DUFF & NONSENSE!

It's OK, I won't say I told you so - part VI: The second Renaissance and Enlightenment of Europe

By George and all the Saints, the Jerries are in the shit and the PIIGS are sitting pretty in the straw!  Who'da thunk it? ...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/11/06/germany-will-lose-grip-eu-economy-gets-much-weaker/

The interesting point, however, is this. It [Germany] is starting to underperform the Mediterranean economies. Italy, helped by prime minister Mario Draghi’s reforms, and a ton of stimulus money, is doing a lot better.

In the latest quarter, Italy’s GDP rose by 2.6pc, almost 50pc faster than Germany (and inflation at 2.6pc is a lot lower as well – no sign of stagflation there).

France is doing better than expected, with resilient GDP growth, stronger than forecast job creation, and rising exports, and while retail sales are sluggish (down 0.2pc last month) it is doing a lot better than in Germany. Likewise, Spain is bouncing back from the pandemic, with factory output rising.

Heck, even Greece is doing a lot better, with growth of more than 7pc forecast for this year. The net result? The imbalances within the eurozone are just as strong as they always have been. It is just that they have switched places.

It is Germany that is emerging as the weakest link, and the Mediterranean states are doing better. And that will reshape the bloc in two important ways.

First, power will shift from Berlin to Paris and Rome. With the departure of Angela Merkel, and her replacement by the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz running an unlikely coalition of socialists, greens and free market radicals – a combustible mix if ever there was one – that was always likely to happen.

Next, Germany won’t be able to preach austerity anymore, nor will lectures on spendthrift Mediterraneans hold much sway. It is easy to tell everyone else what they are doing wrong when you run the strongest economy. It is a lot harder when you are one of the weakest.

I've often wondered why the EU's economic core was in the middle North and not at the periphery.  All other things being equal the shortest distance to other markets for sales and purchases is where you'd expect capital and labour to coalesce, like the US.

But all other things weren't equal.  The central North was well run and the periphery a shambles.  But in the Single Market, Four Freedoms, and State Aid Rules that gravity defying start point can't last.  Especially when the grip of a single currency with austerity and internal devaluation as the obligatory and only means of righting national ships  imposes itself on the feckless periphery for a few decades to bring them into line with Teutonic righteousness.

Are we about to see the inversion of europe: the shift of power and control away from the central Northern core to the city states of the periphery?  What a glorious, fantastic place that would be, a neo-Greek phoenix rising from the ashes of Teutonic dominance.

And if we'd still been in the Great Game of europe in its current incarnation of the EU, as the ultimate peripheral nation and super-City State with all the finance of the City of London behind us we'd be top dog of the city states: the Athens of the second renaissance, the Venice of the second age of Enlightenment.

Instead ... Good call 23/06/2016.

Muppets.

SoD

Chaos and climate - part1: Linear systems

It's D&N quiz time again!  Let's get straight into it!

Starter for one:  Who said this? ...

“…we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

No?  A rabid climate change denying fossil fuel company CEO?  Me?  Well yes, obviously in my case.  But in the case of the fossil fuel company CEO - and all CEO's for that matter - they'd rather chew their own dicks off than utter a cancel culture provocation like that!  Watch their depots get blockaded by Stinking Rebellion and Isolate Britain?  Get voted off the board by the shareholders?  Not bloody likely.

Astonishing though it may seem, that was the UN's IPCC!  Yes, the doyen of anthropogenic climate change and "carbon causes warming" linear orthodoxy made that statement in their climate pronouncement named "IPCC AR4 WG1".

A series of articles on the WattsUpWithThat site by someone called Kip Hansen brought the claim to my attention, and the implications of it are explained in layman's terms beautifully in those articles, the first of which is linked here and the subject of this post ...

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/15/chaos-climate-part-1-linearity/

I'll overlay my commentary onto those articles one-by-one, per my post title.

So linear systems right, you remember them from school?  You take a range of input values and you mark them up on the x axis.  Then you process them one-by-one through a calculation to produce the output, with the caveat that you do not feed the output back into the input of the calculation in any way.  You plot the output on the y axis.

In their strictest, simplest form, linear systems have their output directly proportionate to their input.  For example: y = 2x.  Take the input on the x-axis and double it, then plot that on the y-axis ... 

Linear system: A system in which alterations of an initial state will result in proportional alterations in any subsequent state.

In mathematics there are lots of linear systems. The multiplication tables are a good example: x times 2 = y. 2 times 2 = 4. If we double the “x”, we get 4 times 2 = 8. 8 is the double of 4, an exactly proportional result.

To help us along, let's use a maths run-book rather than stale graph images shopped by someone else.  Take a hike over to the Desmos site, in particular, click this run-book example ...

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/smufmlkkam

Let's explain what's going on here.

In the body of the chart you can see the x axis going from -10 to 10, and the y axis running from -15 to 15.

Also in the body two linear equations are plotted, one red, one blue, and their crossing point a green dot.

In the run-book steps panel you can see three steps.  Steps 1 and 2 are the formulae of those two equations plotted in the chart.  Don't worry about them yet, we're going to delete them in a sec and do our own anyway.  And the third step is the cross over point:  -1 on the x axis and 3 on the y axis:  (-1,3).

The run-book works its way down the steps plotting the results of the formulae and points that you've "coded" into the steps.

So, click on the "X" on the right of each step and delete the three of them.  Your chart should be blank and the run-book steps empty and waiting for you to input your equation(s).

Click in the step 1 formula field and type: y = 2x .

You'll notice a purple line drawn across the chart from bottom left to top right.  Congratulations!  You've just coded your first linear system equation in the Desmos run-book tool!  Much quicker than plotting the dots on graph paper like we old farts and fartettas used to do at school!

To check it's working, pick a value on the x axis, like 2 for example.  Trace it up to the purple line and then across to the y axis, you get 4.  So y = 2x, putting x = 2 into the formula yields y = 2 times 2 = 4. So y = 4.  Check - the purple line is correct.

Now you can play with the formula - knock yourself out!

Push the line up by adding 3 to the formula ...

y = 2x + 3

The line gradient stays the same but instead of running through the origin (0, 0) it runs through the point (0, 3) higher up the y axis.  That's as complicated as it gets for linear systems: still proportionate but also offset by an amount.

Flatten the line by changing the 2x to 0.5x ...

y = 0.5x + 3

Now the line is flatter with a gradient of only 0.5 but still passes through the offset point (0, 3) instead of the origin (0, 0).

To change the gradient to a downward slope from left to right make the 0.5 negative, so -0.5x.  To pass through a point lower on the y axis change the +3 to -3 ...

y = -0.5x - 3

Congratulations again!  You've just mastered linear mathematics!  You've gone bottom left to top right, top left to bottom right, changed the gradient, and raised and lowered the offset of the line.  There isn't much more that you can do with a straight line on a two dimensional surface!  That's a linear system for you.

Back to Kip's narrative ...

He makes a fantastic observation.  It's one of a plethora of state education brain prepping techniques to turn pupils into linear minded simpleton authoritarian type people ...

Aside: It is this feature of linearity that is taught in the modern schools. School children are made to repeat this process of making a graph of a linear formula many times, over and over, and using it to find other values. This is a feature of linear systems, but becomes a bug in our thinking when we attempt to apply it to real world situations, primarily by encouraging this false idea: that linear trend lines predict future values. When we see a straight line, a “trend” line, drawn on a graph, our minds, remembering our school-days drilling with linear graphs, want to extend those lines beyond the data points and believe that they will tell us future, uncalculated, values. This idea is not true in general application, as you shall learn.

To be continued ...

SoD

What have Egypt, Brexit, and Greta's Holocaust - the murder of 6m Africans over ten years - got in common?

Here's another  brill article from Tomas Pueyo - the guy who did the China article I posted a while ago ...

https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/egypt-part-1

Gotta Love his hard-nut no-nonsense analysis.  No reference to any political philosophy except dictatorship.

So, it's D&N quiz time! ...

(1) Can anyone spot the similarity between Egypt's situation as outlined by Tomas and Brexit?  Clue ...

Lots of poor people and a strong centralized government are two key ingredients for an authoritarian regime. The third one is no alternative its people could escape to.

(2) Can anyone develop Tomas's Egyptian observation below and link it to Brexit and the GH (Greta's Holocaust)? ...

"Have you noticed how the lights in Egypt stop abruptly in the south?"

After changing the water in Mr Fish's fish tank (our one and only pet) and walking around our local lake I shall return with the answers (and yes, there's another clue in this sentence) ...

Answer:

Tomas makes the point that Egypt was a poor country because it could not trade, trade being the bringer of prosperity.  Three quarters of its border were vast and endless sand.  One quarter of its border was sea but only via a delta too shallow for trading ships.  All Egypt could do was eat its own homegrown food, hand-to-mouth subsistence living.

Blighty on the other hand was setup for both trade and homegrown grub.  Trade because Blighty is surrounded on all four quarters by navigable seas; no endless sand or shallow deltas.  And in that sea are squillions of fish to munch on.

However, Brexit has conspired to clobber both of those advantages and so render us like Egypt but without even the grub.

We have fuel shortages in petrol stations, empty shelves in supermarkets, builders without materials, fruit rotting on the vine, pigs being possibly slaughtered and not eaten, all due to Brexit extenuating the post-Covid supply chain recovery.  No other countries have experienced the post-Covid supply chain recovery problems to the point where the actual goods and services are not available to the citizenry,  or left to rot, or destroyed.  We have deliberately diminished our trading potential in goods, services, labour movement and capital, and thereby moved our economy in the direction of Egypt, as if to intentionally silt up our borders.

And the one I haven't mentioned yet is fish.  While enjoying a meal at the super local fish restaurant with my folks in Dorset I remarked how massive the prawns were and how I had to sit the cod diagonally on the plate to get round it.  The chef owner explained, "It's due to Brexit.  We can't get the fish and seafood so they're staying where they are and growing much bigger."

The Gaffer, never one to miss an opportunity to land a blow retorted: "Ha, see, another benefit of Brexit!"  However, the wind was taken out of his sails somewhat when the bill arrived, bloody hellfire, prices are up, up  and away! ...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/seafood-prices-soar-amid-supply-chain-issues-and-worker-shortage-180978369/

When the fishing was done by Brit, French, Dutch and Norge fishermen competitively in the SMFFASAR (Single Market, Four Freedoms  and State Aid Rules) the market was cleared and the stocks levelled.  Now Blighty on her own can't even hook out the critters that surround our island, to add to the fruit, pigs, and fuel we can now add fishing as a failed industry.

And the people worst affected by these primary industries' outputs becoming scarcer and more expensive are low income working people who voted for Brexit that caused it!  The dumbest self-inflicted wound in the history of self-inflicted wounds.  It's like the Egytians pouring salt on their own fertile land!

And there's my first point: Brexit Blighty is like Egypt in that it has reduced its trading potential - through Brexit instead of sand and silt.  But worse, it's also damaged its own domestic productivity and thwarted the harnessing of its resources through Brexit.

My second point is Tomas's remarkable observation of Central and sub-Saharan Africa being dark south of the Aswan dam.  At last CSSA had the chance to develop after thousands of years of powerlessness: with coal powered electricity.  The chance to start manufacturing, and trade its factory and agricultural outputs with Egypt and the wider world, and thereby prosper as Tomas says becomes of trading places.  But no.  Instead, Greta and the Green Blob refused to allow it.  And so Africans continue to live in subsistence poverty, dying at the rate of 600,000 excess deaths a year from lung disease in their smoke filled homes.

Two of the "Four Riders of the Apocalypse": Brexit and Climate Alarmism, doing the do.

Just wish they'd both go walk like an Egyptian ...

SoD

It's OK, I won't say I told you so - part V: Now there's a sentence

But neither Labour nor the Tory wets ever really grasped why Thatcherism worked.

Their attitude to the lady’s economic legacy was like that of savage tribesmen towards an artefact bequeathed by a higher civilization – respectful but uncomprehending.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/09/should-classical-liberals-abandon-hope-conservative-party/

God damn it.  What a brilliant one liner that is.  And, to be honest, that article is the most important to have been written in 6 years.  Apart from those written by me that predicted exactly the same 6 years ago.

That Hannan cannot grasp that the Single Market, Four Freedoms, and State Aid Rules was Margaret Thatcher's legacy, invented, designed and implemented by her and her people precisely because she and they knew that the "savage tribesmen" would revert to type and couldn't be trusted with that legacy, is the final plot line twist that seals Blighty's fate, which is, to become the Venezuela of Europe in perpetuity.

She threw the torch of her legacy, that of classical Liberalism and Libertarianism, to Brussels, and Baby Thatcher - Guy Verhofstadt and his mates - picked it up and shone it back on Blighty for 30 years, during which time we have never been so prosperous and free.

Hannan cannot grasp that.  As though the spear tip of one savage tribesman somehow nicked his Achilles heal as he passed it by, and thereby his "higher civilisation" couldn't bear to let Johnny Foreigner uphold the torch of her legacy, his ideology, over us, and so he was instrumental in extinguishing it forever, as much as any fully fledged savage tribesman.

For classical liberals to give up on the conservative coalition would be fundamentally self-indulgent. It would mean removing the last constraints on government, and ensuring that the debt and inflation crises are needlessly exacerbated. It would mean withdrawing into electoral irrelevance.

Perhaps voters are not yet in the mood for liberty. Perhaps we small government types are still at the Keith Joseph rather than the Margaret Thatcher stage. But when we do eventually turn things around, it will be as part of a broad alliance capable of winning and exercising power. We have no right to walk away now.

As I said 6 years ago and ever since: Brexit means we will have to wait for oblivion before any possibility of Thatcherism and a restoration of prosperity and Liberty.

He cheerfully assumes it will be so as soon as we pass through oblivion's door: "But when we do eventually turn things round", he says.

Ha ha, double fool.  There's no-one left but me and him now.  All generations have been de-Thatcherised by the indoctrination of state education and the BBC and pro-state manipulated media, the peeps and pols are all statists now.  There are no Tory ears to bend, and obviously none elsewhere.

The new Dark Age is upon us.  And that Lady's not for turning.

SoD