Ukraine and the downed Malaysian airliner: four theories

1. For no conceivable advantage and in the certainty that they will be universally vilified, separatist Ukrainian forces deliberately shoot down a civilian airliner travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

2. Incompetent pro-Russian Ukrainian forces bring down what they think is an enemy military transport plane. For some reason this aircraft is travelling at a constant altitude of 33,000 feet 20 miles from Russian airspace, into which, travelling at some 500 miles per hour, it will pass in a couple of minutes. Subsequently a source says that oddly, reportedly "uncomfortable" with his route, the pilot has changed his flight plan, which normally would be to cross further south over the Sea of Azov, to head closer to the heart of the conflict:

source: Daily Mail

(UPDATE @ 18:35: see this from The Conversation about flight restrictions in the area.)

 

source: Mashable

3. In a bungled assassination attempt, someone working for the other side hits MH17 by mistake, thinking it to be President Putin's official plane.

4. The missile strike is a "false flag" pseudo-terrorist attack. In order to curb Russian expansionism (or historically, their partial recovery of some territory formerly under Soviet control) and block what may be Putin's plans for the Black Sea and a nascent EEC-style Eastern European economic union, Western agencies are quite happy to murder some 300 innocent civilians to create a pretext for military intervention in the Ukraine - or anti-Russian boycotts and sanctions.

Update (9:12): the trigger-happy-idiots theory may be correct - see Richard North today - but as North says, has the potential for dangerous anti-Russian spin, which Washington's Blog says was the American approach to a similar tragedy in 1983.

Update (21 July): Richard North says that the Ukrainian government was aware of an operational missile launcher in rebel territory and failed in its duty to warn airlines accordingly.


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EU energy security

It has long been my suspicion that for EU bureaucrats, the orthodox climate message is merely a sales pitch for energy security. Nothing whatever to do with science and the real climate except as a PR vehicle. It’s by no means the whole story behind EU climate orthodoxy, but for me there are four points worth considering. 

• A totalitarian state such as the EU needs energy independence.
• Too many oil-producers are unstable or potentially unfriendly.
• Coal and nuclear have too many political hurdles.
• In a warming world EU peasants should need less energy anyway. 

So it may well be that energy independence is to be purchased at whatever cost to the general EU population, but that cost is not perceived as excessive anyway. At least not to those who matter.

There has always been a problem in taking climate orthodoxy at face value. From the beginning its protagonists have exhibited political rather than scientific behaviour. In a world which failed to warm as predicted, EU climate policies are seriously weird unless climate orthodoxy is not really the political rationale behind them.

Surely we need a vastly more powerful political rationale to explain both the astronomical cost and the implacable way so-called green policies have been enacted. A few degrees of warming doesn’t come close as an explanation and the political classes are wholly uninterested in the projected timescales anyway. 

This degree of extreme political resolve is more characteristic of crazy totalitarian regimes than democracies. Massive projects intended to root out and change forever certain fundamental aspects of civil society. Soviet collective farms for example. Nothing can stop them whatever the cost, be it financial or social.

In which case, any human cost to the EU peasant is sure to be waved aside as collateral damage. Did you expect to be collateral damage one day? No – I suppose folk generally don’t.

The climate message, the extreme propaganda, the corruption of news media, the vicious malice directed at sceptics all point to a massive political project. A project which must be vastly more important than some obviously dodgy climate predictions about a future which lies decades beyond the political horizon.

Energy security fits the bill even if it isn’t the whole story. Blend it with a bungling bureaucracy and a totalitarian ethos and in my view a plausible picture emerges. The only real problem is that with current technology, aiming to power the EU by wind, solar, biomass etc is bonkers.

Why do we always end up with bonkers?

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The Davey Lamp

Ed Davey has an opportunity to make his mark when the lights go out. He could lend his name to a simple non-electric lighting device – the Davey Lamp.

Made in China from recycled power station generators and lavishly plated in genuine Brassex, this retro style no-electric green lighting module is sure to add distinction to any benighted home.

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Foresight and pickled cucumbers

I made some pickled cucumbers yesterday. It doesn’t take long and they should be ready to eat in a few weeks. We enjoy home made pickles,  but for some reason don’t make them as often as we could. My pickled cucumber recipe is pretty old, so I suggest you go for something more modern, but it works fine for us.

To pickle Cucumbers fliced.

Pare thirty large cucumbers, flice them into a difh, take fix onions, flice and ftrew on them fome salt, fo cover them and let them ftand to drain twenty-four hours; make your pickle of white wine vinegar, nutmeg, pepper, cloves and mace, boil the fpices in the pickle, drain the liquor clear from the cucumbers, put them into a deep pot, pour the liquor [1] upon them boiling hot, and cover them very clofe; [2] when they are cold drain the liquor from them, give it another boil; and when it is cold pour it on them again; fo keep them for ufe.

Elizabeth Moxon – English Housewifery (1790)

[1] This of course refers to the vinegar pickling liquor.

[2] I finish here and omit the following step.

I don’t use thirty cucumbers because these days we can buy them all year round. Of course doughty old Liz Moxon was writing for those with the foresight and diligence to eke out a good crop of cucumbers to take them through the lean months of winter and early spring.

In those days, domestic foresight such as this was part of a middle class lifestyle and still not wholly unconnected with survival. In later decades the job would usually have been passed to a servant and later still a food manufacturer. 

I suppose it's the other side of economic progress and efficiency. It's easier and possibly cheaper to buy pickles rather than make your own. So everything is rosy apart from losing certain intangibles we've almost forgotten - such as the need for domestic foresight.

Oddly enough, foresight seems to be a problem doesn't it?

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A moment of luxury

Click to enlarge (Pic source)

Stow-on-the-Wold, heart of the Cotswolds and these days a tourist stop.

We grumbled about the variable temperature in the shower, yet less than 80 years ago, the town had no mains water, and modern drainage only two decades later:

"Stow was, until recent times, supplied with water from springs below the town. For centuries, women and children had carried water with yoke and bucket from the spring on Well Lane. Water carts plied between Well Lane and the town where the water was sold to the townsfolk at the price of a farthing a bucket. Several systems had been tried to force water up the hill including windmills, horse-mills and water wheels but all had failed. In 1871, Joseph Chamberlayne-Chamberlayne, lord of the manor, donated £2000 to the town for a deep well to be bored and this was a success. Mains water was laid on in 1937. Sewage disposal used numerous cavities in the rock, known locally as swillies, as natural soakaways under and around the houses until mains drainage was installed in 1958."

One of the wells on Well Lane (pic source)

We're living a life I didn't dream of as a child, driving from Birmingham to a beautiful place like this in an hour. For how much longer will many of us have cars and zoom round the country like pre-war landed gentry?

One of the charms of the town is its many little alleys (in York called snickelways). Stow's are particularly narrow and the man running the charity bric-à-brac explained that in the old times, when on market day the square might hold 30,000 sheep, the alleys made the wide-fleeced animals go in single file, which made them easier to count; hence the name of Fleece Alley.

Are we looking at the past, or the future?


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Demise of the baby boomers

But things of which we have not had a direct intuition, which we have learned only through other people, we have no longer any opportunity, the time has passed in which we could inform our heart of them; its communications with reality are suspended; and so we cannot profit by the discovery, it is too late.

Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu

Recent deaths among my contemporaries yet again remind me that we baby boomers are on the way out. Not just in terms of mortality because there are a few decades to go yet, but in terms of influence.

So what have we achieved, we baby boomers?

For my part I prefer not to make a list. From the EU to windmills, from house prices to taxes to political liars it’s not likely to be a cheery one. Unfortunately, Proust was right about the value of direct experience too.

As genuine hardship becomes a distant memory, it isn’t easy to see where the vitality to change things will come from. If there is no real need to better oneself, then surely the vitality sags. We see many things in modern Britain, but vitality is not one of them.

So maybe that’s what we’ve done, we baby boomers. We’ve sucked the dear old place dry.

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Does management justify its own costs?

Throughout history, the university systems of the world have evolved from a monastic model, through the industrial model as a driver of social mobility, to the latest, which is the ‘business’ model.

Like all models, this one has assumptions. In this case, the underlying but usually unstated one is that the faculty who teach and research, and the people who maintain the buildings, are not working hard enough.

The proposed solution is to add layers of middle managers, whose only contribution is to ‘motivate’ and generate policies to make everything ‘more efficient’.

The sad reality is that no amount of increased efficiency or hard work on the producers of the system can make up for the cost of this increased administration.

A cynic might argue that the only purpose of these changes is to provide jobs for those who can’t do anything productive.

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