In a dream Susan Hall endorses David Kurten and steps aside…. But that is just a dream.
We [of a sceptical bent] know what’s coming down the pipeline. It’s the how and when that remain the stumbling blocks. Timing is all. Sadiq Khan will ride the wave of opposition knowing that by the time the election comes round those pesky ulez non-compliant vehicles will be history, so he still believes he can win a third term.
Parliament has precisely the same aims – Khan has not been stopped, all the other green dreams like 15 minute cities etc are going ahead.
They work for us actually means do as you’re told – or else.
bobpjones
September 7, 2023 2:39 am
Stalin, would be envious of this level of control.
climate emergency! The planet is boiling- the oceans are boiling- the forests are all burning- stop using all low cost, usable fuels, stop eating meat, never cut a tree, we’ll take away your guns, freeze in the dark, while we listen to all your phone calls and read all your emails and if you speak up we’ll cancel you! I probably missed a few. Seems worse than Stalin.
No, no, much better than Stalin. Many fewer deaths, much less ammunition expended. Just an occasional unarmed military veteran getting riddled with bullets while visiting the Capitol, and surviving tourists being sent to prison for decades. Fewer government agents needed to listen to your phone calls now that A.I. is coming into its own. It’s a new day dawning, America. Embrace it and be happy.
Our ‘pogroms’ have already been administered under the false pretext of covid and the guise of “Safe and Effective”, experimental mRNA drugs. Australia and Germany have admitted they have no idea how many dead ‘vaccination’ victims there are, because there are so many!
We DON’T deport who should be deported.
Have you seen the covid ‘isolation’ camps (Gulags) in Australia?
The Jews of the Holocaust slipped quietly into submission believing their government would never turn on them.
We no longer have governments, we have bureaucracies that regulate by Executive Order and Statutory Instrument.
Passing laws through British, American and European parliaments is now a tick box exercise as our representatives are cowed to their own corruption, self entitlement, and blackmailed by their reprehensible personal behaviours.
These pathetic characters kneel at the alter of race and gender minority ideologies, and are too weak willed and/or personally compromised to fight back on behalf of the people who pay them.
It is not a democracy when it’s enshrined in legislation that the colour of someones skin determines their educational and employment prospects; nor when children can be overtly influenced that they are capable of determining their gender whilst in Nursery School.
It is not a democracy where freedom of expression is actively shut down by Governments, the media and big tech, acting in consort to promote an agenda no one in their right mind would ever consider.
All of it, whilst our governments assure us “It’s for your own good”. The last resort of tyrants down the generations before they finally turn on their own citizens.
You are the kind of dangerous fool who would join them to save your own pathetic skin.
Excellent summation, HotScot!
The criminals and criminally insane wandering the halls of Western governments have partnered with the neo-Marxists to install their preferred system: feudalism with modern thought and information control!
We are now in a race to see if the billionaire psychopaths can take total control through their purchased political puppets, or if humanity can shake off the shackles being installed in the name of saving the planet from a completely beneficial trace gas! Interesting times, indeed!
This is hysterical nonsense. Sorry, but that is what it is. This is the other side of the argument. In this fork you have to indulge in paranoid fact free fantasies about present day life in the West to try to equate it with Stalinism. Make up some mad idea to try to find, in the present day West, the 15 million or so killed in the purges.
Or the tens, maybe hundreds of millions who died under Mao in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
The other fork, Hobsbawm and the fellow travellers, you minimize Stalinism and then claim it was very little worse than the West, and of course it was very idealistic.
You are completely correct. Those who compare the current excesses in the West and claim they are as bad as, or worse than, Stalinism cannot have read history.
That is not to excuse the current excesses in the West which are serious and disturbing.
People who do this are effectively turning into apologists for one of the most evil regimes in world history. It amounts to equating true evil, the murder of millions or tens of millions, with a mixture of incompetence, authoritarianism and hysteria.
If you want to get an idea what Stalinism was really like, read Robert Conquest. And if you want to know about Western apologists on the left are like, find out about Seamus Milne and Eric Hobsbawm. Intellectual dishonesty and the condoning of genocide. Also read about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China. Nothing remotely comparable in the present day West.
And if you want to compare present day in the UK with Stalin or Mao, reflect on this. How many people, in either one, would have dared to block traffic on major roads in Beijing or Moscow? How many would have done it repeatedly? And how many would have survived? This is the difference between the treatment of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain and the treatment handed out to the most mild of dissenters in Soviet Russia in the thirties.
Read about the purge of the Leningrad Party. That will give you a graphic insight into the way it was, people dragged out of a party conference and shot in the courtyard, the attendees directed to carry on with the conference. Or read about the Ukrainian famine.
Michel, I think you misunderstand the case. For example, you say “How many people [] would have dared to block traffic on major roads in Beijing or Moscow? How many would have done it repeatedly? And how many would have survived? This is the difference between the treatment of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain and the treatment handed out to the most mild of dissenters in Soviet Russia in the thirties.“. The organisations you refer to, Extinction Rebellion etc, demonstrate in favour of the wanna-be Marxist Socialists in government and are encouraging them to continue their relentless drift to the left. In contrast, not only is it is not safe to protest against the Marxism, it is even not safe to say anything Britain Turns Offensive Speech Into a Police Matter. In the US, the Proud boys are getting 20 years in prison. That’s the difference. It’s not too bad yet, while the law provides some protection against summary execution, but Paul Homewood and David Kurten are telling you where this ship is headed if we don’t turn it around.
One factor is that the art and science of mind control has advanced considerably since the says of Stalin and Mao. In general, the beliefs and concepts of people are limited to the information they have. Enough people are plugged into the mainstream ideology to form a major political power block, They believe what it tells them, no mater how ridiculous relative to physical reality. It forms their reality, thus they conceive of no reason to rebel, thus no harsh physical measures are needed to control them. Also, many realize that physical threats, especially financial and freedom of movement, loom in a background that they try to avoid thinking about.
Here in the USA, and to some significant extent in other western countries, the doctrine of separation of powers still provides some significant barriers against the worse behavior of those in power. Recall that a number of individuals in high political positions have, in recent years, called for criminalization of “climate denial”, with a few calling for the death penalty. That those people have not actually proposed legislation (yet) is a credit to the remnants of the system, not to the individual mind sets.
They believe what it tells them, no mater how ridiculous relative to physical reality. It forms their reality, thus they conceive of no reason to rebel, thus no harsh physical measures are needed to control them. Also, many realize that physical threats, especially financial and freedom of movement, loom in a background that they try to avoid thinking about.
There are very disturbing trends in civil liberties in the US and UK, that’s for sure. And they should be, and are being, resisted.
But they are not even remotely on a level with the mass murders, genocide and crimes committed by the Maoist and Stalinist regimes.
The sentencing of the Proud Boys doesn’t affect this one way or the other. In the UK, ER, JSO, IB have been tolerated but are now being put down when their excesses got tiresome, which is a common way in which such movements are treated in the UK. Cf Greenham Common.
The law in the UK doesn’t ‘provide some protection against summary execution’. That’s absurd. The UK does not have the death penalty and hasn’t since 1969. There is no indication that there is any possibility of reinstating it. Summary execution is not the subject of ‘some protection’. Its not happening and there is no prospect of it happening.
The South Yorkshire police have encouraged the reporting of non-criminal hate speech. But the reaction to this, a mixture of outrage and ridicule, also shows that the comparisons to Stalinism are absurd. You’d not find either in Russia in 1935, because everyone was rightly terrified.
Is it ‘not safe to say anything’? There is a tendency to cancellation when going against the progressive party line. But its not unsafe in any normal sense. Its nothing like what happened in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China. Read Conquest, read Dikotter, read The Gulag Archipelago.
Get specific, that’s how to see it. The 17th Party Congress took place in 1934. Over the next four years 1108 of the 1966 delegates were either executed or disappeared.
There is nothing remotely comparable to this happening or in prospect in the West. And this, remember, was only one tiny indicative incident in the large scale purges which accounted for around 15 million people. How many exactly we shall never know.
You think the Proud Boys sentencing is too harsh? In Stalinist Russia they would never have been sentenced. Never even come to trial. Just vanished without trace.
We need to keep things in proportion. The Chinese, Soviet and National Socialist regimes were by aim and practice mass murderers and genocidal. They were more or less on a level, though the Chinese lead the world in scale of their atrocities. Any attempt to equate our own societies with those regimes is not just factually wrong, its despicably misguided in that it tends to excuse or condone what they did.
As I say, apologists for Communism tend to use two arguments, one being to deny or minimize the atrocities, the other being wildly to exaggerate our own issues. Either way the result is apologetic, its to condone by equalizing two things as different as night and day. Wrong and contemptible.
In most cases, the original owner of the property gave the power company an easement to enter your property for the purpose of reading the meter and maintaining their equipment. That easement becomes attached to the property and the only way to get rid of it is by court order.
good question- what exactly is a “smart meter”- in recent years, all or most of Wokeachusetts now has meters with some kind of wifi on them so, I think, somebody just drives down the street and reads the meters that way- but if they can send a signal I presume they can receive a signal which means they can control the power into the house??? So I don’t know if what I have is a “smart meter”. I see the meter outside the house- maybe if I walk by it someday it’ll start talking to me!
I think the big question is whether there is a contactor in the unit that can actually switch off the electricity to the main panel. I think (hope!) probably not. The measures will more likely be coercive through high usage charges during times of low wind output. Needs more investigation, for sure.
The meter itself allows for remote reads and probably helps with restoration efforts after storms. It’s the ancillary equipment, i.e., the ‘contactors’, that one needs for look out for. Those, and signing up to allow the utility to control your appliances in exchange for a few bucks off your annual bill.
UK smart meters are useless unreliable c**P. They can be remotely controlled by GSM (phone system) to read your actual consumption as often as they like (often 15 minute average) and switch off your supply completely. Ours have a display of the consumption and cost (but this is even more unreliable) I have been waiting a year for a replacement! They do gas and electricity. Mad idea.
Well, there is a lot of information here. Some kind of RF network for communication. And yes, they can remotely turn service on/off so there must be a switch or contactor. They don’t say anything about demand response for grid supply issues, but the smart meter will be PHYSICALLY ABLE to individually isolate any metered service remotely, if I understand correctly.
Of course, because they will need to manually read the meter.
In the 60/70s my parents had out meter behind a fence that was for our dog. He wasn’t really aggressive but was protective so a NEW meter reader would not go through the gate to read the meter. We had post cards that we filled out showing the location of the dials for the “energy”, see they even have me using their BS language, actually watt hours that had been used. WE paid for the stamp to send it in. The power company would set an appointment about once a year to do their own reading to verify the “actual” usage, never a problem.
It will probably be worth the 13 per month, but eventually they WILL replace your meter. The excuse for installing the meters is to save money on the man hours to read meters.
The USE of the meters is going to be the issue.
Load Shedding: Now this could benefit a RIGHT minded government, by shutting off the power to ALL leftist organizations when load shedding is necessary due to leftist policies. You know, Gates foundation, Tides foundation, etc. etc. Then when their generators kick in, sue them through the EOA for the pollution from their generators.
Appliance control: This is the scary one. Keep your old appliances as long as you can. Most older models can be repaired. You just need to search online for the parts. If necessary a black market WILL be created to provide the repair parts from China. The Chinese will not allow this major stream of income to dry up regardless of what the Communists in the US or UK or EU or Australia or NZ want.
The excuse Scottish Power use to get me to allow them to install a smart meter is that the present meter is old (24 years) and might become dangerous. My electrician says that is rubbish.
We allowed a “smart meter” to be installed a number of years ago. The only thing it controls is the water heater. And with an 80 gallon heater, we have never had an issue. Any additions will be met with negativity.
Smart Meters have advantages for the power company. Besides the obvious data on customers bills every month which customers like….no more meter readers getting bitten by dogs….no need to send out someone to cut off power for unpaid bills, just phone the customer during a high load and cut the power while discussing the amount in arrears….In the event of power outage in an area, much easier to power up a city block at a time than a whole substation worth of load…maybe someday a tool for controlling rolling blackouts, but that would be a serious issue as guillotines are not electric….
They can change the firmware remotely at any time, it can change overnight if they wish! You don’t use any other electricity then, I think you may be misinformed?
Unless they also rewire your house, the only thing a smart meter can do to you, is cut power to the whole house. They do not have ability to shut off appliances or anything else individually, without wiring changes to support that functionality.
Does that hold true also with “Smart” appliances? I’m wondering if the meter might be able to communicate with such devices to selectively control them, assuming they were in the house.
Of course, how would it be able to determine that the refrigerator is in the house it’s controlling? (or would that matter to the utility?)
Energy costs as a proportion of a family budget are extremely regressive. (Poor people pay a much larger share of their income for energy.)
If you are a government official that deliberately raises energy costs, then you are deliberately hurting the poor.
Or, you are just too dumb to understand basic economic truths – which also covers a lot of politicians across the world that support these crushing policies.
This is, of course, why I regularly call out Nick Stokes as a hater of the poor.
His religion of unreliable electrical generation falls heavily on the poor.
Bruce P
September 7, 2023 5:12 am
David Kurten for President! He said it all so well, much better than our flimsy pols in the States.
Just as there is nothing more juvenile than “adult entertainment”, there is nothing stupider than “smart appliances”. Smart for the tyrants in charge, maybe, not for the user.
There was a time when it was actually possible to significantly improve the efficiency of your household appliances by using better motors and such. That was in the 50s. Today they achieve higher efficiency ratings by degrading performance and increasing cost.
Adding a networked microcontroller to make it possible for the Net-Zero Police to shut it down when the smart stupid grid is too flaky to keep the lights on is just nuts. This is not efficiency; this is simple totalitarianism.
Here in the States many of the coldest states are already fully converted to heat pumps. Any new house will certainly have one, and most of the old gas units that used to work so reliably when it is 20 below outside have gotten old and have been replaced.
But take a close look at your indoor unit – it may even have a switch on the thermostat that says: “Emergency heat”. Or maybe it does the switchover automatically. When it is too cold out for the heat pump to work, it switches to electric heating coils! The least efficient and most power-hungry way to heat your house.
When it gets really cold there is often no wind available. Or the lubrication in the turbines is frozen solid. And all the solar panels can only work a few hours a day, even when they are not covered with frost or snow. So now we are regressed back two centuries to a coal-powered house, much less carbon-friendly than a gas system.
When stupidity cannot explain a movement, we have to understand it by following the money instead.
“Today they achieve higher efficiency ratings by degrading performance and increasing cost.”
new refrigerators and electric stoves now only have a few years warranty
my parents, decades ago, finally dumped their frig not because it failed but because my mother got tired of having to empty it to defrost it- it was at least 40 years old
I have a 20 YO “garage” refrigerator at my house. The Ice maker quit working about 5 years ago and I replaced a couple of control boards for under 30 dollars US and it still works as good as new. Why a second ice maker, because Las Vegas summers.
We left an even older “garage” refrigerator with our daughter. That fridge is pushing 30years old. Same manufacturer, same ice maker problem, same repair, still working fine.
Any refrigeration system with factory sealed refrigerant and no shaft passing from inside the refrigerant to outside (as in a car belt driven AC compressor) SHOULD last for a very long time. The only penetration of the Freon envelope would be the electrical conductors. I have seen refrigerators from the 40s that are still operating just fine.
As an aside- I happened to be looking at my new frig- it’s a Frigidaire- same brand I grew up with- so, looking at it – it finally dawned on me the origin of the name- FRIGID AIR. It’s always spoken fast as one word- so I never noticed. Amazing the things we see but never notice!
Smart for the tyrants in charge, maybe, not for the user.
Another example of the two edged sword. I wold argue that increased efficiency benefits the society as a whole. A meter that does not require a meter reader could lower costs. At least in part, it is also easily turned against the user.
It appears there is no longer even a pretense of an edit function here.
mleskovarsocalrrcom
September 7, 2023 7:17 am
Most people never heard of Agenda 21 and most of those that did discounted it as a fairy tail. Believe it, the Marxists have chosen the 21st century to come out of the closet.
It has been estimate by Michael Kelly, the inaugural Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge that it would cost between £75,000 and £100,000 to convert an average 3 bedroom house in the UK to meet NetZero standards.
Two things here: I costed the precise modifications Kelly outlines on my own 3 bedroom house some two years before he produced his original report, and I can confirm he is correct. I have the quotations.
Secondly: It was some time prior to Covid when I undertook my costing exercise, and Michael Kelly’s report was published, and over the period of covid materials and labour for construction skyrocketed. You can probably add £50,000 to those numbers.
In 2020 there were an estimated 27.8 million households in the UK (ONS). Very few (probably single digit percentages I would hazard to suggest) conform to any meaningful NetZero standard.
Most people won’t have the available cash to spend up to £150,000 to convert their average 3 bedroom home so where are they going to go to get that money?
Yes, the banks, for loans and mortgages.
Say 20 million households were non compliant and had to spend £150,000.
That’s £3,000,000,000,000 (Three Trillion GBP) worth of government enforced, windfall business for the banks over the next 27 years.
Entirely coincidental that the (ONS) tells us our net debt reached £2.6Tn in 2023.
Now, it would be ridiculous to suggest that the 3Tn from all those home improvements would go directly to paying off the country’s debt however, tax receipts generated from the income of all those workers and the materials they employ to undertake those home improvements would make a serious dent in the 2.6Tn debt.
The banks, of course, will be dancing a jig.
Anyone getting the picture yet?
There are a few flies in the ointment, as pointed out in Kelly’s report. The UK has around one third of the skilled labour available to undertake this mammoth task before 2050. Nor can we do as we usually do, import the necessary labour from the continent, they to will require all the skilled labour they can muster for this exercise.
The training cost’s of those individuals would be an industry unto itself which needs to be funded. Gosh, another windfall opportunity for the banks and more income tax revenue for the government. What a surprise!
Meanwhile, the manufacture of all that oil derived insulation material for lofts and walls etc. would emit more CO2 than it could ever save. And where will all that oil come from if we’re banning the stuff and demand from transport (the biggest user of oil) diminishes, and therefore goes up in cost as it becomes scarcer, thanks to EV’s being nationally mandated from 2035?
But that’s part of the plan …. you will own nothing and be happy. Since you can’t afford your home it will be given to the government to do as they please. Anecdote: A friend who migrated from Russia to the US did so because the government said her home was too big for just her and her husband and confiscated it. They were put in a deteriorating one bedroom, one bath, three room apartment of 400 square feet. Guess who moved into their home? One man and his wife who were government apparatchiks.
Kevin Kilty
September 7, 2023 8:22 am
Good man. I doubt he has anyone listening to him. The average English voter is as big a dope as the average American.
Quote:“”Tory MPs have raised alarm bells over the flagship Energy Bill, labelling it a “recipe for energy disaster” that could potentially burden consumers with soaring costs.
In a dream Susan Hall endorses David Kurten and steps aside…. But that is just a dream.
We [of a sceptical bent] know what’s coming down the pipeline. It’s the how and when that remain the stumbling blocks. Timing is all. Sadiq Khan will ride the wave of opposition knowing that by the time the election comes round those pesky ulez non-compliant vehicles will be history, so he still believes he can win a third term.
Parliament has precisely the same aims – Khan has not been stopped, all the other green dreams like 15 minute cities etc are going ahead.
They work for us actually means do as you’re told – or else.
Stalin, would be envious of this level of control.
No, he wouldn’t Aren’t you forgetting the pogroms, deportations and the gulags?
What pray are our equivalents?
climate emergency! The planet is boiling- the oceans are boiling- the forests are all burning- stop using all low cost, usable fuels, stop eating meat, never cut a tree, we’ll take away your guns, freeze in the dark, while we listen to all your phone calls and read all your emails and if you speak up we’ll cancel you! I probably missed a few. Seems worse than Stalin.
No, no, much better than Stalin. Many fewer deaths, much less ammunition expended. Just an occasional unarmed military veteran getting riddled with bullets while visiting the Capitol, and surviving tourists being sent to prison for decades. Fewer government agents needed to listen to your phone calls now that A.I. is coming into its own. It’s a new day dawning, America. Embrace it and be happy.
Our ‘pogroms’ have already been administered under the false pretext of covid and the guise of “Safe and Effective”, experimental mRNA drugs. Australia and Germany have admitted they have no idea how many dead ‘vaccination’ victims there are, because there are so many!
We DON’T deport who should be deported.
Have you seen the covid ‘isolation’ camps (Gulags) in Australia?
The Jews of the Holocaust slipped quietly into submission believing their government would never turn on them.
We no longer have governments, we have bureaucracies that regulate by Executive Order and Statutory Instrument.
Passing laws through British, American and European parliaments is now a tick box exercise as our representatives are cowed to their own corruption, self entitlement, and blackmailed by their reprehensible personal behaviours.
These pathetic characters kneel at the alter of race and gender minority ideologies, and are too weak willed and/or personally compromised to fight back on behalf of the people who pay them.
It is not a democracy when it’s enshrined in legislation that the colour of someones skin determines their educational and employment prospects; nor when children can be overtly influenced that they are capable of determining their gender whilst in Nursery School.
It is not a democracy where freedom of expression is actively shut down by Governments, the media and big tech, acting in consort to promote an agenda no one in their right mind would ever consider.
All of it, whilst our governments assure us “It’s for your own good”. The last resort of tyrants down the generations before they finally turn on their own citizens.
You are the kind of dangerous fool who would join them to save your own pathetic skin.
Excellent summation, HotScot!
The criminals and criminally insane wandering the halls of Western governments have partnered with the neo-Marxists to install their preferred system: feudalism with modern thought and information control!
We are now in a race to see if the billionaire psychopaths can take total control through their purchased political puppets, or if humanity can shake off the shackles being installed in the name of saving the planet from a completely beneficial trace gas! Interesting times, indeed!
This is hysterical nonsense. Sorry, but that is what it is. This is the other side of the argument. In this fork you have to indulge in paranoid fact free fantasies about present day life in the West to try to equate it with Stalinism. Make up some mad idea to try to find, in the present day West, the 15 million or so killed in the purges.
Or the tens, maybe hundreds of millions who died under Mao in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
The other fork, Hobsbawm and the fellow travellers, you minimize Stalinism and then claim it was very little worse than the West, and of course it was very idealistic.
Both versions are contemptible. Pitiful.
Point out a single item in my post that can be factually refuted.
Wait until, the net-zero stasi come a knocking on your door. Let us know how you feel then.
The net-zero stasi won’t knock on your door; they’ll just shut off your water and power until you reach the recommended level of obsequiousness!
Knock! ?, they’ll probably just smash it down, with a big red key 😀
You are completely correct. Those who compare the current excesses in the West and claim they are as bad as, or worse than, Stalinism cannot have read history.
That is not to excuse the current excesses in the West which are serious and disturbing.
People who do this are effectively turning into apologists for one of the most evil regimes in world history. It amounts to equating true evil, the murder of millions or tens of millions, with a mixture of incompetence, authoritarianism and hysteria.
If you want to get an idea what Stalinism was really like, read Robert Conquest. And if you want to know about Western apologists on the left are like, find out about Seamus Milne and Eric Hobsbawm. Intellectual dishonesty and the condoning of genocide. Also read about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China. Nothing remotely comparable in the present day West.
And if you want to compare present day in the UK with Stalin or Mao, reflect on this. How many people, in either one, would have dared to block traffic on major roads in Beijing or Moscow? How many would have done it repeatedly? And how many would have survived? This is the difference between the treatment of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain and the treatment handed out to the most mild of dissenters in Soviet Russia in the thirties.
Read about the purge of the Leningrad Party. That will give you a graphic insight into the way it was, people dragged out of a party conference and shot in the courtyard, the attendees directed to carry on with the conference. Or read about the Ukrainian famine.
Michel, I think you misunderstand the case. For example, you say “How many people [] would have dared to block traffic on major roads in Beijing or Moscow? How many would have done it repeatedly? And how many would have survived? This is the difference between the treatment of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain and the treatment handed out to the most mild of dissenters in Soviet Russia in the thirties.“. The organisations you refer to, Extinction Rebellion etc, demonstrate in favour of the wanna-be Marxist Socialists in government and are encouraging them to continue their relentless drift to the left. In contrast, not only is it is not safe to protest against the Marxism, it is even not safe to say anything Britain Turns Offensive Speech Into a Police Matter. In the US, the Proud boys are getting 20 years in prison. That’s the difference. It’s not too bad yet, while the law provides some protection against summary execution, but Paul Homewood and David Kurten are telling you where this ship is headed if we don’t turn it around.
One factor is that the art and science of mind control has advanced considerably since the says of Stalin and Mao. In general, the beliefs and concepts of people are limited to the information they have. Enough people are plugged into the mainstream ideology to form a major political power block, They believe what it tells them, no mater how ridiculous relative to physical reality. It forms their reality, thus they conceive of no reason to rebel, thus no harsh physical measures are needed to control them. Also, many realize that physical threats, especially financial and freedom of movement, loom in a background that they try to avoid thinking about.
Here in the USA, and to some significant extent in other western countries, the doctrine of separation of powers still provides some significant barriers against the worse behavior of those in power. Recall that a number of individuals in high political positions have, in recent years, called for criminalization of “climate denial”, with a few calling for the death penalty. That those people have not actually proposed legislation (yet) is a credit to the remnants of the system, not to the individual mind sets.
They believe what it tells them, no mater how ridiculous relative to physical reality. It forms their reality, thus they conceive of no reason to rebel, thus no harsh physical measures are needed to control them. Also, many realize that physical threats, especially financial and freedom of movement, loom in a background that they try to avoid thinking about.
Sounds like 1984.
Great statement. Thanks.
There are very disturbing trends in civil liberties in the US and UK, that’s for sure. And they should be, and are being, resisted.
But they are not even remotely on a level with the mass murders, genocide and crimes committed by the Maoist and Stalinist regimes.
The sentencing of the Proud Boys doesn’t affect this one way or the other. In the UK, ER, JSO, IB have been tolerated but are now being put down when their excesses got tiresome, which is a common way in which such movements are treated in the UK. Cf Greenham Common.
The law in the UK doesn’t ‘provide some protection against summary execution’. That’s absurd. The UK does not have the death penalty and hasn’t since 1969. There is no indication that there is any possibility of reinstating it. Summary execution is not the subject of ‘some protection’. Its not happening and there is no prospect of it happening.
The South Yorkshire police have encouraged the reporting of non-criminal hate speech. But the reaction to this, a mixture of outrage and ridicule, also shows that the comparisons to Stalinism are absurd. You’d not find either in Russia in 1935, because everyone was rightly terrified.
Is it ‘not safe to say anything’? There is a tendency to cancellation when going against the progressive party line. But its not unsafe in any normal sense. Its nothing like what happened in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China. Read Conquest, read Dikotter, read The Gulag Archipelago.
Get specific, that’s how to see it. The 17th Party Congress took place in 1934. Over the next four years 1108 of the 1966 delegates were either executed or disappeared.
There is nothing remotely comparable to this happening or in prospect in the West. And this, remember, was only one tiny indicative incident in the large scale purges which accounted for around 15 million people. How many exactly we shall never know.
You think the Proud Boys sentencing is too harsh? In Stalinist Russia they would never have been sentenced. Never even come to trial. Just vanished without trace.
We need to keep things in proportion. The Chinese, Soviet and National Socialist regimes were by aim and practice mass murderers and genocidal. They were more or less on a level, though the Chinese lead the world in scale of their atrocities. Any attempt to equate our own societies with those regimes is not just factually wrong, its despicably misguided in that it tends to excuse or condone what they did.
As I say, apologists for Communism tend to use two arguments, one being to deny or minimize the atrocities, the other being wildly to exaggerate our own issues. Either way the result is apologetic, its to condone by equalizing two things as different as night and day. Wrong and contemptible.
The Chinese Communist Party has destroyed more freedoms and rights than any group in modern human history!
US Government: “Hold my beer!”
Just keep it to less than two beers a week.
Read Dikotter. Also read Yang Jisheng‘s two books.
Here in my home state of NY my utility company says I will get a “smart meter” in 2025. I need to investigate exactly what functionality it has.
This gentleman David Kurten is very perceptive about what is going on in our world.
Beware! “Smart” as appended to anything, means “terminally thick”. If you get any choice in the matter, turn it down.
Smart….
Following [pre-programmed] orders
No choice. It’s the utility company’s meter, and they get to change it.
They need to violate private property by force to do so if the homeowner objects.
In most cases, the original owner of the property gave the power company an easement to enter your property for the purpose of reading the meter and maintaining their equipment. That easement becomes attached to the property and the only way to get rid of it is by court order.
good question- what exactly is a “smart meter”- in recent years, all or most of Wokeachusetts now has meters with some kind of wifi on them so, I think, somebody just drives down the street and reads the meters that way- but if they can send a signal I presume they can receive a signal which means they can control the power into the house??? So I don’t know if what I have is a “smart meter”. I see the meter outside the house- maybe if I walk by it someday it’ll start talking to me!
I think the big question is whether there is a contactor in the unit that can actually switch off the electricity to the main panel. I think (hope!) probably not. The measures will more likely be coercive through high usage charges during times of low wind output. Needs more investigation, for sure.
The meter itself allows for remote reads and probably helps with restoration efforts after storms. It’s the ancillary equipment, i.e., the ‘contactors’, that one needs for look out for. Those, and signing up to allow the utility to control your appliances in exchange for a few bucks off your annual bill.
UK smart meters are useless unreliable c**P. They can be remotely controlled by GSM (phone system) to read your actual consumption as often as they like (often 15 minute average) and switch off your supply completely. Ours have a display of the consumption and cost (but this is even more unreliable) I have been waiting a year for a replacement! They do gas and electricity. Mad idea.
Mine will be surrounded by a Farady cage!
After the first missed reading, the power company will send a tech out to find out what is wrong.
Well, there is a lot of information here. Some kind of RF network for communication. And yes, they can remotely turn service on/off so there must be a switch or contactor. They don’t say anything about demand response for grid supply issues, but the smart meter will be PHYSICALLY ABLE to individually isolate any metered service remotely, if I understand correctly.
https://www.nyseg.com/documents/40132/5899081/FINAL+NGAW003+NYSEG+Smart+Meter+FAQs+3.15.23.pdf/3613d4a6-6f44-1bda-d29a-293677727baf?t=1679337825613#:~:text=A%3A%20A%20smart%20meter%20is,the%20meter%20and%20our%20systems.
Oh, and I do get to opt out and keep the old meter if I pay a $13 per month fee.
Of course, because they will need to manually read the meter.
In the 60/70s my parents had out meter behind a fence that was for our dog. He wasn’t really aggressive but was protective so a NEW meter reader would not go through the gate to read the meter. We had post cards that we filled out showing the location of the dials for the “energy”, see they even have me using their BS language, actually watt hours that had been used. WE paid for the stamp to send it in. The power company would set an appointment about once a year to do their own reading to verify the “actual” usage, never a problem.
It will probably be worth the 13 per month, but eventually they WILL replace your meter. The excuse for installing the meters is to save money on the man hours to read meters.
The USE of the meters is going to be the issue.
Load Shedding: Now this could benefit a RIGHT minded government, by shutting off the power to ALL leftist organizations when load shedding is necessary due to leftist policies. You know, Gates foundation, Tides foundation, etc. etc. Then when their generators kick in, sue them through the EOA for the pollution from their generators.
Appliance control: This is the scary one. Keep your old appliances as long as you can. Most older models can be repaired. You just need to search online for the parts. If necessary a black market WILL be created to provide the repair parts from China. The Chinese will not allow this major stream of income to dry up regardless of what the Communists in the US or UK or EU or Australia or NZ want.
The excuse Scottish Power use to get me to allow them to install a smart meter is that the present meter is old (24 years) and might become dangerous. My electrician says that is rubbish.
We allowed a “smart meter” to be installed a number of years ago. The only thing it controls is the water heater. And with an 80 gallon heater, we have never had an issue. Any additions will be met with negativity.
Smart Meters have advantages for the power company. Besides the obvious data on customers bills every month which customers like….no more meter readers getting bitten by dogs….no need to send out someone to cut off power for unpaid bills, just phone the customer during a high load and cut the power while discussing the amount in arrears….In the event of power outage in an area, much easier to power up a city block at a time than a whole substation worth of load…maybe someday a tool for controlling rolling blackouts, but that would be a serious issue as guillotines are not electric….
They can change the firmware remotely at any time, it can change overnight if they wish! You don’t use any other electricity then, I think you may be misinformed?
Unless they also rewire your house, the only thing a smart meter can do to you, is cut power to the whole house. They do not have ability to shut off appliances or anything else individually, without wiring changes to support that functionality.
Does that hold true also with “Smart” appliances? I’m wondering if the meter might be able to communicate with such devices to selectively control them, assuming they were in the house.
Of course, how would it be able to determine that the refrigerator is in the house it’s controlling? (or would that matter to the utility?)
Correct, in respect to actual control.
Energy costs as a proportion of a family budget are extremely regressive. (Poor people pay a much larger share of their income for energy.)
If you are a government official that deliberately raises energy costs, then you are deliberately hurting the poor.
Or, you are just too dumb to understand basic economic truths – which also covers a lot of politicians across the world that support these crushing policies.
“If you are a government official that deliberately raises energy costs, then you are deliberately hurting the poor.”
Did you hear that, Joe Biden? You are hurting the poor, Joe.
I hope you realize you are addressing someone with 3 mansions and a portfolio of bank accounts that would make small countries envious.
They have to destroy the poor in order to save the poor.
This is, of course, why I regularly call out Nick Stokes as a hater of the poor.
His religion of unreliable electrical generation falls heavily on the poor.
David Kurten for President! He said it all so well, much better than our flimsy pols in the States.
Just as there is nothing more juvenile than “adult entertainment”, there is nothing stupider than “smart appliances”. Smart for the tyrants in charge, maybe, not for the user.
There was a time when it was actually possible to significantly improve the efficiency of your household appliances by using better motors and such. That was in the 50s. Today they achieve higher efficiency ratings by degrading performance and increasing cost.
Adding a networked microcontroller to make it possible for the Net-Zero Police to shut it down when the
smartstupid grid is too flaky to keep the lights on is just nuts. This is not efficiency; this is simple totalitarianism.Here in the States many of the coldest states are already fully converted to heat pumps. Any new house will certainly have one, and most of the old gas units that used to work so reliably when it is 20 below outside have gotten old and have been replaced.
But take a close look at your indoor unit – it may even have a switch on the thermostat that says: “Emergency heat”. Or maybe it does the switchover automatically. When it is too cold out for the heat pump to work, it switches to electric heating coils! The least efficient and most power-hungry way to heat your house.
When it gets really cold there is often no wind available. Or the lubrication in the turbines is frozen solid. And all the solar panels can only work a few hours a day, even when they are not covered with frost or snow. So now we are regressed back two centuries to a coal-powered house, much less carbon-friendly than a gas system.
When stupidity cannot explain a movement, we have to understand it by following the money instead.
“Today they achieve higher efficiency ratings by degrading performance and increasing cost.”
new refrigerators and electric stoves now only have a few years warranty
my parents, decades ago, finally dumped their frig not because it failed but because my mother got tired of having to empty it to defrost it- it was at least 40 years old
I have a 20 YO “garage” refrigerator at my house. The Ice maker quit working about 5 years ago and I replaced a couple of control boards for under 30 dollars US and it still works as good as new. Why a second ice maker, because Las Vegas summers.
We left an even older “garage” refrigerator with our daughter. That fridge is pushing 30years old. Same manufacturer, same ice maker problem, same repair, still working fine.
Any refrigeration system with factory sealed refrigerant and no shaft passing from inside the refrigerant to outside (as in a car belt driven AC compressor) SHOULD last for a very long time. The only penetration of the Freon envelope would be the electrical conductors. I have seen refrigerators from the 40s that are still operating just fine.
As an aside- I happened to be looking at my new frig- it’s a Frigidaire- same brand I grew up with- so, looking at it – it finally dawned on me the origin of the name- FRIGID AIR. It’s always spoken fast as one word- so I never noticed. Amazing the things we see but never notice!
Such things have long been recognized NOT to be in the best interests of the manufacturers.
Another example of the two edged sword. I wold argue that increased efficiency benefits the society as a whole. A meter that does not require a meter reader could lower costs. At least in part, it is also easily turned against the user.
It appears there is no longer even a pretense of an edit function here.
Most people never heard of Agenda 21 and most of those that did discounted it as a fairy tail. Believe it, the Marxists have chosen the 21st century to come out of the closet.
It has been estimate by Michael Kelly, the inaugural Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge that it would cost between £75,000 and £100,000 to convert an average 3 bedroom house in the UK to meet NetZero standards.
Two things here: I costed the precise modifications Kelly outlines on my own 3 bedroom house some two years before he produced his original report, and I can confirm he is correct. I have the quotations.
Secondly: It was some time prior to Covid when I undertook my costing exercise, and Michael Kelly’s report was published, and over the period of covid materials and labour for construction skyrocketed. You can probably add £50,000 to those numbers.
In 2020 there were an estimated 27.8 million households in the UK (ONS). Very few (probably single digit percentages I would hazard to suggest) conform to any meaningful NetZero standard.
Most people won’t have the available cash to spend up to £150,000 to convert their average 3 bedroom home so where are they going to go to get that money?
Yes, the banks, for loans and mortgages.
Say 20 million households were non compliant and had to spend £150,000.
That’s £3,000,000,000,000 (Three Trillion GBP) worth of government enforced, windfall business for the banks over the next 27 years.
Entirely coincidental that the (ONS) tells us our net debt reached £2.6Tn in 2023.
Now, it would be ridiculous to suggest that the 3Tn from all those home improvements would go directly to paying off the country’s debt however, tax receipts generated from the income of all those workers and the materials they employ to undertake those home improvements would make a serious dent in the 2.6Tn debt.
The banks, of course, will be dancing a jig.
Anyone getting the picture yet?
There are a few flies in the ointment, as pointed out in Kelly’s report. The UK has around one third of the skilled labour available to undertake this mammoth task before 2050. Nor can we do as we usually do, import the necessary labour from the continent, they to will require all the skilled labour they can muster for this exercise.
The training cost’s of those individuals would be an industry unto itself which needs to be funded. Gosh, another windfall opportunity for the banks and more income tax revenue for the government. What a surprise!
Meanwhile, the manufacture of all that oil derived insulation material for lofts and walls etc. would emit more CO2 than it could ever save. And where will all that oil come from if we’re banning the stuff and demand from transport (the biggest user of oil) diminishes, and therefore goes up in cost as it becomes scarcer, thanks to EV’s being nationally mandated from 2035?
Kelly’s report can be read here: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2022/03/Kelly-Net-Zero-Progress-Report.pdf
It doesn’t, of course, include my Tinfoil Hat derived Conspiracy Theories about banks, and our government’s desires.
But that’s part of the plan …. you will own nothing and be happy. Since you can’t afford your home it will be given to the government to do as they please. Anecdote: A friend who migrated from Russia to the US did so because the government said her home was too big for just her and her husband and confiscated it. They were put in a deteriorating one bedroom, one bath, three room apartment of 400 square feet. Guess who moved into their home? One man and his wife who were government apparatchiks.
Good man. I doubt he has anyone listening to him. The average English voter is as big a dope as the average American.
As an American, I resent that statement!
I can’t deny it, of course, but I do resent it!
Yeah, I know. The jokes is older than me, and I’m old.
Americans will soon be choosing which bills to pay and which to skip.
story tip
How a UAW Strike Could Raise Your Auto-Insurance Premiums | Barron’s (barrons.com)
Are electric cars more expensive to insure? (yahoo.com)
Why some homeowners are dropping their insurance (yahoo.com)
Why energy bills skyrocketed in the U.S. West – E&E News by POLITICO (eenews.net)
Trucker warns Biden’s EPA regulations would be ‘catastrophic’ for the American food supply | Fox News
Sustainable means affordable dummies-
Shoppers say they want sustainable goods, but won’t pay more (msn.com)
Quote:“”Tory MPs have raised alarm bells over the flagship Energy Bill, labelling it a “recipe for energy disaster” that could potentially burden consumers with soaring costs.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/tory-mps-warn-ambitious-energy-bill-risks-soaring-costs-5487031