A poor performance by Boris.

I just wonder if he has early stages dementia, and I am quite serious about this question.

Boris Johnson refuses to apologise for the peculier mention of Jimmy Saville whilst at crossed swords debate in the House and gives no valid reason to drag this irrelevant point into the harangue; merely to hurt the Opposition Leader, to stab Sir Keir Starmer; this by any standards was brainless, ignorant and cruel. All he need do is apologise and admit the situation, the heat overcame him, but his ongoing waffly obfuscation since then and somehow pretending there was any justification for this most awful blunder compounds his hurt, his damage and what little is left of his credibility. To anyone, it looks bad, a despicable act.

This last few days have been shameful in those that are now defending Boris, hearing Kwasi Kwarteng this weekend was particularly dire, Kwasi insisting the vaccine roll-out and fight against covid was plainly the achievement of Boris Johnson, others have voiced how he was near death and his epic battle to fight it, he pulled through, etc etc! I could practically hear ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ start to play in the background! Embarrassing how Kwasi Kwarteng can stoop so low, this would fit more with Russia and China than the UK.

As blogged previously I’m horrified how these sad blind unfortunate so called supporters are insistent on voicing what are supposedly a ‘list of achievements’ of Boris Johnson, utter humbug. I beg to differ and would say his REAL list of achievements makes for very sad reading and worst of all we have to live with the real world consequences of it all, ask any ordinary working person; Rishi Sunak likewise equally in my mind not so clever as so many would have us pretend, history will not be kind to them.

Where is objective clear thinking and accountability?

Lets list top of my head the dastardly acts of Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak et al ….

Peroguing of Parliament (actually now seen as illegal).
Pushing through Brexit which again is disastrous, for decades we will hurt from this. It will hit precisely those businesses comprising ordinary working people, growers, manufacturers.
Blind to the impracticality of the Northern Ireland / EU trading border.
Most definitely eroding the status of the poor and the ordinary, the mass of people, the stats in 10yrs time will amply demonstrate this.
Snatching the notorious £20 note from the poorest, this Rishi is very mean and cruel.
Billions wasted on HS2 particularly in a time of zoom meetings and remote working.
Both NI and income tax up for ordinary workers.
Crippling energy costs, on the rise, unfettered a huge profit machine for the those companies that can stay the course.
Still allowing the IR35 tax loophole, this is disgraceful by any standard other than vested interest and greed.
Not any great real effect on climate change, Boris is a Johnny come lately at even accepting the phenomena.
In my opinion Boris disrespects the House, remember it suited Boris fine to have the likes of Dominic Cummings as close advisor; whoops that is a misnomer, theres nothing ‘the likes of’ Dominic Cummings, fortunately a total one-off and Boris couldn’t get enough of him.
The phoney mantra of ‘levelling up’ which will prove to be empty and hollow.
The disastrous withdrawl from Afghanistan and its consequences, I shudder at the suffering and poverty we have left behind, as with Iraq a consequence of western meddling.
The multiple serial contravention of covid restrictions at no.10 and if Boris couldn’t recognise the contravention then what was happening inside no.10 on a day to day basis?
The billions wasted on the Dido Harding track and trace fiasco.
Draconian lockdowns, quite needless when losing family members. Imagine the misery in adhering to a ‘rule’. This well illustrates the Boris lack of empathy and callous disregard to the ordinary and suffering.
The millions perhaps billions wasted on inappropriate substandard PPE at the start of covid, bought from ‘mates’.
The billions wasted on naive Rishi shovelling out money as ‘loans’ to companies that subsequently surprise surprise declare themselves bankrupt.
The stupidity of the cash grants ie free money no strings handed out without any screening whatsoever from Local Authorities to any small business that said ‘yes’, lets face it hospitality needs to shed massive overcapacity and many niche businesses under covid have thrived. A waste of money once again.
We’ll see the situation quite soon where doctors on call-out will be making visits to homes six months of the year in cold weather where the occupants suffer without heating, Boris and Rishi have set the clock back a hundred years.
Immediate rampant inflation, surely not a surprise to anyone but Boris.
Measly near non-existent rates for savers.
The rise of the private landlord has been allowed to increase unfettered.
And perhaps worst of all the huge NHS backlog, literally millions of people held in limbo UNABLE to enjoy the magnificent resources of as we are told so often this wonderful NHS.

Its hard to believe such a list of blunders. I would like all of these blunders to be investigated and will it happen, not really. The Boris Government is increasingly looking to be a clowns comedy cavalcade.

Rishi is so divorced from reality if he were to walk along a street (I doubt he ever would) and if a poor person were to hold out their hand he would probably mistakenly think they want to give him money!

Theres not much cheer or hope in any of this; merely ‘dread’ for the ordinary.

We are in dangerous territory here, where its expected the public have no memory of the rolling disaster of Boris Johnson or whatever Government, this whitewash and lack of any sense of history is precisely what George Orwell warned us against.

No10, Boris and climate change.

I subscribe to updates from carbonbrief.org and this just arrived in this morning. Makes for interesting reading, and pertinent to these last few weeks wishing this countrys leadership can get back to focusing on climate change, the elimination of poverty and coping with the future.

But lets also remind ourselves of COP26 Glasgow … what did it achieve?

Were the right people invited?

How will COP26 be viewed in hindsight?

In actual effect was it pointless?

One could be certainly justified in saying it was pointless, the IPCC we must remember does not factor in the effects of methane, something that can arrive as microbial activity, thawing methane hydrate previously locked as ice, and subsea ice itself thawing and allowing vent to previously trapped methane fields. Also, I find it erroneous when the multiplication factor of say 80x is bandied around for methane which is a projection over an incredibly generous time frame, in reality with a series of big releases in one season of thawing our time on this planet would be measured in months, and at that timeframe the methane effect must surely be many hundreds that of CO2.

Revealed: The 11 slides that finally convinced Boris Johnson about global warming

Lets add some substance to this, casting around re methane Al Jazeera have this worthwhile article and vid embed third of four lower down the page … https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/10/27/melting-arctic-ice-permafrost-uncontrolled-global-heating

Boris …

Interesting how my older blogposts attract zero enquiry according to my stats here at wordpress. Maybe we/ I are wasting our time at this onscreen activity?

Anyway, Boris Johnson has pulled another master-stroke to match his Prorogation of Parliament in that the pending Sue Gray report has been totally emasculated by the newer police investigation. A master stroke of simplicity yet a resultant total obfuscation of getting at the facts!! Well done Boris, playing to expected form as usual!!

ie “I report that *** something happened at *** a certain address concerning certain *** individuals but unfortunately *** certain facts said and unsaid cannot be mentioned ! ”

What an utter heap of B/S !!!

You could not make this up, beyond any plausable fiction, but there it is laid out bare for all to see, or not see!

This is censorship of the highest order or perhaps the burial of facts and liability re drinking and socialising in covid times whilst ‘ornery folk suffered massively at correctly interpreting the words and rules of our so-called masters. Wow … were we taken for fools!!! Admittedly and this is how it will pan out is that the good folk at no.10 appear socially distanced in that garden (lucky too, looks very pleasant) and they kept to their work bubble. Yet its the draconian measures levied to everyone else that galls.

I’m sick of hearing endlessly on bbc r4 last week how ‘The Sue Gray Report’ will be a no punches pulled ‘as it is’ hard reality, how she is such a respected and incisive Civil Servant. Bah humbug, puff and bluster as Boris full on would term it… its been utterly ‘throttled’ as per strangled to death. What a waste of resources, news reporting airtime and general gas lighting.

We have climate change, we have (predictably) rampant inflation and the poor are getting poorer and these pointless Boris induced shenanigans are what occupies the time of Parliament and media news coverage. As my dad would say…”They couldn’t organise a p***-up in a brewery”.

Boris strikes again huh. We also hear all last week again on bbc r4 at ‘how much’ Boris has achieved, again this to my mind is a total misnomer. All he has done is tread water so to speak, made Brexit happen regardless of the slow dripping cost over the coming decades and most certainly made the poor poorer (and more anxious).

Yet Boris ‘n Co trundle out the feelgood message of ‘levelling up’ at every opportunity, we know fine well this is all merely window dressing, is hype and actual fact will amount to very little or nothing. I can see them all in a huddle rehearsing this months latest mantra, “We say this we say this – yeah yeah yeah – we got it!”…. all posh boys with low attention spans until the next mantra comes along. I fear it could end up as the proverbial London bus if they’re not careful, you wait ages and all of a sudden two come along together!

Clever kid Boris uh … and what are his qualifications? Not many really … privelige, a posh elite education and Editor of the posh mag ‘Spectator’ …. come on Britain … get real!

And co-hort Rishi who is as ever divorced from the real world and the needs and struggle of the poor now wants to screw the poor as hard as he can, remember he took back the twenty quid a week from the poorest but having scattered money far and wide as ‘loans’ to businesses or any limping business in sight that now have surprise surprise now declared themselves bust and no longer able to pay back their extraordinary naive loans from Rishi. What sort of world do these over-priveliged kids think is out there?

You know when you are poor when you are not only cold but also hungry, when you are in fear of your Landlord due to misguided policy these last thirty plus years of allowing rampant buy to let and throttling to near zero Local Authority housebuilding and theres no chance of a job. We have not achieved progress thats for sure.

We are also told money is now to be taken as additional income tax (again the ordinary will pay, the slick and dubious IR35 tax dodgers again slither out of sight) … for the NHS to clear the backlog, but as is often stated, it takes many years to train and qualify people to do this task, it cannot be turned off and on like a tap

I have no problem with a penny or two of higher tax, I must be the last man in England to deliberately and wilfully retain sole trader status even after forty years of self employment, I quite happilly contribute to the system. I think the IR35 loophole is the hole in the bucket of tax collection.

Con-man bluster-fool Boris needs to be held accountable, his array of courtiers and sycophants need to be brought in, to be reined in. I never thought I would b thankful for Dominic Cummings.

History will judge him badly, inept, out of his depth, a blustering fool. As per a First World War General of the worst sort.

postscript, things aren’t quite right in this world. We read now that the murderers installed in the British army will no longer ever be held accountable by a new ruling, or more precisely be held to account for the 108 live rounds fired on Bloody Sunday (the second such day termed Bloody Sunday after the first mayhem of the Black n Tans in 1920) of 1972 in Derry. Soldier ‘F’ I think the stats declare killed two and injured five others, no way should this paratrooper be not rewarded with jail time.

https://www.derrynow.com/news/home/731486/soldier-f-accused-of-murdering-two-people-on-bloody-sunday-named.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)

But why is it ‘the Establishment’ does all it can to obfuscate and move so slow for those rampant paratroopers to never have to pay the price? These were live rounds remember on UK soil. I listened to the Peter Taylor 25th Jan ’22 radio broadcast, interesting interviews, particularly chilling being the manner and response from the Para CO.

Too much screentime for kids.

Are kids able to read anything further than three sentences or more exactly do they EVER read more than three sentences strung together? Like … things called ideas, instruction, information?

We as adults are kidding ourselves and more particularly kids themselves are kidding us all that this is ‘work’ or education or learning … when it is mostly anything but. I don’t mean the bright kids or those from motivated households, but I mean the kids from households where theres never any utterance of anything remotely connected to learning.

I can think of instances in even my limited social interaction where the adults seem apparently unable to contribute anything to a childs intellectual development. And then of course once age sixteen has passed them by and the exams fizzled to nothing everyone exhibits collective blindness as to how a valuable life opportunity/ waymarker has been allowed to drift past beyond reach. A vacuum of any hope to human potential.

We also as adults in this present age collectively somehow retain this silly notion that a laptop is ‘now essential’ for learning …. WHAT UTTER RUBBISH. What most average kids learn, or more correctly attempt to learn in a day I’m sure could quite easily be typed on one side of a sheet of A4; maybe even A5.

Perhaps the Russians are right on this, no child under eighteen is allowed to use a mobile phone.

Paper and books retain the images, facts and explanations forever, no matter how many times it takes until eventually ‘it sinks in’ and I know this myself from at later middle age still retaining the pleasure of ‘finding things out’ to quote Richard Feynman, making it a hobby to memorise things, little bits of foreign language, technical theory of various sorts. How we learn has been a fascination of mine most of my life, half a century and more. It is the ability to open the page again, to revisit again and again that sets it into ones mind, the weak point of screen based learning is that mostly its a once only experience, theres no pages to flick! Another weak point of screen learning is that theres too much faffing about to find what it is you want, I reckon any serious for instance medical student or professional engineer intending to pass exams will jettison the screen for a hard copy set text in book form, but anyway they will be bright and know the material already when plunged into exam prep.

And what of writing itself, gone is the effort and eventual mastery of a ‘good hand’ likewise the ability to make quick and efficient sketches and so many times we realise already kids and young adults can barely spell. Theres too many lame excuses from all concerned why this that and the other cannot be made to happen. The antidote is called hard effort and application and this means the ordinary and the struggling are now worse off than they have ever been and to my mind certainly book based learning can be called the most efficient reward for time spent, little in life that is valuable is gained without a little pain or effort.

Minds eye visualisation is hardly mentioned but once developed sets you apart from the vast majority, its also my experience minds eye visualisation is much reduced by an overwhelming reliance on a screen. This I believe is under-reported and under-researched.

I came from a ‘humble’ background, I recall vividly over fifty years ago meeting a slick new potential uncle that was technically literate (college ‘n suchlike) and could actually recall and set down on paper circuit diagrams and explain it all and most certainly had this ten year old enthralled.

Another case in point, an ex g/f has two grandchildren, age ten and fifteen, which up until December a web fascination fed only from a phone screen is now a laptop and x-box for the just turned ten year old girl (!) and a self bought laptop a few months ago for the boy of fifteen that now spends all night camped out in the parked caravan; I wonder at what time he eventually gets to sleep? I’ve already highlighted to the grandmother the dangers of all this, the reality of web addiction, and so what happens is yet more addictive gizmos are bought for them! Am I speaking a language they understand, does it sink in …. obviously not!

I predict the lively bright ten year old girl within three months will be solemn, uncommunicative and increasingly obese. She will be obsessed with the utterly pointless so called ‘social media’ and hobby activity will be a thing of the past. Progress? I think not.

The bright and advantaged will fly ahead as more than ever, the ordinary the slow are increasingly an underclass, disadvantaged by the over zealous application of screens and keyboards. Art, creativity and handicraft, modelmaking and inventive play for the younger kids and striving to make things with their hands and make them better each time is increasingly looking to be practically a Victorian oddity in its total abandonment. So does this mean the effort to do better with increasing skill in hand eye co-ordination and visualition are becoming near extinct … looks to be so!

I had two years ago when lockdown started produced two very good worksheets for them, intending to get them hopefully with my input to lay their work out better on paper, twenty questions or topics or mini projects were covered … did either of them do anything from this attention of mine ….. nothing, zilch.

Jaron Lanier who knows all about things tech implores us all to dump the screen and keyboard to dump facebook and phony titled ‘social media’ … and how very right he is.

postscript, lets bullet point a few ideas of what troubles me of endless screentime for kids and the obscenity of mindless parents desperate to buy them more crap at every opportunity …

reduced attention span.
inability to follow a thread of educational information or explanation nor any desire to do so.
reduced vocabulary.
a world view and view of life formed by less than ideal pundits and other such nonsense makers, advertising and clever attention grabbing algorithms.
reduced interaction with parents and family relations, no sense of past, no anecdotal recollection.
becoming isolated from realtime face to face human interaction, losing the ability to evaluate who is kosha, who is spouting nonsense or fantasy.
impaired ability with pen and paper, cannot sketch, writing poor, atrocious layout on paper.
blind to any decent tutoring coming from another adult, if it don’t come off a screen they just don’t want to know.
seldom if ever visiting the same page twice ie for reinforcement of material learnt.
a world devoid of Art, of the achievements of human endeavour, many things of beauty and creativity since the Stone Age all eradicated in a generation.
hanging on to extremely trivial social media posts, curled up in a chair with zero exercise.
an acute sense of living in the here and now, trivia rules okay; history eliminated.
kids do nothing to please their elders, their focus or loci is the screen.
and parents that are no different from the kids.

Not a pretty picture is it?

Thwaites Glacier.

This rolled up into a news story mid-December and quite rightly too but what no-one is mentioning is the monstrous tidal wave and subsequent follow-on ripples when the Thwaites Glacier drops into the sea. This is not an ‘if’, it is an absolute certainty, only question is ‘when’ … and probably a lot quicker than we have bargained for. The question is, how far around the globe will this tsunami from Thwaites actually penetrate?

We hear of the likes of Henry Dimbleby on bbc r4 this teatime informing us of the need to re-wild, the need to minimise meat consumption (yes I concur) but the arguament re methane in agriculture is quite tiny (and laughable) when one considers the likely many multiple ‘methane burps’ from the Arctic; our actions to remedy are a mere pin-prick and is JUST NOT worth the effort! As well as feel-good platitudes we need to evaluate quantities, realise the scale of what nature can throw at us. Then we’ll realise how we are wasting our time.

I’ve seen so-called ‘re-wilding’ and I suggest creating a better urban landscape, more competent gardens at home is a more valuable exercise.

It is pointless but lets pretend we are trying, we need ….

i) a one child policy.

ii) the near elimination of the American style burger culture.

iii) to live close/ local to our work.

I myself am a twit, no fridge, no washing machine (or tv or mobile) … but does my personal endeavour really help matters at all, not at all unless I can get half of every country in the world to do the same. Will they, not really and y’know it doesn’t even matter….

climate change in the UK …

This bugs me, for the first time ever I can hang out towels at 11pm just short of them dripping with a hand wring from a wash in my downstairs loo sink as per my usual routine (being sans washing machine at this location) and bingo next morning they are dry. This may be usual in say the Caribbean but is not the norm for the north east of England in mid November!

The year end of 2026 is the line in the sand I chose for what is tolerable and what is as mentioned to friend Gary the point at which I presume conditions may well become difficult indeed. COP26 has been an utter failure, who the hell handpicks these numskulls? Pundit Beckwith over on youtube includes footage and dreary as his presentations as ever are they do illustrate some very misleading presentations at COP26. Footnote: Paul, please try and assimilate NT manner and humour…. your fifteen minute vids are hell to get through.

COP26 seems to have utterly disregarded interconnected amplifying feedbacks and their importance, their many-fold increase over anything linear, ‘linear’ being the darling of COP26 and the emasculated head in the sand IPCC and the curse of NOT being able to get a grip on what really is happening.

COP26 failure…

One country India should not have been allowed to water down the COP26 statement re coal use, the general concensus and plain common sense dictates how we should proceed. Its no use the individual doing his or her best to minimise carbon footprint when its the big emitters and industries that must offer clout and crunch the big numbers.

A statement, merely something on paper, this is what men in suits do best, when will the scientists and engineers be given chance to show their best? I think an alternative to COP needs to be instigated, I would hope such a thing is happening right now. But if you read and listen to tone and the possible outcome of many experts on this, those at the sharp end with knowledge, direct observation and data they too think as I do that a vast chemistry set of reactions has been set in motion and I doubt theres much we can do. For instance look at jet stream, arctic warming, Greenland ice melt, ocean plankton, etc etc.

COP26 was feeble, an obfuscation, fiddling whilst Rome burns.

In all practicality with impending arctic methane and the interconnectedness of amplifying feedbacks its all just window dressing so to speak but as responsible adults and responsible nations we must do our best, we must never give up on this. Though it would be useful to think we could look back and think we did our best the scene set is not good and immediate practical effect of our efforts looks very poor indeed. One point five will soon look irrelevant to everyone, it will blow away in the breeze, but if it helps minds focus then so be it.

Watching silly billionaires pour their money into junk spaceflights and super yachts is uncomfortable to watch; shame upon them, pity we couldn’t boycott their activities, I never have been keen on Amazon anyway. A glorified shopkeeper!

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/

note in the above the heat over vast at present still withheld gas reserves in northern Canada and likewise the heat exactly over the shallow Laptev Sea ie northern Siberia. In time and we are already in my opinion at that point the Arctic instead of cooling the planet will become a vast engine, an agency of heating, our enemy so to speak. Its only in recent years scientists are working out the worlds water circulation into the Arctic, the importance and danger between fresh and saline, warm and cold.

Ice is funny stuff, once huge bodies of it ie the Greenland ice sheet is most obviously melting with endless melt pools and rivers falling thousands of feet into the interior of the ice massif then theres nothing that in all practicality can be done to halt this process. In pure vengeance I’d like to winch trump and his cronies beneath a helicopter and dump them in the middle of the fast thawing wilderness, a childish idea perhaps, but for the harm and delay they have caused I think perfectly justifiable.

Watch out for methane which exists in three forms, vast trapped reserves, subsea frozen hydrate and as the result of a warming of ancient carbon deposits now being prompted to microbial activity. As repeated already the irony of burning ancient diatomaceous oil and associated gas deposits has led to their oceanic demise, thats half of the world CO2 conversion gone, increasing CO2 also means trees and green land based CO2 conversion activity will also decrease, its their natural reaction. Fun times ahead.

postscript, please read arctic-news.blogspot … here i copy and paste re methane and the IPCC total refusal to acknowledge its importance or apparently its existence !!!

copy and paste …”One of the largest threats is seafloor methane and despite repeated warning from some of the best experts in the field, the IPCC simply waves away this threat. This and other elements in the bar have been discussed in detail in many earlier posts such as this one and on the extinction page.”

COP26 disaster …

COP26 is a failure, worse than I feared it would be.

Where are the scientists, where are the new ideas, the latest data, feedback projections?

It has dumbed down even below what a weak and blind IPCC could have stage managed.

I predicted a huge backlash to mans intransigence and eternal hubris and boy o boy theres going to be some very angry people, and in many senses rightly so.

Its my opinion the UK Government is delighted we are entering rapid and gross inflation, it will massage downwards the huge spend from Rishi, much of the money being quite un-needed, £10k lump sums to small businesses that didn’t need it and a furlough scheme that I reckon has been much abused and which continued for far too long. Covid is still out there but in many instances its a case of “Covid – what covid?”

I’m not impressed on the performance of bbc radio news on getting detail out on what really matters as we move forward to an unstoppable oven of catastrophe, this will make any war look as a minor scale dummy run.

We hardly hear of the feedback effect of multiple systems all catastrophically amplifying each others effect and eventually the collapse of one another, like a house of cards, in essence negating or destroying each single systems ability to survive; lets throw a few probable eventualities around…

diatoms and plankton will die, are in fact dieing, therefore half of the world CO2 to O collapses. Who mentions this?
the ability of land based green growing things decreases CO2 conversion as CO2 itself increases, never mind methane.
aerosol masking multiplier.
ice gone, particularly the importance of vertical melt.
fact: jet stream now in two parts, dragging warm wet air over the Arctic.
fact: sunspot max for 2026 and transition from El Nana to El Nino coincides!
weather systems will waver and abandon the worlds conventional food production areas.
meat production (burgers?) needs to be drastically curtailed / minimised.
live near to your work.
does anyone consider pollution from commercial sources, diesel fuelled agriculture, construction and the military?
if we are for a fact losing/ have lost insect populations, hence we are losing small songbirds then what if we lose earthworms … that would be catastrophe.
if the oceans are warmer and of greater bulk what of tectonic plate shift?
existing wind and solar depends on established conventional weather patterns, not weather in flux.
we need a one child policy.
methane
methane
methane
etc

Nero himself would be aghast as how we are holding our nerve and blind to what is happening, fiddling with inconsequentials when the big things need to be addressed. The tree problem for instance, unless its evergreen ie the conifer then here in northern latitudes we have a thing called autumn leaf fall, likewise most green growing things, for half the year are near to dormant. The tree thing is difficult in the UK, already near all land is used as is most appropriate, theres not much slack.

Still thinking trees, we only have land surface to play with and most of that being unsuitable, yet six sevenths of the worlds surface is water, therefore in my opinion a solution must be water based / oceanic.

Heres an idea, rather than carbon offset which is in itself an often dubious mechanism we could have death offset, pay poor brown people to die instead of ourselves … mighty quicker than a one child policy! Whoops, gallows humour.

But seriously here is a scientist talking …

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/

To the specific page in response to the COP26 cop-out …. http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-exclusion-of-climate-science-from-cop-meetings.html

Timescale? I just read stuff (preferably by scientists) … year 2026 will I fear be a much different place than where we are now, see the above bullet point list, year 2030 may well have seen homo sapiens much compromised if not near extinct.

Read up on aerosols ….http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/aerosols.html

read up on thermal expansion … http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/thermal-expansion.html

note in the above further down the page mention of ‘hole in sea ice in Laptev Sea 2010’,

The Laptev Sea will become famous for its shallowness and store of methane hydrate now set into melt mode. One could spend day upon day compiling this information, I only hope readers delve further than what at preseent at least at this address appears google presenting an obstacle at seeking out the latest scientific opinion, if it was fashion or burgers or stupid social networking it would be presenting me with a myriad of connections.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/runaway-warming.html

http://methane-hydrates.blogspot.com/2013/04/methane-hydrates.html

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/extinction.html

An atrocious radio interview…

The performance this morning at 08:45 of Amol Rajan was atrocious, I used to enjoy him on the Media Show but his personal qualities are proving insufficient to be fronting early morning news on bbc r4.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amol_Rajan

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj9z

Amol Rajan was interviewing Steve Barclay and made a complete mess of it, I would hope his bosses tackle this horrible treatment of Steve Barclay; this is a new low, is not acceptable. In my opinion Steve Barclay was quite in his rights to abandon and walk away from this horribly ‘loaded’ treatment. Steve stuck it out much to his credit.

I think there needs to be an inquiry and there needs to be an apology from Amol and from the bbc for this.

Amol needs to realise this is not a gladatorial engagement, you don’t pick up points for destroying your ‘enemy’ and you certainly must not promote your own emotive bent when the format is principally to deliver current news in an unbiased intelligent manner and in this case allow the interviewee impart of their best. This is not the place for a tabloid shock treatment.

In my opinion the UK sort of ad hoc muddled through with covid, in all fairness we were completely in the dark and anything like ‘lockdown’ was at first contemplation a real shock to contemplate and seemingly alien to anything any of us had experienced. We knew there would be casualties, this is sad and lamentable, but such is life (and death) and covid. Death I am afraid stalks the Earth and will take the vulnerable.

I see now we have a media bandwagon of stirring up passions with ‘accusations’ of groupthink and the leapfrogging to new insights all by means of hindsight. Of course hindsight will temper and modify our opinions, how else can this be, it will provide ammunition for critics but as stated already at the time in my opinion we mostly did the best we could in those uncharted waters. Better then than the USA under fairground trickster trump and the extraordinarily timid Dr Fauci and seemingly so-disengaged Deborah Birx; trump we may remember dumped the Dept for dealing with pandemics the first week he entered Office; or at least dumped by those pulling the strings, I doubt trump would ever have an opinion of anything other than his own self.

If learning from the past is so much in vogue among pundits then how was it of the foot and mouth crisis of twenty years ago the guidelines and basically the manual of operations learnt and devised from the previous foot and mouth thirty five years earlier by the Duke of Northumberland was totally ignored! Important lessons and methods such as burial on site being totally ignored. That particular Duke was very highly regarded, I doubt anyone knew more of husbandry and correct farming practices.

Personally with unfolding covid it jarred on me that mass event gatherings were allowed to continue for so long.

Likewise it seems to me inconceivable that some care workers were allowed to continue WITHOUT the covid jabs.

Dido Harding and the Track and Trace I think needs some greater scrutiny, the costs were bizarrely high yet a trifling twenty quid a week to the poor the Government seems ‘so important’ and needs to be cut in such a cruel, petty short sighted way; the longterm cost I’m sure will be far higher than any twenty quid.

Here we are with this mornings reaction … https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-58880971

(However, jarring to see Cummins with his worn out violin being given a soap box to whine from, yet again).

Boris, lorries and food…

If Boris cannot match drivers to the necessary requirements of an adequate operating capacity for this countrys food needs then what the heck is he doing managing this country?

Can he be trusted or can he even comprehend the necessary fine detail and sophistication of fiscal policy, the control of money supply and inflation, of effective financial management, of international relations, ie complicated stuff ad infinitum etc etc all bound up with understanding nomenclature and terms that I cannot comprehend? The last few days we have had daily re-runs of ‘crisis what crisis’ when in fact the first requirement to solving anything is to realising there actually IS a problem.

Increasingly when I see and hear Boris I cannot help but recall some bumbling inept middle or higher rank military man.

The highly toxic and disadvantageous mix of Brexit and shunning of all European hired hands is an absolute recipe for disaster but yes we certainly walked into it eyes wide open. Farage and any other brexiteer you can think of have certainly landed us into a complete mess, setting the clock back fifty years.

The Tories talk of ‘levelling up’ but as every day ticks by there is nothing other than an increasing inequality, a blind halfwit would surely be able to ascertain of this. A case in point has been the withdrawl of the £20 regular covid payment, being withdrawn we are told ‘to save money’ but this so-called reason is complete nonsense, the hardship, anxiety and fear engendered by this measly withdrawl of an assistance payment will result in far more than any twenty quid per person in future spending to help the poor and needy. Yet it is only now that furlough payments are to cease, an expense that could have stopped even months ago. A bit of a joke considering present day mobility, there must be many people back to working full time and pocketing the furlough money. Another state sponsored scam…..

To compound Tory stupidity as well as announcing stopping the £20 covid payment Boris and team announce ‘new measures’ to help the poor ie another form of payment to look for. Surely if all is ticking over why the heck introduce yet another with set of hurdles with all the attendant stress and admin costs of starting all over again from scratch! Loony is the only term for Boris & Co. Madness. All of this when we are staring into the prospect of inflation of the likes we have never seen for many decades even for the simplest things as food and heating.

Why is practical wisdom and the foresight of experience so unfashionable?

Another quite blind and stupid idea from Boris and his team of which Rishi Sunak the Chancellor seems adamantly keen are the cuts in Overseas Aid, this again is madness. Imagine in your mind projects and programmes that would be abandoned, food, medicine, healthcare, schools, assistance to self sufficiency, birth control, education, equal rights …. all scuppered by the ‘levelling up’ Tories. I’m sure China would be delighted to step-in, if we in the West are so stupid then good luck to them. Very much a case of out of sight out of mind with Boris and the team I think, this could in fact suit them admirably as a campaign slogan.

If I were in charge the first thing I would do is hunt down those big corporations that are so skilfull at tax evasion, the Amazons that are destroying the multivarious web of stockist to end user network that has existed for a long time, their relentless market capture.

Additionally here in the UK we have an epidemic of individuals operating for tax purposes as Limited Companies, this I think is as obscene as any tax avoidance by say Amazon. Already this typical individual IR35 is on ‘big money’ and somehow pleads themselves as a special case somehow not needing to contribute as all the rest of us…. quite sickening. Yet still expect a legal system, Police, education, healthcare whenever it suits them! IR35 hypocrites I think is the correct term.