Islamophobia! Homophobia! Transphobia! FarRightPhobia(™)!

Of the four terms, descriptions or ideals listed above, three of those four are inventions to categorise and inhibit comment or opinion which may be construed as offensive to the person, grouping, mythical ideal or religious body concerned.

The fourth, namely FarRightPhobia(™), is my own invention, as it seeks to wound by classifying any person, group or Political Party who attempts to stray from the recognised and accepted Liberal ideals so carefully protected by vocal minorities as ‘FarRight’. Straying by virtue of applauding ‘Nationalist’ politics, populist (there’s another pejorative term for people who wish to band together to protect what they see as their heritage); or any other person, group or even Government which seeks to protect its own National traditions.

Of the three other categories of ****bia’s, I consider them all to be equally bogus, relying, as they do, on their self-administered Hate Crime status for persecuting and silencing any who oppose their ideas, ideals, politics or twisted notions of sexual orientation.

But my own named invention is a ‘DogWhistle’ term for a whole arc of characters ranging from the ‘Anti-Islam Activist’ Tommy Robinson; then through the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, trawling in the whole of the new ‘Vox’ Party in Spain, alongside the solidly nationalist Polish Government, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, onwards to the hoped-for accession by Farage’s Brexit Boys: and any number of Youtube commenters who stray a millimetre away from the liberal line.

The new Right have a place, and if they succeed, as I earnestly hope they do, in swelling their ranks within the EU Parliament, the former Elite will suddenly be looking at, for the very first time, an Opposition worth talking about. Just think, an EU Parliament, holding a Right-Wing standpoint majority, looking at, as it can; the Budget for the EU? Will they all be slated with the FarRightPhobia banner? Or will they march forwards to bring the tiniest bit of Democracy to that whole EU bureaucratic dictatorship?

Promises made, and Promises broken!

At the base of this post is a scanned copy of an item which we were promised would not be possible. Four-odd years ago, a Tory Prime Minister, scared shitless by a perceived looming threat from UKIP, organised a Referendum which might lead us to the ‘promised land’ of a Great Britain & Northern Ireland (GB&NI) outside of the monolith which was the European Union.

Nearly three years ago, we had that Referendum. Millions of words were written about the terrible fate which was to be our lot if we voted ‘Leave’: many of those empty threats came from that same Government which had, reluctantly, put the Referendum in place, but many more were from embedded, powerful people who just ‘knew’ that the only way to go was with their beloved Europe. And yet, and yet: 17.4 millions of British voters said ‘bollocks’ to these threats; said ‘bollocks’ to those who just knew that ‘they knew better’ than we 17.4 millions il-educated louts who just didn’t understand or grasp the huge benefits of the EU superstate which somehow were so much more clearer to the ‘Elite’.

The 17.4 millions who voted to leave were ‘deluded’. Those 17.4 millions just could not believe that a Government which had promised an ‘IN or OUT’ Referendum would go back on its word. The 17.4 million British voters, after nearly three years of backsliding, backstabbing, lying and prevarication from a Parliament which was composed of 80% MPs who were given a firm instruction from their voters, and were desperate no to obey those instructions have conspired to build a stalemate, aided and abetted by a lying Prime Minister May who has consistently planned a path towards that very stalemate.

That Poll Card states that I am able to vote in an election for the European Parliament for the North East Region. But the North East Region of WHERE? You won’t find England mentioned anywhere in EU literature. As in Orwell’s Big Brother, we were relegated to being ‘Airstrip One’ in Oceania. We are neutered by their voting rules, we are castrated by the big voting blocs in that same Parliament, so why, I must ask, should any of us vote at all? As my colleague James noted earlier, a decision not to vote is a statement wasted. If you do go, and deface your ballot, that is counted.

The old parties are counting on the collective memories of their ‘sheep’ to be dulled. They are hoping that we, as a NATION, have forgotten that we said “ We want to leave’: they are hoping that the collective sheep who patiently vote Labour or Tory will not remember that they lied to us, they are hoping that we will forgive them, because, after all, the big Parties have our ‘best interests at heart’; don’t they?
Well, if I read the runes correctly, the old parties have not got their wish. They might have gained some traction with their lies, and counter-lies, but when Farage’s Brexit Party come out trampling the grass despite those notices stating ‘Stay off the grass’, they hopefully will realise that Abraham Lincoln was so right when he stated:-

 “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

The art of generating sheer, unadulterated Bullsh*t

I am a long-time fan of good, well-written and -plotted American political drama series and films. We rarely see a good reproduction on this side of the pond, possibly because of the dearth of good politically-astute writers. The ideal series, in this writer’s opinion, was The West Wing, which followed the highs and lows of a Democrat President over two tumultuous terms in the White House. Its treatment of politics in America was subdued, its message was refined; and didn’t attempt to ram down your throat that everything the President or his Party did was great, and everything championed by the Republicans wasn’t, automatically, bad. The series gained 277 award nominations, and won 87. I liked it, I hold the boxed sets on my shelves, and recommend it to any.

 

Not so much the latest political series from the States, namely Madam Secretary. The first two series were good to excellent, with good storylines, well-acted and well-plotted: in other words; believable. But the present series? I have never watched a more nakedly-biased set of programmes up to, and including, all three Brit Party Political Broadcasts. It is so anti-Republican that it should be renamed the Nancy Pelosi Hour, it is that bad. If they aren’t battering away at the ‘heinous’ idea of ‘Nationalism’, as opposed to the glories of a Global scenario where everyone loves each other, while singing ‘Kumbayaaa’: they are hammering out the message that Global Warming, or alternatively Climate Change is not only real, it is already here; or the fact that the whole developed world must accept the ‘Refugees’ from countries which have disappeared under the rising waters! This type of naked propaganda does their message, if there is one, no service at all: as even the dimmest can see underneath the make-up and the gloss, a scenario which is reminiscent of Goebbels at his worst.

 

Death of a writer.

 

 

It seems to be that, in order to ‘break the mould’, in order to ‘cast off the bindings’, these days you need to be dead, murdered, to gain the attention of both MSM and (certain) politicians.

 

Lyra McKee was virtually unknown ,and certainly unheard of, outside of her own small circle of family and admirers. She was a journalist specialising in research and discussion regarding the aftermath of the Belfast Agreement. She died from a bullet wound, from a weapon fired by a member of a ‘dissident-Republican’ group named the New IRA. The name itself speaks volumes. As the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) has not gone away, had not disbanded, (despite the many solemn promises to the contrary), has not disarmed: and has, indeed a tighter control over who does what, and with what, than any other self-styled dissident group in the whole of Ireland.

 

The mealy-mouthed platitudes of the female leader of Sinn Fein hold little prospect of the restoration of the devolved Assembly, now dormant for over two years: as their demands for an Irish Language Act, along with acceptance of legal abortion and homosexual marriage are anathema to the politicians of the Democratic Unionists Party (DUP). That same DUP who know only too well what response there would be to their proposals of a resumption of the Assembly immediately, with parallel talks regarding contentious items to be held simultaneously, will not bow down to a Republican Party who know, only too well, that immediately the DUP would agree to talk, out would come the twisted Sinn Fein logic which states ‘Give us all we want, and there won’t be any trouble’.

 

Nope. notwithstanding the verbal pleadings of the catholic priest at the journalist’s funeral, and the standing ovation his words received, if the IRA/SinnFein bunch keep up their demands which are both unacceptable and indeed unpalatable to the people of the DUP, I don’t see a breakthrough at Stormont, or Londonderry, or indeed anywhere else on that still deeply-divided and troubled corner of this United Kingdom of GB&NI!

Measles……Vaccines?

Lots of so-called experts have climbed on to the so-called Measles Epidemic, calling for mass vaccinations to prevent this ‘terrible scourge’ from spreading further into the unvaccinated children,, and many more have climbed on the ever-more vociferous denunciations which target those who preach against the ‘Settled science’ of multiple effect or (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccinations.

 

As I am definitely no medical expert, I have to rely on the published and accepted evidence of medical practitioners and scientists, and have also to take in the published results of surveys which sought to disprove the findings of those, such as Dr. Andrew Wakefield; who posited that there was a direct correlation between MMR vaccinations and autism in certain of those children vaccinated  by this (MMR) vaccine. Dr. Wakefield’s thesis was attacked from all angles, despite his statements otherwise, here in the UK, his research was stated to be false, and riddled with error, and he was disbarred from medical practice in Great Britain & Northern Ireland.

 

The practice of vaccination has been accepted as scientific fact for centuries, after Edward Jenner proved, in 1796, that an weak injection of cowpox overcame a smallpox infection in a young girl. But it is indeed a long stretch from a weakened strain injection of a similar disease, to the multi-tested, meticulously-tested drug regimes of today. With literally millions vested in the sales of MMR vaccine products, the huge pharmaceutical giants obviously reacted with speed to frustrate and deny the statements of theories of Dr. Wakefield, and to a large extent succeeded, as he was forced to relocate to the USA.

 

But, strangely; no-one has come forward to assert that autism, and the prevalence of that condition in youngsters who have received this powerful drug cocktail is entirely disassociated. Better if Dr. Wakefield had set aside his small test survey, and instead concentrated on the fact that autism numbers had increased substantially during the time that the MMR vaccine had superseded the initial single doses of targeted vaccines against individual diseases. It is not beyond the comprehension of those untrained in medical practice to accept that the sudden heavy viral overload, produced in very young children when given the MMR vaccine, is sufficient to produce change in that young, still forming body: which would not have occurred if the vaccines had been given in the old, well-proven, single vaccine method.

True, many parents found the constant appointments for the single vaccinations tiresome, and time consuming: but what if it were proven that the MMR vaccines were literally too powerful for some young patients’ systems to absorb without a reaction; and that reaction was to result in the formation of autism in that unsuspecting child’s body and mind?

 

Just asking!

 

Glasgow: High-tech finally comes a-calling?

A news item in the Glasgow Evening Times caught my eye. For many reasons.

The event? The scheduled arrival at Glasgow Airport of an Emirates Airbus 380, beginning a regular service to Dubai.

Why the surprise?

Was it the fact that the big jet was visiting Scotland at all?

Was it the fact that the airport had spent an estimated £8 million to equip the buildings with the necessary extended sections, walkways, transfer areas, etc., as the large Airbus is totally oversized for average terminals?

Or was it the fact that one resident commented “Went to put the bin out and saw a crowd of folk in the street. Turned out the Emirates #A380 was landing at Glasgow.”

 

My eye was caught by this comment, but only to the extent that at least one Glasgow resident has not only been issued with a rubbish bin, but he also actually uses it!

Whats all this Bull***t* about grief for a building?

I have witnessed, over the seven-odd decades I have been reading and watching newscasts, news reports and radio broadcasts, many times when grief should reign supreme. I was thirteen years old when I read the historical work entitled ‘Scourge of the Swastika’, by Lord Russell of Liverpool. As a compendium of doom, of hatred, of a singular listing of Man’s inhumanity to his fellow Man, it has few equals. I was born during World War 2, I just about remember my father visiting us at home in the indoor bomb shelter where I, along with my mother and my two brothers slept every night of those long war years, but it was only after reading of the actions, philosophies and practices of one Nazi Nation, over those few years of that illusory ‘1,000 Years Reich’; did I actually understand why we went to war, why my father served in the British Army, why my uncle died on the fields of Normandy, alongside many thousands of his fellow Servicemen. Those six-odd years, along with the terrible years before war was actually declared, epitomise, for me, the reasons for Grief. The remaining Jewish remnants of a once vital sector of European civilisation had more than enough reason for their grief; as their fellow Jews were slaughtered for the mere reason that they were Jews!

We all experience grief, for happenings both deeply personal and for those who have lost loved ones in disasters large and small. Grief is a truly human emotion, as we feel a hurt and a loss inside our minds and hearts. My sister died when just sixteen years old. She contracted leukaemia, went from the body of a vital, healthy teenager to a ghost with eyes, in the space of months. Her death shattered my father, and my mother was, truly, never the same again. That was grief, so raw, so immediate, so very understandable. My wider family has suffered similar losses, with immediate family watching as illness or disease eats away at a loved one’s very essence; and have to face the consequences. We are no different to millions more.

As the philosopher stated “Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.”

As I stated, grief is a human emotion, about other human beings, some close, many more distant, but still, the very instance  of one’s passing causes one or many to grieve, and then to heal, and to move on.

So why are so many talking, writing or commenting about their grief over the devastating fire which has consumed the roof and interior of a Catholic Cathedral in Paris?

In links such as this, or this, or this, or even this: they are writing and talking about a Building. A historic building? Yes, but still built of stone, and timber, and glass and iron. It has no beating heart; it does not possess a soul, or a mind, or indeed a conscience: so why indeed this outpouring of an emotion which should be reserved for humanity?

Yesterday Australia: tomorrow, Great Britain & Northern Ireland

Interested yet appalled observers have watched in total disbelief as Australian Governments, through their cack-handed ‘Climate-Change-and pay-for-weather-to-change’ policies have virtually destroyed; through incompetence, venality, belief in  discredited theories about the Climate, and a total lack of political competence; a well-designed, well-managed, cheap and functional electricity distribution system. Replacing it with a set of policies which have doomed the Australian public to decades of brown- and black-outs due to a reliance on electricity generation from solar panels, wind turbines and (believe it or not) super-Carbon-Dioxide-generators powered by diesel engines as main base load generators at what can be categorically stated as the most costly electricity prices on the planet.

For years, Australian power generation policies have rested upon a base load supply generated by coal-fired  and gas-turbine powered generating stations, supplemented by hydro power schemes. Result, a power generation system designed and controlled by Engineers, which delivered electricity cheaply over the vast expanses of the external rim of the Australian Continent. For those who perhaps do not understand how big Australia really is, check out the fact that from Perth to Sydney is 2,700 miles. Through the lunatic policies such as the Renewables Energy Target, the Australian Government, after the forced closure of the Hazelwood coal-burning generation station, allowed AGL, the owners of both Bayswater and Liddell coal-fired power stations to increase their prices for electricity. The Liddell plant was repriced from $40 to $60 per megawatt hour, to greater than $5,000 per megawatt hour, making almost $3 billions extra profit for the Generation giant during the recent power surge. This profit was also boosted by much of the power offered by the Bayswater plant almost doubling in price, from about $40 per megawatt hour, to about $80 per megawatt hour.

Who, readers may well, ask, is paying for this absurd rise in a Generator company’s profits? Well, just as ever, it is the poor, silent Aussie taxpayers who foot that bill, as well as every other attempt at making ‘Climate-Change-and pay-for-weather-to-change’ policies actually work.  But the real reason why the electricity bills for the average Aussie has quadrupled in four years is through the change in the unreal expectations of the Network Owners. Here’s what consumers are paying for: in 2010, the networks began to spend $45 billion, approved by the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), on building and upgrading the poles and wires. This unprecedented spending allowance was granted on the back of dire warnings from the networks that energy demand was about to skyrocket, and unless the networks were allowed to spend tens of billions, the poles and wires simply wouldn’t cope.

Unfortunately, the networks did not realise that Electricity generation was changing, and this vast upgrade, built to give a system which could withstand upheavals, missed the revolution indicated by solar and battery technology

Here’s what consumers are paying for: in 2010, the networks began to spend $45 billion, approved by the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), on building and upgrading the poles and wires. This unprecedented spending allowance was granted on the back of dire warnings from the networks that energy demand was about to skyrocket, and unless the networks were allowed to spend tens of billions, the poles and wires simply wouldn’t cope.

It just so happened that this demand spike was predicted to be the most dramatic in NSW and Queensland, the only two states where the networks are government-owned. However, things did not go according to plan. As soon as the networks started spending, energy demand didn’t skyrocket – it did the opposite. In 2010, for the first time in Australia’s history, demand went down, and it’s gone down ever since.

Here’s the rub: the networks had a strong incentive to ignore the naysayers, because the more they built, the more they got paid.

Despite year-on-year reductions in demand, the networks carried on building to match their over-inflated projections, installing Rolls Royce infrastructure that consumers hadn’t asked for, and would never need. Eventually, when the evidence was too pressing to ignore, the networks did rein in some of their spending, but not enough to stop electricity bills going through the roof.

Before the networks even had their spending approved, industry observers and experts were warning them – and the regulator – that their demand projections were way too high, and would lead to unnecessary investment.

“There were signs. Many organisations and individuals – and I was one of them – said their demand forecast was simply too high,” says analyst Bruce Mountain, who’s been advising regulators around the world for almost 25 years.

“But I think also one needs to ask the question: have they profited from an expansion of their capacity? Was this something from which they stood to gain? The answer is obviously yes. They stood to gain very sizeably.”

Here’s the rub: the networks had a strong incentive to ignore the naysayers, because the more they built, the more they got paid. Not only could they charge every dollar of that $45 billion back to consumers through their bills; they could also add on another 10 per cent – their “regulated rate of return” – and charge that back to consumers as well.

This incentive was supercharged in 2006 by state governments: they wrote the rules for the regulator to enforce, thanks to a deal with former prime minister John Howard, who gave them rulemaking authority in exchange for their blessing to replace state-based regulators with one new federal body.

The most egregious overspending on the poles and wires occurred in NSW and Queensland, where the networks are government-owned. This also happens to be where network profits have risen the fastest, via the bills of businesses and households across both states.

For the foreseeable future, consumers will continue to pay for investment they didn’t ask for, and will never need, every time they pay their electricity bills.

Bruce Mountain has conducted detailed analysis of network profits in these two states. According to his calculations, in 2008 – prior to their multi-billion dollar spending spree – the profit they earned on every electricity connection (every house or business connected to the grid) was $180. Today, it’s $500.

“I haven’t seen network charges higher in any other region or country of the world,” says Mountain.

Much of this profit was generated by a neat trick: back in 2010, using a combination of lobbying and legal appeals, the networks secured a 10 per cent interest rate on their cost of borrowing. This was several percentage points higher than they had to pay their lenders, especially in NSW and Queensland, where the networks borrowed at low government interest rates. But no matter what rate the networks actually had to pay, consumers were charged the full 10 per cent.

Calculated on billions of dollars, every percentage point the networks could secure above the actual interest rate they paid equated to hundreds of millions – all of it pure profit, and all of it paid for by consumers through their electricity bills.

This is all perfectly permissible, according to the networks’ peak body, the Energy Networks Association. Every dollar of network spending has been assessed and approved by the Australian Energy Regulator – it’s not the networks’ fault if that decision was too excessive. Besides, if the networks were to be forced to return some of their profits, that would create an unstable – and untenable – investment environment that would end up costing consumers more in the long run.

But even the regulator has conceded the network price increases are “hard to justify”. In its 2011 State of the Energy Market Report, the AER said it was restricted from making “holistic assessments” of how much of the investment was efficient or necessary, and that “this restriction has led to consumers paying more than necessary for a safe and reliable energy supply”

Yes, the networks needed to upgrade their poles, cables, substations and other transmission equipment, but it is the average poor bloody Aussie who cannot afford to buy the solar panels and the storage batteries which can take advantage of Australia’s bountiful sunshine, and who are tied to the networks cables for their electricity.

But readers must turn, reluctantly, from the stark lack of choice imposed upon Australian energy users to the equally stark choices being forced upon us here in Great Britain & Northern Ireland (GB&NI). After the grovelling morons (MPs) in Westminster voted in the Climate Change Act, we in GB&NI have watched as the Climate Change clowns have steered  us towards an Energy collapse; by starving coal power stations of maintenance funding because they do not comply with EU Regs; by vast amounts of subsidy (your taxpayer cash) flooding into the holy ‘Renewables’ cashbag (wind turbines, solar, and by burning wood (Yes, Wood) at Drax Power station): as well as by not building replacement power stations to replace the old nuclear stations as they approach the end of their safe working lives! We also watch the un-dead hands of the greedy thieving culprits as they use the pretence of pushing ‘Climate Change’, and the billions of £ sterling therein, towards enriching themselves at the public expense. For instance Lord Deben, a.k.a. the former MP John Selwyn Gummer is alleged to have enriched his family company by up to £600,000.00 by facilitating contracts for those companies who have made substantial payments to his family company. In speech after speech, the QUANGO which he chairs has pushed the acceptance of battery-powered cars to the point where his Committee is advising the Government to push for all petrol- and diesel-powered cars to be banned by A.D. 2030 rather than A.D. 2040. He makes no mention of the fact that Johnson Matthey, who paid his company nearly £300,000.00, is planning to build a huge vehicle battery plant somewhere in GB&NI.

But nowhere in this huge pile of lying garbage spun out by this same Climate Change Committee is given the slightest hint of the sheer problems which will be unearthed once the demand for charging all these “Carbon-Neutral’ battery powered cars becomes evident. We will need the present number of power stations which give a coherent, stable base load to be increased by a factor of 200%. The reasons for this huge increase in power availability is not only through the need to power the millions of battery charge points to give battery-powered vehicles the stable source needed; but also to also absorb the huge increase in generation load once the ban comes into force whereby all gas-fired boilers will be removed, BY LAW, and replaced with electricity-powered heating systems. This last statement is not envisaged as yet, but as the same Committee is pushing for all new homes to be fitted with electric boilers, (so as not to add to the “Carbon Dioxide” emissions, so denigrated by the Climate and Greenie-brigades: it will not be far behind, as the dreaded “Carbon-Dioxide fuelled Climate Change” is just around the corner. Also not included is the vast expense of installing suitable electrical connections for the aforementioned electric boilers, and the slightly secondary problem of where all these skilled electricians, necessary for the electrical boiler and electric stoves to be fitted: are going to be found, trained, paid and overseen!

Also unforeseen, but would be self-evident, is the total upgrade of the National Grid, together with all the towers, overhead cabling, switchyards, massive transformers and associated switchgear; as the present system is just managing.

The final item, forgotten by all except those, who like me, think things through to the end: is ‘who is gonna’ pay for all these things? The new electrical boilers, the stoves, the switchgear, the towers, the cabling, the skilled staff to install and run the very upgrades, the new power stations: they don’t come cheap. As ever, its you and I, the bloody taxpayers, who will be forced to foot the bill financing this fools’ paradise!