Coming soon, the 55 United States of America?

 

Following the Biden administration's proposal to turn Washington DC into another US state...

1. A number of counties in Oregon are exploring the possibility to join Idaho instead:

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/05/19/Oregon-Idaho-Donald-Trump-Joe-Biden/3341621450876/

2. My brother comments:

"The only state that is free to do something similar is Texas. In the agreement which brought them into the Union, they can break up into up to 5 states. 

"The problem for the power hungry GOP in the state is at least twofold. Firstly, they would no longer be one of the biggest states, and secondly, the state is actually becoming more liberal in the areas near the big cities. [His son] thinks that this will accelerate with things like the recent power grid debacle."

... would that make Texas the 'Five Star State'?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_divisionism

MIDWEEK MARVEL: Fractal art, by JD

 ... aka Mandelbrot (and similar) sets https://sk33lz.com/create/fractals/history-fractals

A few colourful digital designs created with ChaosPro fractal generator - http://www.chaospro.de/index.php Every image started like this: << pic 000 >>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set

START THE WEEK: Green, Broke and Cold - by Wiggia

                        or... TO 2030 AND BEYOND: THE ROAD TO NOWHERE

 

The nudge unit is going to have to work overtime on the Green Deal as more and more facts are released or found on the total impracticality of it, all the ridiculous costs involved and the restrictions that will by necessity be imposed on citizens to even begin to make it all work.

I had an example today of the other side of the argument. We have just had a new gas boiler installed in our new house; I spoke to the engineer and asked why, if gas boilers are to be banned from being fitted in new homes from 2025 and phased out in the early thirties, are the likes of British Gas advertising deals on new ‘efficient’ gas boilers.

He said: it is simply not going to happen. The new boilers in the pipeline will be made to be able to change to hydrogen when and if that occurs, otherwise gas boilers will simply carry on being used.

Once again heat pumps were explained as being only useful in new efficient houses and with underfloor heating; it is simply not practical to upgrade older houses enough to make heat pumps viable - radiator sizes alone would have to be increased by 50% because the heat pumps work at a lower temperature.

We have spoken of all this before. The costs to change for the average householder are ridiculously expensive and I agree it is not going to happen and why would anyone sane change with all that expense to a system that is going to cost you a lot lot more to run? 

With more and more fact-based opposition to the Green Deal emerging from reliable sources, I cannot believe  that Boris is ploughing on with all this and the whole CC emissions carbon zero nonsense. There can never be carbon zero; they are just words, an unachievable goal for the eco loons who never explain how it can be achieved other than by impoverishing the population.

The video in the link below shows the rank stupidity of much of the ban everything argument. It starts with the news that seals are losing their young because of lack of ice and then shows a large broken away iceberg; this is enough for those who believe to shut down all things fossil fuelled.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/gas-boilers-banned-sale-2033-003600419.html

The headline for this video is ‘Gas boilers should be banned’; it takes a big leap to connect dead seal pups and a broken-off large piece of ice with gas boilers.

And that is the part I do not get. The cyclical nature of weather of the millennia has resulted in cold areas becoming hot, hot areas returning to the ice age and everything in between. Not once have I heard an explanation for how all these events that happened long before Man could be because of us, and even now the ‘science’ has difficulty separating the two.

We have come a long way from the industrial revolution and those dark satanic mills; it is now history, the virtual slave labour of those days is gone, yet is replicated in countries that supply the minerals for the clean new world that is to be founded on battery power; the hypocrisy was never more evident, 'battery power means less of a carbon footprint', that myth is being unpicked on a weekly basis, yet even that is not enough, we now have reports that the eco fascists are not really satisfied with EVs as apparently their tyres give off far too much toxic dust and so do the brake pads. It really is never enough for these b******s, and why do they gain traction? No one votes for them and the background to nearly all of these organisations is always a lot more than just a quest for clean air: it is about changing the way we are governed and making us live how they consider we should.

Naturally none of this will cost them anything. They rarely work unless it is for the same organisations, they are an army of protesting eco mercenaries who have far too much time on their hands; governments listen to their tosh, but they are banging at an already open door - it can only be for the advantage of big business, it is certainly not for the general population, who will be paying for all this for decades.

In our local paper the Eastern Daily Press, there was this week what could be only be called a puff piece by a Swedish company building the latest windmill farm off the coast here. A Dr Catrin Ellis Jones from Vattenfall, a Swedish firm that is building 300 windmills of the coast near here, is asking the people of Norfolk how a multi-million pound fund should be spent in the area supporting our transition over the next three decades to low carbon living.

The company has appointed several ‘ambassadors’ to connect with the local population, ie propagandists.

Two things: first, no one has been asked if we want to go this route in the first place, for all the obvious reasons laid out multiple times; and secondly, where has this money come from? Certainly not from any philanthropic arm of Vattenfall; it almost certainly comes from the huge subsidies given to the wind farm industry - our money!

The UEA professor in sustainable energy chips in: ‘This is an exciting opportunity for all of us in the Norfolk community to say what we love about living here ( what has that got to do with windmills?) and start thinking about the energy and climate future we want for our area.’ What we want has already been decided by the powers that be and it’s more windmills. It sounds as though the old nudge unit has been wheeled out again; we have no say in any of this, it has all been decided that this is the way forward.

Once again in this long drawn out winter we have had more than a few days when energy from wind has been at abysmal levels. Only the interlockers keep the lights on; there is never any mention of this from the pushers of the green movement or anyone else, about this fact that when we need power on cold, dark and often windless days it is not going to come from windmills, yet in mid-summer with low demand and adequate wind the whole industry jumps up and makes headlines about how over 50% of our energy was supplied by the same sustainable? source - even that is not strictly true as they include imported nuclear power not our nuclear power.

It is very difficult, even if you wanted to believe in what is laid out for the future of this country in the climate change debate. This committee, headed up by the industry subsidised Lord Deben (aka Gummer of the beef roll incident), gives a road map of what is required to reach net zero, a figure that means very little but will cost billions over many years to even attempt to achieve.

https://www.theccc.org.uk/2019/02/21/uk-homes-unfit-for-the-challenges-of-climate-change-ccc-says/

The whole thing should be dumped. We are quite capable of improving living conditions without this nonsense and without adding to our enormous current debt. It could be of course that it will never happen as the money simply isn’t there on this scale; hobbling the country with energy costs is already hurting Germany which is building, yes it really is, new coal-fired power stations after the disaster of closing down all their nuclear ones. Does Boris actually believe he knows better than all the failed green energy schemes around the world? If he does, we have a big problem. 

Worldwide the West is suffering from leftie governments, and that includes our current one who would have us consume what they believe and want us to consume, whereas we buy what we want to consume. The only way they can change that is to ban or make what we consume too expensive and then replace it with an equally or more expensive poor substitute; that is happening now in many areas under the guise of health, climate change, and the altering of thought processes with duress as in so called hate crime or the pronoun wars; all cobblers but still making progress. 

None of this is good and yet 'bread and circuses' is winning at the moment.

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Persian Carpets, by JD

Mashad, as well as being one of the holiest cities in Iran, is one of the main centres of carpet production. Situated in the north east of Iran, in the province of Khorasan, the carpet manufacturing is extensive and produces mostly large carpets which are also sold under the name Meshed. The wool from Khorasan is recognized by its softness

An oriental (Persian) carpet, when it first comes off the loom, has a very raw and rough appearance and before it can be sold it needs to be washed so as to remove the fragments and small pieces of wool which have remained amidst the weft and warp of the carpet after it has been clipped. This operation gives lustre and shine to the fibres of the wool, and causes the pile to take its natural smooth direction.

Washing brings additional colours out of the skeins of wool giving a pleasant shade to the carpet. Many techniques are used in different countries, from simply dipping the carpet in a Persian brook and hanging it in the sun to dry, to complex chemical processing carried out in modern factories in Europe or the USA.

Alternatively, twenty or thirty years of use in an Eastern home will do the trick: there, all the loose hairs in the wool will gradually come out and the gentle traffic of feet without shoes in a room with little or no furniture will cause the fibres to begin to glow with a natural lustre.

I have a couple of the smaller carpets at home and they seem to be unwearoutable. As well as being silky smooth after all these years they have retained their colours very well.

-------
* An earlier version of this post originally appeared at Nourishing Obscurity on 24/3/2011; that original post has been lost in Nourishing Obscurity's technical problems.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Angels of Venice, by JD

Harpist Carol Tatum, cellist Irena Chirkova and vocalist Christina Limhardt are, or were, Angels of Venice. There have been several changes of personnel over the years but the music revolves around Tatum as de facto leader of the ensemble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_of_Venice
https://www.angelsofvenice.com/

Parliamentary democracy: belling(ham) the cat, by Sackerson

When two honest men met in Parliament, one was shot and the other hanged. Though two centuries old, the story sheds light on current issues of democracy and government.

The date was May 11, 1812 and Prime Minister Spencer Perceval had arrived to take part in a debate. In the lobby, John Bellingham stepped forward and shot him at close range with a half-inch pistol ball; Perceval staggered back, took a couple of steps forward and died immediately.

Rather than run, Bellingham identified himself as the ‘unfortunate’ perpetrator and sat down quietly, awaiting a trial that he expected to exonerate him, for, as he later explained to the court, he had spent five years as a victim of injustice in Russian jails while British officials had done nothing to assist him; and on his return to England his subsequent petitions for redress had been refused or ignored. Latterly, Perceval himself had told Bellingham (incorrectly, it seems) that the time limit for petitions had passed. Perhaps the fatal moment of decision came when a civil servant at the Treasury had said ‘that I had nothing to expect, and that I was at liberty to take such steps as I thought fit,’ which he interpreted as ‘a carte blanche from the British government to right myself in any way I might be able to discover.’

It wasn’t even a personal grudge against Perceval. Bellingham said that as a gentleman he had the right to exact satisfaction from any member of the Government, as sharing collective responsibility, and would have preferred shooting the Ambassador to Russia who had been the first to deny him help. However, the murder was seen by others as a wider political act – there was rejoicing in Nottingham, Leicester and Sheffield where many people saw Perceval as a reactionary fighting against radical demands for reform. Also, a Frenchman who witnessed Bellingham’s inevitable execution wrote four years later that the crowd’s mindset was ‘Farewell poor man, you owe satisfaction to the offended laws of your country, but God bless you! you have rendered an important service to your country, you have taught ministers that they should do justice, and grant audience when it is asked of them,’ and noted that the public subscribed handsomely to support the financially ruined man’s widow and children.

 For their part, Parliament voted a large sum to provide for Perceval’s family; unlike so many holders of public office past and present, the Prime Minister had neglected to monetise his position and influence and had barely more than £100 at the bank when he died. He seems to have been a principled man in public life and a loving husband and father. In person, he could hardly have made a more unsuitable target for Bellingham’s revenge.

Yet the question remains, whom should the Government serve, and how?

The long British struggle with the autocratic power of the Crown, leading to the rebellious barons’ Magna Carta in several versions in the thirteenth century, then bursting out in civil war in the sixteenth as absolutist Scots monarchy overstepped the mark, and again in the seventeenth in fear of pan-European Catholic authoritarianism, ended with the current model of the ‘Crown in Parliament’; but although that cat had finally been belled, its power passed down to the office of the Prime Minister and the other Cabinet Ministers past and present, all automatically members of the monarch’s Privy Council. We have seen how fast the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and the Council can override the customary liberties of the subject – the late Tony Benn warned that it could abolish our civil rights in an afternoon, and so it has proved.

Ironically, the instrument used was not the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act 2004 that as Lord Sumption has noted is hedged about by stringent and frequent Parliamentary reviews (despite which, we must be thankful that the Constitutionally inventive Mr Blair had no opportunity to use it), but an older health Act whose provisions have been so generously reinterpreted as to accommodate every whim of the Minister for Health. When he issues an ukase, we must obey, and the police who used to be our local guardians of the law have become almost a national militia to enforce (and even gold-plate) his centralised directives.

The ease with which this happened sets a dangerous precedent for some possible future administration with a much more radical and potentially oppressive agenda - let us look across the Atlantic for an example of Constitutional tinkering seemingly aimed at enabling a power-grab by the Executive. Here, now, we have another cat that needs a bell, and it is a matter for the deepest regret that the Opposition has failed to act adequately in probing and challenging the wielders of power. So many in Parliament, including the present Labour leader himself, are lawyers; have they forgotten how to cross-examine?

For whom do our MPs work?

Edmund Burke told his constituents that he represented their interests rather than their opinions, and we see from the bitter squabbling on social media and elsewhere how divisive an Athenian-style direct democracy could be.  The representative model suited a time when much of the economy was local and regional and it took days to ride to Westminster; other forms of communication were similarly slow and piecemeal.

Now, we have mass media yet are better able to judge and vote the winner of a television talent contest than who is to be our Mayor or Police and Crime Commissioner. In the latest elections I read the statements by the local PCC candidates and while they all seemed to be against crime (rather than for releasing all prisoners and sacking the entire police force) there was precious little to convince me as to who would do the job most effectively; TV seemed little interested in informing me about them, rather than about singers and dancers.

There is also the issue of voter numbers. Before the 1832 Reform Act few people had the franchise: on average, about 1,200 per constituency - famously, the pocket borough of Old Sarum had only seven electors, themselves nominated by the landowner since the houses where people had once lived no longer existed. It was therefore likely that a voter would recognise the Member of Parliament and be able to speak to him.

The average modern British constituency has over 73,000 voters (as at the 2019 General Election.) If the Parliamentary candidate wished to address (and listen to) them all at the same time, he/she would have to book a football stadium; and if we reduced Parliamentary seats by 50 to 600 (as Mr Cameron and others wished) that average would rise to over 79,000 – only Twickenham or Wembley could cope. Even now, 16 English constituencies have more than the 90,000 voters that Wembley might accommodate (headed by the Isle of Wight at over 110,000.) How could we make our individual voice heard in that size of crowd?

The answer is that we can’t. Rather than standing for us in Parliament, some MPs seem to think it is their duty to represent their Party to us. Once voted in, the successful MP need not do very much (although, to be fair, many try) to keep us contented. Disciplinary feedback is via the Party leader’s office, unless the MP is a Minister https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/making-complaint/if-we-cant-help/members-parliament . A 2009 court ruling http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8025255.stm said that there is no legal remedy if your MP ignores you. There are of course various Codes of Conduct and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards https://www.parliament.uk/pcs/ can help to bring pressure, but strictly speaking Statute law will not stand with you when you have a complaint. https://medium.com/from-mysociety/are-representatives-legally-obliged-to-reply-to-constituents-1ce79034e007 . Worse still, the Party system has become so strong that even an excellent, very hard-working and independent-minded MP can lose his seat if he/she loses the Party’s support, as we saw with Frank (now, deservedly, Lord) Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Field,_Baron_Field_of_Birkenhead#Resignation_of_the_Labour_whip .

The new wine of integrated economics and modern communications threatens to burst the old skin of the political system. There is much work to do, to make the Mother of Parliaments fit for use.

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: From my sketchbook, by JD

The first of the two horses below was copied from Leonardo da Vinci but his is better than mine, of course. The other horse is copied from a Rennaisance guide to drawing, the idea being that a figure can be built up with a series of small squares and rectangles approximating to the shape/outline of the figure. That second horse sketch was further developed into a painting to show something similar to the white horses etched into the English landscape.

The second picture of a lady at the bus stop came out of my head; the bus stop sign is of the old Tyne & Wear transport logo before they were all privatised.

The gentleman sitting at the table was one of a series of quick sketches from life during one of my art classes.