Some thoughts

  Why is Britain poor? - Ed West reviews a paper on why everything takes so long and costs so much.  There are some truly shocking stats, but this one takes the biscuit: ‘ the planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.’ The first thing we need to do on gaining power is blow up the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act (TCPA). The case for prisons - The Inquisitive Bird gives detailed evidence on this, and why removing some wrongun's from circulation benefits the rest of us: 'nearly a third of shoplifting arrests in 2022 involved just 327 people, who collectively were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.... 2020, three prolific burglars were on the loose in Leinster, Ireland. Together they had accumulated over 200...

Yesterday The gold price reached an all-time high (Homer Simpson voice: "So far"). As the Royal Mint's latest bulletin  summarised:  Gold surged past $2,580 for the first time on Friday afternoon. In USD terms, gold is up 24% since the start of the year. You'd be forgiven for thinking that this means it's a bad time to be buying, however, there are a couple of exceptions that I'm going to explain in this post (all prices correct as of 14/09/24, but rounded up or down as appropriate). First of all, are you looking to invest or collect? I do a bit of both, (silver more for collecting) so I tend to buy what interests me and what I consider to be a good deal. There are two types of businesses I buy from, bullion dealers and collectible coin sellers. Of the former, I usually use Chards and Bullion by Post . The former is usually slightly cheaper, but they charge for postage and capsules, so I usually buy from them if getting multiple items. The latter gives free p...

Via Instapundit, behold the poor sods; still traumatized by covid:  Meet the Americans STILL isolating 4 years into Covid pandemic... including NJ woman who's been in lockdown for 1,620 days While I do I feel a bit sorry for people (especially the elderly) who were terrified into thinking catching it was a death sentence, after 4 years they need to get over it. The people featured in the article definitely have other mental health issues, this line stood out:  Hill, who uses they/them pronouns' Yep, a well-adjusted individual here! It does seem that there are more and more people (and women in particular) who are too fragile to cope with everyday life. Social media has made people more willing to divulge personal issues that they would have kept to themselves in the past. I recently reconnected on FB with a woman I knew at school and she is constantly posting about her anxiety and other issues.  This post on Mental health and Leftism is also telling, and given women (esp...

Today was the last day of the summer holidays. The past few weeks have been busy preparing for results days, and then ensuring everything is ready for the start of the new school year.  I went to Brussels for the bank holiday weekend last week, primarily to visit Waterloo and its battlefield:   The Lion Mount and Panorama on the battlefield. The Hougoumont Farm Memorial at the farmhouse Napoleon's last headquarters And Wellington's HQ (now the museum) I also went to Liege for a day, while there I was wandering around a park on Sunday afternoon and came across a group of  ‘ puppy players ‘. It definitely, IMO, comes under the category of ‘do what you want in the privacy of your bedroom, but don’t frighten the horses.' Liege was pretty, with an impressive station, and a very old school aquarium. Finally, I went to  the Cantillion Brewery, Autoworld, And the Basilique Nationale du Sacré-Cœur. Overall a nice weekend away. 

  I'm not dead yet insists Biden as he's loaded onto cart of corpses - The Babylon Bee

If, as Voltaire once wrote, the Kingdom of Prussia was not a state with an army, but an army with a state, then modern Britain is surely not a state with a healthcare system, but a healthcare system with a state.   The NHS need not depend on immigration  - Sam Bidwell, The Critic 

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A long and depressing read on the effects of welfarism on women:  The march of Kamala’s brides . I like the term BOT- Bride of the State- to describe how women have replaced husbands with government programs: BOTS have demanded and received not only the female-targeted government grants, educational and jobs programmes, and social safety nets that benefited Julia and Linda and their singular progeny, but also a much broader set of social engineering measures that are fundamentally reshaping American mores. Since the Nineties, young American women have been positioned as the primary beneficiaries of neo-Victorian speech and conduct codes that have fundamentally transformed the behaviour of men and women everywhere from classrooms to workplaces to bars. However, this has a price (beyond the higher taxes) But have these efforts made BOTS happy? The answer, according to young women, is no. In fact, the demographic that has been the most highly socialised into core progressive values an...

A good point is made here:  How Much Is Elon Musk Willing to Lose to Protect Free Speech?   'roughly speaking, 75 percent of Elon Musk’s wealth is tied to Tesla. And Tesla, of course, is an electric car company. 'According to Gallup, 71 percent of Republicans would not consider owning an electric vehicle. Eighty-three percent of Democrats would consider owning an electric vehicle. You don’t need to be a statistician to recognize which audience matters most to Tesla’s core business model.' This reminds me of the irony of Alyssa Milano saying she was going to sell her Tesla and by a VW, forgetting who started the latter. Hopefully, he'll make enough money from Starlink to counter the fall in Telsa sales.  UPDATED: a good summery of The British elites’ crazy rage against Elon Musk

An interesting article by Roger Kimball:  What the Right Gets Wrong About Art . Excerpt: ' it is no secret that much if not most art in recent decades has abandoned beauty, abandoned the ambition to please the viewer aesthetically. Instead, it seeks to shock, discommode, repulse, proselytize, or startle. Beauty is out of place in any art that systematically discounts the aesthetic.' and 'The trick, for viewers as well as artists, is not to lose sight of beauty but to concentrate primarily on something seemingly more pedestrian — the making of good works of art. The best guides to this task are to be found not in the work of this season’s art-world darlings but in the great models furnished by the past.' Worth reading and pondering

A collection of articles on events oft eh past weeks that I found interesting and depressing (Hopefully none of which will get me in trouble with Two-Tier Starmer) The Disunited Kingdom  - IM 1776 There is No Cope  - Konstantin Kisin The Hollow Kingdom  - Christoper Rufi Labour to 'Define' Islamophobia So It Can More Easily Continue Its War on Native Brits - HotAir Were the ‘Spontaneous’ Anti-Racism Rallies Even Real?  - Daily Skeptic Night of the ghost fascism  - The Critic Britain’s Foxes are Beset by Wolves - N.S. Lyons Humorous takes from the Babylon Bee: Elon Musk Buys The United Kingdom To Establish Free Speech There In Latest Bond Film, 007 Tasked With Taking Down 83-Year-Old British Grandma Who Shared Inaccurate Meme Speaking of memes: And finally, Dominic Frisby's very good song (a few months old now but very apt at the moment)

An interesting article on Boom supersonic, who I've been aware of for a few years and seems to be making steady progress in developing a new SST:  ‘We just have to bu ild it’: Why Concorde’s successor is eyeing supersonic flights to America I particularly like the CEO's comments regarding the ecoloons who think we could go back to a diet of turnips and living in hovels:  “There are some people who look at this and say, ‘Well, I guess we should all have less things. We should use less energy, we should go to fewer places.’ There’s been a lot of virtue-signalling and it’s very depressing. “I believe in a future of abundance. I believe the north star is human flourishing and that we should build a future in which more people can go to more places more often.”  Having missed the chance to fly on Concorde I hope they can deliver and develop the Overture.

This essay has been a long time coming, as my thoughts on how to implement have changed as the price of gold and silver have climbed and inflation has bit since the pandemic. It will briefly summarise my thoughts on the desirability of a gold standard, and then describe a practical plan for doing so. It is focused on the UK but other countries could adopt a similar plan, and based on current (August 2024) gold prices . Humans have used various forms of currency since the dawn of time. Gold and silver coins have been used since Lydia minted their Stater . Dominic Frisby has written extensively on the history of the Gold Standard, house prices and wages in gold , and its industrial uses so I'm not going to recount them here, merely add that I've been reading about this topic since Detlev Schlichter's Paper Money Collapse came out 10 years ago. Since my early teens, I've also been interested in coins and money, bringing coins back from foreign trips and collecting b...

School broke up last Tuesday, and on Wednesday I went to Belgrade for 4 nights. This was my third trip this year (in Feb I went to Malta and in April China and Japan), bringing my total number of countries visited up to 44. My aim is 50 by 50 so am on track for that, after getting behind during the pandemic. Belgrade was very hot, an interesting mix of old and new. One thing I hadn't known before was that it was right on the border with Hungary before WW1 (the Sava and Danube rivers were the boundaries), and there is a suburb on the west bank called Vemun that was a Hungarian town. I spent my time there mainly in the old town, visiting various museums, churches, and galleries. I also did an evening boat trip on the rivers and went to the cinema to see Deadpool and Wolverine. Coming up I'm going to Brussels on the August Bank Holiday weekend, in October will be visiting Glasgow and Belfast, while next Feb will be going to Cape Town and the Garden route in South Africa. 

I spotted this meme recently and it sums up pretty well the main problem I have with generations as a demographic group: Simply, a 20-year 'generation' is too long. The idea of a generation is that members have a similar outlook due to their formative experiences. My generation is defined as anyone born between 1981 and 1996, a period of 15 years. Yet someone born at one end will have had very different experiences than one born at the end.  I often find talking to people at the tail end of the cohort don't remember songs, TV shows, etc that I did from my childhood. I can remember some events from the late 80's like The Herald of Free Enterprise and Hillsborough disasters but my brother (3 years younger than me doesn't). I often find more in common with tail-end Boomers (born 1965-80) than them. I'd suggest decades of birth are more useful for defining a cohort. 

A good analysis by Dominic Frisby . I have long been a fan of returning to a gold or silver-backed currency, at the very least as a store of value, ever since I bought my house. It is a typical Edwardian terrace. When new it cost around £400 (when a pound was a gold sovereign). When I bought it in 2008, I worked out that the purchase price was approximately the same as 400 sovereigns. Its value in gold was almost unchanged in a century!

As Low Status Opinions has succinctly put it, Labour has not just hit the ground running , but gone 'full on Tonto, absolute double nut job bat shit crazy crackers looney tunes, on Week One'. Today, we saw the King's Speech, which committed to a range of measures. The main one this post will focus on is rail nationalization. First, I'll point out how most of the UK network was built by private firms in the 19th and early 20th century and was nationalized in 1948 after being commandeered and run into the ground twice in the world wars. I'll also point out that what is usually considered to be the best rail network in the world, Japan's, is mainly private (JR is a consortium of 7 firms, each covering a specific area. Last I heard only the 3 on Honshu are private and the 3 covering Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku are still state-owned. In addition, numerous private firms compete with JR, often running parallel tracks on similar routes (where I lived there were JR and...

F*ck Starmer, F*ck Labour,  F*ck everyone who voted for them. (exhales) Now I've got that off my chest, let us reflect. The Conservatives deserved to lose Labour didn't deserve to win.  I'm used to being disappointed with elections, but this one was a new low. I'd hoped Reform would come second in % of votes and  10-20 seats. I wanted the useless fake Tories reduced to below 100  and was annoyed the watermelons (Greens) got 4. The SNP wipeout was a plus, but the Islamist independents are a worry. Turnout was low, as I'd expected apathy was a big winner.  In the end I voted Reform. I saw my local (now ex-) Tory MP at a school event last week. I was helping run the BBQ at our summer fair and he bought a hot dog. We chatted for a bit then he suddenly said 'I'm REDACTED, by the way' as if annoyed that I hadn't recognized him. I asked if he was confident about the result and he replied not really, and blamed 'Reform voting idiots' for his impendi...

 I was going to start a QL post this weekend, but have noticed that of the links I've collected over the past two weeks, about 80% were from the same 3 sites (Spectator, Unherd, and The Critic), and the rest were mainly culled from Guido and Instapundit. At this point, I have to wonder what value I'm adding collecting a handful of stories from these sites if I'm not going to do more than add pithy comments and quote a few lines. So for now I'm going to pause this series and try and resume posting more of my own thoughts, the trouble I've had lately is that spending all day at work staring at a screen really tires my eyes, and most evenings I don't feel like adding to my daily screen time.  This past 2 weeks I've been fairly active, going to a concert in Canterbury and spending a day at Kent's castles, while this yesterday I took my niece out for the day. Tomorrow I'm off on holiday to Croatia for 10 days, so there will be no posting until my return.

As I mentioned yesterday I wento to Chartwell on Saturday. I've been there once before many years ago, it was cool to see Churchill's paintings, awards, and other memorabilia. One thing that stood out was this quote on families::  'One should aim to have 4 children, one for mother, one for father, one for accidents and one for growth' A sentiment I could get behind!