Trouble On The Trains

There is a nasty accident waiting to happen. It is on the railways and it has been only a matter of luck that it has not already occurred. It is nothing to do with tracks or signals or normal running.

It is in the design and equipment of many trains now in use and what might happen. One reason why it has been avoided is that there have already been cases of passengers smashing their way out of carriages. The stories have been slanted to suggest that they have been foolish or impatient.

The new stock with its air conditioning systems, fully enclosed carriages with windows that cannot be opened and doors that lock shut all depend on the power available. What has happened recently is that trains have come to a halt and the power is shut off or has failed.

At most times of the year this would be a nuisance which may give rise to discomfort of one sort or another. In the London Underground even at cool times of the year a train stuck in a tunnel can became very uncomfortable.

At times when it is very hot and the train is either in a confined space which heats rapidly or out in open hot sun then the conditions in the carriages can deteriorate quickly. The carriages can literally become ovens.

The latest occurrence was on South Eastern Railways Dartford line. A train breakdown and South Eastern’s typical lack of ability to sort out the traffic or deal with it resulted in trains being held for hours without power or ventilation. Passengers then smashed the doors open and detrained.

Because of the media’s obsession that heat is good there is no mention of the risk that had the passengers not done so then there could have been a real threat to life. How many in the train were vulnerable to excessive heat? How many could have suffered real damage had the situation continued?

One trouble is that the RAIB which deals with safety etc. rather than the HSE are strong on the technical side but not so keen on messy passenger affairs. Having people on the trains interferes with their smooth running and the meeting of targets.

So South Eastern can get away with sending ambulances to wrong locations, not having first aid kits available and not bothering with tiresome accident reporting procedures.

There have been other reports of passengers elsewhere having to take their own action here and there but the prevailing attitude is unsympathetic, the authorities more or less claiming that they should sit and suffer until all the blunders and errors have been dealt with.

One problem is that there are cases of passenger foolishness that has had serious and sometimes fatal consequences so it is easy for the authorities to suggest that all the incidents are for these reasons.

But they are not, just how long will it be before a disaster occurs in a train that has been left without aid in overheated conditions?

Flogging Dead Horses

Perhaps, I am not best placed to say much about teacher’s strikes or what happens in schools. It is now twenty five years since I was in one for matters to do with education and only twice since and then over twenty years ago as part of music audiences which had nothing to do with the schools.

There are rumours that changes have taken place. But in my time there were also changes. There was the notion that Elementary Education was no longer enough. It was argued that many, the radicals asserted all, of youngsters should have some form of basic secondary education, lasting even as long as the age of 15.

It was a few years after my time that this came about and there are some ancients who once felt it would not do much good who now claim to be vindicated. Also, there is in my memory the indirect experience of people whose education began in the 1860’s and 1870’s. In the extended family some began teaching in the 1880’s.

In all that time we have a plethora of reports, commission, campaigns and all the rest that have produced the situation we have now. I do not use the words “service” or “system” or “sector” because it is not clear at all what it is for. Also, this emanated from government, interested bodies and vested interests, notably the trade unions representing the teachers.

What rarely appears in the discussions, or in the economic equations, is what we are dealing with. No, I am not going down the pupil as “client” or “customer” road, I am talking about what goes on in the heads of young people as they are going through the education years. In my experience this has changed and neither government nor teachers take on board the implications.

Imagine a world with no radio, TV, film and where coloured visual imagery was limited to a small number of options. Imagine growing up in a crowded house with several siblings and maybe three generations with perhaps other family or lodgers as well.

Imagine that for almost all of your class work would begin at 11 or 12 and that might be for sixty or so hours a week. That work normally would be very physical and that capability was critical. Very often you would be just one of a team and as a child you would have spent so much time on the streets such a group would be the norm.

If you were a little more prosperous with higher status then some form of shop or clerical job might be had, the group would be that of the church you attended, on the whole stricter conditions might be applied, but otherwise unless you have access to the most expensive books it would be much the same.
From this we can move on down the generations in stages as the world has changed. Print material became much more available with more in colour. Then came film and then recorded music. With this came the tidal wave of American influence on popular culture. By the 1930’s it became clear that Britain may have had the biggest empire but America was winning the war of the film and music media.

So what was in the heads of the pupils by the 1940’s was radically different from that of the 1880’s. Since then the pace has quickened. Firstly there has been TV and bigger film and magazine output with a strengthened media and marketing force targeting the teenager and then moving on to the younger child and then the youngest.

In the most recent decades we have had the early computer years running parallel with the media and marketing forces of the time. Now the coming of the internet and the whole raft of satellite and other communications systems has transformed the young into almost a different animal.

In short what the pupil groups are that now face the teacher are almost another form of life from what the teacher was at their age. They must certainly be very different from my own youngsters of the sixties and seventies. Quite how they compare with my mine and those I knew from long before is astonishing.

The expectations of the length of education, the nature of the work they might aspire to, how that work is governed and what they might encounter and what future there may or may not be has gone beyond any sensible comprehension.

What might or might not be considered “punishment” has changed a great deal since my Headteacher pursued difficult parents down the street waving the policeman’s truncheon used in lieu of inadequate canes.

In the item “Punk Banking” a few days ago, I pointed out that the punk years were those of many of our political and financial superiors and I think it shows. This applies also in the education world.

That they have to manage youngsters whose world and home experience is so radically different from theirs is possibly something they cannot cope with.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

Back To The Future

The maps of the world are ever changing and have been down the ages. The map of Europe in 1920 was very different from that of 1910. Today the map is different from that of 1980 in some respects. It is very different from that agreed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Before then the dynastic wars of major family groupings had led to persistent alterations in who ruled which territory in Europe and by what means. After 1815 as the British and other Europeans went on an imperial spree the maps of much of the world as they are now were created often with scant regard for either geography or local population.

One area where British officials rode roughshod over the wishes and hopes of the locals was in the Near East in what is now Iraq and the Gulf States. For a long while Britain was the “protecting” nation with ships and men on the ground to enforce the new political entities. More recently this has been done by the US Navy.

One consequence of all this is that there are a lot of groups now who feel that they have a claim either from recent history or from much longer ago to this or that patch. Argentina who disputed The Falklands with Britain not long after it became independent still claim that the 1833 declaration of British rule is wrong and they should have the islands on the grounds of geographical proximity.

The Spanish still cannot accept that Britain’s interest in Gibraltar since the early 18th Century should be maintained, again despite the wishes of the locals. In many parts of the world one claim or another can go back a long way. In the Near East Iran or Persia maintains its claims from the ancient past and the situation there is very complicated, see this 1700 word article from The Oil Drum which is a bare summary.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7682#more

To come to more homely matters, if the elite in Brussels do not see Europe in quite the same way as the elites within the “nation” states this should be no surprise. It is all about power, money and control in any order you prefer. The picture above is one that appeared in the Mail to much howling at the moon by Richard Littlejohn.

Sorry, but you pay a lot of geezers a lot of money to sit in offices to dream up ideas that take their fancy and then push them at the suckers who might buy the deal and this is what happens. It is very like buying promotional offers from newspapers.

The Arc Manche Partnership Zone pictured above is not new. For those of us who think that the 12th Century at the height of the Medieval Warm Period might have been fun, all that good cheap English wine, it reminds me vividly of the central core of the Angevin Empire. Add more territories around to the north and to the south, Anjou, Poitou, The Vexin and Aquitaine and you have it all.

Unluckily, the elite who were running it were too embroiled in other matters to concentrate on keeping what they had, Crusades, the throne of France and other adventures to control what were really unprofitable waste lands inhabited by pastoral tribes as well their internal family disputes. So the Angevin Empire did not last.

The problem with this is that the Angevin Empire pattern does not sit well with the Empire of Charlemagne, nor with any other of Europe’s passing imperial structures, the original Roman Empire, the later Spanish/Austrian based Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic, The Third Reich or others.

With the EU turning into yet another passing ramshackle imperial structure that might collapse because of its own internal contradictions and inability to make either policy or decisions that are effective or make sense we cannot know what the future may bring.

One thing is certain is that if you leave making the maps to detached and power crazed elites who do what the hirelings of their then court suggest it will all end in tears and trouble.

Turandot Saves The Euro

It is quite simple, honoured sir, you answer three riddles successfully and you get the girl with all the wealth of China behind you to live more (or less) happily ever after or until the next big earthquake.

If you fail to answer any of them correctly then we chop off your head and dispose of the remains accordingly.

The first riddle is how much do you think we think you have got and are good for?

The second riddle is that if you answer the first how long do you think we will give you to pay it back and what security will we demand in the meantime?

The third riddle is………………

Mr. Fixit

The video of Tony Blair expressing his faith in the Eventual Euro, put down by many as a bid to be President of the EU, was a rum do. If one followed, or tried to follow it, the going was very soft, he was talking about a set up in which a President was not so much what you and I would understand as one, but more of either an Imperator Rex or Holy Roman Emperor.

I suspect that reality in this event would be while we were thinking it was more Holy Roman Emperor what we would be getting was Imperator Rex. Having got us into Iraq and Afghanistan and helped to create the pre-conditions for the Libyan debacle what might he do with Europe?

Operation Barbarossa II perhaps started by an incident at Radio Gleiwitz? Or another venture? As a non-historian he may not be aware of the 1812 business, but with Blair in charge that would be all too likely.

What really spooked me was when talking about the Euro and the Five Conditions he says airily, like you know what this is what it is all about if you know what I mean, it is essentially a political decision but we have to get the economics right. This more or less reflects the level of thinking.

The man really does believe that economics is something that can be “fixed” and “got right” by a small group of politicians and once fixed remains fixed for political purposes. Oh dear, well Conan Doyle did believe in fairies and was said to be a very clever man.

The trouble is that our Tony is not alone in this fantastic whimsy, when you look at that lot in Parliament (both chambers) they all seem to share this mad and bad idea.

The notion of global economics as some kind of potentially static system that can be “fixed” by politicians talking to their favourite bankers and celebrity media and financial friends is widely shared. The assumption is that if you can “fix” these things you can engage in whatever enterprise or creative destruction that takes your fancy.

The best any politicians trying to run a political entity can do is to attempt dealing with managing their end of it with the very limited means and knowledge that they have. If a week is a long time in politics it can be a lot longer than some matters that bear on the world economy and economics.

The idea of a world which is ever changing, difficult to predict and where the immediate past is more often uncertain and confused in reality than either those involved or any of the figures would have you believe is alien to Tony and his like.

They just do not understand any of it. This may be because most of them are lawyers with the quaint idea that if you make a law people will obey it.

Here are three links below for taste. One is a full story from the New York Times on shale gas matters; I did use the word confusion. Another is a very short one that people who do not share our master’s visions are making their own arrangements in Switzerland. Lastly for balance is a short view from the Left about who will be paying and who will be paid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/26gas.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

http://golemxiv-credo.blogspot.com/2011/06/lovely-little-detail-from-switzerland.html

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2011/06/25/asking-british-banks-to-take-greek-losses-is-the-same-as-the-treasury-bailing-out-greece/

Apparently the sale of UK tickets for the much touted Olympics has descended into a major fiasco. Meanwhile the party at the brewery has been cancelled for Health and Safety reasons.

Thank you Tony.

The Games Afoot

In a sense this is a retrospective looking at old themes. I have posted before on the subject of Nassim Taleb and his “Black Swan” thesis. Briefly, this says there are unexpected happenings out there waiting to happen and will despite the fact that we cannot accept that they exist. My view has been that there are potentially many of them.

The Market Oracle has a long article by someone who shares that view. It is about the USA and says, as I have done, that there are a whole flock of them out there.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article28838.html

As for Europe we have governments and central bankers frantically telling is not to panic, not to panic and hoping to persuade the media to go along with them. If the same people had realized the potential problems much earlier on we might not be faced with bleak possibilities or probabilities.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/anatomy-serial-european-banking-collapse

As our tax revenues remain in serious shortfall and are likely to do despite all the attempts made to bridge the gap we are going to be faced with some ugly and unwelcome choices. As our wealth becomes concentrated into fewer hands and is exported to free it from taxation increasingly we can only tax what cannot be moved abroad.

As my preferences is for low taxes the loss of this potential means that I and all the others who are stuck with the UK system are paying heavier and heavier rates with a disproportionate burden falling on the poorer.

So around Whitehall there have been quite mutterings in some corners about taxing property in one form or another. The threat of a Mansion Tax is raised again. As our elite has gone a bundle on property and has imported all sorts of others to prop up the market on a basis of relatively low taxes and obligations the notion frightens them out of our wits.

But some sort of radical revision may become necessary. The trouble is that it will take another major crisis, as above, to make them face up to the inevitable. Also, it will be far from popular, rather like a Poll Tax with all the trimmings, even if the levels and take is geared to hurt the poorest least.

On Thursday 24 September 2009 I had a good deal to say about this:

http://thecynicaltendency.blogspot.com/2009/09/property-tax-price-of-folly.html

This was a long post following a much briefer comment two days before on the 22nd about Vince Cable and his “Mansion Tax”.

The subject was revisited on Wednesday 31 March 2010 in “Death, Taxes and Deceits”, but this article was related to the sticky question of how to pay for all the services etc. needed for the aged. Essentially, the only way to pay was going to be taking the cost from the properties one way or another:

http://thecynicaltendency.blogspot.com/2010/03/death-taxes-deceits.html

To put it into rugger terms, Cameron is the scrum half playing behind a badly beaten pack with a butter fingered fly half and a line of three’s that are too flat and persistently getting offside, too often right in front of their own posts. The full back does not know how to tackle and is averse to physical contact.

The referee, supplied by the EU, seems to working to another rule book and the opposition knows every trick in the book. Is Cameron up to the job? Can he save the team by his inspiration and dogged fighting spirit? Or will he feign injury, take an early bath and head for the bar?

There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight………..

RBS, A Shot In The Dark

The idea of giving us RBS shares is very much back to the ‘80’s and all those lovely privatisation deals where the ordinary citizen is given the chance to join in the action.

Given what has happened since then (who owns British Gas?) one might have thought that wheezes like these needed more careful thought.

The idea that some of us, quite who is not certain, will have the chance to own our own little bit of RBS is being touted as the answer to the very difficult problem of what to do with it in a way that will not upset people.

I was gifted a square metre of some Highland wasteland to enable me to call myself a Laird. More recently, my attachment to Islay Whisky gave me a couple of square feet of that island where rainwater becomes a gift of the gods.

These were welcome, but the idea of being lumbered with a piece of RBS is worrying. It is too much like putting a shot of turpentine into the whisky. It may be an idea to see if it all works but instinct and a sense of smell tells me other wise.

As for more serious and informed comment, it is my opinion that it is impossible to follow this contribution to the debate:

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/business/britain-urges-rbs-to-take-huge%2c-potentially-lucrative-risks-201106233985/

Slainte!