Even AI systems may begin to wonder

The forthcoming Holborn and St Pancras by-election is a grim prospect, an absurd contest, effectively between Green and Labour if current polls are a guide. 

Yet UK political life is absurd to begin with. More government, more laws, more regulations, more complexities nobody can possibly understand and nobody wants to understand anyway. Certainly not elected MPs. Certainly not that Burnham chap. Certainly not that Polanski chap.

It has become the great British mania, government for the sake of government for the sake of more government where the individual becomes lost in a maze of worthless abstractions swirling around the plughole of failure and betrayal.

Take Zack Polanski as an example. His political message for the voters of Holborn and St Pancras will be absurd because absurd is what he does. It's his political style, his act, the things he says which raise cheers from the absurd members of his absurd party all adding to a humongous pile of absurdity.

And Polanski’s pointless determination to make something of the absurdity, to pile one absurdity on another as if the great pile of nonsense somehow becomes more than nonsense. As if believers expect it to morph into a path to a better life for all - almost all - not those unreconstructed cynics who dare to describe Green hymns to a Green Utopia as twaddle.

And it’s fashionable. Good grief it’s fashionable. Great streams of fashionable twaddle, only worth repeating to like-minded folk who weave it into empty deserts of media vacuity. Even AI systems may begin to wonder if their data centre existence is worthwhile after all that learning.

The Green message may be absurd, but is not unfashionable, even for those middle class folk who aren’t quite persuaded by true believers. Not quite keen enough join the party. Not keen enough to offer more than a sympathetic political ear to the placard wavers with their cheerfully maniacal finger-wagging.

And yet the Holborn and St Pancras by-election will be held. Voters will vote. Votes will be counted. The winning candidate will be declared. The show will go on, and on, and on...

Stolen, expired, resold

Ashe Short has an interesting Just the News piece on investigations into U.S.-funded medical aid items stolen in Africa. The whole piece is well worth reading as UK debates about international aid seem to flop around going nowhere.

Stolen, expired, resold: USAID watchdog breaks up Kenyan pharmacy scheme

Reminiscent of Orson Welles' "The Third Man": Every stolen antibiotic or antiretroviral resold through a back-channel pharmacy represents both a taxpayer dollar that bought nothing and a patient who got an expired, mishandled, or counterfeit dose instead of treatment.

The United States Agency for International Development, Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG) has once again stopped the theft of U.S.-funded medical items...

The operation follows others performed by the OIG, which former USAID Inspector General Jonathan Schofield described on Just the News, No Noise last week...

In that interview, Schofield recounted another incident in Africa involving malaria and AIDS medication. He said that “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of commodities” were being shipped every year from the U.S. to Africa, and organized groups began stealing the products.
Dozens of people all around Africa arrested

“But these are criminals, so they weren't worried too much about refrigeration. They weren't worried about expiration dates. They wouldn't tell people how to administer whatever the product was,” Schofield said. “So, people were continuing – could get sick and die.”

A slight degree of contempt

What did members of the political classes think of Makerfield voters when the June by-election result was announced? 

What do they still think of those Makerfield folk who offered their votes to a political stratagem whereby Andrew Burnham would become an MP before ousting Keir Starmer from No.10?

It seems reasonable to assume that there was a degree of contempt for voters among the political classes and their media chums, a degree of contempt which is not difficult to understand. In voting for Burnham, the voters of Makerfield complied with a party political tactic with no significant probability that it would benefit anyone but Burnham and his political cronies.


The other members of the committee, who were all rather elderly people, were a good deal impressed by Mary, and inclined to side with her and against each other, partly, perhaps, because of her youth. The feeling that she controlled them all filled Mary with a sense of power; and she felt that no work can equal in importance, or be so exciting as, the work of making other people do what you want them to do. Indeed, when she had won her point she felt a slight degree of contempt for the people who had yielded to her.

Virginia Woolf - Night and Day (1919)


Suppose we rephrase the above Woolf quote slightly, the change is not dramatic.

The feeling that he controlled them all filled Burnham with a sense of power; and he felt that no work can equal in importance, or be so exciting as, the work of making other people do what you want them to do. Indeed, when he had won his point he felt a slight degree of contempt for the people who had yielded to him.

Cooking With Numbers - Recipe £380

Shimeon Lee has a useful TPA piece on what is called "The Poverty Premium" by the charity Fair by Design and the University of Bristol. 

A closer look at “The Poverty Premium”

A curious piece appeared in the New Statesman last month, claiming that low income households pay hundreds of pounds more for the same essentials as everyone else. The article rests on a longstanding series called “The Poverty Premium” by charity Fair by Design and the University of Bristol, which aims to quantify additional costs faced by lower income households. Their latest estimate puts this figure at £380 a year. The author’s solution? More welfare spending and market interventions in the name of “economic fairness”.

But is any of this true? This edition of a closer look examines how that number has been constructed, finding that much of the premium is either not really an extra cost or has surprisingly little to do with poverty.

For anyone paying attention, the conclusion holds no surprises whatever, but the whole piece is well worth reading as it raises the familiar question of concocted numbers used to push a political agenda. 

It's almost fascinating to see numbers being herded like sheep towards the Fabian pen. Straightforward lying would be more honest.

Conclusion

Unsurprisingly, the report calls for more welfare and subsidies, alongside micromanaging supermarket prices and even expanding 20 mph zones. These poorly designed policies are bad enough, but what is worse is that they are based on evidence that not just fails to stand up to scrutiny but points in the complete opposite direction from reality.

Freedom and crime are linked as indivisibly as...

A further development to the recent bootlicker post is the curiously symbiotic relationship between governments and crime. 

For example, here are two quotes about the endemic nature of crime, one from nineteenth century philosopher Herbert Spencer, one from twentieth century Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

Governments supposedly aim to protect us from crime, but they also invent reams of new crimes for reasons Spencer understood 175 years ago.

Let men learn that a legislature is not "our God upon earth," though, by the authority they ascribe to it and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is, at the best, borrowed.

Nay, indeed, have we not seen that government is essentially immoral? Is it not the offspring of evil, bearing about it all the marks of its parentage? Does it not exist because crime exists? Is it not strong, or, as we say, despotic, when crime is great? Is there not more liberty—that is, less government—as crime diminishes? And must not government cease when crime ceases, for very lack of objects on which to perform its function?

Herbert Spencer - The Right To Ignore The State (1851)


Governments are not viscerally opposed to crime, they prefer moral boundaries to be blurred and as Spencer suggested, endemic crime gives them a permanent reason for being there.

Yevgeny Zamyatin took this further in his dystopian novel WE, where he links reduced crime to reduced freedom, offering any governing class the opportunity to invent crimes forever in pursuit of totalitarian rule. This is the Fabian approach of course, step by step with bootlickers supporting each step.


Freedom and crime are linked as indivisibly as... well, as the motion of the aero and its speed: when its speed equals zero, it does not move; when man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

Yevgeny Zamyatin - WE (1921)

Zack must have a solution for this

An interesting Blackout News report on a major unsolved problem for anyone inclined to pretend that old wind turbine blades can be recycled. They can't - that's the problem. 

As far as we can tell from their speeches and legislation, the keenest minds in European governments have been unaware of this intractable problem for a long time, unlike less enlightened folk who have known about it for years. This tells us something, but it's merely a repeat, something we already know.


Recycling of old rotor blades unsolved: Up to 75,000 tons of GRP waste per year

Berlin – In Germany, the disposal problem of old rotor blades is growing because more and more wind turbines from the expansion years after 2000 are reaching the end of their life. because large parts of the old stock were not designed for a high-quality material cycle. The German government expects 326,000 to 430,000 tonnes of waste from pure GRP sheets by 2040. In individual years, up to 75,000 tons of GRP waste can be generated. In addition, there are up to 212,000 tons of sheets with GRP and CFRP components. These older composite components in particular can only be recycled at great expense.


The whole piece is well worth reading, partly because it's interesting and partly because we may as well assume that yet another subsidy is probably looming over the sustainability horizon, a recycling subsidy. 

The subsidy suspicion arises quite naturally because there are possible ways to recycle, or at least dispose of blades currently reaching the end of their useful lives. Not that their lives have been useful in any meaningful sense beyond political virtue-signalling, but that's another issue.

Crushing and incineration are no substitute for a material cycle

Mechanical processes crush old leaves into flakes, granules or powder. However, the original fibres are not retained in a high-quality form. The cement industry can use crushed material as fuel and mineral substitute for raw materials. Although this reduces the amount to be disposed of, it does not produce new equivalent glass fibers. In Germany, simple landfilling is also largely ruled out, which is why efficient recycling routes are absolutely necessary.

A study by the University of Strathclyde examines a pilot plant with 1,000 kilograms of rotor blade material per day and 365,000 kilograms per year. This results in around 247,100 kilograms of recycled glass fibres per year. The gross costs on a pilot scale are around €5.30 per kilogram of recycled glass fibre. New glass fibers, on the other hand, are estimated by the study at the equivalent of around €1.98 per kilogram. This means that the recovered optical fiber costs more than two and a half times as much as new material in pilot operation. The CO₂ balance is also worse at first: Recycled glass fiber causes 2.24 kilograms of CO₂ per kilogram, while new glass fiber causes 1.90 kilograms of CO₂ per kilogram.

Those bootlicking apologists for trivial interventions

Towards the end of August, Christopher Snowdon wrote a most interesting Critic piece on the erosion of small freedoms and the corresponding accumulation of small annoyances. 

This is one of the problems of course, those small annoyances accumulate. Over time they become a drag on daily life until we adapt, while knowing we shouldn't have to adapt to preposterous official intrusions.   

In defence of small freedoms

Bootlicking apologists should stop defending government intervention on the grounds of its supposed triviality

As laws become more preposterous and governments intrude ever further into the private lives of individuals, you might expect the public to revolt. Instead, the growing state has given rise to a strange breed of bootlicking gimps who go out of their way to bat for the government.

The journalist Tom Harwood was in Washington D.C. this week and tweeted a video of himself unscrewing the cap from a bottle of Coke with the caption “Sweet land of liberty”. The point was that he was able to fully remove the plastic cap without violently twisting and tugging its tether — a freedom that has been denied to residents of the EU since 2024 thanks to Article 6 of the Single-Use Plastics Directive.

At this point, Snowdon brings in the bootlickers who defend each little pointless burden as if nothing much is being demanded of us. We should suck it up is their airy message, telling us we're making a fuss about nothing. 

The whole piece is well worth reading because as we know too well, another example could pop up tomorrow.

But minor inconveniences soon add up. I wrote last week about the government’s plan to put vape products behind shutters in shops. The Impact Assessment rather conservatively assumes that this will lead to transaction times taking two seconds longer. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you add it all up it amounts to a cost of £43 million on retailers. It has been estimated that Europeans waste a total of 575 million hours per year clicking on cookie consent buttons which, when monetised, amounts to €14.3 billion. Those who defend GDPR don’t seem to mind this, although they suddenly find that their time is incredibly precious when the non-EU queue is longer than the EU queue at passport control. It then becomes the turn of the eurosceptics to say “It’s only a queue, mate! What’s the big deal? You don’t mind queuing at the supermarket, do you?”