A sense of community

From Wikipedia

Here's an interesting quote many folk will have come across at one time or another.

He could not see, it was not born in him to see, that the highest good of the community as it stands is no longer the highest good of even the average individual. He thought that, because the community represents millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more important than any individual, forgetting that the community is an abstraction from the many, and is not the many themselves. 

Now when the statement of the abstract good for the community has become a formula lacking in all inspiration or value to the average intelligence, then the “common good” becomes a general nuisance, representing the vulgar, conservative materialism at a low level.

D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow (1915)

Such a common word isn't it? Community. What could be nicer than to be part of a community? Yet a community binds us together in a way which may be benign or oppressive, but is too often merely political. 

Community. A community facility. A community resource. A community organiser. Wasn't Obama a community organiser? Or maybe a community organizer. Sounds grim to me. Not a job I'd relish. 

Unfortunately Lawrence was right. The idea of community has become a formula lacking in all inspiration or value to the average intelligence.

We've forgotten that bit haven't we - the inspiration? We've sucked the human juice out of a useful notion and made it dull, mechanical and more than a little unhealthy.

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Climate and the bourgeoisie

An early low-carbon bourgeois
From Wikipedia

To my mind the orthodox climate narrative is obviously political, not a scientific discovery about the future. Equally obvious - it was designed for maximum bourgeois appeal. So what is the attraction of such a superficially alarming narrative?

As we all know, the orthodox climate narrative is wrapped around an apparent threat to bourgeois comforts via drought, floods, rising sea levels and many other catastrophes. Sounds scary, but the mitigation part of the narrative holds out a juicy promise of unlimited future comforts via sustainable energy.

Admittedly one would have to be gullible to swallow the sustainable energy guff, but that is what feed-in tariffs are for - to create a misleading sense of familiarity with wind and solar. Familiarity is half the battle. Add in a green badge for saving the planet and the job’s mostly done.

Saving the planet by developing clean, everlasting energy sources. What else offers more appeal to the bourgeois sense of entitlement? What else offers such balm to the uneasy modern conscience?

The up-front demands are minimal. A spot of recycling, some curly light bulbs and a Toyota Prius on the drive. No neighbour can beat it for quietly sanctimonious swank.

Not only that, but the potential rewards are enormous – nothing less than a life of permanent comfort. Because it’s sustainable isn’t it? That’s the carrot. Beneath the sanctimonious shroud-waving, the climate narrative has a deeply selfish appeal – deferred gratification on a humongous scale.

No wonder the Guardian and the BBC push it with such sanctimonious relish. No wonder they react with such swivel-eyed malice towards anyone who might threaten the dream.

Many climate sceptics seem both angry and confused at the casual dumping of scientific integrity by the climate narrative. I think this is because the rewards so covertly offered to the climate faithful are hugely underestimated. Apart from five centuries of scientific progress the sacrifice is not excessive for those able to afford their energy bills without undue stress. Yet the supposed gains are disproportionately colossal.

Seth Pecksniff is alive and well. These days he recycles his Waitrose wine bottles, pops his old trousers in the charity bag and drives a Toyota Prius on mileage allowance.

The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair is not a caste. But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march of the human race.

Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)

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Putin vs the EU - stunning quote

"His wealth and position are built on the wealth of his people: socialism’s power by contrast is derived from wealth destruction, which explains much of the political divide."

Read Alasdair Macleod's five-star essay on Ukraine here.

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Beneath the social construction

Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a structure, there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious mine, the philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. 

Such and such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers. Such another with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one catacomb to another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize there. 

Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities, and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the bottom and the inside and the outside. 

Society hardly even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works, as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The future.

Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (1862)

I like this quote. Social change is the result of a kind of disjointed undermining. Even the miners have little idea of consequences, however fanatically they dig away down there.

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The power game

Source

Clean Technica reports on the Westermost Rough offshore wind farm.

The United Kingdom celebrated the installation of its first 6 MW wind turbine over the weekend, having erected the first of 35 Siemens 6 MW turbines at the Westermost Rough offshore wind farm in the North Sea.

The Westermost Rough offshore wind farm is a joint venture between DONG Energy and its partners Marubeni Corporation and the UK Green Investment Bank.

Is that this Marubeni Corporation?

Marubeni Corporation, a Japanese trading company involved in the handling of products and provision of services in a broad range of sectors around the world, including power generation, entered a plea of guilty today for its participation in a scheme to pay bribes to high-ranking government officials in Indonesia to secure a lucrative power project.

And this Marubeni Corporation?

In January 2012, Marubeni Corporation agreed to pay a US$54.6 million criminal penalty to settle multiple US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) charges relating to its work as an agent for the TSKJ joint venture. The TSKJ joint venture comprising Technip, Snamprogetti Netherlands, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) and JGC Corporation hired Marubeni to bribe lower-level Nigerian government officials to help it obtain and retain contracts to build liquefied natural gas facilities on Bonny Island in Nigeria. TSKJ paid Marubeni US$51 million which was intended, in part, to be used to bribe Nigerian government officials.

Of course I am not implying or suggesting that there is anything questionable about Marubeni Corporation or the Westermost Rough project.

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It's the lawlessness plus the militarization of police - together

First, two pics from the link below:

 

Then the link: http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/11/protests-turn-to-free-for-all/

Additional material, via Barry Ritholtz:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/turning-policemen-into-soldiers-the-culmination-of-a-long-trend/376052/

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/americas-weaponized-police-force-could-benefit-from-one-more-weapon-cameras/376063/

Then you might look at this link on police exceeding their legitimate authority:

Rogue policeman who tried to get DNA sample from young girl to prove she was daughter of kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch is sentenced to prison

 ... which might tie in with this:

The missing children ... which is getting a little tangential to the main theme of this article.

Sackerson asks us to look at the second pic above, more so than the first.  Sorry, methinks both must be viewed in conjunction in order to make sense of what's going on.

Whilst I'm with him on the second and will write on it below, the issue of the top pic and the lawlessness the society has fallen into due to corrupt politicians, left-captured judiciary which condones criminals but incarcerates the minor, especially non-PC, offender and the overall weakening of the institutions of society, actually ties in with the increasing militarization of the police.

In old left-right terms, there's one of each issue in this tale, which raises the question, if both left and right are concerned, then what are we concerned about and the answer to that is the State.

And as has been shown in posts passim, almost ad infinitum, the State is not only encroaching but the hidden group behind it - I hesitate to call it a ruling class - is going down the same path as near the end of the Weimar Republic.

Whilst the left, through its organs Scientific American, MSNBC, the Cato Institute, the Atlantic and others zeroes in on the militarization, the right's American Thinker zeroes in on something different:
  http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/08/obamas_call_to_calm_in_ferguson.html#ixzz3AoT6K1QF

The president’s interest is, or should be, the health of our nation, and the totality of its people, to include the people of Ferguson inclusively, but not exclusively. He should adamantly reinforce his support for the “rule of law”, for either we have justice (true justice, premised on findings, not emotion), or we have chaos and anarchy.

National Review Online makes a good point:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/385656/grossly-exaggerated-militarization-police-critique-ferguson-rich-lowry

It was ridiculous and wrong for police snipers to train their weapons on peaceful protestors in Ferguson. But, when you get right down to it, the militarization of police has had basically nothing to do with events there, even though the Left and parts of the Right have wanted to make that the main issue.

It's too convenient that this over-militarization, as opposed to its bobby on the beat function, should coincide with all this rank lawlessness.  It's almost an invitation to FEMA and the days of the new heavy-handed police reaction.  Well maybe not new - you'll recall the miners' strikes. NRO again:

So now Governor Nixon is calling in the National Guard, or in other words, “militarizing” the response. What Ferguson needs is the restoration of basic order, and the absence of it has never been the fault of the police, but of a small, lawless fringe of protestors bent on mayhem.

See, we swing left, we swing right and never really look at BOTH sides of the issue together.

We don't focus on the real culprits who even condone the lawlessness, whilst militarizing the police. And as that article says, Ferguson is only one small part of the issue which has been going on for quite some time.

But the point is, all these new threats are conveniently arising, in order for the stormtrooper reaction.  ISIS for a start is a faux-Islamist group - see Operation Cyclone for background.

Let's not go too left-field but there still is the little matter of the Patriot Act quickly following the "convenient" 911. We've also seen the innocuous FEMA holding camps with the inturned barbed wire tops of fences which are explained away as training barracks and whatever.

Trouble is, the left will bring that up and the right poo-poohs it, then the right will bring up the failure of police to act on the lawless and feckless in Ferguson and the left will say no, no, it's all the police's fault, ignoring how this lawlessness is spreading and threatening ordinary people.

Thus both sides fail to agree - we can't even agree on which photo is more important - and thus we fail to combine to stop the whole phenomenon of the game of these people I call Them, for want of a better term.

In other words, the power behind the politicians who both appoint the pollies and run them from behind the scenes.  In the case of Cameron, one of them can be named immediately - Barosso.  If you need another name - Sutherland.

This is where the issue is.  If you go through those links, the pattern is not only clear, it's worldwide.  Australia is also doing these things, and Canada.


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How to be overweight

After a recent visit to a Little Chef, I've been wondering just how easy or difficult it is to be grossly overweight. I'm sure keen weight watchers know the answer to this already, but how many extra calories do you need to put on the pounds and keep them there?

exercise.com has a calculator which I'll assume is reliable, so I began with a BBC report taken from the ONS which says the average English male in 2010 was 38 years old, 5ft 9in tall and weighed 13.16 stone.

Okay, so the calculator says he should consume from 2090 to 2700 calories per day to maintain that weight depending on how sedentary he is. Let's take to 2400 calories for someone who is mostly standing.

Next I doubled the average guy's weight from 13.16 stone to 26.32 stone. That sounds pretty hefty to me. Going back to the calculator our not so average Englishman should consume from 3100 to 4000 calories per day to maintain his new weight, again depending on how sedentary he is. Let's take to 3550 calories for someone who is mostly standing - although that may have become less probable.

So to maintain double the average weight, our average Englishman needs an extra 1150 calories. That's not much more than a Medium Italian pizza from Pizza Hut. 

From the same source, the average woman in England weighed 11 stone and was 5ft 3in tall. Let's assume she's also 38 years old. So to maintain double her average weight, our average Englishwoman needs an extra 960 calories. 

To my considerable surprise, maintaining a such a huge weight as 26 stone possibly isn't that difficult. It only seems to be a pizza a day. Doesn't seem enough to me but I'm not an expert on these matters. I've never had a weight problem but I do enjoy pizza.

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