£10 for Lavazza Rossa? What The Actual Fuh?

 

£10 for a twin-pack of Lavazza Rossa? It was £6 (on a Nectar offer, I grant) in the summer. A couple of years ago, it was less than that.

Has there been a coffee drought? 

Google says so. Brazil was hit by a drought this summer and production was down. Since coffee is the second-most important substance in the world (after lithium for all those iPhone batteries) for the media classes, you'd think this would have been on the front pages of every UK newspaper. Woe is us, for our Starbucks will cost far, far more. But no, because the UK media are obsessed with Westminster gossip. 

Never mind. The rumour is that the olive harvest was good this year, so we may not be paying £12+ for ordinary virgin oil, like we are at the moment.

None of this would have happened if we were still in the EU. We would have had a sunny summer as well. In fact, it would have been like this...

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(Richard Burton was the original and greatest. I saw him in it when I was a nipper, and it deserved every day of its long run.)

Aspects of Immigration: Canada

I am going to let this one speak for itself.

   

Of course, nothing like this happens in the UK. There are no universities which depend for their continued liquidity on the colossal fees from foreign students, and there's no suggestion that those students are awarded degrees about one grade up from what they deserve, because the examiners are aware of the realities of academic economics. Oh. Wait. There are. In fact, find one that doesn't.

The Coming Starmer / Labour Decade

Everyone who didn't vote for him, and a few who did, are now piling in on Sir Kier Starmer. At any moment, they hope, another revelation about who paid for his underwear will remove him from office. Just like the Left did when Thatcher got in.

Nope.

Ain't gonna happen. (Also just what happened when Thatcher got in.)

He's here for the next ten years, because the Conservatives will not be electable in 2029, and will not be able to assemble a coalition government.

(Also just like the 1980's, but in reverse.)

Good times (1990-2008) elect weak leaders; weak leaders make bad times (2008 - 2034); bad times elect strong leaders; strong leaders make good times.

We are now at Peak Weak. First Boris Johnson - who himself admitted that it was ridiculous he was Prime Minister - and now Sir Kier Starmer and his cabinet. Rishi Sunak wasn't as bad as either of those, but he wasn't going to bring good times either.

So get ready for ten years of posturing, distracting, and oblivious legislation and social policy.

Labour has two jobs.

The first is to reduce the cost of the NHS to the taxpayer by at least a half, while improving Maternity, Neo-natal and A&E services.

The second is to stop and reverse illegal immigration.

I hope they do one or both.

Because I don't want to see the state of this country if they can't do either.

You won't either.

And you need to pray that competent people choose to go into politics in the next ten years, or you will just have more weak leaders.

How The Far Left Creates The “Far Right”

It’s Newton’s Third Law: a batshit-crazy policy will create a batshit-crazy response. More formally, the intensity of the reaction to a new policy will be in proportion to the extent it varies from commonly-held opinion (if there is one) multiplied by its probability of being turned into law and / or institutional policy.

Instruct medical staff to ask middle-aged men if they are pregnant, and have middle-aged men walk out in mind-blown astonishment.

Push for the adoption of an expensive, noisy and inefficient technology (heat pumps, electric cars) on ideological grounds, you will get a reaction pointing out that it is expensive, noisy and inefficient and your policy is dumb.

Continue to pile on privileges to one group of people, and some of the other groups are going to bear a huge grudge against the over-privileged.

Tell people that a woman can have a beard and a p***s, and a lady writer with more money than Croesus will ridicule the idea on Twitter.

In ordinary circumstances, this would be called “healthy pushback” or “engaged public debate”. But to the Far Left, there can be no debate, since its policies are perfect. Resistance is pure evil.

The “Far Right” only exists to the extent there is a “Far Left” pushing extreme policies into legislation and institutional practice. The Far Left cannot get rid of the Far Right, so it must silence it. Freedom of speech is the freedom to express one’s exact degree of support and admiration for the policy. Anything else is hate, terrorism, Far Right extremism.

Why We Take “Government Advice” - But Shouldn’t

I swear if I read the phrase “according to experts” I will write a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph suggesting that they ban the phrase, and substitute instead the name, rank, recent relevant publications, and commercial or State affiliations of the “expert”. Something like

Dr Misha Andry (54), Lecturer in Public Health at the University of Carlisle, a subscriber to the Guardian, a member of Greenpeace and of the National Trust, whose most recent publications have been on the transmission of sexual diseases in gerbils.

This sort of thing should be willingly provided by the “expert” and is often available on WIkipedia or LinkedIn.

Okay. Rant over.

There is a serious side to this. The concept of expertise was philosophicalised (which is now a word, meaning, made the subject of a philosophical investigation or enquiry) by Hubert Dreyfus in a series of essays, in which he laid out a five-level characterisation of skilfulness at a task. It has since been abused beyond belief by HR departments and Training Consultants.

Dreyfus was arguing that the so-called “expert systems” (the ‘computers will replace knowledge workers’ hype of the time) could never replicate the actual decision-making of human experts, becuase truly expert decision-making was highly contextual, used implicit knowledge (in the sense of Polyani’s book with the same title), and could not be distilled into rules.

As a description of how experienced, knowledgeable, organisationally-senior doctors made decisions, he was right. Where he was wrong was assuming that they made better decisions because of it. What little research there is suggests that younger doctors, who are nearer to their up-to-date training, make better decisions than more experienced doctors who have not kept up with the research.

He was, I suspect, over-impressed, as many were at the time, by the confidence of senior medical people. Dreyfus formulated his ideas in the late 1970’s (published in 1980), since when public expectations have risen to the point where today, too many of us have too many examples of friends and colleagues being mis-diagnosed, ignored, and given the wrong treatments and drugs. The NHS has become notorious for its hounding of whistleblowers, and also spending millions on NDAs. We can assume that, if there ever was a time when Consultants were diagnostic giants striding the wards, it is well past.

So the “implicit expertise” Dreyfus described is a myth, but the manner of making decisions he describes as “expert” is surely still with us. I would simply remove “Expert”, with its unavoidable overtones of superior diagnostic performance, from the Dreyfus classification, and add a note to the “Proficient” description that, with time, much of the decision-making and task performance will become more nuanced, seem to be more case-by-case, and almost unconscious. In addition, however, those people have about the same success rate (and its variation over time) as people who make their decisions more consciously.

Dreyfus’ point about limits to the development of AI / Expert Systems still stands. What does not stand is his implict praise for the “Expert” way of practicing.

The lesson of the last twenty or so years, in every profession from banking to public health, is that experts are fallible, and sometimes more-than-fallible. The usual solution is to introduce regulatory guidelines, which will amongst other things, require decisions to be made in a transparent, systematic way that may in addition incorporate compliance with purely political considerations, such as equality legislation. In addition, the lawyers will prefer some kind of documentary proof that these regulatory requirements were followed. This, of course, imposes a bureaucratic overhead of work on the productive staff.

In a technically and legally complex economy, no one person can ever become well-informed enough to take responsibility for all of their decisions. Just as we cannot test every egg for salmonella (nor could we afford the equipment), we cannot understand every tax law, nor everything to do with the working of our cars, let alone anything to do with medical treatment. We have to be able to “take someone’s word for it” and not then become liable for doing so - as long as it is the right kind of person. The principle we need is that competently following “expert advice” absolves one from liability if something goes wrong as the result of the competent application of that advice.

The law define who the “experts” are, whose word we may take on trust. For cars, that is a manufacturer-certified mechanic. For food, it is a licensed retailer. For medical purposes, a GP or Consultant. Within a company, it will be one’s manager, as within the Armed Forces it is one’s superior officer. These people do not absolve one of liability because they are right, but because the law or institutional practice says they do.

On this principle, “Government advice” is not taken because it is right, but because being able to prove that one followed it competently is an absolute defence.

It would be nice if “government advice” was given because it was right, or at least based on the best available evidence and thinking, but of course it is almost invariably wrong. It must be politically acceptable, within the abilities and pockets of most of the population, does not commit Government to spending more money, and is seen to be coming from the “right” sources, which will be members of the Establishment, or, and this is where the trouble starts, “experts” whom the Civil Service are prepared to listen to. The resulting compromises and ideological influences, as well as industry and single-issue group lobbying, almost guarantee bad decisions.

Who should the Government be listening to? One would think, to the people who know most about the issue, who have studied its past and how other countries have dealt with it. Who have recently conducted research about it, and whose papers are cited with respect by other researchers. And whose computer models produce the same answer twice in a row given the same inputs (rather than professors at Imperial College). The “experts”. Who can be cited by Ministers, who are therefore absolved from responsibility. Because they followed the “experts”.

Here’s the Catch-22. If there were a small range of solutions to an problem, that could be packaged up and made available to the public at an affordable price, which would happen if this issue recurred frequently and affected a large number of people, then… well, the private sector would be selling those solutions already and the Government would not need to get involved.

The Government gets involved when the issue is new, infrequently occurring, has a horrendous cost, and there is limited experience and research to draw on. This will mean that there are many competing theories about the causes and remedies, and no way to decide quickly between them. Advice in these cases will require significant technical understanding to evaluate. This is what the Chief Medical and Scientific Officers (and their staffs) were set up to do, but the world has become far too complicated for that to work. And often in these cases, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Sadly, in these circumstances, what Governments need is certainty. Even if it comes from people who have produced appallingly inaccurate forecasts before, and whose social and political agendas are barely hidden under their shirts.

And this is how activists capture Government. Not by attacking Whitehall and Westminster with guns and ammunition, but with policy papers, advice, “research” by fellow-travelling academics, and PR campaigns, that are as certain as they are false, and passionate as they are obsessive.

Hence the need to identify the anonymous “experts” who make eye-catching claims with immediate political relevance.

Which is where we came in.

Vote Early, Vote Often

And don't vote for anyone who supported Lockdown.

Complexity Is Stifling Growth

It’s not the economically inactive that puts growth at risk. It’s having an economy with jobs that are skewed against the distribution of skills in the population.

The following argument is sketchy, and it uses IQ as a crude indicator of skill levels. Key points: population average is 100 points, standard deviation is 15 points, and inter-test variation is 5. Lots of other personal qualities affect someone’s life-chances, as do the circumstances of their upbringing. People with high IQ’s can be a**holes or decent people, as can people with lower IQ’s. Differences of 3 or 4 points are meaningless, differences of 10 or more are real. The sweet spot for a business manager is around 115 (+/- 5). As a very rough guide, under 85 has a hard time fitting into the economy, and over 120 starts to have a hard time fitting into the social world. Moral character is entirely independent of IQ. Okay?

15% of the UK population 16-64 who are economically active (total 32m) has an IQ of 85 or less, which means there are a very small number of jobs in an industrial / knowledge-work economy they can do. That’s 4.8m people who aren’t quite up to the job requirements, training or not.

No matter how good the economy, there’s always what the economists call frictional unemployment due to firms moving, going broke, having hiring freezes and other such stuff. That rate varies with the health of the economy: it’s around 1m now. Also there are some jobs for people under 85, but I’m going to pull a number of 1.5m from the air.

This should mean we unemployment of around 4.8m + 1m - 1.5m = 4.3m. (1)

Instead it is around 1.5m. Which means the economy has something like 2.8m jobs being done by people who aren’t quite up to it, or even are a long way off being up to it. That’s slightly over one in eleven workers, and it will be spread across the ability levels and personal temperaments.

That’s where the feeling you’re talking to someone who doesn’t quite catch on to whatever it is they should be catching on to.

So this economy is doing a fabulous job of employing people. It has generated so many jobs that employers have to hire down to a non-trivial extent.

But, we have grown the complexity of the products, services, processes, laws, supply chains, finance, and so on, past the point where we have enough people to handle that much complexity.

So the real challenge for the managers and law-makers of the future is to simplify everything so that regular people can handle it.

And to do so without embedding the complexity in computer systems that can be hacked or disabled, and which will be un-maintainable by regular people.

You’re welcome.



(1) Sure we could adapt the figures for immigration, but it would not make a big difference. The 3m immigrants from the EU are skewed to the right, but there are 4m from elsewhere who aren’t.

Worklessness Risks Growth

In their 12th June edition, the Telegraph ran an article with the headline “Worklessness risks growth after hitting 13-year high”. The writer, Tim Wallace quoted Tony Wallace of the Institute of Employment Studies, and Alexandra Hall-Chen of the Institute of Directors, as saying that this was a Serious Issue the like of which had never been faced by the UK economy since, well, the last time.

Wallace should have told them, and the ONS (whose skills at data collection I don’t question, but who are no better than anyone else at providing interpretation and context), to hop on a bus.

For one thing, comparisons with previous highs some random period in the past are meaningless: there’s always a time when it was a) this bad, b) worse, c) better. Choose your year. I’ll choose 1995, because no-one was complaining about worklessness then.

Next, always check that the quantity they are talking about is what you think it is. “Workless” in this article means “economically inactive according to the ONS Labour Force Survey”. Its age range is 16-64.

Wait. 16? Aren’t they still at school? Indeed, isn’t half the population between 16 and 21 at school, college or university? Yep. Then, according to you and me, they aren’t “economically inactive” - they are doing what the economy needs them to do. Guess how many students there are in 9.5m “workless”? 2.65 million. So really, there are only 6.84m “really workless” people. In 1995, there were 7.16m “really workless” people.

In 1995, 2.87m people were looking after their family and home - which is work whenever I do it, so let’s correct for that as well. In 2024, that was 1.73m, so that in 2024 there were 5.11m “really workless” people and in 1995 there were 4.29 “really workless” people. The difference is a combination of long-term sick and “other”, as advertised by the press.

However… in 1995 there were 25.14m people employed, 2.47m unemployed, and 4.29m really workless. In 2024 there were 32.9m people employed (!), 1.42m unemployed, and 5.11 really workless. The number of 16-64 year olds went up by 16%, the number employed went up by 25% (!), the number unemployed went down in absolute terms, and the number of really workless went up by 19%.

So this economy, compared to the heady days of 1995, is employing 7.7m more people, has reduced unemployment, supports more students, has more women out at work, and someone thinks that 0.8m people being long-term sick is going to hold it back? I don’t think so. It’s 2% of the working population, which assuming they all worked and contributed average GDP / head, would be an increase in GDP that could be wiped out by one lousy decision in the Treasury or the City.

Vote For Someone Who Didn’t Vote For Lockdown

July 4th.

Isn’t that a holiday in the USA?

It’s also a General Election here.

My MP will get returned because they have a majority as large as the population of Sweden, and under electoral law this constituency must return the Labour candidate.

So I’ve always been able to vote for whoever in the secure knowledge that it will make absolutely no difference at all.

But this time, I will append a silent protest.

I will not vote for anyone who voted for lockdown in March 2020.

All of them must lose their seats. It’s the only thing politicians understand.

Digging To China

China. Economic powerhouse? Future super-power? Communist nightmare? Land of glittering skyscrapers? There are a handful of channels about China, of which I’ve long liked this one. The place is a dysfunctional mess that almost makes the UK look well-organised… almost. This channel provides a good look at a country with about 15% of the world’s population.

But Now I Feel That Our Politicians Are Actually Freaking Clueless

I have known times when politicians have been out of touch, or have failed to read the electorate. I have known times when they have proposed policies that belonged to a world that had passed already. Even during those times, I had the feeling that they knew what was happening in the world, what were the important issues, and that they shared, broadly, the same hopes, fears and dreams as the rest of us.

Same for journalists, civil servants, local government officials, and to a slightly lesser extent, academics and the managers of State or quasi-State organisations.

But now I feel that our politicians are actually freaking clueless: they do not understand what is happening in the world, they can’t read the electorate, they are focussed on trivial issues to distract themselves and us, and most of all, that they do not share our hopes, fears and dreams. Instead, the politicians, and a significant proportion of civil servants, local government officials, academics and the managers of State or quasi-State organisations, have completely different priorities, leading them to propose policies that make our lives more difficult, and worse than that, think that we should not have the hopes, fears and dreams that we do have.

Most of them were around in 2020-2022. The era of the Coronavirus Act, and the restrictions imposed under a dubious interpretation of powers granted by the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, was the most shameful period in the history of UK politics, journalism, academia and public administration, which fell over themselves to outdo each other in their fealty to the Church of the One True Virus, its prophet on Earth, Anthony Fauci, and his Bishop in the UK, Matt Hancock.

Events proved that none of those prophets, nor any of their followers, had the slightest clue what they were doing or talking about. They were panicked and bullied by the press - who wanted to Get Boris - and their own advisors, who had delusions of competence and held us in contempt. None of them had the gumption to ask: if this is so deadly, how come anyone was left alive on those cruise ships?. It’s a simple, common-sense question, and nobody asked it.

Most of them are still in one post or another. But now they know they aren’t up to the task of sorting out the cultural, economic and political mess that is post-Brexit UK. So they are in denial, and sling distractions in the political air like so much chaff.

Hypergamy aka The Servant Takes The Money…

The concept of hypergamy originates in India: the word was introduced in a nineteenth-century English translation of Indian law. It referred to marriages where the partners did not come from the same caste, and hence (since the caste system is linear) one had a higher caste than the other, and the other had a lower caste than the one. The concept made sense because the caste system was codified and widely understood in Indian society.

That the translators had to invent a word suggests that there wasn’t already one in English, and so the behaviour had not been identified as a thing-in-itself. Possibly because there wasn’t a defined social hierarchy in English society at the time. This doesn’t mean that some groups of people didn’t think they were better than other groups of people, it means the law or some other institution didn’t codify and enforce those judgements.

Applying the idea of hypergamy without referring to an established social hierarchy is a tricky bit of concept-stretching. There’s a temptation to define it in terms of the economist’s generalised “value”, which might include anything, and which, crucially, depends on each person’s evaluation of whatever it is that carries the “value” - money, status, kindness, influence, social skills and so on. Two people may agree on the facts, on the things to be valued, but assign different values to each of the things. For example, social skills that are valuable to one person, are useless to another.

This makes arguments using the concept of hypergamy tricky. One partner in a relationship may think of it as having an equal flow of value, and hence assortive, while the other sees a consistent net transfer of value from them, and hence sees their partner as hypergamous. At this point, the concept ceases to be useful, because it has dissolves into unresolvable disputes over evaluations, rather than facts. Transfers of “generalised value” are not matters of public fact: the what of the transfer is, but the value each person places on it is not.

So to define hypergamy, we need a bunch of resources that can be publicly observed and measured (in some equally public) way. Typically this would include wealth, income, social standing, political influence, and similar. Secretaries marrying bosses and nurses marrying doctors used to be the romantic staple. This can’t include everything, for a reason we will see shortly.

A question is whether the consistent net transfer of hypergamic resources from A to B, creates an obligation on B to balance it by doing things outside the hypergamy-criteria, that A finds valuable on a personal level. For instance, a man with money, reputation and social standing may have a partner who provides a sunny attitude, support, loyalty and a splendid cooked breakfast. That’s what’s been missing from his life, and that’s the balancing personal value she provides.

Answers can be argued in all directions. We might say that the institution of marriage puts men under an obligation to provide a net flow of resources without thought of “reward”: ask not what your wife can do for you, but what you can do for your wife. We might say she was being a free-loading ingrate if she didn’t provide a balancing personal return. We might say that relationships are not supposed to be zero-sum transfers of resources and favours, but opportunities for each partner to show their love by selfless sacrifice to the needs of the other. And other such sophistries to support our chosen side of the argument. This is a dead end.

The attitude of the partners is important. If she chooses to be a sourpuss to demonstrate that she damn well feels no hypergamy-induced obligations, that’s her decision. She might have chosen to be graceful instead. If A is domineering because “it’s his money”, that’s also his choice: he might have chosen to be gracefully generous instead.

As I understand Dr Orion Taraband’s discussion of hypergamy, his claim is that a) hypergamy is a feature of female nature (and indeed “female nature” may shape the list of hypergamic resources), b) the net transfer of hypergamic resources from him to her effectively makes her a servant (because in all societies, the servant takes the money), and c) women don’t like being in that position, so they turn into sourpusses. Unless they decide to be graceful, and since Dr Taraban practices in the San Francisco Bay Area, he doesn’t see much of that.

There is no causal link between being a (hypergamic) “servant” and being a sourpuss. It’s an understandable consequence, but it’s not inevitable. It shows us that the key question to ask about a possible partner is: will this person turn into a sourpuss if she thinks she’s being paid? To see that question is to see that the real questions is simply: will this person turn into a sourpuss given the way I think I’m going to be behaving in this relationship?, because my behaviour is a factor as well. Some of you can do relationships, and some of us can’t.

The moral of this tale is that men and women need to know what a good partner looks like, and whether they are one themselves. Men need to understand that she’s a good partner because she had (by today’s standards) an exceptional father and mother, and if he doesn’t match up to Dad, she’s going to get upset and leave, or stay and turn into a sourpuss. Women need to understand that he’s a good partner because he had (by today’s standards) an exceptional father and mother, and if she doesn’t match up to Mom, she’s going to feel very out-of-place around him, and will get upset and leave, or stay and turn into a sourpuss.

I can’t stress this last point enough. Men who want “good women” must be “good men” themselves, and women who want “good men” must be “good women” themselves. How likely is this in a society in which forty per cent of sixteen year-olds are not living with both their biological parents?

A large proportion of the population simply has no idea what a “good partner” looks like, or how a “good partnership” works. They never see it.

A lot of people make lousy choices of partner: always have, always will. If they didn’t have hypergamic criteria to help them make those lousy choices, they would invent others. If they didn’t make lousy choices, around half the population would wind up single and childless. That’s what is starting to happen now, but not because people are making better choices or preferring to go without. It’s because they can’t find a hypergamically-acceptable partner who makes them think a bad choice might be a good idea.

The Lockdown Policy Test

I propose the Lockdown Policy Test. A policy supported or promoted by anyone who also supported lockdowns, masks, social distancing, the Rule of Six, or other Covid measures, is most likely to be as economically damaging, and socially disastrous as any of the Covid measures. After all, if they were dumb enough, or weak-minded enough, to fall for the obvious stupidity of Covid policies, they will probably fall for other dumb policies as well.

Since the House of Commons, the Civil Service and Local Government is still almost entirely populated with the people who voted for and imposed the Coronavirus Act, and the media is still populated by journalists who went along to get along, and the Universities are still full of academics who stayed silent rather than risk losing their grants…

…we can dismiss just about any policy or issue that any of them are pushing, from the so-called “climate emergency” to sending illegals immigrants to Rwanda, and from Diversity and Inclusion to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, electric cars, zero-carbon, and yadda yadda yadda.

Judge the quality of a policy by the quality of the people, regimes, and societies that adopt it.

Because now and for the next ten years, we will have a test to judge the quality of the people: did they go along with the Lockdown measures?

People Who Need To Feel... Anything

There are two views of the Good Life.

The first is that a good life is full of good works: what matters are the kind, useful, constructive, healing, things we do.

The second is that a good life is full of feelings and relationships, and it does not matter what those feelings and relationships are: what matters is to feel and relate intensely.

It's binary: your temperament is one or the other.

You may, however, believe one, while living the other. Believing that life is for the feeling, but living sensibly, is very common amongst former drunks, junkies, coke-heads, divorcees, and the like, not all of whom enjoyed the ups and downs of their chaos. Chaos is not emotion. You can have emotions and still have a clean and neat kitchen. People who live for feelings often do good works, but for them it's a by-product not a goal.

The people who live for feelings don't just want rainbows and candy-floss. Emotions need to be sweet and sour. Anger, disappointment, frustration, grudges, revenge, contempt, resentment, are just as good.

Football fans are like this. They would like their team to win, but what they really don't want is a nil-nil draw after ninety minutes of faultless defensive play on both sides. They want the roller-coaster. It's the same as gambling: losses work the emotions as much as wins.

Any emotion is better than no emotion. Any relationship is better than no relationship.

This is only dysfunctional from the point of view of Stoicism, Protestantism, and other such fun-sucking approaches to life, many of which on closer examination turn out to be associated with aristocracy and established wealth. In many societies, vigorous, engaged, volatile, emotion-based action and reaction is prized and honoured by the masses, and is thus highly functional, providing the emotional roller-coaster ride that makes living, well, Life.

Therapists who emphasise having "good" emotions and "good" relationships , or at least removing the bad stuff, dumping the users, losers and abusers, are in fact closet Good Works people. Emotions and relationships can only be "good" and "bad" relative to some goal or purpose. Whereas to the emotion-centric emotions and relationships have intrinsic value for good or ill.

Understand that "sour" emotions are as satisfying, if not more so, than "sweet" emotions, and many puzzling things become clear. Especially why people stay in so-called "dysfunctional" relationships, or take stupid risks, or believe daft things: it's all about the emotions. Take away those and their lives become empty, no matter what good things they may also be doing.

When emotion-centric people get older they can often seem to flip. Suddenly they don't like drama, and aren't interested in people who cause problems. This isn't because they have suddenly acquired a goal in life: it's because the rewards they get from the emotions are not worth the energy it takes to create and maintain those high-cost emotional states. The same cost-benefit calculations that kept them in and around chaos, drama, users and losers, now make them choose to live a quieter life, because the costs don't go down, but the benefits do.

And In Other News... Society Has Collapsed

You are not crazy.

This is f*****d up.

Look at the idea of a society and somewhere near the centre is the idea of a bunch of people in the same geographical country, speaking dialects of the same language, using the same currency, paying taxes to the same Government, sharing often ineffable ‘values’, ‘attitudes’ or ‘behaviours’, and with some minimal idea of co-operating to make each others’ lives better. Add in some criminals, psychopaths, screw-ups, misfits, alienated souls, cheaters, grifters and shirkers, but not too many, and you have something we would recognise.

Societies have a background level of dysfunction and cacophony, because people have conflicting aims, different abilities, diverse work ethics, and odd ideas about how much they need to work to pull their own load. Plus there's the class / caste stuff and the whole Us and Them thing which people seem to like, as well as behaviours and attitudes from dark corners of the human soul. Add in changes in fashion, technology, prices, salaries, and the blizzard of sales pitches and uninformed BS masquerading as advice and education, and there's enough to make anyone older than about thirty-five feel like the-kids-these-days... Most of that does not count as dysfunction, unless it actually interferes with the smooth functioning of the economy, or starts producing too many people with justifiable reluctance to take part in the institutions of the society. Too many tax-paying non-participants can skew a society the wrong way.

How much dysfunction makes a breakdown?

Some of the many ways a society can screw up are:

Failing to provide jobs with a future for its young people 

Putting the way of living of ordinary parents beyond the means of their children An inadequate or overly ideological education system 

Having rules that hinder the development of a thriving economy Failing to take care of members of the Armed Forces (1) 

Failing to provide an efficient and effective Police force and justice system Allowing petty criminals to go un-punished (2) 

Failing to keep its borders secure (3) 

Having too much wealth accruing to too few people at the expense of the ordinary worker (4) 

Failing to re-train its workers to keep up with economic change, and especially hiring outsiders in favour of re-training (5) 

Allowing inflation to get too high for more than a year (6) 

Raising taxes that are wasted by inefficient management and poor policy-making (7) 

Being distracted by activists agitating for extreme policies that affect small proportions of the population (8) 

A Civil Service that forgets it works for the taxpayer, rather than for another Civil Service (9) 

Class warfare (10)

And of course, the Big Three... Attempting to invade Russia, occupy Afghanistan, or stem the spread of a virus by Lockdowns.

(So-called 'Advanced Economies' can add: failing to get food on the shelves, petrol in the pumps, water from taps, gas from the Mains, electricity from the Grid, buses at the stops, trains in the stations, phone signals from towers, data down the Internet, GPs in the surgeries, doctors and surgeons in the hospitals, money from one person to another...)

I'd say... four or more and your society has collapsed in a heap on the floor, and someone needs to call an ambulance.

Was there ever a time the UK dodged most of these screw-ups? It wasn't bad between 1954 (when rationing ended!) to 1990, even if there was double-figure inflation in the 1970’s and million-plus unemployment ever since, but after the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties, it starts to roll downhill slowly. After about 2010 the speed picks up, and by 2016 the cracks are spreading as the media / academic / activist / Human Rights Industrial Complex declared class war, in retaliation for the Brexit vote, on the ordinary taxpayers who paid their salaries.

Four years of that, and faced with a bad case of the flu in February 2020, British society started to crack, and in March 2020 collapsed in clouds of dust. What we’re seeing now are people wandering around in the rubble, pretending that everything is OK because, well, they're still getting paid. And they have Mondays and Fridays off working from home.

This is the aftershock of the collapse. Most of the same things are still wrong. Nothing much has changed.

It is not some short-term temporary aberration. It was a long time coming, and it will be a longer time leaving.

(1) The treatment of discharged soldiers with disabilities is a scandal. As is the accommodation they have while serving. 

(2) Pretty much like a large Democrat-run city in the USA from 2019 onwards. 

(3) Looking at you, Angela Merkel. Also the UK Home Office. 

(4) This is a serious problem in the USA. Less so in the UK. 

(5) Every company and government ever. On the other hand, workers need to be prepared to accept re-training. 

(6) Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe at the top of the league, with the UK in the 1970's at the bottom. 

(7) 40% of UK taxes goes to the NHS. We can't see our GP for four weeks, and unless you are actually bleeding out in front of the staff, the operation will be a year hence, and postponed twice. 

(8) How the exact **** did Stonewall get to pronounce on the suitability of anyone for anything? 

(9) For about thirty years, the British Civil Service thought it worked for the EU. It still wishes it did.

(10) This is a thesis in itself I will sketch in another post.

"Experts" and "Authorities" - Not

One of the more darker corners of the culture that the Lockdowns shone an unintentional light on, was the idea that Government enquiries, official investigations, and explanations provided by high-ranking officials and academics with their hands on the money-tap, form a coherent officially truthful story of the major events in our society and economy. Disagreeing with the details of this story makes one a dissident whose speech should be restricted from general circulation, and offering competing stories makes one a 'conspiracy theorist' who should be denied access to the media in any form. These "authorities" include "the distributed network of knowledge claim gatherers and testers that includes engineers and politics professors, security experts and journalists" according to Professor Neil Levy, one of those philosophers who appears now and again to suck up to an indefensible orthodoxy.

"Politics professors, security experts and journalists" are not "experts" at anything, but some engineers might be.

If there were "experts" and "authorities", who might they be?

One group of people they could not be is Government, Civil Service and other institutions of the State. It's not a Government's job to tell the voters the truth. Never has been, never will be. One job of Government is to maintain civil peace and order, and all sorts of abuses get hushed up for that reason. Another job of Government is to relate things to "broader interests and issues", which also leads to all sorts of hush-and-lousy-compromise. Governments are rubbish at knowing which issues really need to be played down and which need to be made public, but it's still their job to try to get it right.

For this reason, anyone who holds a Government position, for example Chief Medical Officer, or who is in the pay of the Government, such as every academic in every university, agrees with Government propaganda policy, not because it might be right, but because it's part of their job description to do so. That disqualifies their opinion on any subject in which the Government has an interest.

One rule of thumb is that anyone who says they are an "expert" on something, isn't. Those who know, know how little they know and how ambiguous that little is: it takes real ignorance to be certain and authoritative about anything.

Another rule of thumb is that when a journalist cites an "expert" without also citing that "expert's" name, source of income, qualifications and relevant experience - as would be required in any court - the person they are quoting is a paid shill pushing a policy.

"Experts" must be un-connected with any commercial enterprise, political cause, social movement, religion or other such organisation that has an interest in the issue. Else their support of that institution's position will be considered to be bought-and-paid-for.

"Experts" must only give evidence about the matters-of-fact on which they are "experts", which is generally a fairly narrow range.

Outside that narrow range, "experts" are as ignorant as the person sitting next to you this morning on the bus / train / coach / traffic queue / Zoom screen.

Even within an "expert's" subject, just because someone knows a lot about the facts of an issue does not mean they will be any good at devising the relevant social or legal policy. The Lockdowns showed us that most "experts" are fanatical left-leaning socialists who think more Government-spending and monitoring is the answer to everything.

Did it always used to be like this?

Yes.

But the world wasn't as complicated, inter-connected, and highly populated. There weren't welfare states, and there wasn't as much money to be made by quite so many people. There was no pharmaceutical industry, and the media was way smaller than it is now. Fewer people depended on the Government for their salaries, so the influence of Government was not as all-enveloping as it is now. Your GP routinely made house calls.

Back in the Good Ol' Days<™> it didn't matter that the experts knew even less than they do now. Governments didn't do dumb things, unless it was to invade Russia or attempt to occupy Afghanistan.

Now it matters. And Governments do dumb things year after year after year.

How Good Times Make Weak Leaders

Remember that saying Good times elect weak leaders; weak leaders make bad times; bad times elect strong leaders; strong leaders make good times? Let's start by discussing good and bad times.

These apply to the personal and professional lives of the upper managers, administrators and policy-makers (to include the elected legislators) of the major social, media, cultural, State, political and business institutions. Ordinary people can be suffering financial crises, unemployment, dramatic changes in the labour market, and all sorts of other stuff, or of course none of that, and it doesn't count. As long as the upper-middle class (roughly) is having a cushy time, those are "good times". In the UK, that was from the passing of the Maastricht Treaty to the end of 2015: The Second Belle Epoque. Their professional lives were easy, their dominant assumptions about society, culture and economics were unchallenged. China and Russia were behaving themselves, and EU made travel easy, and legislation even easier - all one did was tweak whatever Brussels threw out.

Your kids can't afford a place of their own, that's just the economy. A journalist's kids can't afford a place of their own, that's a serious flaw in the housing market.

If life gets too hard for the Rest of Us, we will start to object, misbehave, go on strike, and make the lives of the UMC (upper managerial class) difficult. That gives them an incentive to make sure that life isn't too hard for the common people.

We can complain about the economy all we like, but one thing we must not do is question the UMC's assumptions about the society, political institutions, and culture. That is perceived not as a threat to their survival - that would be mere economics - but their vision of themselves as Good People who deserve their privilege as a reward for their Goodness. The form that Goodness takes can vary from decade to decade, but since about 1990 it has been about having Broadly-Left social views and ideals. Before that, it was about having Broadly-Right ideals. Challenge whatever is their claim to moral superiority and you threaten them with the disintegration of their identities. In Good Times, the UMC is complaisant and herd-like, and jolly comfortable that is too.

Let's turn to what leaders are. A 'leader' in this discussion is someone who gets to set policy in a particular institution, so that following that policy protects us from sanctions imposed by that institution. A strong leader can bring people along with them, and isn't scared of imposing sanctions: a weak leader is unconvincing, and won't impose sanctions. (Yes, this applies to street gangs as well as Governments.) `Leadership' is contextual: someone can lead in one institution, and follow in another.

Leaders depend on holding an institutional position, and one gets to be a leader by occupying one of those positions. Having got there, it's up to the incumbent to do something, or collapse exhausted by the climb up the greasy pole.

Most of the rest of the people in the institution will follow a strong leader - though some will resist - or they will goof off if they spot a weak role occupant - though some will throw themselves behind policies they see advantage in.

Where do the strong leaders come from in the bad times? They were there all the time, but they weren't attracted by the jobs in politics, the upper reaches of public administration, and other high-profile institutional roles. In the good times there is too much go-along-to-get-along. Too many third-class people. Too much consensus. So the strong people go to where their qualities of character can be useful, or they find a lucrative niche somewhere and enjoy the decline.

Where do the weak leaders come from in the good times? They were there all the time as well. They didn't want the jobs when times were tough, and they wouldn't have been chosen anyway. But when times are good, suddenly good chaps who go along with other good chaps are exactly what seem to be needed. Strong-minded people are all very useful, but they can be a nuisance. In good times, we need co-operation, not conflict. Weak people love co-operating. There's nothing wrong with co-operating, as long as it's with people who share your goals. 'Co-operating' with people whose goals conflict with yours is called 'giving in'.

It's possible for one institution to have strong leaders, while another has weak ones, at the same time. Think of Sweden in 2020: a weak Government of consensus-driven politicians who fortunately were not in charge of public health policy. Anders Tegnell was, and he turned out to be nobody's go-along guy. The Swedes were the only country who did not succumb to the hysteria.

One way weak leaders damage their institutions is failing to fight back against strongly-led activist groups advancing avant-garde goals that threaten the current aims and values of the institution.

Weak leaders can be distracted by internal disputes and high-profile non-issues. This is what happened to the British Parliament between 2016-2021 (Brexit) and the US Government between 2016 and 2020 (the wonderfully named 'Trump Derangement Syndrome'). It's no co-incidence that various avant-garde activist groups made so much progress with their causes during that time, or that the UK and USA Blobs started taking on lives of their own.

How do the required strong leaders get back into the institutions when they are needed? In the UK, it's not by coup or vigorous campaigning. it's by a slower process in which the people who select and elect the candidates for key positions decide that the current lot are a bit wet, and some drier people are needed. A major donor to an activist organisation decides it no longer advances his various goals (it may have become a liability to their social standing or business interests, for instance) and withdraws their money. A Board of Governors decides the last CEO got on perhaps too well with everyone, and now they need someone who can focus on the business needs. These decisions will be made against the backdrop of what the various people sense to be a prevailing sentiment amongst the public - whatever that 'public' might be.

That mechanism relies on the general population containing a range of views on almost everything: this is why enforced consensus is a liability. A variety of views is needed, so that when the time demands this or that view, there will be people ready to explain, publicise and propose ways of implementing it. If everyone thinks, or makes a show of thinking, the same, when circumstances demand a response outside the permitted range, that society will fall victim to those circumstances. This is all basic On Liberty.

The idea that society consists of homogeneous 'Generations' is an artefact of the media and academic obsession with certain institutions, that are able to impose the appearance of a high level of conformity on the behaviour and opinions of the staff. As soon as the institutional control slips, so does the conformity.

That Trans Thing

So here's my take...

The aim of the Trans movement is, one assumes, to help Trans people establish productive, stable, emotionally-satisfying lives in society, and to help them deal with, and get legal remedy for, the occasional ignorance and prejudice they may meet(1). Sounds like a nice part-time gig for a few lawyers, medical advisors and social workers. Not something an FTSE 100 company needs a policy on, and certainly nothing trillion-dollar hedge funds such as Black Rock and Vanguard need to be involved in.

The core demand of Trans activism is that people of one sex(2) should be able to claim the legal and institutional rights, privileges and protections accruing to people of the others. Since women already have all the legal and institutional rights of men, Trans activism reduces to the demand that men should have access have to the many rights, privileges and protections of women in Western societies that are not shared with men(3).

Unlike religious conversion, where considerable changes of behaviour are required of the convert, the Trans movement insists that no changes of phenotype or behaviour are required of the Trans person. Men should get the special rights and privileges of women simply by professing that they "identify as a woman". This has been a really terrible decision, opening the door to a parade of chancers, frauds, and grifters who have tarnished the Trans brand badly.

Another terrible decision was to copy the feminist tactic of "Invading male spaces": this was the idea that anywhere men gathered together should be subject to female supervision and policing. In Western societies this has been more or less completely successful. In the same way, Trans activists insist on the right to "invade female spaces": women must have nowhere they can feel safe from male intrusion, observation, and competition.

Another series of bad decisions has been to fail to distance itself from...

a) children who use it to irritate their parents and bully their teachers 

b) trillion-dollar hedge funds using it to advance their profitability and influence (cf "ESG / DIE") 

c) the social-work / teaching / NHS / local government / civil service / media nexus, who are using it to silence or remove their opponents 

d) governments who are using it as a distraction from the serious issues 

e) media who use it as click-bait and to put on a freak-show

How the Trans movement shakes off these mistakes, and becomes useful again... I have no idea.



(1) I know. But it's what they should be doing 

(2) There are men, women and hermaphrodites. "Man" means anyone with at least one Y in their chromosome, "hermaphrodite" means hermaphrodite, and everyone else is a woman. 

(3) Don't pretend there aren't any.

Would "Someone" Breaks The Undersea Internet Cables?

Not that they would, of course. Any more than they would blow up their own gas pipeline, or break a dam that mostly supplied water to parts of a country it is occupying, but I digress...

Should "someone" start breaking up the undersea cables that carry all those cat pics and Tik Toks we all love so much, what happens?

Your online banking will still work. That runs over Openreach's UK domestic network.

The retail banks have their own private networks. So do the railways and the armed forces. The NHS has a small flock of under-fed carrier pigeons.

All the big companies have copies of their websites disbursed to servers over the world. Amazon will still be up and running. Some services may not work, but we will still be able to buy Chinese junk from it, as long as that junk is physically in the UK.

Your fixed-line calls to domestic numbers either go over Openreach or Virgin's network. Your mobile calls to domestic numbers go over your carrier's mobile domestic network. So you can still send messages saying you have to cancel.

Anyone who really needs international comms will have satellite capacity on standby, as well as redundant undersea capacity in all directions.

So I think that business carries on as usual, but they will use it as an excuse for even poorer service, even if they are not affected.

You can find a detailed map of the world's undersea cables here. It's not a secret. Take a look and it becomes obvious that there are a handful of landing points in each country. Send a special ops team out to blow those up. Or you could follow the land lines back to one of a smaller number of data centres / telehouses, and blow those up. You could always hi-jack an airliner and fly it into one. If that's too extravagant, hire a trawler and sail it past those landing-points trailing a great big net behind you. That's worked any number of times in the Mediterranean over the years. Breaking the cables in the open sea needs submarines and trained divers, so that cuts the suspects down to a short list.

Still. Breaking some ocean internet cables. Sounds bad.

Maybe even as recently as fifteen years ago it would have been. The capacity and the number of cables available today is beyond any projection anyone would have made in 2008. To make a noticeable difference a saboteur would need to break a dozen or so cables on several different coasts within a week of each other. Undersea cables are easier and cheaper to repair than a gas pipe.

More importantly, there's no cyber warfare if there's no cyber-connection to the enemy.

"Good People" As Useful Idiots

Throughout history groups of people have wanted to identify each other, and to feel superior to everyone else. That's what the "Shibboleth" story (Judges 12:5-6) is about. Not only must the Bad People find it almost impossible not to betray themselves almost immediately, but it must be difficult for the Bad People to turn into Good People.

Good People usually work in the public sector, broadly construed as any occupation financed almost completely by the taxpayer. NHS, universities, schools, the Armed Forces, the Emergency Services, BBC, local council staff and officials, and publicly-funded arts organisations. It's about a third of the UK workforce. It's not everyone in the public sector. Good People are usually managers rather than doers, and policy-oriented rather than operational. They see themselves as being funded by the Government, and prefer political parties that hand out money, which has usually been the "left-wing" parties. They loved the EU, because of its generous grants, hence their existential panic over Brexit.

Their education stressed going along with the prevailing group-think, which can happen in the Science Faculty (think "Climate Science") as well as the Arts. They are usually not engineers or researchers whose work can be disqualified by an experiment. Good People often believe in "experts" rather than "facts" and "experience", not least out of collegial courtesy, since many of them are "experts". This makes Good People sitting targets for frauds, grifters, marketing departments, visionaries, snake-oil salesmen, and pseudo-scientists.

A qualifying Good Belief must meet a number of criteria: it must work against the interests or beliefs of regular people; it must have a very low probability of ever being turned into legislation; and it is must have a very low probability of Capital ever turning into a profitable product or service; and it must not be detrimental to the Good Person. Also, it helps if it is more expensive than the mainstream alternative.

Refusing to use modern medicine is not a Good Person belief, since it can cause harm to the Good Person. Veganism is a Good Person belief, as is keeping kosher. World Peace is not a Good Person belief, because who doesn't want that?

Being "for" homosexuality was a Good Belief. It had resisted changes in legislation for hundreds of years; it is not well-regarded by the common herd; even after the 1967 legislation, Capital has been hesitant to aim products at the Gay market, partly because it is too small to support major spending; and of course, if the Good Person was gay, it was a bonus, and if they were straight, it didn't matter. Until their children came out. By the 2010's the Police across the world were happily taking part in Pride marches, as were lots straight people and politicians. Homosexuality is now nothing remarkable.

Which was an utter disaster for the Good People. For about five decades, the Good People had been able to distinguish themselves by professing a belief that homosexuality should be nothing remarkable. And now the Bad People agree. Which means the Good People needed to find some other cause to distinguish themselves. If that cause was going to be around sexuality, it was going to be pretty far out. And it turned out to be just that.

Climate Change had some things going for it. The facts are iffy as heck, which means that one must believe. Bad People want facts, Good People are Believers. Nothing bad was going to happen because of Climate Change (if was real) in the short-term: climate disaster has been ten years away for the last thirty years. For a couple of decades after the start, there was no hope of it turning into legislation, there were no serious alternative energy sources, and few demands on individuals' behaviour.

Having baited the Good People, the Climate Change con-men pulled the switch. They continued to press for legislation from whichever body might find it a constructive-looking gesture. They let the investment banks in by inventing so-called "carbon offsets". They persuaded Governments to subsidise wind farms, which made alt-energy a better investment. Nobody ever pushed the "energy security" issue, because that smacked too much of Nationalism, and Good People are not Nationalists, but energy security (from the increasingly volatile Middle East) was the unspoken benefit of all this. The con-men flooded the culture with pseudo-science, graphs compiled by methods so dodgy as to make political polls look honest, and frequently-published forecasts of possible disaster and death. The Good People found they had been suborned into a full-fledged activist movement, and it took a few years for them to disassociate themselves from it. People who use phrases like "climate emergency" sound like the cranks they are. Sadly, that crankishness has been embedded into Government policy, and it will take our politicians a while to extricate themselves from it.

"Diversity" is a Good Person belief. They are insulated from it by their postcodes and occupations, and by the fact that Good People are inter-nationally the same. The legislation had long been in place, it cannot be turned into a product or service, and it provided a lot of cheap labour, often to look after Good Children. Furthermore, "diversity" could mean that one's wife was now up for a lucrative part-time Directorship. In the meantime, "diverse" neighbourhoods and organisations have much lower levels of social trust, participation, co-operation and communication. Crime figures are carefully never printed or discussed. It was hi-jacked by a number of interest groups, all of whom measured it by looking at outcomes, while simultaneously denying they were imposing quotas.

"Being nice to illegal immigrants" was briefly a Good Cause in 2016. The Economist - the reference Good Person source - even suggested that a million people was not so many given the population of Europe, and we could absorb them. It never occurred to the witless writer that there were several hundreds more of those millions in the queue. Women in Germany and Sweden felt guilty about having to explain that the men who molested or raped them were, well, not native Swedes. The official obfuscation of the crime figures was driven by one thing: the incumbent Governments were all left-wing socialists, and they were terrified that the right-wing would get support if the truth was made public. Also, the fact that these immigrants seemed to have the phone numbers of lawyers, and detailed instructions about the welfare payments they could get, and of the European rail system, started to seem a little odd.

The immigrants had NGOs helping them, and those NGOs needed money. That money did not come from millions of donors, but from a handful of wealthy activists who have more money than they will ever need, and are looking for elite social recognition, which they get through backing Good Causes. The emergence of that class was something new in the 2000's: there had been rich people before, but they used their wealth to help themselves, even when founding institutions in their names. The new class did not want popular publicity and recognition, but only to belong to an elite. They did not elderly men and women gluing themselves to the M25: they did it through PR companies, NGOs, and lawyers who realised there was a nice living to be made pandering to them. Small in number, these are the most dangerous kind of Good People, as they can and have inflicted huge amounts of harm on ordinary people.

Illegal immigration in the USA is a large-scale political grift: the main beneficiaries are some large religious organisations who are paid to place illegal immigrants, and they do so because the Democratic party uses the immigrants to jerrymander voting districts. It is hidden, badly, behind the facade of a Good Cause, which is used by Democrats to pose as morally virtuous. Good Causes are now often hi-jacked for very different purposes.

Capital has been hi-jacking Good Causes since the start: Good People make up a decent-sized, high-margin market segment. Electric cars. Fake meat. Green electricity. The Whole Foods chain. Feminism was hi-jacked to get women into the workforce (notice how they got the jobs, but never the creches that the original feminists were asking for). MeToo was hi-jacked by managements and used to remove people - usually older white men - from their jobs or contracts on a mere allegation. ESG / DIE scores were invented specifically to whitewash the activities of hedge funds and investment banks. In return it was exploited by the certifying agencies, who realised they could push extremist agendas, and the hedge funds simply would not care.

The ability of Capital to react at speed does not help: no sooner does a cause become Good than marketing departments start to think about how they can hi-jack the cause reflect their customers' concerns in their products and messaging. Those marketing departments are often full of Good People who see themselves as furthering the cause. And hey, if they can get a promotion out of it, that's a win-win. After all virtuous consumption is the easiest virtue of them all.