Utopia, you are standing in it!

My Insights #2 this week:

Events have rather overtaken last week’s blackout. The outage on the evening of 9 August left 35,000 households in the dark for up to two hours on the coldest night of the year.

This week we published a paper on the blackout by Carl Hansen, the former Chief Executive of the Electricity Authority from 2010 to 2018.

Hansen’s paper is full of insights. He steps through the blackout to identify the crucial moment which led to the outage. He explains how the electricity system deals with shortages. And he shows who is responsible for what, when outages occur.

Hansen’s main message is that officials at the Electricity Authority must be allowed to do their job and investigate the outage. The facts must be established before any response from the government.

The blackout was a stern reminder of electricity’s iron law: the lights must stay on.

Introduction

On 15 August 2021, Prime Minister Boris Johnson requested that the Speaker recall the House of Commons from its summer recess early so that MPs could hold an emergency debate over the fallout of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which the Taliban took as an opportunity to recapture Kabul and to install themselves as the de facto government once more.[1]The House of Commons would originally have reconvened on 6 September under its regular sitting calendar but met instead on 18 August.[2] The Lords Speaker also recalled the House of Lords for the same day. The British House of Commons and House of Lords could meet to discuss the British response and efforts to evacuate their diplomatic personnel and refugees because the two houses had merely adjourned for their regular summer recess. The British House of Commons has cut short its adjournments in such a manner…

The Signs Pointing to a Snap Election, June to August 2021

Since at least mid-June, the media had treated an early election as a fait accompli, and politicians and political parties began acting as if the writ had already begun by early July. On 15 June, several MPs in the House of Commons delivered their “Farewell Speeches”, including Jack Harris (New Democratic Member for St. John’s East), Simon Marcil (Blocist Member for Mirabel), and Kate Young (Liberal Member for London West).[1]The very same day, Elections Canada announced that it could administer a general election during the pandemic without the statutory amendments contemplated by Parliament which ultimately died on the Order Paper on 15 August.[2]On 22 June, Prime Minister Trudeau denounced the 43^rd Parliament for its “obstructionism and toxicity,” not the sort of thing that one would say in advance of a…

In the end, of course, the bottom line of yesterday’s Reserve Bank announcement was unsurprising and perhaps inevitable – action deferred on account of Covid. It wasn’t as if they were on some statutory schedule, so they could easily have postponed the decision for a couple of weeks, but in the scheme of things the difference between that and waiting for the next scheduled review (6 October) isn’t great. It is clear from the Bank’s forecast numbers they had not been minded to raise the OCR by 50 basis points this time, so if need be they can always catch up by acting a bit more firmly in October.

There was even something to praise. The Bank had revamped the look of the document and – bad-wig new logo aside – it was a definite improvement, even if it is hard to be sure what (if anything) the front cover…

Elite replacement

A direct consequence of the invasion was the almost total elimination of the old English aristocracy and the loss of English control over the Catholic Church in England. William systematically dispossessed English landowners and conferred their property on his continental followers. The Domesday Book meticulously documents the impact of this colossal programme of expropriation, revealing that by 1086 only about 5 percent of land in England south of the Tees was left in English hands. Even this tiny residue was further diminished in the decades that followed, the elimination of native landholding being most complete in southern parts of the country.

Natives were also removed from high governmental and ecclesiastical office. After 1075 all earldoms were held by Normans, and Englishmen were only occasionally appointed as sheriffs. Likewise in the Church, senior English office-holders were either expelled from their positions or kept in place for their lifetimes and…

Scholars generally concur, however, in relating an evolutionary process to the institutions and principles eventualy forming and constituting the empire, describing it as a gradual assumption of the imperial title and role of the emperor and the empire itself over the lands under its authority.

Let us delve deeper into the creation of the empire. First some background information leading to the rule of Charlemagne.

From the time of Roman Emperor Constantine I (r. 306–337), the Roman emperors had, with very few exceptions, taken on a role as promoters and defenders of Christianity. The reign of Constantine established a precedent for the position of the Christian emperor in the Church.

Roman Emperors considered themselves responsible to the gods for the spiritual health of their subjects, and after Constantine and his conversation to Christianity, the Emperors believed they had a duty to help the Church define and maintain orthodoxy. The emperor’s…

‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

I read this when I was 16 in 1977. The Soviet Union still existed, Eastern Europe was ruled by communist dictatorships and England was visibly falling to pieces. The external situation was bad enough but being a teenager and new to this kind of adult literature, it scared the bejesus out of me, in fact it helped introduce me to what books could really do, their power to change your entire view of life.

Quite clearly Nineteen Eighty-Four is the summary towards which all of Orwell’s writings were heading. It brings together numerous themes, ideas and obsessions which thread through all his previous work:

• The theme of political lying, of the power of political propaganda if applied with ruthless consistency to utterly distort ‘the truth’ – something which Orwell had seen…

Summary

This is a very mixed bag of a book. The first quarter or so is a thrilling global overview of the main trends and developments in industrial capitalism during the period 1875 to 1914, containing a vast array of fascinating and often thrilling facts and figures. But then it mutates into a series of long, turgid, repetitive, portentous, banal and ultimately uninformative chapters about social change, the arts, sciences, social sciences and so on, which are dreadful.

And underlying it all is Hobsbawm’s unconcealed contempt for the nineteenth century ‘bourgeoisie’ and their ‘bourgeois society’, terms he uses so freely and with so little precision that they eventually degenerate into just being terms of abuse.

And in his goal of insulting the 19th century ‘bourgeoisie’ as much as possible, Hobsbawm glosses over a huge range of crucial differences – between nations and regions, between political and cultural and religious traditions…

When it comes to the noise that drives neighbours nuts, wind power outfits get away with blue murder. And there’s a reason for that.

Over the years, hundreds of our posts have covered the topic of the adverse health effects caused by turbine generated incessant low-frequency noise and infrasound; the woefully inadequate, indeed, utterly irrelevant noise standards written by the wind industry; and the institutional corruption that:

a) allowed those standards to become the “benchmarks” in the first place; and

b) witnesses public authorities, with a responsibility to protect public health, not only sitting on their hands, but barracking in favour of the wind industry, at the expense of the very people these planning and public health agencies and authorities are paid handsomely to protect.

In this post from February 2015 – Three Decades of Wind Industry Deception – STT set out a chronology of what the wind industry and…

Another day, another rural community revolts against industrial wind power. This time it’s thousands of Indian villagers fighting back to prevent the destruction of their precious forests and fertile farmlands.

In the absence of massive subsidies, the wind industry would pose no threat, to anyone, anywhere. But, for as long as governments dole out taxpayer and power consumers’ money in the form of endless subsidies, mandates and targets, wind power outfits will continue to ride roughshod over hard-working farmers and their families.

While the charge NIMBY is often levelled by wind industry rent-seekers at those protesting against the prospect of having 260m high monsters speared into their backyards, in STT’s view there is no place for industrial wind turbines, anywhere, ever. Our argument starts with the unassailable fact that weather-dependent wind power simply cannot deliver meaningful electricity on demand; never has, never will. Accordingly, wind power is, and will always…