Take it Back

I can’t be alone in being appalled at the behaviour of our governments over the last thirty years. And yes, I am going to say it; Margaret Thatcher was the last leader with a clear and profound belief in the British people and a desire to fight the forces lined up to attack our way of life. Her successor seemed to want nothing more than to subjugate our will to that of the EU politburo and Tony Blair and his crazy gang set about dismantling forever a Britannia that had taken a thousand years to build.

After Blair came a series of caretaker administrations intent on nothing so much as appeasing the international judicial junta and as a result we have tumbled into more rabbit holes than Watership Down. The trans debacle, the ever-inflating exam grades, the dash for devalued qualifications as proxy for actual, meaningful skills, and the appallingly disjointed Net-Zero policy are all obstacles we have allowed the government to put in its own way. Policy after failed policy, while the public is shouting from the sidelines that they won’t work, will incentive the wrong behaviours and will cost a fortune.

Who would have thought that it would take a mere 40 years for a country which once ruled the world to become a feeble ward of court, reliant for its every need on one surrogate parent or another? When did we become, both individually and nationally, incapable of fending for ourselves? If it’s not the EU it’s the UN, or NATO, or, heaven forfend, the WEF. One after another supranational entity has fingers in all of our pies; it has to stop.

I’m not saying we become isolationist, although I don’t see how that would be any more disastrous than the mess we’re in now. But what the country – any country – needs is strong governance that actually works. Leaders need to be actually, not nominally, accountable for their actions. And those leaders need to actually lead, not just follow the latest on-trend opinions of the chattering classes, although they really do have to listen to those who will be affected by legislation, which they don’t appear to have done for a long time.

If we don’t want to allow illegal entry into the country then we should prevent such passage. If we want people to be able to afford their own homes then we shouldn’t allow foreign money to flood into the housing market, inflating prices out of reach. And if we want people to be able to afford to drive to work, heat their homes and power their lives, we need to have an energy supply both under our control and within our budget. Likewise, education, health, law and order and the entire constitution and behaviour of society as a whole.

And none of this is impossible, yet with every nervous, eggshell-treading, politically correct, U-turn invoking announcement, minister after minister has only made the situation worse. Boris Johnson may be all the things his haters say he is (although, blimey, how could one human hold so many flaws?) but he was, and remains for many, a popular choice. His eventual ousting by the very people rejected in his electoral victory speaks volumes about the distance which now stands between the establishment and the population at large.

Unless this changes, soon, I can envisage a time when people simply take matters into their own hands. Some already are; vigilante patrols, paedophile-hunting groups,a nervous few challenging aggressive islamification. But when youths can simply walk into MacDonalds, high street electrical stores, sportswear outlets and the like and take whatever they wish with impunity, it becomes clearer than ever that our police ‘service’ has lost control.

Naturally, such talk of muscular, law-applying regimes will provoke the flaccid left to protest and wail and moan, but when I said flaccid, I meant it. Those who the left once courted as their own, the working class, are on our side now and what is left is a wishy-washy collective comprising the limp and ineffectual malcontents of the identitarians, the soft, liberal middle class and a few posturing academics whose theses bear no merit.

Time to get our bite back

We should simply stop listening. You want safe spaces, you think it’s all because you’re black, you are offended by differing opinions? Who cares? The sooner we adopt a national ‘fuck you’ attitude to all this crap, the better. Get in line, pull your socks up, give your kids a clip round the ear from time to time and reclaim your natural British right to tut loudly in queues. All is not yet lost, but there is little time left to save the best nation on Earth.

Don't you just hate that?

 There I was, on Friday night, responding to a Twitter follower who had announced his intention to procure a tasty takeaway. Next thing I know, my account is suspended. For what, you may ask, which I did.

My appeal to the Twitter gods - presumably perpetually offended American infants - elicted the following response:

"Your account has been suspended and will not be restored because it was found to be violating Twitter's Terms of Service, specifically the Twitter Rules against hateful conduct.

It is against our rules to promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.

Additionally, if we determine that the primary purpose of an account is to incite harm towards others on the basis of these categories, that account may be suspended without prior warning."

Wow, I did all that? The next question has to be, how? By using vernacular, and a bit of nostalgia. The tweet which released so much venom is below.

Quite the monster, am I not? So, here I am again, locked out in the cold... with my 'rubbery' chicken.

See you on the other side some time.

Green Around The Gills

 Saint Greta of Thunberg has been in the news again and she is still happily berating the grown-ups for all the evils of the world. It was a quiet morning at work, so I walked the half-mile to the Co-op Local shop and thought about what I had done. I was appalled at the sheer amount of litter at the roadside. Packaging, takeaway wrappers, indeed quite a lot of once-edible food, and plastic bottles as far as the eye could see.

Quite apart from the obvious eyesore, this speaks to a separation of self from society as people discard things with no consideration for those who will see it, those who will, eventually, pick it up and the very planet everybody now pretends to care so very much for.

We throw away perfectly usable stuff and we carelessly hoard things of little value to us. For example, there is more gold in a tonne of mobile phones than in a tonne of gold-bearing rock, and it is easier to extract, but we cling onto our old phones as the value of recycling is relatively small to us individually. And then, minerals, metals, finished products and other valuable resources are daily committed to the grave of landfill with impunity. We have grown up spoilt, but the fluffy rug of abundant cheap energy has been brusquely whipped from beneath our feet and we have no idea how to keep our balance.

I think about this sort of thing, a lot. I am concerned at the general level of ignorance and incuriosity about our world. What is energy, where does it come from and why does it cost what it costs? Looking out at vast cities, how is it possible that their denizens are fed and watered and cleaned and kept free from disease? What is this thing made from, and how do we know about gravity, time, electromagnetic radiation, the elements, the stars, the universe? And why does humanity keep on coming back to the fictions of deity?

So, when I mischievously tweeted about how one might find the shiny new electric vehicle they have just purchased has become a financial millstone around one’s neck, I was expecting both agreement and disagreement, and this is how it transpired. On the one side, many Tweeters agreed, retweeted or liked my original thread in all its hyperbolic glory. On the other, a relatively small number (mirroring, I expect the relatively small proportion of RV owners out there) bristled at my ignorance and launched full-on rebuttals of all my assertions.

Par for the course, naturally; you are either right or wrong on social media, and sometimes both at the same time. Schrödinger’s opinion. But, for what it’s worth, here is my stance on all things net-zero related:

·       One size, one solution. does not fit all.

·       Is it accessible?

·       Is it affordable?

·       Is it reliable?

·       Does it cost more than it saves?

·       Does it do less environmental harm than what it replaces?

·       Is it wise to replace now, or should I let my current technology run its course?

And what of the future? How will my new life paradigm evolve over the next year, next 10 years, next 50 years? At the moment there are dozens of apparent solutions to the one big problem. In time there will be fewer mainstream technologies and the rest will be in the hands of the eccentric few who can afford to indulge their passions and invest their time and money in novel ways. But it is a fact that the majority of us will have to toe the line; I just want it to be the right line. And right now I don’t think anybody knows where that line will be drawn.

Compromise is the key!

As it stands, going green may well be good, but it is a long way from being cheap and what sways most people is cheap, rather than good. The EV discourse attracted thousands of likes and a good many replies, most of which I tried to address in a placatory tone – I’m not anti-Electric Vehicles, I’m just sceptical about everything – but some respondents showed up with fists clenched. Let’s not make it a fight, eh? But, when it comes to the whole net-zero strategy, let’s all ask the hard questions before we part with our hard-earned.

Listen up!

Heard on a podcast: Nadia Whittome, MP, talking about Labour and what they want. Turns out it’s decent homes for all, well-funded public services, fairness, security and the chance for everybody to prosper. She then rather betrayed her shallowness of thought by adding that, in contrast, the Tories [boo, hiss] wanted to sow hatred and division and send poor, desperate asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Brava Nadia, the next election is in the bag, for sure. But perhaps, for balance, she might want to listen to the wishes of natural Conservatives (not the current, soft-palmed LimpDem version, obviously). I bet they are security, trust in the police and the courts to be fair and even-handed, prosperity for all, and efficiently run state-funded services. After all, why throw away a well-established manifesto? The Tory voice may then have gone on to say that Labour has a naïve view of the world founded on Marxist dogma and a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

The point is, of course, that both sides want substantially the same aims but just have different views on how those aims may be achieved. But when it comes to knowing their enemy, both sides could do with a good read of Sun Tzu and a generous slap on the head. Slagging off the Tories is how Labour think they appeal to their base and pitying Labour’s need for victimhood is how the Tories appeal to theirs. But what about appealing across the board?

Nigel Farage’s success – for it was a monumental achievement in the face of all that was levelled at him – was, by any measure, remarkable. 12.6% of the votes went to a party that many were afraid to even mention for fear of being reviled by the parties they had abandoned; abandoned because they no longer felt represented; a supposition which we later found to be absolutely true.

There is no debate any more in the UK. Parliament has no more a plan to listen to the voters than it has to cycle to the moon… or listen to the other side. Discussions in the house are reduced to name-calling and one-upmanship which, while these are long established techniques to wind up the other side, without substance are meaningless and petty and turn ever greater swathes of the electorate away from politics.

It has long been my contention that the majority of the population broadly agree on what outcomes are needed, but that almost none of us have the first practical idea how to bring it about. We repeat slogans and soundbites, we cleave to positions we have never really thought about. If you are poor and feel deprived and somebody tells you this is because the Tories took all the money and bathed in it, why wouldn’t you hate the Tories? And if you are in a decent job, receive no state benefits and are all the time besieged by rhetoric that demands you surrender ever more of your hard-earned to feed the feckless, why wouldn’t you look down on those who vote Labour?

The two sides of this divide appear to have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of division when in reality the gap between left and right is quite small. But we only ever seem to hear the extreme positions – usually promulgated by the extremists on the opposite side. Much as with the trans-malarkey, which statistically affects virtually nobody, all the oxygen in the room is used up by activists and the moderate voices are not heard.

I long since gave up hope of seeing proper, in-depth discussions of the very real concerns of the population, conducted with empathy for the opposing view and with the intention of arriving at a solution. Instead, we get these adversarial shouting matches which end in acrimony, the only beneficiaries of which are the commentariat who now get to write searing indictments of each side’s argument. And what of the poor and homeless, the immigrant invasion, the cost of energy, the parlous state of education…?

For what it's worth, this is where I am, yet 

the left would call me a far-right extremist.

We have not made progress in any direction other than that vision of the New Labour government, which was to transform the UK into a broiling, bustling melting pot of competing cultures. Presumably, there was no plan of how to manage the utter turmoil into which it has thrown us; we would adapt and integrate and be grateful, I imagine. Well, we haven’t. It is getting worse, and the political class seems to have become ever more detached from the reality on the ground.

It doesn’t much matter who takes the helm as the next Prime Minister, the job they have ahead is monumental and will take more than the evidence suggests they are capable of. But something has to be done. The Tories don’t have the answers, but neither does the Labour Party. And neither do the rag-taggle gang of chancers in all the little parties, but if they don’t really listen to each other, when a party which speaks with a single coherent voice comes along, no matter how abhorrent what they say, they will sweep the board. Listen up Westminster, when your palace becomes a mosque your chattering voices will be silenced forever.

A Million Stupid Ideas Flying in Close Formation

When Gordon Brown made his famous ‘no more boom and bust’ declaration he was falling prey to the mistaken belief that he had the supernatural ability to curb such cycles. This is a very common affliction in those with some power; soon enough they begin to believe that the gerrymandered process which put them in place conferred both wisdom and efficacy beyond mere human expertise. It is a conceit, a folly, often followed by a fall. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad; the madness being a form of megalomania.

It has often been said that economic forecasting was invented primarily to make astrology look credible. But the economy usually defies most predictions, and the commentariat choose to ignore the majority of incorrect forecasts. Although economies can be pushed and persuaded, they are ultimately the summation of many much smaller decisions made by those who contribute to it. If enough people decide to stop buying and start saving the flow of money is redirected in ways that may be broadly modelled but cannot be entirely foreseen. Much economic lore is not so much soothsaying as just being wise, and selective with the data, after the event.

Although governments may be able to do some small somethings, their powers are poor in the face of panic. Whatever you do, don’t tell people there is going to be a shortage of fuel, or toilet paper… or money. You may think you are being honest and precautionary, but watch the herd stampede us right into the crisis you warned of. And talking of crisis, just exactly how many crises do we need at any one time and how will the reactions to them interact and intersect? The truth is nobody knows, and it is impossible to plan for outcomes which nobody can accurately predict.

But humans do like a good story, which is why the mongers of doom and conspiracy are currently yet more encouraged to believe that all this shit is happening by design, rather than through simple, unemotive chaos. Responding to a tweet about climate change and net zero, I invoked Hanlon’s Razor: “Never ascribe to malice that which can more readily be explained by incompetence”. In response I was scolded for being a blind fool, then blocked, as is often the way with those who desperately need to stick to the story they believe.

It turns out that incompetence has an economy all its own whereby the cumulative effects of lots of tiny blunders takes on the appearance of intent. Thus, just as climate alarmists will ascribe every weather event, wherever it is, whatever the seasonal norms, as more certain proof of their thesis, it is easily possible to assemble all the little cock-ups and rearrange that random jigsaw puzzle to create a picture entitle ‘intent’.

Nobody involved in rolling out 5G cares one hoot about Covid. Doctors and epidemiologists are sharply focused on their mission without any regard for the ravings of Klaus Schwab. The Chinese have colluded with nobody to bring about Net-Zero ambitions in the trigger-happy, activist-responsive governments of the west, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is all about Russia and nothing to do with The UK’s inflation rate.

Yes, there will be a rubbing of shoulders between all of these things at times, and there may even be brief collusions or coalitions aimed at solving, or exacerbating, one problem or other but the notion of a team of humans clever enough to bring any of this about by deliberate intent is something of a stretch. The intersection of a million little incompetencies may occasionally give the appearance of a vaguely definable direction of travel, but look again a few days later and you’ll see it was just the particulates from an explosion briefly flying in formation before plummeting back to earth.

If you believe it, it's true.

We do love a pattern, we Earthlings, but sometimes the creative effort of finding a pattern in a mess of erratic, non-aligned events of the age is not worth the candle. Economies are the result of many individual decisions, influenced by many different motives, which often assumes the guise of deliberate planning. Stupidity is much the same; a million irrational, fact-free beliefs can look, at times, like a plot. And it takes a special kind of stupid to join those dots.

A Rush of Blood

Naturally there is outrage over the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie. Leaders throughout the west have come out in utter condemnation of islam and its adherents and untold £billions have now been committed to investigate and eradicate its pernicious effects on the modern world. Politicians have lined up to openly challenge the muslim infiltration of the west with vows to seek out and remove all those who kill, injure, rape or promote hatred in the name of allah.

Obviously, the opening paragraph is a just as much a pack of lies as is islam itself. Instead, guarded comments about extremism and radicalism have been carefully drafted and delivered so as to cause the minimum offence. The supposed ‘peaceful majority’ of muslims have remained obstinately silent because they belong to a cult whose creed is submission, total and unquestioning.

In fact, many voices have been heard to say we mustn’t jump to conclusions, we mustn’t encourage anti-muslim sentiment and we must condemn all who seek to take vengeful matters into their own hands. The arresting police in the USA have even stated that there is no known motive behind the attack. No motive, you cowardly lickspittles, no motive? The unredeemed fatwah, whose bounty for Rushdie’s death was even increased relatively recently. No motive for the attempt which has been openly praised by Iran’s state media? No motive for an action widely celebrated across the muslim sectors of social media?

And what do you make of this spokesman for islam in Britain telling muslims to stay quite because any comment, any media appearance would be a trap? The trap of course is that if you rejoice then you are admitting that islam is a barbaric and backward death-cult, but if you condemn it, you will in turn be fatwah’d by the same barbaric and backward death-cult. Well, excuse us if we take your call for silence as a silent approval.

 

 As always, our government will await the advice of the muslim council, or brotherhood, or whatever authority they kneel to, before making any kind of a move. They will consult muslim clerics to learn what help and support they require in this, their hour of need. But of one thing you can be absolutely certain, the victim here will turn out to be the islamic community, forever beset by the evils of ‘islamophobia’.

Haven’t we heard enough, had enough, of all this? The religion will not reform; islamic scholars imported from Pakistan will ensure it. Entire communities will continue to be segregated from the population they feed off, their female children unschooled, their wives ignorant of the English language for fear they may hear an alternative doctrine. All we hear about these days are human rights, but within the religion of submission there are no rights except what their perfect model, the child-raping mohammed, decreed.

They even tell us, repeatedly, that they will prevail and that British women, western women, will submit to the veil, that they will rape the infidel women to create bastard muslims, that soon their number will be legion. We hear this, we see it, but by all accounts our governments do not. Is it because they fear the wrath of khan and his cohorts, or is it that they genuinely believe the muslim propaganda that opposing them is worse than the holocaust? Or is it something else altogether?

If the Twin Towers wasn’t enough to open their eyes and the London Bridge attacks and the Lee Rigby killing, and the thousands upon thousands of young girls raped and murdered by Pakistani gangs, and the open aggression visited upon white people in muslim-only zones of former great cities… what chance is there that the attempted murder of a celebrated, knighted author will make any difference? We have to give up any pretence that the government of the UK cares one jot for its rightful citizens.

(*Note for the uninitiated: As I do not believe islam to be a valid entity, I have refused to capitalise islamic terms because only proper nouns need to be capitalised. It is a small protest, but 'tis mine own)

Level Headed

While still on Twitter suspension (during which time I have achieved many useful things; perhaps I should get suspended more often?) I can nevertheless still browse the site and see what’s winding folk up. Today I came across this tweet: Link Professor Bill McGuire modestly bills himself as “Volcanologist, climate scientist, broadcaster, activist, socialist, best-selling author…” Author of what, you may ask? A new book called Hothouse Earth, in which this Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL posits the gloomiest of dooms ahead for the planet. 

And why not, eh? It’s a hot topic (pun intended) and he's bound to earn a few capitalist quid from flogging this dead horse. After all, it’s not like he’s going to be contradicted and he is certainly not going to be proved wrong in his lifetime; he’s 67 and the cataclysmic forecasts are projections hundreds of years hence. But let’s have a go anyway, shall we? The article he links to predicts a worst-case scenario of 5 m sea level rise by 2500. Yes, 2500, which is 300 years away. Nothing I could see in the Guardian article suggested McGuire’s sensational 52 m prediction.

 His career has long been founded on doom and disaster – you wouldn’t be inaccurate to presume he has a vested interest in scaring people – beginning with an appointment some thirty years ago as Professor of Geohazards and Director of the UCL Hazard Research Centre. A glance at some of his book titles gives you a quick study of the man and his modus: 

• Surviving Armageddon: Solutions for a threatened planet (2005). 
• Global Catastrophes: A Very Short Introduction (2006). 
• Seven Years to Save the Planet (2008). 
• Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards (2012). 
• Waking the Giant – How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes (2012). 
• Knock Three Times: 28 modern folk tales for a world in trouble (2019). And, of course, 
• Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide (2022).

 Oh, he also blogs for Extinction Rebellion; make of that what you will.

 A tour through his timeline reveals all the expected tendencies: anti-Tory, pro-socialism, hater of all things fossil-fuelled, calls for state-run utilities, Palestine… it goes on and on. Tweet after tweet reveals him not to be the data-driven, serious scientist he tells himself he is, but rather a partisan people-hater. We need top-quality minds to be working on this stuff, and we need properly coordinated energy, social and economic policies, yet from what I see, the people with the most influence tend to be these activists posing as pragmatists.

 Whoever inherits Boris Johnson’s crown needs to very quickly get a grip and clamp down on the apparent knee-jerk responses to every bit of climate quackery. If those sea levels really are going to rise we need to be properly planning for decades, if not centuries in advance to adapt to the effects. And given that nothing we do right now will have any measurable effect for half a century hence, we can afford to divert our attention and resources to solving the current difficulties. The green shit can come later.

If this goes unchallenged people 

like McGuire will earn a fortune.

 I am no climate change denier, but neither am I a climate change junkie. I have no need to search for the next fix of apocalyptic rhetoric. I am, I imagine, more in tune with the vast majority of the Earth’s population, willing to work on my own energy budget just so long as I can see that my efforts are not being hamstrung by governments lurching from one faux-emergency to another. So let’s apply a bit of common sense here. Get back to gas, frack for victory, dig up a bit more coal, keep developing diesel, but most of all, let’s just keep a level head on our shoulders.

Fringe Benefits

 It's the Edinburgh Fringe again, and every year it gets worse. From the knockabout proving ground for wannabe comics and offbeat entertainers it has become an international festival of  'the correct values'. While we rail against 'wokery' these clever people (for many are very intelligent indeed) work hard at finding ways to rail against the establishment. And whereas the establishment, in Peter Cook's day, meant the Lords and landowners, the judiciary and Parliament, today the establishment they revile so much is you and me.

Expect a plethora of QWERTY-style 'edgy' identity-based shows, supported by a number of gutless worthies disproportional to their actual representation in society. Omid Djali has a new show there, I expect him to be brilliant, as always. But when he launched in Edinburgh 29 years ago he had an audience of three and was something of a flop. Some years later his superb 'Iranian Comedian' character subtly challenged perceptions of race as his heavily accented first half gave way to his born and bred Londoner reality.

Like all the success stories he worked at his craft and he understood what an audience wants. Many of the newbies, however, will be lauded for saying vagina out loud and slagging off the Tories. Yes, I know, slagging off the Tories has always been fair game, but now 'The Tories' is code for anybody who wants to keep Britain British, to raise their kids in the indigenous culture, to control our borders, police our streets and prevent children from being gang-raped by Pakistanis.

I'm currently suspended from Twitter for first asking whether people would support a short sentence and immediate deportation thereafter, or a very long sentence, paying for their incarceration by hard labour. In a parallel discussion I replied to a no-doubt, right-on Tweeter, asserting that the majority of 'grooming gangs' were white. My reply is below; you decide which bit offended the Gods of Algor.

As it happens, I agree to an extent with the judicial arrangements in those parts of the world from which I have no desire to import immigrants. Not quite, perhaps, an eye for an eye, but definitely deterrent sentences, especially those which may prevent re-offending. It is no secret that a very large proportion of the population would support the death penalty for terrorists, traitors and the hideously violent. In contrast castration for proven violent rapists (not those maliciously charged by unreliable victims) seems almost mild; a tap on the. er, wrist.

But here, of course, is where we hit the buffers. Who decides? And what is in 'the public interest'? While the audiences at Edinburgh will lap up the poorly constructed, dog-whistle jokes', the Crown Prosecution Service will go for the low-hanging fruit of angry young men reacting to their sisters' being harassed. And Twitter will allow all the leftist hatred to go unpunished while its algorithms will target 'hate words',no matter the context. 

I know Twitter has always been censorious but I swear it has become ridiculous, with suspensions handed out on the flimsiest of pretexts. And having been suspended once, an account is now labelled as offending against Twitter's values, further suspensions becoming an inevitability unless you restrict yourself to rainbow flags and gender diverse unicorns. Anybody who has read Kafka will be familiar with the impossible situation of one's defence becoming evidence for the prosecution. See that last line in the image above?