of these children with beards goes on the rampage and kills or rapes someone; after all, 'lessons have been learned.'
The paucity of our representatives was today put on display for the nation. There was never a better example of why we should not vote for the vast majority of them and the bankrupt parties they all represent. The future for us? There isn't one any of us would want coming out of that place.
In the USA Joe Biden has surfaced to put on one of the most appalling displays of defence over a totally failed exit strategy in Afghanistan, blaming all and sundry for his obvious errors; and then twenty-four hours later, or five days according to Joe, he doubles down on the same strategy and again blames everything and everyone else.
Boris has put himself in a hard place as from the start he has brown-nosed Biden and followed the 'net zero', 'build back better', 'Great Reset' line, which now looks discredited, it always was, and as with the rest of European leaders he has been ignored. No good talking of being disappointed in the leadership of the USA in this one when you have failed to speak out about other obvious inadequacies that have emanated from the White House ever since Biden took charge. Bojo’s address to the house was as bad as all that which followed.
Today we have had two of our own talking total b*****. Firstly our defence minister Ben Wallace almost repeating word for word what Biden said: if nothing else you would have thought that seeing the hammering Biden was justly getting he might just have revised his interpretation for his own sake, but no he also seems to think that what happened had nothing to do with any strategy, if there was one, and everything to do with the Taliban moving to fast, so in fact it was the Taliban's fault all along.
One got the impression from this he was fishing for the feeling-sorry-for-him vote, such was the humble ‘we could do nothing’ stance throughout.
And then we had our Chief of Defence Staff Sir Nick Carter coming out with all sorts of woke platitudes in this interview including what I hope will be for him forever remembered as his words, “the Taliban are just country boys” - all that was going on outside the perimeter fence was just joshing, was it?
Obviously the reports of the chopping off of hands in the provinces and the killings outside the airport perimeter fence had passed him by, such is the state of our intelligence, and he has never read or heard anything contrary to his woke bumbling, such as this from a woman in Afghanistan in 1999:
"Living under the rule of the Taliban regime is like being in an abusive relationship. At first it's good. They make lots of promises, they watch their steps, they even deliver on some of their promises. But while you are being lulled into a false sense of security, they are making their plans.”
Or the reports that the Taliban are now starting to look for collaborators.
- made an appearance on Talk Radio where she managed to maintain a smug 'I know better' face for the entire duration of the interview; nyone who has seen Lucas interviewed will have observed the same trait, it’s a Green thing:
See from 2.03 in; she manages to make everything a party political broad cast without ever answering the obvious questions and elephants in the room; they never do.
She is another who has never had a proper job and despite her prominence in the Green party only managed 2.1% of the vote when she stood in the general election last time, hardly a mandate to pontificate to the rest of us how we should live or the direction the planet should be heading in, yet again as with all minorities however small they get more of a say than the majority who really don’t want to be told they will have to pay much more for less, by someone who, I repeat, has never worked in the true sense.
These are just some of those in the spotlight at the moment in the UK and the USA. it has often been said that it takes a crisis to show what leaders are made of; there can be no doubt the current crisis shows we have no one of any value in the top jobs, a vacuum of talent and common sense prevails.
As a bit of light relief: the Daily Mail is on the story about the Australia v Afghanistan test match to be held in November that is ‘likely’ to be cancelled, as good a prophecy as any I suspect. At moments like this it is good to know the press have their finger on the pulse.
Last week Mr S. asked "Nine this time ! Is this numerologically significant ?"
I wasn't aware that I was posting nine songs so often, it just happens subconsciously I suppose. But when I looked it was surprisingly easy to find the number nine occurring so often in popular song so here are nine songs celebrating 9.nine.neuf.neun.nueve.nove!
1) #9 DREAM. (Ultimate Mix 2020) John Lennon w The Plastic Ono Nuclear Band
2) THE CLOVERS - ''LOVE POTION NO.9'' (1959)
3) The Blues Brothers - Riot in Cell Block Number Nine (Official Audio)
4) Number Nine -John Martyn
5) Engine Engine Number Nine Roger Miller with Lyrics
6) T-ARA[티아라] "NUMBER NINE [넘버나인]" M/V
7) Paul Ansell's Number Nine - Red light
8) Wilson Pickett - Get Me Back On Time Engine Number 9
13 August: The first move is made to construct the Berlin Wall - a barbed wire barrier:
East German soldiers, left, set up barbed-wire barricades at the border separating East and West Berlin on August 13, 1961. West Berlin citizens, right, watch the work.
This photo and others of the Wall over time can be found here:
14 August: East African Kikuyu rebel Jomo Kenyatta is released from prison. In 1963 Kenya becomes an independent State, Kenyatta its first Prime Minister, and in 1964 its first President.
19 August: Harvard professor Timothy Leary delivers a lecture in Copenhagen titled 'How To Change Behavior.' It is inspired by his experience of taking the psychedelic drugs psilocybin and LSD, both legal in the United States at that time. His first taste of 'magic mushrooms' was twelve months before in Cuernavaca, some 50 miles south of Mexico City; he called it 'the deepest religious experience of my life.'
Huxley has been invited to the conference by Richard Alpert, who is working with Leary on the Psilocybin Project at Harvard (both professors are later dismissed, in 1963.) In 1967 Alpert, continuing his spiritual search, travels to India and meets a Hindu guru called Neem Karoli Baba who persuades him to give up drugs and renames him Ram Dass, with a mission to help others on their quest.
Roughly coincidentally in time and place, Cuernavaca is also the place where Roman Catholic priest and radical thinker Ivan Illich founded his Centre for Intercultural Formation (CIF), originally a training centre for missionaries to Latin America (incorporated March 3, 1961.)
UK chart hits, week ending 12 August 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)
"...if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be so much the better for mankind – and all the worse for the fishes."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
"With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art."
Following on from Wiggia's splendid diatribe against the NHS (not his first and probably not the last!) I shall try to add some further thoughts from a slightly different perspective. I was recently a 'guest' of the NHS after feeling unwell with what I thought was some form of chronic fatigue https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-cfs/
This 'fatigue' turned out to be a previously unsuspected heart condition and so I was carted off to hospital for treatment. Three hospitals later (one of them just as a day visitor) I can say with absolute certainty that the NHS is itself terminally ill and its demise cannot be far away!
The Hippocratic Oath referred to above mentions the word 'art' in several places. I was once told by a doctor that they no longer have to 'swear the oath' which is a serious error in my view because that word 'art' is important and is why the oath remains valid. Doctors and nurses are engaged in the art of healing, helping the body to heal itself because that is what the immune system does. It will need help occasionally in the form of pills and potions but unfortunately the medical profession distrusts the uncertainty that is inherent in the 'art of healing' and pretend that 'science' can provide a certainty of outcomes, conveniently forgetting that every person is different and not all patients will respond exactly the same way to whatever treatment is administered. Doctors now follow a mechanical philosophy that people are nothing more than machines and can be mended in the same way that any other machine can be fixed. Doctors have forgotten, in other words, the importance of what used to be called the 'bedside manner' To quote Voltaire - "The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."
Whether the doctor has a positive or negative attitude is important because this is unconsciously picked up by the patient and could affect the rate of recovery; it is essential to encourage optimism in the patient. If the doctor does not exude confidence in the end result, how can the patient have any faith in his or her 'healer'? (Voltaire also said "Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all," but it is not a good idea to tell patients that!)
My month or so in hospital left a few lasting impressions. It was cold in all three! Perhaps it is just me because I really don't like being cold, at home I have the heating on most of the time. But being cold in hospital meant the nurses had difficulty in taking blood samples from my veins which had mostly withdrawn to seek inner warmth! And the air conditioning, which is another of my pet hates, meant that the atmosphere in the wards was very dry adding to the problem of taking blood samples. None of the blood pressure machines appeared to be working properly, more often than not showing error messages. To be fair they do get some rough treatment being dragged around from ward to ward and between beds. I wonder how many plastic aprons they use in a day? Nurses and doctors would go to the dispenser and tear off an apron from a roll. They would the wear that apron for the brief visit to a patient after which the apron and sometimes gloves would be discarded into the special hazardous waste bin. How many aprons? Why is Xtinction Rebellion not kicking up a fuss about all that plastic being thrown away? Or is it going into an incinerator?
But the most vivid memory was of the food. It was disgusting! I did not see a single piece of fresh fruit bar the occasional banana. Somehow I managed to get a bacon sandwich but I wish I hadn't bothered. There was no butter on the bun, nothing not even margerine and the bacon itself had been purged of fat leaving a very dry slice of tasteless bacon. Verily, a cardboard sandwich!
In the comments to Wiggia's post, Sobers makes some very sound suggestions for ways to reform the NHS or even to start again with a new way of treating the sick. But that would be to continue the current system which is not really interested in having a healthy populace. The pharmaceutical companies need a market for their products so there is no future in curing people of whatever it is that ails them.
It is better, of course, not to become ill in the first place. A friend of mine always used to say "Doctors are best avoided!" until he needed a doctor which he did one day in dramatic fashion: he walked into the A&E department of his local hospital and promptly collapsed onto the floor. "That's one way of jumping the queue!" I told him and he agreed because he saw the funny side too. Fortunately he recovered after a bit of surgical violence, a kidney operation.
Prevention should come from what I call 'psychosomatic wellness' instead of 'psychosomatic illness.' Dr Bruce Lipton has a book called The Biology of Belief and he has many videos with that theme on YT. Dr Joe Dispenza also has many videos on a similar theme. But as my chiropractor once told me "There is no money in that!" meaning the pharmaceutical companies would not be able sell their snake oil to the NHS!
We in the UK have certainly done quite a lot. Governments of
both colours have watched as our manufacturing industry shrivelled while the production
was moved abroad. The service sector was already 69% of the economy in 1990,
but grew further to 80% by 2018; manufacturing output over the same period fell
from 17.3% to 9.9%. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01942/SN01942.pdf
I do not think we are going to maintain an advanced economy
and generous welfare state by taking in each other’s washing; but then, I’m not
an economist, unlike the 20,000 professionals who failed to foresee the Global
Economic Crisis.
Transition to less polluting and more sustainable forms of
energy production are worthy objectives, but it is obvious there will be huge
costs involved in the changeover; costs that a steadily weakening economy like
ours may not be able to bear.
We also need to look at physical reality instead of the
fictions of GDP and the magic money forest that is papering over the
irrationality of our privileged normal life. A 2015 article in Forbes by energy
writer James Conca analysed Energy Returned On Investment, or EROI (alternatively,
Energy Returned on Energy Invested – EROEI). https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-tool-to-predict-the-best-energy-mix/
This looks at how much energy it takes to make a unit of energy – a difficult
calculation, because you have to work out everything involved, from soup to
nuts. Conca find the returns on coal and gas are great (though they have a limited future);
solar, biomass and wind not so much, especially when you factor in the cost of energy
storage. Oh, for the days when oil simply gushed out of the ground !
Doubtless technological improvements will raise the EROI,
but even then it does not look as though renewables – even if they could satisfy
all our energy needs – can come close to competing with nuclear power (with its
dangers) or hydroelectric (for countries with lots of mountains and water.)
It looks as though all our Western agonizing over energy is
not going to stop excess global CO2 emissions anytime soon – assuming that
humans are the major factor in this, rather than, say, vulcanism.
We seem to have forgotten the lesson of King Canute: we can’t
stop the tide coming in, but we can move further inland. That is, instead of
trying to ‘save the world’ (what godlike arrogance!) we should think how best
to save ourselves. If sea levels are going to rise, why are we still allowing
property developers to build on flood plains? If we are going to get longer
spells of hot weather, why are we allowing our population to grow when our freshwater
supplies are limited? If our crop production is affected by heat, or even by
cold if Europe cools instead – a possibility, if the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort
Gyre collapses https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-a-wayward-arctic-current-could-cool-the-climate-in-europe
- was it a good idea for the UK’s strategic food stockpile to have been
scrapped in 1995? https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/strategic-food-stockpile/
In short, why are we not working urgently, long and hard on
contingency plans and structural changes to reduce our vulnerability to shocks
in the logistical systems that supply us with the essentials of life?
