Tuesday 29 September 2015

The TL;DR Manifesto

Big thanks to everybody who has taken time to peruse my posts & offered support.  I'm hoping to update this blog several times a week, which will obviously have an impact on the other vital trolling / blurking / anonymous posting that I carry out on behalf of mankind periodically; I thought it about time to put my money where my mouth is...


So yesterdays post has already put me into several hundreds of hits (too modest to say quite how many - does two count as "several"...?) which is far more than I had hoped for, in large part thanks to retweets from @VoxDay, @DickDelingpole and @HDHammer865 plus a commendation from @Jonathan_Drake.

However, no comment...

Please do give your feedback to the posts - you can be sure that I will eagerly read and cherish every single one.  Not sure if the Blog layout is too bleak, text too small, etc.  Whether the content is just way off & I should stick to tweeting pictures of animals, or just TL;DR.  I do have a tendency to go off on one & recognise that my prose needs work.  Break it up a bit, perhaps...?  Perhaps people just need time to understand that when I go off on a ramble, I will always make it back again.

So, a bit about me - office jockey of 20 year - man and boy - Austrian Economics, Ludwig V-M, Ayn Rand, Jesus Christ, Breitbart, Delingpoles, TakiMag, A.T., Voxday, English, French, German, Russian languages, Opera singer in training (for which I have been ejected from many a so-called-boozer...) Dutch Barges, Mycology, Culture Wars, New found Sci-Fi aficionado (where do I sign up for the Hugo awards...?)  Crusader for Radical Libertarianism.  Secretly quite like to own a really nice gun (W.W.J.D...?  W.G.W.J.O...?) not into drugs, or libertarians obsessed with legalisation either for that matter, but would quite like to watch Peter Hitchens do some acid.  Leader of #GamerGate though I now treat games / consoles with the same reverent fear as the dark things from a John C Wright novel, for their ability to suck away my soul.

I plan to blog about the farts of stupidity that the MSM still manage to somehow waft under our noses.  Signs and portents of the coming cataclysm.  I have been developing a number of consciousness altering ideas which collectively will create a structure that will sit on top of our existing corporate model without touching it.  This is an essential part of the strategy - leave any one piece in place for too long without support & regardless of how brilliant the idea, it will soon be assimilated into the corporate structure.

A list of upcoming blogposts planned to this end:

 - New pay as you go internet protocol.  (to break corporate monopoly, can co-exist with current infrastructure)
 - P2P land mail / freighting system.  This one is bulletproof & will increase societal resilience to economic and terrorist attacks.  Can also co-exist with current infrastructure.
 - The historical origins and imperatives of the corporate structure.
 - The internal contradictions of Socialism / Communism
 - The internal contradictions of Democratic Capitalism / Corporatism
 - Anatomy of societal decline.
 - Traditional Market indicators are Fear & Greed, Supply & Demand.  What about Intelligent Trust & Love?  These are also big motivating factors behind human behaviours.  Discuss whether these are somehow just vectors of the trad four, or separate transcendental values in their own right.
 - Replacement for copyright (government mandate to derive a monopoly from a "creative" work.  I will assert that fear of state violence is the foundations of the distributist ideologies that dominate popular media)  Greed / Love based alternative requiring no violent revolution.  You guessed it - can coexist, just like those bumper stickers.
 - Simple adversarial online heuristic tree system to replace the dominance of the Encyclopaedistes in the culture wars.  Aims to reduce the dominance of SJW / Left / Liberal bias in systems like Wikipedia. (but also the MSM in general).  HT Voxday for introducing me to the concept of the 18th century movement which probably has some resonance in contemporary culture.  Need to research this before doing the post.
 - Ways to hasten the decline of tired MSM tropes.  Previous two subjects should cover the technical aspects.  Discuss the cultural angle & activism.
 - Discussions of free market labour migration theories &
 - Alternative to the current legal system - ways to re-popularise the concept of voluntarism & common law.  Alternatives to & discussions of the outdated courts / jury systems.
 - Technical solutions to assist with the privatisation of public roads.  Discussion of legal safeguards to ensure rights of way, maintenance responsibilities, etc are upheld.
 - General discussion about the tragedy of the commons / anticommons & how technology fills the gap, whilst regulation hinders the emergency of technologies to do so.  (probably went too fast there jumping straight in with privatising public roads...)
 - Privatisation of the Police force & prison services.  Yep - for real.  (Oh - you mean to say that a police force that relies on having a spotless reputation, to be able to secure convictions, in order to stay in business is an unquestionable evil...?  As opposed to what, pray tell...?)
 - Replacement of outdated Governmental / Parliamentary systems.  I hope to popularise the term "Horse and Cart" democracy to describe the level of technology available when the current systems were implemented.  You got into your horse and cart once every four years & trundled down to the voting office to put your cross onto the ballot slip (a cross to show you were a good Christian...)  Regardless on whether you are of a dirigiste or libertarian persuasion, we can all agree that the speed of information exchange in our regulatory institutions has massively lagged behind the speed of exchange in other marketplaces.  Cui bono?  (go on - have a guess...)

Quite a lot to cover there then.  As touched upon briefly, if any one of these lovely ideas were to be introduced on its own it would inevitably be either subsumed by the corporate / government owned & driven monopolies, or could only be introduced in the absence of the others by force, or at the cost of enormous bloodshed.  Hopefully I havent missed out too many major parts.  Power / energy, most manufacturing industries, armed forces, etc.  should adapt pretty well & even gain advantage by diversifying & gaining an edge in 4GW scenarios.

Dont believe me?  Take the internet as a great example.  Whilst freedom has certainly flourished & it has overwhelmingly been a force for good, it has highlighted an inability in mainstream culture to combat threats from intolerant ideologies.  It has simultaneously been subsumed into the mire of monopolistic corporatism who now own all teh datas, all teh highways, all the infrastructure.  The decentralised system designed to protect our military infrastructure from a nuclear strike has become the cradle in which our civilian infrastructure now sits - the fine mesh holding us from falling back into dog eat dog barbarism & chaos.  It could probably be taken down by a few hundred determined fanatics armed with diesel, fertiliser, pneumatic drills, cutting tools and the right knowledge.

The Banishment of Traffic from London. A brief history of UK thoroughfares from the Romans, to the Congestion Charge, to Olympic Zil Lanes

<<Apologies - this is an ancient post from 2012.  I edited it & it has popped to the top...>>

I often cycle to work.  Some people think that makes them special, caring, intelligent types, but I mainly enjoy the exercise, the fresh air, the price, and the relative absence of B.O. from the thousands of other frustrated souls making their way to their place of toil.

There are obvious drawbacks ; the weather that we are so famous for talking about can be quite cold, wet and icy - neither of which are ideal for cycling as a person advances in years, but I pride myself on being of a fairly robust physiognomy.  Potholes and punctures are perennial problems and there are frequent opportunities to be crushed under the giant wheels of the various heavy goods vehicles which move at high speeds through the city streets.  Fact is though, I quite enjoy my 20 minute ride and so long as I avoid getting squished, I remain well ahead in terms of time, money and health.

It would be nice to have other options though, I feel.  Public transport is just so dire in London.  Slow, smelly, expensive, congested.  I wonder whether they should consider introducing a "Congestion Charge" on public transport?  Seems to have done wonders for keeping people off the roads, why shouldnt it work on the tube?  Fact is that although I can justify running an extremely modest family car after the various running costs, taxes, charges and fines, there is no way that I can justify paying £10 for the pleasure of being able to drive in to work and back.

To illustrate how hard it is, I thought that I would put up some pictures from my daily cycle in.  See if you can spot anything unusual about them.  As a clue, these were taken at around 9:15 in the morning.

View looking South from Oval Station:


View looking North from Oval Station:


View looking South past Kennington Station:


Looking North:


Turning off from Elephant & Castle roundabout:
(That busy traffic hub)


Going North up Borough High Street:


Looking South by Southwark Crown Court:


Northwards towards the Shard:


Turning off:


Through the backstreets to Tooley Street:



You may have noticed that there aren't too many cars on what you might expect to be rather busy roads. In fact, there are practically none.  This strikes me as rather strange and extremely worrying as London is supposed to be our financial capital and this particular route is one of the major arteries in.

For those who are not familiar with London roads, London is set out a bit like a dartboard.  We have three circular(ish) roads: 

Ring Road
The "Ring Road", which is a couple of miles in diameter from Tower Bridge in the East, to the Houses of Westminster in the West.  This road contains what is referred to as "The City" of London, also "The West End", plus a little bit "Sarf of the River".

North/South Circular
The "North/South Circular" roads (which aren't particularly circular in places.) These do a radius about five miles from the City/Square Mile and contain pretty much everything that can legitimately be called "London".

M25
The M25 is a wondrous modern construction, a multi-laned motorway which spans a radius 10-15 miles out. and a joy to all those who use it daily.  This road was the inspiration for Chris Rea's song "Road to Hell".  This area within is often referred to as "Greater London" and is bordered by various green belt lands, such as Epping Forest which are fantastic to cycle in.

These rings are intercepted by ten or so major arteries.  For example:

A1
The A1, which was so named because it is the first of our "A" roads.  Known as the "Great North Road", it joins London and Edinburgh, based on ancient roads built upon by the Romans, starting as Ermine Street from the gates of the wall around London and intersecting and traversing most major routes including the "Four Highways" of medieval England.  (Icknield Way, Fosse Way, Watling Street & the already mentioned Ermine Street.)  Running Northwards at about 11 o'clock, it was superceded by Lord Francis Egerton's Grand Union Canal system, Robert Stephensons London and Birmingham Railway line and finally the M1 motorway by John Laing, but still remains in place for much of the way.

A2
The A2 is probably even older and is based on another of the "Four"; the Celtic trackway known as Watling Street, later the "Dover Road", as it connects London with Dovers iconic white cliffs.  The Thames being the oldest thoroughfare, the A2 hugs her Southern bank most of the way out, past the famous Thames tunnel at Rotherhithe that brought Isambard Kingdom Brunel to fame, by being the first of its kind.  Each of the rings intercept the A2 where they cross over the river Thames to the East.  This road also connects the historic strategic naval centres of Rochester and Chatham.

A3
The A3 connects another vital centre of historic sea-power and is known as the Portsmouth road.  It has been a victim of its own success in some ways in that the area in between Portsmouth and London is extremely wealthy, no doubt as a result of the trade which came their way.  Correspondingly, much of the area is designated as "area of outstanding beauty", resulting in the poor old A3 never getting upgraded much beyond a dual carriageway.  However, money & influence going hand in hand as they do, they eventually decided that they would put a great big four mile chunk of it underground at a cost of £150,000 per metre.  A good deal of train stations in this area cater to villages or hamlets of just a few houses but are mysteriously served by fast or semi-fast non-stopping services

A4
On the topic of well heeled environs, the A4 connects Buckingham Palace to the leafier estates further out to the West via the Royal parks, and the Roman spa town of Bath.  This one hasn't had the luxury of quite such Genteel treatment as the A3 though, no doubt because of the connection to the port town of Bristol, which being near to the Atlantic probably had quite a bit of stuff coming over that we did actually want.  It got an upgrade in the shape of the M4, which ex Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott hilariously had the idea to convert into a bus lane at one stage.  Happily, one good thing that the Tories have acheived was to scrap this ludicrous scheme ten years later, but not until after they had designated it as one of the dedicated Zil lanes for the duration of the Olympic games.


And what is the point of all these ramblings, you might wonder?  Well, just to illustrate that these roads are historically busy, main lifeblood arteries to our capital city.  I love cycling on clear, empty streets, but hate the impingements on our liberty which make it possible.  I imagine that dedicated penny farthing lanes would have been seen as progress in Brunel's time, but can hardly see him ripping out railway tracks to make way for them.  Would George V have countenanced the idea of dedicated "Whiff Whaff" lanes for the dandies of the time to go rip roaring past the palace?  I should imagine that the idea of charging people around double the minimum hourly wage for the privilege of entering within a mile radius of the City would offend liberal Victorian sensibilities & invoke another Magna Carta.  The pictures that you see are taken along the routes of the A2 & A3.  The A4 is being used as a "Zil" lane for Olympic dignitaries.  Nobody can afford to use the roads, even if they are allowed to.  The tubes are crammed to bursting point and the roads are empty, but it's ok; they've painted them blue & written cycle superhighway all over them.  So that's alright then.


Monday 28 September 2015

The Comparative Merits of Tolerance

I don't suppose the recent incessant banging of the DrumOfTolerance has escaped the attention of any save the hard of thinking. At least, when not being drowned out by its more resonant sibling, "equality"...

It occurred to me that things have a tendency to engender their opposites.  I'm no anthropologist / sociologist; surely there is a buzzword or catchphrase to describe the phenomenon where prominence given to any one particular human virtue ends up bringing about its opposite, either by necessity filling a void, or by stimulating an equal and opposite reaction.

This preamble, being a roundabout way of introducing a rather neat assertion that I have assembled relating to the nature of tolerance in societies founded on Christian and Islamic systems.  In a nutshell:

I) Tolerance is a virtue intrinsic to societies built on a Christian foundation, often taken to grotesque ends by members not possessed of its corresponding virtues of modesty/humility who prefer to exploit it to flatter their moral vanity.


II) Tolerance is a necessary coping mechanism in structurally hypocritical cultures subject to endless strictures on every form of activity, as is often found in Islamic cultures, where it accordingly finds more natural limits.


To many, the first statement will sound baffling.  The second outright offensive.  Allow me to explain.  Firstly, it is worth clarifying that the ability to express intolerance of certain actions and behaviours is probably as essential as the capacity to tolerate individual differences is to the moral health of any given culture.  Which brings me to a second point of clarity relating to terms.  It merits a brief iteration of the six possible attitudes one may adopt toward any given point of principle:

Rejection = disbelief + opposition
Tolerance = disbelief + passivity
Submission = disbelief + support
Denialism = belief + opposition
Acceptance = belief + passivity
Celebration = belief + support


It is surely a sign of how progressive we have all become that we can move so nimbly between Rejection and Celebration these days, no? (Perhaps another category is needed to describe criminalising people for failing to celebrate things that were illegal less than five decades ago...?)

On the surface, celebration and rejection would appear to be the most principled stances to take on any given subject, which is no doubt why those who have an existential need to think well of themselves avail themselves of their use with such frequency.

The foundations of conservatism rest on tolerance and acceptance.  An understanding of one's own sinful/hypocritical nature and humble acceptance that one's own beliefs may not always be sufficiently well grounded in truth to impose them on all peoples for all times limits the desire to codify positive rights.  Respect for time honoured received wisdom and tradition corresponds with an urge to defend negative rights in the hope that they might conserve us from the Universal Law of Unintended Consequences.  Negative rights which, largely already codified, rarely need tinkering with anyway.  Hence Conservatism's famous maxim to never change the law "except with a trembling hand".

Submission and denialism would appear to be the least principled stances, but it is worth remembering that we are, after all, only fragile humans - lest we also fall into the ever popular trap of judging others too harshly.  Further, in addition to the social fury and scorn that can be heaped upon a person for insufficient celebration or rejection of the latest causes du jour, extrication from the tax system is no simple matter.  In the absence of being able to do so, a person has little power to withdraw their subsidy for the various public programmes to abort babies, inseminate lesbians, euthanise grannies, supply drugs/vaccines to children, etc.

The preamble done, justification for the two assertions follow:

I) Christian Tolerance

Whilst contemporary wisdom would have us believe that anybody claiming an objective external standard of truth will naturally gravitate towards a violently intolerant view of those who don't share their views with such enthusiasm, it is worth considering the central message of Christianity.  You needn't believe in the resurrection, or sky pixies to accept that a story about a God that loves the world enough to sacrifice his only son - to willingly submit to Roman barbarism allowing himself to be crucified for teaching a message of love, forgiveness, and non-judgement, has the principle of tolerance writ large in its core.  But here's the kicker.  The message of tolerance not only refuses to affirm acceptance of immorality, it actively condemns it.  Whereas "let him without sin cast the first stone" powerfully articulates the principle at work in Tolerance II, it clearly indicates a rejection - at a personal / individual level - that poses a common sense existential threat to the uncompromising, absolutist narratives of the many radical positions that (post?)modern day Social Justice Warriors unsustainably heap upon the edifice of societal tolerance raised up by the Christian system, whilst not only rejecting its truths, but also furiously denying the very possibility of any standard of external truth, so famously asserted as being findable by all willing to seek it.  To summarise then, the Christian / Post Christian traditions tend to promote tolerance based on love of your fellow sinner and a respect for a complex, abstract, but at least mostly knowable truth, and yet breed intense intolerance when they abandon humbleness and play fast and loose with facts

II) Islamic Tolerance

I can see that describing another culture as hypocritical is liable to get backs up, so I will lay out straight away that I admit entirely to being a hypocrite of sorts myself.  Therefore, I am not trying to be damning in describing the tolerance found in Islamic Cultures as being bred of hypocrisy - just pointing out that it comes from a different source.  As far as I am aware, there is no equivalent injunction to "let him without sin, etc." in Islamic scriptures, which even contain its opposite injunction to physically, verbally, mentally and spiritually oppose all forms of evil at all times. It is not a misrepresentation to say that Islam is predicated on notions of justice and obedience to Gods will over the love and honest truth seeking that Christianity emphasises in their place.  Indeed the former substitution is widely viewed as a recipe for chaos and the latter a theological absurdity - a position shared with leftists and postmodernists of all stripes.  However, none of this would cut me much slack with Islamic hardliners, as hypocrisy is regarded as something of a cardinal sin in Islam.  The Arabic term is Munafiq and whereas believers in other Abrahamic faiths are offered three options - conversion, submission, or death, polytheists and atheists two - conversion or death, only one option is open to the persistent renegade Munafiq, covered succinctly in the fourth sura by an injunction to "slay them wherever ye find them".  There is some protective ambiguity surrounding the number of chances they get and regarding the full list of behaviours that put you beyond the pale.  These two factors, plus high evidential tests, plus the odd drop of milk of human kindness probably go some way to explaining the relative paucity of initial stone castings, unless we are to believe that adultery simply doesn't exist in such societies. In addition to matters of faith being in the public rather than private sphere, there are strictures on practically every area of human activity, from clothes, to hair, associations, beard length, prayer, fasting, cloth dyes, cleaning yourself, many of which go beyond mere advice.  In summary, the mystically elusive conception of truth combined with the volume and severity of the many intolerant injunctions impingent on its adherents create a de facto tolerance not widely considered to be a good within itself that cannot therefore be stretched to accommodate whatever you want it to. Therefore, whereas opportunities to be intolerant are only limited by people's capacity to hate one another, unpopular (minority) attempts to impose tolerance will typically backfire and ironically create more intolerance.  The implication being that democracy will not typically promote greater tolerance under such systems.

Wednesday 23 September 2015

The VW "Scandal". Another non-story, brought to you by the Dead Tree press & the ever relevant BBC

Whereas I wouldn’t normally touch the BBC with somebody elses barge pole, they can be quite useful in finding out the opposite of what is actually true at any given moment & can usually (just about) be relied upon to sneak the truth in their articles somewhere down the bottom:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34324772 


It's all another blow for the diesel market

Certainly is. Over the last decade and more, carmakers have poured a fortune into the production of diesel vehicles - with the support of many governments - believing that they are better for the environment. Latest scientific evidence suggests that's not the case, and there are even moves to limit diesel cars in some cities.



It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to spot the dissembling weasel wording in that finely crafted piece of semantic yoga, does it?  

Personally, I’d like to see the “evidence” that ever suggested diesel might be “better” for “the environment” (human environment?  Animal environment?  Biodiversity? Polar bears / Penguins?  Sea levels?  Snails & crustaceans?) in the first place.  “Latest” of course could refer to evidence from 20 years ago if there has been nothing to the contrary in the meantime.  Certainly nothing has ever led me to seriously think that diesel might save the planet.  Try cycling on Londons streets & you will instantly know which of the two types of fuel are the most noxious.  Assuming that is, you are privileged enough to encounter one of the few remaining petrol vehicles that are still allowed in the capital.  Suffice to say, a few minutes behind one of the millions of black cabs or red buses will tell you all you need to know.

The competing technologies of "SI" (Spark Ignition) and "CI" (Compression Ignition) based engines have different merits & have jostled for position in various applications over the years.  

Without going into too much detail, the SI engines tend to use lighter, shorter chains of hydrocarbons, that tend to burn very fast, giving a good power to weight ratio which translates to good acceleration.  The thinner, more volatile fuels range from single carbon methane gas, or even zero carbon hydrogen right up to the various types of "petrol" or "gasoline" that are commonly graded by their "octane" value, where "octane" refers to hydrocarbons chains of eight carbon atoms.  

Compression Ignition engines do not require a spark & instead work by compressing a fuel air mixture to a much higher pressure at which point the mixture spontaneously explodes.  The additional work required to compress the mixture & the heavier engineering required means that these engines tend to have a lower power to weight ratio, which is compensated by using more energy dense fuel - typically diesel or fuel oil with an average chain length of 12 carbon atoms or more.  This most directly equates to a greater range for any given size of fuel tank.

The issues of economy and efficiency are much harder to quantify.  If the price were the same for both fuels, diesel / CI fuels would be more economical, but of course, consumer demand, supply availability and government subsidy are the dominant factors.  Efficiency is also much harder to quantify, as the petrol engines use a less energetic fuel and although the diesel engines have a much higher theoretical efficiency at the higher compression rates, it is questionable whether the extra weight & engineering outweighs this, especially within the range of parameters that consumers would consider desireable for driving on public roads.

What I'm getting at, is that even if there is anybody left out there with any remaining fucks to give about how much invisible, non-toxic plant food they are putting out on any given Tuesday, it is unlikely that there has ever been any evidence to suggest that a diesel vehicle is any more likely to emit less carbon than its petrol equivalent into the atmosphere for any given distance.  Therefore, there must be alternative reasons for the endless shoe / gourd waving.

I would like to offer an alternative historiography of the petrol-v-diesel debate over the years.  I’ll leave the reader to decide whether my version is more sanguine or more cynical…

Late 19th c – motor car that runs on petrol invented, striking a massive blow for Christendom against the various Eastern despotisms and satrapies & freeing us from the reliance of beasts of burden (human or otherwise) and making warfighting a whole lot more exciting.
Winner: Petrol assumes the mantle of Godfrey de Bouillon

Early 20th c – various mideastern states give up slave raiding W.Europe for the Hareems and Galleys & “let” us build loads of petrochem rigs to get all that slightly stickier, but still quite lovely oil out the ground to fuel our tanks & fight our glorious wars with.  Suddenly Diesel is king.  The Nazis didn’t have any of their own & had to figure out ways of breaking down the sticky stuff in coal.
Winner: Diesel drags the modernist ubermensch out of the darkness of superstition

1950s / 60s – turns out there's loads of really nice oil in the North sea.  (clue is in the name – Brent “light” crude)  and guess what – petrol is the greatest!  The American car industry reaches a peak of sorts, consolidating into the big brands, Chevy, Corvettey, Mustangy, Cadillac.  The Ford Cortina hits the UK.
Winner: Petrol liberates man and womankind - Burn Baby, Burn!

‘70s – OPEC collectively throw their toys out of the pram in a tantrum following an epic fail attempt to use all the lovely toys they bought from the Euros / US / USSR effectively against their Israeli cousins & decide they no longer wish to share their national treasure with us.  We decide that Western Civ is far too precious to risk wasting our own limited resources racing around Romford circuit on a Friday night & plump for a nice Volvo instead.
Winner: Back on the Diesel.

‘80s – Nah – actually ripping about in an XR3i is awesome.  Bring back the petrolheads…  Our French cousins, still nervous from the oil shocks of the 70s decide that les Nukes are also awesome & could be used to generate hydrogen / short chain fuels, but not the longer chain stuff very effectively.
Winner: Petrol is good

‘90s – Collapse of USSR & Marxian theory generally deprives the handwringing classes of any kind of effective means of beating their breasts about how our material comfort is built on the backs of crushing economic exploitation of the downtrodden masses of the world, so somebody comes up with the theory that all of our lovely progress is making the weather unbearable for everybody else so that they couldn’t possibly build half decent technologically advanced societies, thereby overturning millennia of received wisdom to come to the conclusion that not just Fire=Bad, but Fire=Very Very Bad.
Winner:  Nobody - the end is nigh...

‘00s – Oooh, it is quite warm isn’t it?  And some of those exotic Bedouin types that we get all our lovely hydrocarbons from have started flying planes into skyscrapers which isn’t on at all.  Somebody comes up with the genius idea that rather than buying all their hydrocarbons & selling them loads of carbohydrates in return (i.e. food – wheat, bread, pasta, etc) we could just turn the carbohydrates into hydrocarbons & sell them stuff to fight each other with.  Biodiesel rocks!  At the same time, however, it is being said that the good stuff is running out and it begins to look like the same guys who were in charge of totalling XR3i’s on the Gallows Corner flyover on the A12 in the ‘80s have now got their hands on the wheel of the economy, so it would be great if somebody could give it a bit of a “jump start” by investing in loads of awesome tech to develop dilithium crystals & building some really cool solar stuff & windmills to get free power out of the air and that?
Winner:  Diesel (and Kumbaya)


‘10s – The pearl-clutchers belatedly realise that the poor old Orang-utans have borne the brunt of their planet saving crusade.  Turns out that there is some kind of supply and demand thing that means people are going to chop down loads of forest to grow stuff if you suddenly tell them that you need loads of it really quick.  The anointed one brings peace and harmony to the M.E. nations who enthusiastically throw off their shackles & use their newfound freedoms to embrace their traditional values of poverty, chaos and barbarism.  All the neck slicing puts even the hardcore handwringers off their falafel, even to the point of boycotting petroleum products from the Mullahs who want to nuke the little stable in Bethlehem where our Dear Lord and Saviour lay down his sweet head in a manger two thousand years ago, although they are supposedly not on the same side as the neck slicers.  (who can tell, after all…?)  The internet finally breaks the stranglehold of the Honourable Society of Barons of the Dead Tree Press & it begins to dawn on people that the economy is pretty well FUBARred and that perhaps spanking the rest of our overdraft on Enron / Solyndra / Hanjin / Ningbo renewable lottery scratchcards wasn’t the best investment & that just maybe we should allow market forces back in.  This happily coincides with the discovery of shedloads of gas that can be frack'ed out of the ground.  It also coincides with the Russians embracing the virtues of the economic system formerly only promoted by the capitalist running dogs & exporting yet more voluminous quantities of light hydrocarbons.  Recent meetings even suggest that the resurgent unreconstructed Leftists under Comrade Corbyn may be seeking a rapprochement, or detente perhaps, with their former Soviet masters.  Therefore, at present Petrol / Gas / Light chain fueled SI engines are well and truly back in vogue
Winner: Petrol / Gas / Putinoff Vodka

The future...  Anybody care to speculate what might happen if the current conflagrations with our Russian neighbours continues to escalate to the point that they no longer want to sell us all their lovely light oil & gas products & we have to rely on the millions of years worth of sticky long chained coal that our island sits atop?

Personally, I'm giving serious consideration to ditching the pushbike & going for one of those single wheeled segway things.  If only they did a petrol powered version...