Rebecca Long-Bailey: Overqualified to say the least.

Meet someone who is NOT going to be leader of the Opposition:

As you can see she's far too intelligent, competent, and principled. A Leader of the opposition can fall into one of two categories: A unprincipled scumbag who will betray the electorate as soon as they are elected, or a principled, yet utterly incompetent person whom the media can crucify in their regular Two Minute Hate sessions and serve up as an example of why socialism is crap.

And why Corbyn is a DRUG CRAZED NAZI COMMIE who LOVES TERROR and HATES BRITAIN

Rebecca Long-Bailey falls into neither of those categories, and thus she will NOT be leader of the Labour Party. If she was, there's a danger she'd get elected, and if she got elected, she might actually change things around here. Uh huh, can't have that. The ruling class Mafia that runs things needs dupes and morons in charge just as much as it needs dupes and morons to vote for them.

The REAL voting, of course, is occult, hidden. Who knows what conversations our beloved leaders have with newspaper proprietors and Russian oligarchs (and spies!) when they take over?

I don't know how these people are selected but I can guarantee that just as the last Labour leader was dim-witted 1970s vintage electoral Kryptonite, the next Labour leader will be a Centrist Remainer who does what he's told, so that if the public turns against Johnson, the Oligarchs have a Safe Pair Of Hands to run their affairs for them. At least until 2030 when the country is either devoured by the sea or vanishes under a hail of nukes :-D

If she does get to be Labour leader, she won't stay that way, and if she does, she won't get elected, but if she does, the bastards will have no problem with kicking her out on her ear and replacing her with someone more ideologically reliable. It wouldn't be the first time.

Today is election day

Today is election day.

Today is election day and I just saw a video of Labour supporters playing in a brass band on a pedestrian bridge over the main motorway into town.

It was raining and miserable and cold and they'd all come out anyway.

It was just so incredibly sad. All their hope, all their energy - they have no chance against Boris Johnson's army of thugs and liars.

They reminded me of the band on the Titanic, playing as the ship went down.

Today is election day and it is probably the end of democracy in this country.

Today is election day and everyone is really into it, and it makes no difference because the means of communication are owned by liars, cheats, and bigots.

Today is  election day and they might as well swear the bastard in already, because the newspapers and the national broadcaster hold the Opposition to impossible standards while waving away the government's every impropriety, its every prejudice, its Russian Oligarch and fascist supporters, its crooked connections, even the fact that people can't ask the Prime Minister a simple question about honesty without even a hand picked TV audience erupting into gales of laughter - the truth is censored, covered up, stymied, and the cover up itsself covered up, so that all we have left is a nation of amnesiacs, uneasy and angry as abused dogs with the knowledge that something is wrong - but lashing out at everyone they see because they have no idea what.

And oh, the lies. The lies are everywhere, screaming from every newspaper, every screen, everywhere a symphony of bullshit designed to both deceive the gullible and demoralize those who know the truth.

Today is election day. You should definitely vote. It might be your last chance for quite a while.

Imagine an asteroid...

Imagine if an asteroid was coming to get us.

 Imagine if there were already meteor showers and even relatively minor impacts happening on a regular basis, but governments decided that, due to free market ideological purity, they had NO intention of doing anything about it... they claimed to care, but they wouldn't release any real resources - in short, imagine if asteroid impact mitigation was entirely up to private enterprise, charity and individuals. Imagine also that no crewed space exploration had taken place since the early 1960s, since the putt-putt era of Gagarin, Tereshkova, and John Glenn - imagine that we never landed on the Moon and that no human had ever spent more than a couple of hours in space.

The last man and woman in space

Imagine that a dino-killing asteroid was coming to hit the earth in 30 years at most and we didn't even have NASA.

 The first and last American in space

He'll see you right when the time comes

.

Imagine that, for some reason, certain private interests, perhaps the makers of asteroid shelters, had convinced large swathes of the population that asteroids didn't exist, or that if they did exist, weren't a problem.





Imagine if the President of the United States didn't believe in asteroids, and it was considered an article of faith among his party that they didn't either.

Not such a stretch...

Imagine if even opposition figures just waffled and fudged when asked what they were going to do about the asteroid.
 
 Imagine if an asteroid was going to hit the Earth in at most 30 years time, and most people acted like they didn't give a shit - and the authorities were asleep at the wheel.

Imagine if we had to put together a space mission to destroy this asteroid within ten years or we would certainly perish - imagine if we had to design and build an entire class of spacecraft, monster nuclear weapon, delivery system, and crew return vehicle within TEN YEARS, or the asteroid would be too near the Earth to deflect no matter what we did. Imagine the public anger, the sense of betrayal, if our leaders just spouted platitudes because they were alright, they had bunkers and private islands sorted out, and they were just going to leave the rest of us to fry - too bad, suckers!

Again, not such a stretch...

Now imagine that most people didn't feel angry or betrayed but simply resigned to their fate. Imagine if an anti-asteroid protest movement existed, with slogans like BUILD THE BOMB and DETONATION NOT DEVASTATION and LETS BLOW UP THE FREAKING ASTEROID ALREADY, and they were universally derided as weirdoes on the fringes of society, unwashed hippie layabouts, and subversive leftie scum - even among other protest movements! Imagine if in its desperation, this movement resorted to blocking traffic just to get traction on the airwaves because the world was going to end and all that happened was that people got pissed off because it made them late to work.

This is what is happening with global warming. Humanity has a vast job to do, sure it might not work, just as bombing the shit out an asteroid might not work, but it's better than waiting to die. And nobody gives a flying fuck. I condemn myself as much as the next person, but I have no goddam clue what to do. So I wrote this.

Maybe Extinction Rebellion aren't perfect, but at least it's a start.

That BrexAnalysis In Full!

Hard Brexit is baked in the cake right now, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Boris Johnson will be Prime Minister. You might as well start hanging his picture on your dartboard already. He's not just the front runner - the person in second place is so far behind him they might as well not bother, the bookies are giving them six to one against.

His opposition research is completley on point, his media operation is as slick as ever, and nobody else who has a chance has anything like his profile.

Fucked.

General election?

There's a much smaller chance of a general election than you think. As little as 50% - for every Chablis-quaffing, inbred, chinless Tory douche that's stupid enough to believe their own lies, there's at least one sniveling, degenerate, arse-kissing liberal scum fuck in the other parties that will do anything - ANYTHING  - to prevent an election - whether it's suck off Boris Johnson, eat a turd, or prop up the Tories however batshit they get.

My guess is they'll survive a confidence motion by one vote or something equally comical and BJ McMiniTrump calls an election anyway. The fix is totally in and the Corbyn bubble has definitely burst so they can afford it, and anyway, the time wasted will run down the clock to no-deal which is their actual objective here, even more than staying in power (if that's possible).


Expect him to not only push a hard Brexit, but also actively use Brexit to win an election. VOTE FOR ME in the most ironic manner possible is the way it's gonna be, then after he wins: HA HA SUCKERS FUCK YOU KISS THE NHS GOODBYE A CHECK-UP NOW COSTS YOU YOUR KIDNEYS.

The TLDR: Don't get too excited, kids.

"Sustainable growth" vs actual sustainable growth

Thanks to Low Tech Magazine for inspiration. (Green version here)

You read a lot about sustainable growth and green energy these days, and you're going to read a lot more about it in the near future. The problem with this idea is that it's very much a case of too little, too late. We have only a few years in which to act and we should have started a generation ago.

"Be realistic - demand the impossible"

With this in mind, here are some of what I feel are more realistic ideas for eco-policies. Not remotely economically or politically realistic of course, just realistic in terms of, you know, physical and biological reality.

Bear in mind that this is just to start with and that these are quite vague ideas designed to give a sense of scale and scope. This is not a detailed policy position paper, it doesn't give the colour of the stamps in ration books or the type of in-passport microchip used to track carbon use. All I can say for sure is that the measures would probably have to get a lot tougher as time went on - for instance, in the medium to long term it might just be better to ban flying entirely as you can travel just as effectively by ship or train if you really want to be there, and most everyday business / diplomatic matters can always be resolved by teleconference.

* Cars would be allowed in theory, but minimum fuel price should be around UK£13 / US$20 litre. Fuel taxes generally should be on the order of 2,000%. (current UK fuel taxes, which are considered very high, are somewhere roughly in the region of 100%)


* To replace cars, two and four-seater pedal/electric velomobiles could be built. To encourage adoption I'd give generous tax breaks to builders, maybe start a state-owned company or two myself, and the speed limit would be dropped to 40MPH on multiple lane motorways, 30MPH on single lane rural roads, and 20mph on urban roads. Limit enforced by speed governors built into all vehicles and enforced by yearly MOT. Tampering with governor / speeding would be severely criminalized.

If I got my way, you'd all be pedalling around in these!

 

* Air travel ration: You are allotted something like 22,000 air miles (or equivalent to a there-and-back antipodean flight - "once around the Earth"). You can sell all or some of them on the open market or you can use them. If you sell them you have no money problems for a long time - which would solve a lot of poverty-related problems.

This would allow you to fly at most from the UK to Australia and back once, OR London to New York and back twice, OR UK to the Balearic Islands (a popular holiday destination) and back 13 times. For an American that would translate into 4 flights between New York and Los Angeles. Ever. Unless you paid something like half a million dollars for someone else's air miles.

* Internal flights in physically small countries (smaller than, say, Germany) or flights shorter than 500 miles are BANNED (ie, London-Edinburgh). They'd be substituted by rail travel with sleeper carriages where needed - fuel duty could be possibly waived in the case of public transport to encourage adoption, though electrification should be the long term goal.

* The most environmentally efficient forms of power are wind and CSP (Concentrated Solar Power). Existing PV (photovoltaic) should still be subsidized, but a questionmark put on further adoption as PV cells are quite polluting in the long run. To keep the lights on, transcontinental-scale power grids need to be installed alongside massive CSP plants in desert regions and wind farms at sea - though storms may make wind farms a bad idea in the long run, desert CSP plants should work out... as long as we can keep terrorists from blowing them up.

Let's get all our energy from deserts, he said. What could possibly go wrong?

* Even with all this work, there's a very good chance we might not make it. Civilisations do sort of collapse from time to time, and environmental disasters are top contributors. As a civilisation at risk, we have to make sure that the crap we've already manufactured is kept somewhere safe while we're out pillaging and doing the whole Mad Max Dark Ages thing, or we'll be screwed no matter what we do. Additionally, there are still clowns out there who think that nuclear power is the only way to deal with climate change.
 

Seems legit.

Now while it may or may not be carbon-neutral - and remember, uranium doesn't come out of the ground in nice clean pellets - there is no long term storage for the waste.

The closest thing we have to a solution to this is throwing used fuel rods into boreholes a few miles deep - and if you go a bit deeper, the earth is already quite radioactive and so hot that it turns into taffy which swallows up just about anything you care to put into it. Upshot is - put your nuclear crap and PCBs and whatnot several miles underground or so and you ain't gonna see it again. The only problem is, imagine all the cost of drilling for oil, only even deeper - and not even getting any oil at the end of it!

So there you have it - the actual cost of really building a green economy and retaining anything like our current lifestyles - a WWII sized effort that would turn everything upside down and change our lives forever. Velomobiles, restrictions on air travel, a new wave of energy colonialism (That ended well last time!), and billion-dollar holes in the ground - and that's just for starters!

I haven't even mentioned making people use the same phones and computers for 10-20 years at a time, or power rationing, or that we'd need to nationalise whole swathes of industry just to make the required amount of economic planning possible, or the teeth that already unpopular supranational bodies would need to enforce such measures... oh and did I mention that I agree that certain current and former oil executives should be arrested and charged with crimes against humanity?

At last!
(I jest- seeing Dick Cheney behind bars might be funny, but he's relatively small fry.
Most people have never even heard of the worst ones)

Of course, if you asked an economist, a politician, or the average voter about any of these ideas, they'd laugh in your face - nobody would vote for it and nobody would pay for it. (Not even the Dick Cheney bit? C'mon... -Ed)

This is why none of these are remotely politically or economically feasible, even less so in the current climate of nationalism and extreme capitalism. Ask a climate scientist however, and they'd probably tell you that these very modest ideas don't go remotely far enough. Still, you gotta start somewhere, and putting a few solar panels on the roof and treating yourself to a new Prius just isn't going to cut it.

As a wise man once said, if you refuse to make your way of life negotiable, you get a new negotiating partner - reality. At some point we will be forced to do all of the above and more - AND some really grim stuff like a one-child policy, a ban on all but minimal animal farming, etc, etc, etc.

The real question however, is even more simple. Do we want to survive or not? Because if pollution's got so bad it can kill something as big as a whale, what do you think it's gonna do to you?

The Inuit are doubly screwed.

Neoliberals just don't get it.

or which country has the best economy? Britain Vs. Japan

Here's an article that should be called "Mass unemployment and industrial stagnation are A Good Thing 'cos then we'd have slightly better TVs, or something." Have a shufti:

https://origin-www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-20/japan-must-let-zombie-companies-die


It basically argues that the Japanese are stupid, evil and bad because they subsidize some of the biggest companies in the world. What they should do is embrace neoliberal solutions, let everyone go bust and embrace "creative destruction" (an insane slogan that had to have been dreamed up by an economist on the really bad drugs).

This company is Bad and Wrong and A Failure.

Now, imagine that you are a high-ranking government official of a medium-sized, advanced, industrial country. What would you rather have? The possibility of slightly better TVs together with the certainty of mass unemployment, industrial stagnation and social unrest, or the dreaded "OMG zombie companies" and *gasp* public debt! ...together with... high employment, cheap goods, and world-class corporations?

Put it this way: Would you rather be Japan, which has one set of things, or Britain, which has the other - and all of the problems that each of those lead to?

The UK has followed a strict neoliberal prescription since the late 1970s: Tight budgets, slashed social spending, no industrial subsidies, regular bonfires of regulations, freewheeling enterpenerurial capitalism, broken trade unions, corporations can do what they like, the City can do what it likes, and blah, blah, blah, yadda yadda yadda.

Sucessful British factory enjoying fruits of happy times boomtown neoliberal economics 

Japan followed a neo-Keynsian policy since the 1990s when the bubble economy burst and it became obvious to even the most stupid person that capitalism sometimes needs a helping hand and a little cash to grease the wheels, especially when times are hard and orders are thin.

Failing Japanese factory, enduring failed policies that don't work because reasons

Japan makes consumer goods, solar panels, industrial equipment, robots, computers, and cute cartoons. It's an industrial and cultural behemoth. Sure, it has a lot of public sector debt. But this can be managed and kicked down the road, and that debt buys you something: Social stability (which the Japanese prize). After 2011's triple-horror real life disaster movie of an earthquake, tsunami and raging nuclear meltdown all at once, the country bounced back and is still basically functional. It has its problems, but so does every society. The worst? Japanese people work too hard and they live a long time! IT'S CHAOS I TELLS YA!

The UK makes: Crap TV shows, some of the best comics nobody's ever heard of... er... the Raspberry Pi! Er... oh yeah, weapons! We make lots of guns, tanks and bombs... er... um.. ah... I'm sure there's more but that's about it.

Exports are good, though!

And it shows. We have millions on the breadline and hundreds of thousands on actual breadlines living on food handouts. Also mass homelessness- nobody quite knows how many Britons live on the street, but slumped, emaciated figures sleeping rough are a common sight here, as are small but growing shanty towns consisting of tents routinely handed out by charities to the homeless - because there is such a housing shortage, at least anywhere near where the jobs are, that people can't afford to live anywhere.

There is a lot of luxury housing, but that's because housing is considered a luxury.

 As a result of all this human misery and industrial mega-fail there is such social instability that cities periodically erupt into mass rioting - the last time, 2011 - the same year as the tsunami in Japan- involved every city in England and lasted five days.

That creative destruction, working its, er...

traditional neoliberal economic, er... magic. Yes.

Our relationship with our neighbours is poor and deteriorating as public anger is whipped up into a frenzy and channelled into an orgy of xenophobic scapegoating by the newspapers, which all seem to be owned by the same handful of rich, right wing men.

The government seems to actively despise the people while using said scapegoating to leverage even more power; meanwhile Scotland and Northern Ireland are openly talking about secession - raising the possibility of actual Soviet-style national dissolution to go with our Soviet-style stagnation and poverty. Creative destruction indeed!

We don't even make better TVs. In fact, I have no idea when we last made a TV. I know we used to make computers, back in the '80s... you can probably see them in one of our many museums. But perhaps I'm being unfair: I mean, we do have the Rasbperry Pi...

British computer

 Japanese computer

Oh, and about that debt everyone goes on about? We also have massive debt, but it's all either off the books (thanks, PFI and bailouts!) or private - which means that when people can't pay anymore because they need to buy food or pay bills, we're going to get another crash.

So yeah, "Zombie companies" and government bailouts, while indeed lossy and imperfect, are better than the alternative.

It's better to be Japan than Britain. Neoliberals just don't get it.

We've got a PR problem...

I've been thinking about politics more recently (as you can see if you've come here from my Twitter and Facebook TLs) and I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the reason the Right are doing so well and the Left and Centre are doing so badly is simply that the Right have very good Public Relations. They know how to communicate with people - and the Left, and Centre, do not.

It's all about presentation. If you are political and go on demonstrations or whatever, think about how the public - ordinary passers-by - are affected by your behaviour. What do they see? Are you forthright and confident? Or just intimidating? Do you look like a concerned citizen or a troublemaker? Perception is VERY important.

This is GOOD P.R.

You may be aware of a slogan: "The whole world is watching!" Well, the world is watching - and the world is quite a judgemental place, so if you look like stupid or threatening, you are going to turn people off.

This is BAD P.R.

Black hoodies, dark glasses and a thousand-yard stare are BAD PR. So is randomly smashing things up for the cameras, even if it does get you media attention- it gets you the WRONG KIND of media attention. It also puts off people in the street who might otherwise join in with your protest, especially vulnerable people such as the elderly and those with children.

In potentially dangerous situations, such as anti-fascist demonstrations, dressing all in black and staring people down also confuses people - traditionally it's Fascists who wear uniforms and intimidate people, so wearing a uniform and intimidating people at anti-Fascist demos, as well as being BAD P.R. could even conceivably create a risk of what are termed "blue-on-blue" or "friendly fire" type situations. Which you DO NOT WANT.

However normal clothes, a friendly engaging manner and a ready smile are GOOD PR. It's important to make your point, but it's also important to make a good impression and get people to join you. You want to be inclusive, right?

I'm not always great at this myself - I've been known to yell at people on my own side and look like a dickhead myself. Nobody's perfect! Generally when I get so pissed off I'm going to make a fool of myself I try to leave the area though. It's just not worth it.