Flights Of Fancy

Given the turmoil in the media over Syria and what is involved in military action, there is enough comment on that covering all opinions and ideas.

There are the unintended consequences and other matters of issue.  But it distracts from the economic and financial matters impending.

This salutary reminder of history was listed by Automatic Earth today from Howmuch dot net that encapsulates the key known economic and financial crises of the last two millennia. It has easy to read definitions of type and a six minute video going fast down the ages.

These cause upheavals and struggles for power and territory, so do wars for these and other reasons and so do periods of radical technical change.

At present we have all three going on at the same time.  Our governments are consisted of people who do not understand any of it and who are unlikely to be able to control what happens when.

They may like to tell us that they are winning battles, but the truth is they have already lost the war.

Gearing Up

With the Greens going puce in Paris in their efforts to bring to an end industry and other secondary energy heavy economic activity in Western Europe in the name of global warming, meanwhile in Beijing there is one of the regular toxic smogs inflicting serious health problems.

The signs are that it is getting worse rather than better.  In London, there are also problems.  Here in the UK a while ago we accepted the then causes of air pollution problems and were persuaded if that if vehicles went diesel all would be a lot better, if not entirely well.  Now we know that diesel is nasty.

Also, it is no good going back to a primitive lifestyle of early man, not just because of food supply etc. but because they huddled together in huts with wood and natural elements in the fire, many of them had health problems from that air pollution.

The BBC has run a three part series on renewables etc. in "Power To The People" which made me quite sentimental about the Ferrybridge C Power Station that loomed so large over the horizons of my past.  There were things that gave pause for thought.

One answer to our energy problems has been that if enough wind farms, solar farms, tide and water sources are put to work we will not need all the dirty sources.  One key argument is that when the wind stops here, it will be blowing somewhere in Europe and power will be made available to use.  This is called inter connectivity and is at the heart of the case.

But it does not work  like that according to Euan Mearns in Energy Matters who has done a detailed study of the wind figures.  And if it doesn't then inter connectivity cannot be relied on.  One implication is that we will always need 100% backup from gas, nuclear or other dirty sources for our energy demands and needs.

But there was something about wind turbines that caused an ancient twitch.  Using air is not "free", the turbines have to be put up, and that costs money.  More to the point is the business of maintenance, repairs and replacements which we are all too fond of ignoring.  They have to be monitored, which costs, and then work will always need to be done.

The part that stood out was the gear boxes.  We forget how central gear boxes are our civilisation and economy.  Children in schools should be taught matters such as the development of gearing, compound steam and such like to realise the impact of key technical advances of the past on our present.

The wind turbines are only as good as their gear boxes. But wind turbines are hard on them by the very nature of their function and work. So every time a gear box needs attention skilled men have to go to the turbine, clamber up it and then see what can be done.  How long will it be before the turbines need their gear boxes replacing?

This is not "free" and certainly not cheap, given the location and structure of the turbines.  Also, it is not a cost those debating future energy supply take into account in making their promises and claiming what is best.

Buy shares in gear box companies?

The Filthy Fifth

A few days ago BBC2 screened a two part series fronted by Mark Urban on the part played by the Fifth Royal Tanks of The Royal Tank Regiment.  Among the first armoured troops to go to North Africa they were part of an elite who went on to be in the Normandy Landings in 1944 and then to northern Germany at the very end in 1945 (picture above in Hamburg).

In the desert smartness was a low priority because of other needs and demands.  Given the conditions, the nickname "The Filthy Fifth" reflects typical squaddie humour of the period.  It may come as a surprise to some that the men of that time in the services had their own ideas about a lot of things.

The Regimental March is the old song "My Boy Willie" and words I recall were "It wasn't the Yanks who won the war, it was my boy Willie, never been in a tank before.......".  It is a fine tune to march to, been there, done that, a few years after the war with a divisional parade.

It was a squadron of The Filthy Filth who were there to march to it, then one of the units in the 7th Armoured Division (Desert Rats) stationed in Northern Germany as Cold War Warriors.  They had joined the Division before El Alamein and were with it until the end, the Division being disbanded in 1958.

The two programmes in the series are mercifully quite straight forward avoiding all the usual bank crash wallop favoured by documentary makers these days.  The horrors are the realities of tank warfare and there was more than enough of that in the various campaigns involving 5RTR.

One part that was discomforting to say the least was at the very beginning in the first years of the war.  The regiment, like all the other tank units, was equipped with tanks that were grossly inadequate, under powered, under gunned, unsafe and unreliable.  If Willie had not been given American tanks later we would not have had an armoured force left to fight.

How was it that the mighty intellectuals of the civil service, the generals of the high command, presumably the intelligence services and not least the politicians, were unaware of the capability of the German tanks and anti-tank artillery?  If they were aware why did the Army finish up with tanks that were a liability?  Later there were better tanks and guns, but still inferior to the German.

Even the tanks that were produced it seems were poorly made, more being lost in breakdowns often than were destroyed by enemy action.  Was it simply bad workmanship and if so how was it in the chain of production that such unreliable products were sent out for men to die in?

This is before you have the outlandish tactics at first adopted by a general staff who did not understand armoured warfare.  What were pseudo cavalry charges must have made easy targets for the superior power of the German guns.

It seems that for the first British tanks to have a chance of knocking out a German one, they had to get a to a couple of tanks length for their shells to impact on the German armour.  Typically, it was the men who were blamed and not the failures of supply or command.

What worries me is looking at the government of the present and for that matter the opposition, the situation today seems to be just as bad, if not a great deal worse.

We are being given cheap propaganda, lies a plenty, seriously substandard services and no effective planning for the future in a dangerous and demanding world.

As in 1940 and 1941 we could have to pay a heavy price for this.

Physics For Beginners

Einstein was trying to explain how easy it was to have slippers that were square to equal his balance.

This was mistranslated, unluckily, by an academic unfamiliar with his accent and thought to be a theory.

E=MC2

There has been endless trouble since.

Red Sails In The Sunset

When the Shadow Chancellor, John MacDonnell was flinging words and Red Books around the Speaker's table it came from someone who as a teenager admired Mao Zedong as an epitome of socialism and has clung on to him ever since.

Mao died an old man in 1976, had learned his socialism from reading Marx and Lenin in the 1920's and then developed his ideas embodied in the Red Books, the bibles of The Left in the UK of the period say 1960 to 1990.

It is a great pity that MacDonnell has kept his reading and understanding to these limited sources.  Had he known much of Ramsay Macdonald and his works there is a lot of interest there.

For example his major work "The Socialist Movement" of 1911 has this to say in Chapter 6, pages 147 to 149, on The Class War:

Quote.

The idea of the class war no longer represents the motive forces organising Socialism and forming the Socialist movement.

Those who still use it are like those more backward religious communities which express their theologies in the terms used before there was a science of geology.

Unquote.

Perhaps John should change his researchers and special advisers.

Thanksgiving Identity And Diversity

When those in the USA who celebrate Thanksgiving Day tuck into their turkey we will have eaten pork.  The new settlers may have needed to eat what they could, back in England the population would have depended on pork for its basic meat protein.  Which brings me to the question of a sense of identity.

A five minute in depth research gives a wide variety of figures for the number of people said to be descended from those early settlers.  The higher ones look most improbable, a try at a figure would take time and would depend on key estimates which may well not be reliable.

Despite this, it is likely that there are many people out there who are descended and are not aware of it and they may well be the majority.  On the other hand, those that do know will have other ancestors who will be very many and various.

Given that Thanksgiving is supposed to suggest a sense of American identity among many of the population this raises more questions than it answers.

Back here in Olde England many feel that our present elite are engaged in an assault on any sense of identity for the British and are anxious to have us be diverse.  The latest spat is the item on the three sets of remains of the "first Londoners" who have varied origins.

This has been dealt with in the web sites of "Is The BBC Biased" and "Biased BBC".  The most obvious comment is that three or four is far too small a statistical sample to be a basis for any kind of generalisation especially out of one location.

Apart from the blinding obvious that if you have a new settlement founded by incomers then necessarily they will all be migrants there are other matters.  Moreover, as a port and landing place, often a location for armed groups and then a centre of government whatever was going on in the sticks and other places London would have been relatively "diverse".

It may have been the first larger group of housing etc. on that patch but in the few thousand years before that there must have been a scatter of people, perhaps small in number, in the area from time to time.  The chances of finding remains of them under say Camden and Kings Cross are slight.

In the period in which I grew up a major source of a sense of identity was religious.  This might relate to geography in some cases and the part of the Atlantic Isles of origin.  Often the sense might be localised to your town, with the "British" or "Irish" "Scots" "Welsh" or "English" parallel.  It was never entirely clear, just the muddle we went along with, more or less.

On the other hand at one stage there was the notion of "Empire" that demanded our loyalty and then after World War 2 we were encouraged to somehow take on board a vague Internationalism where we were all brothers and sisters.

For many this did not work well, they preferred class or political party and in any case we were becoming bombarded with media and business to take on other roles.

Ford and other motoring companies invited us to be loyal to their brand and products, yes I was once Cortina Man, and the marketing boys (not many girls) tried their best to persuade us to build a sense of identity around their offerings even down to toothpaste.

If people asked who am I or what am I the media and the marketing people were all too anxious to instruct them. The pop music business has been frantic to have people identifying with a particular subset or performers.

This reached its apogee several years ago when in a contest for Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party, all ten candidates swore their oath of loyalty to the group "One Direction".

Some therefore turn to history to work out who they are and what they may be, but this may be no help, it could make it more difficult.  If you find out a lot it might make it almost impossible and intricate if different faiths, different occupations and place in the class structure matches that of the past.  There are going to be people you would rather not see there.

In the USA it was the many chances and convolutions of the history of the 17th to 19th Century for it to become a continent wide, English speaking (then) entity in its present form.  If a few battles and wars in Europe had different results we could have had a patchwork of contending states that differed strongly from each other and had different ideas about identity.  Oh, well not quite like that of the present.

This piece of music for me expresses the spirit of Thanksgiving if you have 25 minutes to spare to relax and just let it come to you.  With five minutes left the vision cuts but the music continues.  The shot replacing the vision is from the Martha Graham dance production, see Wikipedia.

As for identity and diversity, perhaps it might be best just to give up and stick to football.

Climate Syria And Sense

HRH Prince Charles thinks that it is climate change in the shape of drought that is the root of the problems with Syria.  Many will agree with him in that it seems so obvious.

But what if there wasn't a drought?  If so, what are the problems and how did they arise?

This long and detailed article in "Energy Matters" by Roger Andrews takes a close look at the situation in the last few years in Syria in relation to agriculture and its production.

This extract is from half way:

And if drought wasn’t the cause what was? There have been two historic contributors. First was Syria’s skyrocketing population, which more than quadrupled from 4.7 million to 22.1 million between 1961 and 2012.

Second was Syria’s government, which in an attempt to keep up with population growth encouraged rapid development of irrigated croplands beginning in the 1980s (according to FAO data Syria’s irrigated cropland increased by 70%, from 693,000 to 1,180,000 hectares, between 1990 and 1995 alone, which explains the large increase in wheat production over this period seen in Figure 7).

Unquote.

It is argued that the upsurge of oil prices a few years ago hit the farmers hard both in pumping the water they needed and getting the crops to market.  In short many went broke at a time when other pressures were increasing.

So in the last fifty years there has been a huge increase in population.  The Government attempted to increase the primary resource of food to keep up with it but were unable to increase the secondary and tertiary sectors enough to provide for employment and wealth for the growing population.

Events beyond their control meant that food became short as well.  Then the complex situation led to a collapse in which the latent bodies of extremists took advantage with outside support.