Cummings and the zombie parties

Dominic Cummings says https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9708057/Dominic-Cummings-prepares-unleash-salvo-Boris.html ’all the parties are rotten to the core, old decrepit entities literally dying on their feet.’

It’s hardly surprising. The current British electoral system can be gamed, and so the parties concentrate on ‘the swing voter in the swing seat’, spending fortunes on focus groups, computerised voter modelling and tailored propaganda.

The people don’t understand the ins and outs of most political issues, and they are hardly likely to be educated by what they see and hear from the mass media. They rely more on sensing the soul of the party they support, and that too has them confused: it’s been a long time since Labour stood for the working stiff and it is riven by factions; while the Tories are perceived as the party of privilege, banding together in the pursuit of power and hang the principles.

If the third party, the LibDems, ever got into power they would explode, like the chameleon placed on a tartan, for they have a habit of saying one thing locally and another nationally, as we saw in last week’s by-election campaign: against HS2 and free rein to housebuilders in Chesham and Amersham, in favour of both in central party policy.

Every political system has its vulnerabilities. In ancient Athens, where all free men voted in their assembly, the weakness was the power of the orator. Demosthenes got Athens to resist the Macedonians; the result was defeat for the city and ultimately his own death.

In modern Britain, it is the unequal vote that skews outcomes. In a ‘safe’ seat you may as well not bother voting, but if you didn’t vote for the winner the system doesn’t let you signal that he/she was at least your second or third choice, so you feel disconnected. Also, in most constituencies – about two-thirds, from when I looked at the 2005 and 2010 General Elections – the winner fails to gain half or more of ballots cast; not so much ‘First past the post’ as ‘Nobody reached the post.’ Last week, Sarah Green won with only 30.4% of the vote (or 16% of registered electors.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Chesham_and_Amersham_by-election#Results It’s hardly a basis for Littlejohn’s cry ‘What the hell happened to the Conservative Party?’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9702591/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-hell-happened-Conservative-Party.html

There is also the disjunction between numbers of seats won and the share of the votes cast nationally. Despite the landslides of 1945, 1979, Blair etc., only twice since 1918 has any party ‘passed the post’ in General Elections - the Conservatives both times, in 1931 and 1935. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7529/#fullreport

In my adult lifetime, there have been only three occasions on which my vote counted exactly the same as anyone else’s: the EC referendum in 1975, the Alternative Vote referendum of 2011, and 2016’s Brexit.

In the first we were misled on sovereignty (or at least, it was downplayed) and Wilson’s government pamphlet implicitly threatened us with the loss of ‘FOOD and MONEY and JOBS’ http://www.harvard-digital.co.uk/euro/pamphlet.htm if we didn’t ratify our (future EU) membership.

In 2011, as I remember it, the two major parties poured sludge all over the idea of AV. The No Campaign broadcast of 11 April https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-13048603 featured Rik Mayall’s Alan B'Stard promising everything to get in, then forming a coalition and welching on all the manifesto promises. Funny, that is what we got under the present system and ironically, the AV Referendum wouldn’t have happened at all if Nick Clegg hadn’t made it the price of his joining the Tories and ratting on the LibDems’ tuition fees pledge.

That leaves 2016. My surprise at the even-handed media coverage of the issues was trumped by the Establishment’s shock at the result; but that’s the flip side of their chronic beamed-down propaganda operations – it made them deaf to messages coming the other way. ‘Nobody knows anything,’ said a stunned Dimbleby when the result was declared; or at least, nobody who matters. They’ve had PTSD ever since, and the subterranean coal-seam fires of their supporters are still burning on Facebook.  Don’t expect to get such a chance again; this isn’t Switzerland.

Cummings is right, but until the voting system is fairer and the people better informed, expect the zombies to continue slugging it out well into the future.

Chesham and Amersham by-election: votes v builders

The Chesham and Amersham by-election results tempt some to draw the wrong conclusions. One such is that other sham John Bercow, tying his jolly-boat to the sinking ship of Labour; at least he’s finally struck his false colours.

By-elections, with their lower turnout and posing no danger of serious GE upset, offer a chance for protest. The LibDems play on discontent but equivocate and betray, as witness Nick Clegg’s U-turn on tuition fees when deputy PM (now regenerated as senior information-suppressor at Facebook.) We know what we’ve got there, in him and them.

What alternative is there? The Labour vote – less than 20% even in the Great Revolution of 1997 – fell to under 2% on Thursday. I don’t know what that Party can do to save itself; it is neither fish nor flesh these days. Where among their number are characters of the weight and experience of the 1945-ers? Instead of an Ernest Bevin we have an earnest vegetarian nebbish, whose main role is not to be the dim theoretician he helped to defenestrate, while the flibbertigibbet Blair flutters in the wings.

One point not much stressed in coverage of the upset is that C&A is one of the decided minority of Parliamentary seats where the MP usually garners more than half the ballots. This time, Welsh parachutee SarahGreen becomes their representative on the basis of only some 30% of votes cast (or 16% of registered voters.) 

Can her victory last? If local resentment at HS2 and planning changes threatening derestricted residential development (I call it ‘flatulence’) turns to a settled hatred of the velociraptories and their developer friends, perhaps it can.

On the other hand, LibDem housing policy calls for 300,000 new homes to be built per year ‘including 100,000 social homes for rent,’ and while the Party in Chesham and Amersham is against HS2, it is for it nationally. This doubletalk is hardly a basis on which to ‘go back to yourconstituencies, and prepare for government!’ 

I leave it to others to list all the ways that HS2’s £100 billion-plus could be spent better; but I submit there is no housing shortage. According to Action on Empty Homes, while 100,000 families are in temporary accommodation, there is ‘a current total of homes without residents of over 928,000.’

Further, the term ‘affordable’ is potentially misleading: it relates to local average rents and mortgages, so that in well-to-do areas the proletariat has little chance of finding somewhere to live.  The citizens who voted in last week’s election dwell in houses that cost far more than the national average (1, 2, 3); what they are likely to see is not an influx of the great unwashed but a rash of executive homettes spoiling their former view across the green fields of England; good for the village shop, perhaps (until the megastores see their chance), but prejudicial to the traditional ‘quiet enjoyment’ of the property they bought at such high prices.

Voting in a LibDem MP won’t change a system that is stacked against objectors. According to Chris Kemp in The Conversation website, his research showed that planners, councillors and local communities

‘believed the planning system was set up to override objections. Applications were approved irrespective of local views or the (often negative) impacts development would have on local infrastructure and services,’

and as for affordability:

‘It is estimated that meeting the government’s target to build 300,000 homes a year would reduce prices by around 0.8%: considerably less than rates of increase over recent decades.’

Kemp says that the proposed planning reforms will significantly increase housebuilding, in part by removing local people’s power to obstruct.

Where there’s a ballot there’s a pencil mark; but where there’s a wallet there’s a way.

WEEKENDER: Business news leaks truth about the Green catastrophe, by Wiggia

        

It is amazing in a world of 24 hour news and information, how little of anything that goes against a perceived agenda or narrative ever gets published, which is why the digital world thrives. Unfortunately the digital world as exemplified with this blog is a gnat's pee in the ocean of things; much is said, little becomes headline news or even makes the inside pages. It often seems we live in an echo chamber and for the powers that be that is how they prefer it

One interesting aspect I have discovered in recent times is the business news in what remains of value in our dead tree press. While news can be suppressed, diverted or conveniently buried in the mainstream section the business sections or not so easily changed: shareholders have more power, to a degree, than the standard voter and therefore more salient facts emerge on all sorts of subjects in the business sections. Not always easy reading but many a truth relating to outside factors comes to the surface.

Naturally most concerns the green scam. Various items are made to look unfeasible and at the same time are not going to achieve much at great cost. The middle classes will be the hardest hit, those that pay taxes that support the subsidies of all green projects, projects that we are told will give us a bright clean future and in which we are leading the world both in our green credentials and our technology, all says Bojo will lead to thousands of new jobs blah blah blah.

Just a couple of corrections to the latter: the drive to install heat pumps has already stalled, says a Times article. 1200 installers are currently registered, but 10,000 are required to fulfil the government's target by 2025. The new heat pumps as described in previous articles cost between £6,500-£8,600 without all the other measures such as underfloor heating, bigger radiators etc.; no average houseowner is going to be able to afford that.

The government has not even drawn up the new technical specification that all new homes will need after 2025; in fact they don’t even meet to discuss until spring 2023, plus should hydrogen become a viable energy source the new homes would not be adaptable to that without further planning.

Jobs resulting from our ‘leading’ position on climate change are just so much bollox. It makes you mad every time they come out with this nonsense. It is claimed we need seven battery production plants to fill the needs of all the estimated EVs that will be coming off production lines; only one is currently planned, with Nissan saying they are waiting to have talks with the government - more subsidies!

Problems with battery disposal have already arisen even at this early stage: municipal vehicles in Paris were found to have defective cells in their batteries, with no way yet of disposing of them; those same vehicles now lie rotting in a field. What exactly are the facilities for when batteries in their millions start to fail?

The giant wind turbines are nearly all made abroad, not one of the top ten companies involved in making wind turbines is British:

https://www.energyacuity.com/blog/2019-top-10-wind-turbine-manufacturers/

Another stumbling block for our quest to be carbon neutral by 2050 and the use of heat pumps to help that target become reality, is the fact they are nearly all made in Asia. With worldwide demand about to rocket for these items they will not be able to cope; we have no facilities here that make them and none on the horizon:

https://thegreenergroup.com/news/ashp-manufacturers/

So when asked government spokesmen come out with the ‘we are committed’,‘we shall not be deterred’, ‘our plan is still on track’ and other meaningless drivel. They can’t back up any of their aims with anything other than word soup.

The big spike in any plans for so-called sustainable energy came with the announcement, again in the business section, that EDF are closing down Dungeness B nuclear plant seven years early. EDF said that two other plants were also at risk of early closing. Of our eight nuclear plants only Sizewell in Suffolk is expected to go on beyond 2030, all the others are suffering from safety failures and have already gone beyond their expected life cycle. This could all be linked back to my article on our chronic lack of infrastructure going forward; with only one new nuclear plant being built we are as they say in the sh*t:  no windmills or solar panels can fill the gap left as none are reliable energy, if the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine as so often in cold winter months, blackouts or rationing beckon, no heat pump will stop you getting cold in that scenario either.

I mentioned this before: July 6th 2020, the much trumpeted day when renewables for the first time supplied over half our energy needs. At that time I could not find the graphic that showed the event, but this one does and shows that even on that day in a hot summer with long days and little demand both publicly and commercially, with so much business shut down, the claim was still false.

                         

Interconnects are hardly renewable as we don’t produce that energy in the first place and biomass is the biggest con of them all, producing more of the dreaded CO2  than the coal it replaced, never mind the transporting of wood pellets half way round the world.

More worrying is what it shows for the future: with coal almost gone the bulk of energy comes from gas and nuclear, that is also the only reliable energy source of any substance; but nuclear as above is doomed for the short/medium term and gas is for the chop by 2050. What will we be left with, without immediate investment and a building program starting now?

It doesn’t even begin to answer the increase by 60% the National Grid say we will need to power all the new electric cars heat pumps etc. Any government that is sane would see all this and say 'hang on, wait a minute, we need a rethink about going forward,' but not this lot.

They remind me of another business statement some years ago when Eddie Stobart said he wanted to be the ‘biggest transport company in the UK.’ A business man and neighbour replied to that saying, 'why the biggest, why not the best?' and we all know what happened to Eddie Stobart. This government are the same, blind to the realities and determined to push forward with something that is not currently achievable nor even desirable in the eyes of those who can read the runes. It is gesture politics that even if the goal is reached will achieve nothing as far as climate change is concerned, because man cannot change climate; but it will set the western world back  into the 19th century, then I suppose we shall all be asked to start clapping - that will be to keep warm, of course, not to applaud!  

It is ironic that Iraq with the world's fifth largest reserves of oil, a crumbling infrastructure and high demand for air conditioning means they are building eight nuclear plants to meet demand and stop blackouts. This sounds very familiar except we are not building eight new nuclear plants, our base load is dropping at the moment and importing energy is the only way we keep the lights on; good, say many, but the cost is at the mercy of providers and many countries like France which exports energy are cutting back on their own nuclear plants so will not have as much spare in the future to export.

Here more than anywhere else we have been caught up in this self-deluding spiral where everything green is good; never is anything allowed to stand in the way of ‘progress’ towards de-carbonisation, we are all believers, or are we? The reality of what is really going on won't hit us until the lights start going out. Too late, then; the demand for emergency generators will outstrip supply.

And there was another worrying development in Holland a week or so ago. Royal Dutch Shell lost a court case because they were not cutting emissions fast enough. A Dutch court sided with Friends of the Earth and ordered the company to cut its carbon footprint by 45% from 2019 levels, within this decade.

What is interesting is the way the case was brought to court: FoE argued that Shell’s business model threatened the goals of the Paris agreement and so put ‘human rights’ at risk by failing to do enough to stop climate change. That, if the appeal fails, is very worrying for virtually every sort of production model on the planet as the alternative is simply not achievable and shouldn’t be pursued anyway. Needless to say Shell caved into the ruling and wibbled on about doing their bit etc.

The case was brought by FoE, six other environmental organisations and 17,000 individuals as The People versus Shell; of course it was not the people versus Shell, it was seven climate-activist organisations and 17,000 members of those organisations. In no way do they represent the people; all of these groups and individuals assume far too much power with never any real push back as to proving how much man contributes to emissions and whether they make much difference anyway. I wonder what difference the Icelandic volcano has made on the same basis over the months it has been spewing forth - perhaps a court order on behalf of the people would have saved Pompeii!

To finish, another article in the business sections this week: the price of cars. The cost of many models have risen 100% in the last decade. Many reasons are given, none really hold water. What does emerge is that nine out of ten cars are now purchased using personal lease plans, i.e. you never own the vehicle. Silly people are obsessed with having the latest model on their drive, you see it on the new housing estates springing up everywhere; a Ford Fiesta is no longer good enough, despite no one actually going anywhere, and the supermarket car parks are full of Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar etc., rather like the houses themselves. 5% deposits and low interest rates disguise the fact the purchase price keeps on rising aided by these financing methods; the debt in this country must be horrendous.

You could look at the car market a different way, and claim this is planned. Electric vehicles are silly money why not level up and make internal combustion cars much dearer and the EVs will seem cheaper? EVs will be very cheap when you plug them in and there is no energy to charge them with; still, by then we may all be huddled in one room wearing various layers of clothes and setting light to what little is left of the furniture to stay warm and be able to look out of the window through the frost on the inside at the shiny new EV, forever motionless on the drive; these days nothing is impossible.

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 17 June 1961

This week's Number One: Elvis sings 'Surrender':

  

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

11 June: Phil Hill brings the winning Ferrari 250TRi/61 home at the 1961 Le Mans 24 Hours.
Hill co-drove with Belgian long distance specialist Olivier Gendebien.
https://klemcoll.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/the-winner-arrives/

 

12 June: German-speaking separatists blow up 37 electricity pylons in the South Tyrol region of Italy (photo source) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Fire

14 June: UK Government announces that new push-button 'panda' pedestrian crossings
will start to replace 'zebra' crossings in the following year (source: BBC)

15 June: East German Communist First Secretary says there is no plan for a Berlin Wall.

Construction begins on 13 August.

16 June: Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev, in Paris with the Kirov Ballet and about to fly with them to Britain, is told by KGB agents to accompany them back to Moscow instead. He breaks away from them, runs to two French policemen and asks for political asylum.

UK chart hits, week ending 17 June 1961

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

Surrender	Elvis Presley	RCA	1
Runaway	Del Shannon	London	2
The Frightened City	The Shadows	Columbia	3
Hello Mary Lou / Travellin' Man	Ricky Nelson	London	4
But I Do	Clarence 'Frogman' Henry	Pye	5
More Than I Can Say	Bobby Vee	London	6
Pasadena	The Temperance Seven	Parlophone	7
You'll Never Know	Shirley Bassey	Columbia	8
I Told Every Little Star	Linda Scott	Columbia	9
Halfway To Paradise	Billy Fury	Decca	10
Temptation	The Everly Brothers	Warner Brothers	11
Have A Drink On Me	Lonnie Donegan	Pye	12
What'd I Say	Jerry Lee Lewis	London	13
Well I Ask You	Eden Kane	Decca	14
Pop Goes The Weasel / Bee*Bom	Anthony Newley	Decca	15
Runnin' Scared	Roy Orbison	London	16
Don't Treat Me Like A Child	Helen Shapiro	Columbia	17
On The Rebound	Floyd Cramer	RCA	18
Little Devil	Neil Sedaka	RCA	19
Wooden Heart	Elvis Presley	RCA	20

An 80-year-old globetrotter predicts US financial meltdown

"There are two reasons why we’re in Europe now, permanently [...]

The second reason was my lack of faith in the US financial system. The American economy is going to collapse. 

That Lehman collapse in 2008 should have blown up the whole fuckin’ system, but this time, it’s going to, for sure, and maybe even during this summer.

It always amazes me that the country is still functioning, sort of, half-assed, today. There’s no way in hell it should be. It’s insane! Yesterday, they announced the monthly consumer index number, which is the measure of inflation in the US, supposedly, which it really isn’t, because they changed the way they do that, about 15 years ago. They used to include things like food and energy, but now, they don’t consider important how much food costs, or gasoline, or heating oil.

I just went through their bullshit list. All their data are phony. They lie about everything, the unemployment report, number of jobs, payrolls. It’s all lies. The GDP number, they lie about that, every single time."

https://www.unz.com/ldinh/escape-from-america-australia-costa-rica-colombia-latvia-spain-and-now-france/

I felt the same when all the government did in response to the Global Financial Crisis was to support the perpetrators, at a cost to taxpayers so great that we cannot conceive it.

Still, hasn't happened yet. As Mark Twain reportedly said, 'The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated' - though even that quotation has been stretched:  http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2010/06/reports-of-my-death-are-greatly.html

He Ain't Heavy

The Hollies' 'He ain't heavy, he's my brother' (1969) is so moving, but I didn't know what inspired it.
Now I do:

1921: an orphan from the local Boys Town home carries his disabled brother
at the Krug Amusement Park, Omaha, Nebraska

https://postcardhistory.net/2020/04/poster-series-xii-boys-town-nebraska/

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/the-hollies/he-aint-heavy-hes-my-brother

Health: the Nocebo Effect

After my wife had a broken wrist repaired she went to see the physiotherapist, cradling her wounded wing in its arm sling. ‘Don’t do that,’ said the physio, ‘because you’re sending a message to your brain that your arm doesn’t work.’

Not all medics have that psychological insight. My GP friend told me long ago that doctors were untrained in communication and tended to deal with patients like motor mechanics fixing cars.

Yet the mind is a powerful force in health, for good or ill. We have all heard of the placebo effect, whereby a pill with no active ingredient that could help the patient physically still seems to have beneficial effects for some who believe in it; few of us will know about its negative counterpart, the ‘nocebo effect.’ https://www.webmd.com/balance/features/is-the-nocebo-effect-hurting-your-health

‘Patients, their symptoms and their healing are negatively affected by the omission of placebo effects, by nocebo effects and by negative suggestions,’ says this writer https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2019.00077/full , giving a counter-example of how a doctor examining an injured leg could end on a positive note by then asking about the other one that’s fine, assisting the patient to see him/her/zirself as OK overall.

Positivity is infectious. My friend said that when he was a houseman encountering one consultant in a London hospital he would greet him with the conventional ‘How are you?’ only to be blasted with an enthusiastic ‘AB-solutely fan-TAS-tic!’; the buzz he got from that would last him all day.

Negativity, on the other hand, can affect you even when you are unconscious and on the operating table. There is evidence that anaesthetised patients ‘particularly recall conversations or remarks that are of a negative nature concerning themselves or their medical conditions. The most frequently reported postoperative effects were sleep disturbances, dreams and nightmares, flashbacks, and daytime anxiety.’ https://pubs.asahq.org/anesthesiology/article/87/2/387/36215/Learning-and-Memory-during-General-Anesthesia-An Conversely, an experiment using headphones and positive messaging on anaesthetised surgery patients has yielded good results https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4284 .

Negativity can also bias clinical decisions. My wife needed an operation for a condition that was a daily and growing misery, but the NHS consultant who spoke to her (on the telephone, of course) made dubious noises, referring more than once to her age (was the subtext, ‘you may not survive the operation’, or was it ‘not worth it, for an oldie like you’?) Having some savings, we went private and that consultant – who could see her, not just her medical records – told her ‘You’ll sail through that, no difficulty’; as she did, and her quality of life has greatly improved as a result.

If you want to know why men don’t visit the GP as often as women, here’s an example. I was getting blurred vision in the evenings – ‘tired eyes’, I don’t wear glasses and never did – but listened to a relative’s advice and saw the GP. Blood test results (‘might as well look for other things while we’re on’) showed I was officially Type 2 diabetic. Gotcha!

Next thing, I’m in with the nurse, who tells me to take off shoes and socks and starts poking my feet with a feather quill, asking me if I can feel that? Jab yes jab yes jab yes, on and on. Now you may think that if I’d lost feeling in my feet or hands I’d have noticed, but nothing was going to stop the Procedure. I was also sent to the optician, who really did give me blurred eyes; all fine. Since then, years ago, I have been repeatedly chivvied for follow-up blood tests and vision screening; I resist.

For underneath all that well-intentioned busy-ness is a subliminal message: ‘You’re on the slippery slope, chum. It’ll start with tingling (I would make a good subject for hypnosis, I obediently started to tingle for days after the poking session – then no more, as I recovered my balance); then numbness, amputation, the lot – the helter-skelter ride down to the wooden box. We’ll do all we can to help, but, you know, inevitably…’

It also helps confirm the inalienable importance and role of the Healer. I am now not an autonomous human being, but a Patient, who must have many Examinations and Interventions and may never be released.

In a way it’s a bit like psychotherapy; yet while Freudian analysts have to undergo training so that they don’t get their egos damagingly mixed up with their patients, I’m not sure how fully this power-relationship is addressed in the rest of medicine. I know that the need to gather relevant information can lead on to nosey-parkerism: once, while waiting to see my GP, an assistant fixed me with a smile and asked whether, since I’d been to Oxford, I’d been a cannabis user. Just what I needed: to confess to a crime and have it put on my far-from-confidential medical records! What private data about you, dear reader, will be ‘scraped’ off after 23 June, and how may it be used? https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2021/05/if-you-dont-want-your-private-medical-records-scraped-and-given-to-third-parties-heres-what-to-do-yo.html

Some may feel I’m over-reacting, but perhaps it’s down to a stereotypical gender difference in attitudes to health treatment. Men tend to have two states: (1) alive; (2) dead; anything else and we tend to prefer (2). When I was an IFA and Long Term Healthcare insurance came in, we were told that on average, women survive in nursing homes for around three years; men, eighteen months. Women are far more commonly on antidepressants than men, yet the latter are three times more likely to take their own lives. This will be put down to stupid machoism – in our times, any sign of stubborn, manly do-or-die go-it-aloneness is denigrated – without considering what society (throughout history and before) really, after all the PC nonsense, expects of men: to be defenders, providers, winners.

Morale is crucial. Australian aboriginals could be killed by having a curse-bone pointed at them, dying despite the best efforts of modern medicine to save them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdaitcha#Bone_pointing . Until we take into account the mind and the effects on it of implicit attitudes and messages, healthcare may be impaired in its efficiency and its ability to address inequalities. More widely, we need to look at how we talk to ourselves and others; cheeriness may sometimes be irritating, but negativity can sour joy in life and even destroy it.