It's that time of year again when thousands if Irishmen and women 'invade' England and descend on Cheltenham for a week long festival of horse racing. And they usually win most of the trophies, 23 last year. And by a strange coincidence(?) St Patrick's Day is always celebrated during this week.
So to join in the celebrations here is a random selection of Irish music most of it being spontaneous musical sessions in pubs as well as in airports, on buses or trains and even in the middle of a flight on Ryanair. And why not - "The cares of tomorrow will wait until this day is done!"
My brother and I are sons of a war refugee. When the Red
Army swept through East Prussia our mother, twentyish daughter of a gentleman
farmer, took the two horses he gave her and rode west. He said he hoped they
would see each other again; it took ten years. Much later in West Germany, her
now-widowed mother told me how they had had to pack up what they could take on
a cart and join the fleeing crowds. A farming couple grudgingly let them sleep
in their barn, not knowing that they themselves would soon be on the road.
Other members of our family headed for the Baltic states and
were caught behind the Iron Curtain; we have no idea of their names and
addresses. Axel, the cousin our mother loved, was killed on the Eastern Front.
The farm, annually buried in winter so deep in snow that the family were locked
in and lived off stored provisions, warmed by the high tiled oven (a coffee cup
went missing for months because a tall relative had left it on the top), furnished
with art and fine furniture including an amber-topped table: who knows if it
still stands, or who lives in it.
Mother got to Hamburg, where displaced people were surviving
by stealing from the ships in harbour; her sack of swag turned out to be tobacco,
so she bought a pipe – she had used to half-smoke cigars for a fat old uncle to
concentrate the tar and nicotine in the other half for him. An American GI tried
to strangle her in revenge for the death of his buddy; mother broke his hold, climbed
over a wall and came to see his CO the next day so no-one else would be killed.
Then she met a British soldier.
Her parents made it to Holstein, where father, pushing
sixty, worked with his hands for the first time in his life; we still have a
painting by her mother of haystacks. Then Wiesbaden and a flat paid for out of
government compensation, where Opa helped refugees reunite; we have an oak
plaque from his former neighbours, with the motto ‘Die Treue is das Mark der
Ehre’ (fidelity is the mark of honour.) A big man, squashed down from 600 acres
with dozens of farmworkers, to four rooms in an apartment block.
Survival; but a permanent shattering of community and shared
history.
This is what has been wished on the Ukrainians, and not just
by the Russians. A word inserted by PM Johnson (among others) early into the
narrative of the invasion is ‘unprovoked’, presumably with an eye to dragging
President Putin to a war crimes tribunal. I can hardly wait for that day, so
that the other third parties whose meddling has caused this tragedy can be exposed.
Provocation does not exonerate violence, but can mitigate the punishment; who
would be coming to the court with clean hands?
Not the EU, gobbling one ex-Warsaw Pact country after another
like a Labrador with no appetite off-switch, even though nations it has already
digested have reason to regret their membership; so letting them into NATO, which
has played ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ for thirty years after the Soviet
Union’s collapse, bringing military threat ever closer to Russia’s borders
despite promises that it wouldn’t. Not the offshore-billionaire Zelenskyy,
almost a prisoner of his ultranationalists, trying to draw the wider West into
a conflict that raises the ghost of 1962 and surprised when, like the Syrian
Armenians, his supposed friends have left him high and dry. Not the countries
that have stood off but poured in money and weapons (what a bonanza for the arms
manufacturers who spend so much on lobbying) to ‘help’ Ukraine, so prolonging
and intensifying the conflict.
Now, months after Putin’s demand that Ukraine remain out of
NATO https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/17/russia-issues-list-demands-tensions-europe-ukraine-nato
was rejected out of hand, Zelenskyy has agreed, saying (he is his own
spin-doctor) that Russia is becoming more reasonable in negotiations; perhaps
the hawkish commentators detecting imminent Russian military collapse are mistaken.
Will we get back to Minsky II, but only after a reported three million refugees
and the vast, heart-breaking wreckage of the nation’s property and
infrastructure?
On the road again, the ordinary people played with by war
planners and geopolitical strategists.
If you have followed Nigel Farage’s career it has shown a dogged determination in his quest to get us to leave the EU and triumphing. It has come at a cost: the bile and sheer hatred that has been thrown his way has on occasions been off the scale, he was never afforded the protection he needed and had to pay for his own security but not before he was publicly threatened physically.
Despite all that he persevered and revealed through intimate knowledge the failures within the EU. Some of his Brussels speeches were seat squirming for the political elite in charge there, in particular the unelected bureaucrats that ran the show.
Nigel then appeared to lose the plot a little after Brexit was achieved. He seemed not to know to do with UKIP and the party disintegrated with infighting and curious, to put it mildly, leadership choices. He also allowed himself to be used by the Conservatives by not standing in certain seats during the election, a fact that they were extremely ungrateful about afterwards; that was naive at best.
Now he is a wasted force shuttling between TV presenting and flirting with comebacks and new parties, so it has come to pass that he sees an opportunity to hold the climate scam up to the light and the effect that government green policies are having on energy supplies and prices.
All well and good one would say, these policies are with the rising energy prices likely to drive many consumers to the 'heat or eat' camp, not something any government wants to be accused of creating during its tenancy of Westminster.
Unfortunately his Talking Pints on GB News on Monday night was not a good start. I did not see all of it but the majority that I saw did not put Nigel in the driving seat. If you are going to invite green zealots with fingers in the green pie on to your program for discussion you need to do your research, they have had years to formulate answers to questions on climate change and energy production. Nearly all presenters who interview these people either go along with the thesis or are not readily equipped to put points that contradict the mantra; sadly, Nigel fell into the later group.
If your guests come back with questionable answers then you have to have the relevant facts at your fingertips, Nigel didn’t; saying ‘Well, we will have to disagree on that one’ is not an answer without those facts and he didn’t have them.
See here…
The ideologue he was interviewing would as with all others who are in this field put forward reasons for green energy; fine, but his simplistic answers were never challenged,. To trot out the '40% of our energy now is green' is a bare faced lie, several weeks this winter there has been no wind and very dismal skies, so no solar, and we had many days when when wind was contributing just over 1% to the national grid and solar less, meanwhile we imported energy and our diminishing nuclear plants were almost into the red supplying what was needed.
This graph from Grid Watch shows the enormous fluctuation in energy supplied by wind. To talk of 40% and more on those few good days is pure hype, the troughs when virtually nothing was being produced are evident and of course during the winter to rely on such unstable supply would mean rolling blackOUTs or worse. Solar in the northern hemisphere is not really justifiable as a grid contributor during the winter months, the troughs easily outweigh the peaks.
The rebuff from Dale Vince, carefully groomed to look every inch the eco warrior, about smart grids is a nod to the fact that green energy alone cannot supply energy in a way that could ever be acceptable to the population or industry. Talk of breaks in supply and getting up in the middle of the night to use your energy ‘allowance’ is a step back in to pre industrial revolution times; why should anyone accept that and pay through the nose for it?
Smart meters are of course now revealed as a way to implement rationed energy when the time comes, not as a way of saving mone; water meters led the way on that one.
Dale then waffled on about new technology giving us storage to overcome the lack of wind. Once again Nigel had no facts on this and sat there looking lost, yet there is plenty of material out there refuting the claims of Dale Vince. Maybe one day they will crack the problem but this is mystic Meg territory at the moment and if there is no solution we should not rushing into a state where rolling blackouts become the norm. Somehow Dale seems to think this is all OK - maybe it is, for him: his warm feeling about what he is doing may well be enough to stave off freezing to death in the winter as many old people undoubtedly would. Still, if that resulted in saving the planet no doubt Dale would think it all worthwhile.
The earlier predictions from the likes of the National Grid that we would need a sixty percent increase in base load to satisfy all the new clean electric devices including EVs and heat pumps blows the whole green thinking on the matter out of the water.
Boris believes that increasing windmills fourfold will solve all our problems, but of course having four times the 1% we now get on a windless day means we get 4%; not exactly a game changer, is it?
Dale then made himself wide open to ridicule when he wanted all nuclear to be phased out and no new plants built. This revealed his thinking on the lines of the old CND campaigns - wind good, nuclear bad - and again no solution to how the unreliability factor in supply is solved.
Naturally not all is good about wind production in an environmental sense either.
Plus Dale would not like any competition for renewables as another form of energy is being systematically trashed after it was discovered to be reliable and cheap to produce, any more than he would admit to being paid, as the contracts allow payment when windmills are feathered down in adverse conditions and cannot produce anything; I think that is called a subsidy.
Wind already has a chequered history in other countries, none so headlining as in California with its rolling blackouts; now that ridiculous placement in the White House Kamala Harris wants to extend the failed California model to the rest of the country…
Dale has obviously not seen what is going on there or doesn’t want to see.
Much was made of the old nuclear plants being buried for thousands of years at great cost and the inherent danger. That money, he said, should be put into research in sustainable energy instead. There was no mention, because it hasn’t happened yet on a scale to be noticed, about disposing of solar panels, something I referred to in an earlier piece. The same problem pertains to the short life carbon fibre off shore windmills and the coming very high cost of the same off shore wind units exposed to sea ravages. The cost of disposal of the short lived windmills, especially off shore has never ben mentioned anywhere other than by those who are not involved in the industry but it is significant.
There have been several studies on the true costs of wind power, none of which support Dale's statements, but then he runs runs a green power company and as they say if you have skin in the game…
True this is a biased web site but there figures are official.
This is part of the introduction to a paper on solar energy production below:
“Publications in increasing numbers have started to raise doubts as to whether the commonly promoted, renewable energy sources can replace fossil fuels, providing abundant and affordable energy. Trainer (2014) stated inter alia: “Many reports have claimed to show that it is possible and up to now the academic literature has not questioned the faith. Therefore, it is not surprising that all Green agencies as well as the progressive political movements have endorsed the belief that the replacement of the fossil with the renewable is feasible”. However, experience from more than 20 years of real operation of renewable power plants such as photovoltaic installations and the deficient scientific quality and validity of many studies, specifically aimed at demonstrating the effective sustainability of renewable energy sources, indicate precisely the contrary.”
There is as an aside the belief that the recent steep rises in the price of ICE auto mobiles is not just from the price of materials and supply, but a deliberate move by the industry to try and create a market for overpriced EVs by levelling up to a degree; a fallacy maybe but as with so much these days conspiracy theories appear to be coming home to haunt those who talked about misinformation in spades; no doubt more will be revealed.
Dale would also like to go back to the vexed question of tidal power; this has been dammed (!) as being hugely costly and while being reliable it is only producing power at the high tide times, not as and when we might need it, and it is only ever going to be a niche contributor for geological reasons.
Dale has a belief all the problems could be overcome in time. That is no solution to our current problems and anyway there is no guarantee with any any of them coming good in any meaningful way at this moment in time. The battery storage belief is so far fetched as to be laughable; maybe just maybe, the capacity needed to have any bearing on demands is not even on the horizon never mind a reality.
All of this Nigel should have researched, it is not difficult, yet he thought a headline popular banner would see him become a leader against eco zealots. He failed miserably at the first hurdle, he really should have known better.
And hovering above all this is Climate Change which drives all these changes we need to save the planet. As with Covid the right sort of scientists have declared that man is evil and we have to change our ways come what may. Maybe we do have to revise the way we live within certain parameters, but the question of how much man is making a difference to the weather is despite the science not very convincing against a background of the way the weather has shaped the earth over the millennia.
The science over Covid is bit by bit being shredded, but the enormous cost in all senses and the damage has been been done. A repeat over climate change could be equally catastrophic, and the west seems to be heading that way; we never learn.
And don’t expect much deviation from the agenda by politicians, they rarely if ever these days admit they are wrong on anything, plus why should they worry? They can claim heating bills on expenses, kerching!
And finally if you Nigel Farage are going to pursue this attack on net zero, get your ducks in a row, it is not that difficult.
Anna Mae Bullock was born in 1939 into a sharecropping family in rural Tennessee. She began singing as a teenager and, after moving to St. Louis, Missouri, immersed herself in the local rhythm-and-blues scene.
She met Ike Turner at a performance by his band, the Kings of Rhythm, in 1956, and soon became part of the act. She began performing as Tina Turner, and her electric stage presence quickly made her the centrepiece of the show. In 1966 the Phil Spector produced record "River Deep Mountain High" made the band, and particularly Tina, world famous. She divorced Ike in 1978, alleging years of physical abuse and infidelity.
She then embarked on a very successful solo career which ended in 2009 because of illness; a stroke and a kidney transplant. She now lives in Switzerland but she will never be forgotten thanks to her 'electrifying' stage presence and performances.
Yuval Noah Harari is a ‘public intellectual, historian’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari
but since he is also said to be Klaus Schwab’s top adviser I shall refer to him
as Tiddles, Blofeld’s cat (anonymous in the Bond films, Tiddles was producer
Cubby Broccoli’s pet in real life.)
Embarrassingly, Tiddles completed his D.Phil. at my old
college in Oxford in 2002 and I am sorry to say that for an intellectual his
thinking on religion and transhumanism appears jejune and he does not seem to realise
its implications. On the whole I prefer the anarchic yobs and Welsh drunks of
Jesus in the late Sixties and Seventies, whose Junior Common Room once elected
a goldfish as President on the grounds that like other leaders it went round in
circles opening and closing its mouth (an interpreter was appointed to convey
its rulings.) Bawling fools tend not to do much harm; it is the theoretical systematisers
and world-reformers that led to the killing of countless millions in the last
century.
‘What is a religion if not a big
virtual reality game played by millions of people together? Religions such as
Islam and Christianity invent imaginary laws, such as “don’t eat pork”, “repeat
the same prayers a set number of times each day”, “don’t have sex with somebody
from your own gender” and so forth. These laws exist only in the human
imagination.’
The Abrahamic religions postulate a God who both made the
world out of nothing and set the rules for our behaviour: the Creator and
Law-Giver; but according to Nick Spencer https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-problem-with-yuval-noah-harari/12451764
, Tiddles’ position is that ‘There are no gods, no money, no human rights, and
no laws beyond the “common imagination of human beings.”’
if we accept that moral laws have no basis, then consider
what this implies for a thoroughly consistent rationalist: a world entirely without
moral laws that are binding independently of our wishes and opinions. David
Hume said in effect that one cannot reason from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’; you can describe
what people think is right and wrong, and even why they may think so, but there
is no reason why you should privately adopt their view. In fact, it is
convenient if you don’t: I should like everyone else to believe in queuing for
the bus, so that I can jump the queue; this helps to explain why psychopaths
are over-represented in positions of power. All that matters (if you have any
care for yourself, and there is of course no reason why you should) is to work
out how to minimise the negative consequences for yourself of society’s
disapprobation of your actions.
This nihilism being so, it is difficult to explain why Tiddles
is in Schwab’s caressing embrace. Schwab may have a grand vision for future
society, but as nothing matters, there is no reason to help him bring it about.
The resistance to this nightmare heaven may have to come
from the irrational, the superstitious, the emotional, the capricious, violent,
stupid, human-hearted humans.
Dig your claws in, Tiddles, and leap off Schwab’s lap.
4 March: 'The Eighteen Nation Disarmament Conference, which included non-nuclear powers in addition to the U.S., the U.S.S.R., the U.K. and France, opened in Geneva.'
5 March: 'A B-58 Hustler jet, piloted by U.S. Air Force Captain Robert Sowers, and a crew of two, set three new records by flying from Los Angeles to New York in 2 hours, 01:15, then back again in 2 hours, 15:02. The sonic boom, from the jet's speed of more than 1,000 mph, broke windows in Riverside, California and Chillicothe, Missouri when it accelerated at 30,000 feet and during a refuelling, and emergency calls were made in cities beneath the flight path. The USAF received more than 10,000 complaints as a result of the flight.'
6 March: 'Rated by the U.S. Geological Survey as "The most destructive storm ever to hit the mid-Atlantic states" of the US, and as one of the ten worst U.S. storms in the 20th century, the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 began forming off of the coast of North Carolina and continued for three days as it moved up the Eastern seaboard as far as New York. Heavy winds and rain coincided with a perigean spring tide, when a new Moon occurred when the Moon was making its closest approach to the Earth. The combined tugging of Moon and Sun made the tides higher than normal. Forty people were killed and $500,000,000 of damage was incurred.'
'In a joint statement issued by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Thailand's Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman, the United States pledged to go to war to defend any attack on Thailand by Communist guerrillas.'
7 March: 'In London, the Royal College of Physicians issued its report, "Smoking and Health", declaring that "Cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer. It also causes bronchitis and probably contributes to the development of coronary heart disease and various other less common diseases. It delays healing of gastric and duodenal ulcers." Sir Robert Platt, the president of the organization, led a committee of nine physicians to compile the research. A panel led by the U.S. Surgeon General would draw a similar conclusion nearly two years later on January 11, 1964.'
'OSO I, the first of nine Orbiting Solar Observatory satellites, launched by the United States, was launched from Cape Canaveral put into orbit around the Earth, to measure radiation from the Sun.'
8 March: 'American drug manufacturer Richardson-Merrell Pharmaceuticals withdrew its request for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve the prescription of thalidomide, which the company had developed under the name Kelvadon. On the same day, the company withdrew the drug from sale in Canada. American marketing of the medicine, which had caused severe birth defects in 15,000 babies, primarily in West Germany, had been blocked by FDA reviewer Frances Oldham Kelsey, who was later given an award by President Kennedy.'
'The Beatles made their radio debut, with a three-song session, recorded the day before, and broadcast on the BBC Manchester programme Teenager's Turn (Here We Go). They performed the songs "Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)", "Please Mr. Postman", and "Memphis, Tennessee."'
10 March: 'Newly independent from France, the Kingdom of Morocco adopted its first constitution.'
'Scottish football club Kilmarnock's home attendance record was broken when a crowd of 35,995 turned out to see them play Glasgow Rangers in the Scottish Cup, at the Rugby Park stadium.'
UK chart hits, week ending 10 March 1962 (tracks in italics have been featured previously)
That raises the question of whether the UK itself is a ‘liberal
democracy.’ How do we define the term? The relevant Wiki article looks back at
a 1971 book by Robert Dahl and lists ‘eight necessary rights’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy#Rights_and_freedoms
shared by all varieties of such forms of government:
1.Freedom to form and
join organisations.
2.Freedom of
expression.
3.Right to vote.
4.Right to run for
public office.
5.Right of political
leaders to compete for support and votes.
6.Freedom of
alternative sources of information
7.Free and fair
elections.
8.Right to control
government policy through votes and other expressions of preference.
How does our country measure up against this yardstick? Not
altogether perfectly, I would argue.
‘Freedom of expression’: we are familiar with the
ill-defined constraints on ‘hate speech’ but also on dissident speech on
subjects such as policy to deal with Covid and the efficacy and dangers of the
new medicines to combat it. Yes, the new media giants are also acting as
censors, but there is no sign that our government pushes back.
‘Freedom of alternative sources of information’: we have
just cancelled RT online so that we cannot consider inconveniently different opinions
and claims of facts from that source. Never mind ‘alternative’: who does not
see gross propaganda in our mainstream press coverage of Ukraine? How are
voters in a democracy enabled to make judgements in such a distorted
information environment?
‘Free and fair elections’: the current system for General
Elections means that many people like myself are in a ‘safe’ constituency where
their vote has virtually no effect, other than in some rare convulsion such as
the collapse of the ‘Red Wall’. We had a referendum on the Alternative Vote in
2011, but my recollection is that both the Labour and Conservative parties ‘bust
a gut’ to rubbish the idea. By contrast, I was astonished that the referendum
on Brexit was covered so fairly in the media, yet since then the Establishment
has obviously been busting another gut to neuter the result. Also, the party
system itself is a major problem – see how hard it is for independents to gain
a seat in Parliament, and how even a veteran like Frank Field can be ousted
when he fails to toe the Party line.
‘Right to control government policy etc.’ In a way it
surprises me that the government is responsive at all, given a guaranteed
five-year period before having to face the electorate again (unless they themselves
choose to go to the country early), and the ability to abrogate civil rights by
Privy Council rulings and passing laws such as the Coronavirus Act with its
‘carte blanche’ powers – which the Opposition allowed to renew without even a
division in the House. The current proposals for a ‘UK Bill of Rights’ look
like a further dangerous enabling for authoritarians https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/is-this-the-reform-of-our-human-rights-that-we-really-need%ef%bf%bc/
plus enshrining the principle that our rights are to be determined by
government and so can be amended or cancelled at a later date. Goodbye the
implications and traditions of Magna Carta and the Common Law.
If the UK were to sit a GCSE examination in ‘being a liberal
democracy’ it might just about scrape a pass with 4/8, but hardly anything more.
