The Tom Sawyer Principle (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

Bosch is a great name when it comes to small consumer durables like, for instance, e-bikes. They go to enormous pains to ensure theirs are safe and street-legal in all respects. Their top o' the line models costs several thousand pounds and are (to me) unaccountably popular.

As you might imagine, theses supabikes do visually resemble e-motorbikes in various respects. Bells and whistles and all that sort of stuff. The Birmingham police regularly stop Bosch-cyclists who are riding legally because they think an e-motorbike is being ridden illegally.

[Pete Jones]

[Mick Harper]

The difference between Musk and a conman are so gargantuan and of such longevity, they cannot be confused. Even though I freely concede that really good conmen come up with schemes that mean they can be confused, gargantuanly and for all time.

The best everyday illustration of this principle is internet scams. Everyone falls for a good new one because we don't realise a scam is even a possibility even though we spend our lives watching out for internet scams.

Musk, as far as I can see, suffers from the fact that most get-rich-quick people turn out to have been scammers at some level. We are so furious if we ourselves believed in the man, even admired him, we are determined to damn them all, just to be on the safe side.

[Grant]

1) he promises profits in the far distant future. SpaceX is worth ten trillion once they've established a colony on Mars etc
2) every business he has "founded" was actually set up by someone else. He bought each company - first one with Daddy's money - and then predicted enormous profits in that distant future, after establishing that he must now be called the "founder"
3) not a single genuine innovation has come from this Edison of the 21st Century. Electric cars existed in 1890! They have slightly better batteries now but they aren't that good
4) his companies hoover up billions in direct and indirect subsidies. Genuine profits - never. Just wait till we are on Mars!

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Nuclear power stations have to be built close to a water source to keep them cool. The land-locked Hungarians figured the River Danube would serve for their only one, the Soviet-era PAKS. Not so. They've already had to reduce it to 50% output and will have to shut it entirely in a week or so unless the Danube gets some water from somewhere.

But these climate changes are natural and cyclical so they should have known it was only a matter of time. I've looked through the records, which go back a coupla thousand years in this neck of the woods. The Danube is always disappearing. I think Strauss composed a waltz about it.

[Pete Jones]

[Mick Harper]

In Britain there are periodic demands that charge-up stations be 'socialised' i.e. any e-car can be charged at any charge-up point. And if the e-car manufacturers won't do it, the state will. They've got a point. The electricity got there via the National Grid, not courtesy of e-car manufacturers.

I get the impression that Tesla is not big in Britain. Is this true? We are in a slightly advantageous position because our own e-car manufacturers being so small (and getting smaller with news that Nissan in Sunderland is being shrunk) we can afford to let cheap Chinese imports flood in.

Ireland (and Europe's grey market) won't like that. But the Greenies will (as long as Elon himself is kept out).

[Mick Harper]

The CIA and the Media, Carl Bernstein
(Rolling Stone article, 1979, audiobook on YouTube)

This is a mildly mind-blowing account of how many working journalists were purloined by the CIA to work as part-time (and mostly unpaid) agents in the years between 1947 and 1973.

However the detail I thought most arresting was when a list of CIA officers serving on some committee or other was read out. One of them was described, matter-of-factly, as 'previously Willi Brandt's case officer', indicating the then West German Chancellor was considered to be a prime CIA asset.

But, this being the Cold War, Brandt's long-time confidante and office chief-of-staff was later convicted of espionage. He was more than an asset, he was a full-time spy in the employ of the KGB.

[Mick Harper]

Panorama this week was all about a Cornish academy school. It was a why-oh-why? piece complaining that Camborne children were being educated in a reign-of-terror. It really did seem awful, over and above the awfulness of going to school generally. It made my old-fashioned grammar school hippyesque by comparison.

The people running it were no dog-and-pony show. The Athena Learning Trust had academy schools, primary as well as secondary, all over the south-west. And the method is not localised. It seems there are similar academy trusts the length and breadth of the land.

However there is no doubt that such schools are successful in terms of exam results, Ofsted reports and parental choice. So, yet again, our liberal masters have discovered there is nothing new under the sun.

Before education became compulsory in 1903 and could be lengthened to a languorous minimum of ten years per child, you used brutality to cram in everything useful (the three R's) in the least possible time (parents were paying for it) and then sent them on their way. In Camborne's case, down the mines.

[Mick Harper]

Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State under Clinton (woo-hoo!), was heard complaining in a recent documentary recounting American policy re the Bosnian War of the nineteen-nineties, that

[Mick Harper]

Several railway stories for you today. ['Thank God, Mick, we were going cold turkey.']

1. I was watching a bloke discourse eloquently about the Taiwanese railway system. Typically of a railway buff, he knew everything about its history but apparently didn't know every single kilometre was built by the Japanese during their occupation of the island. Never mix trains and politics.

2. He was giving us a critique of some trains going out of service. This is a favourite subject of railway YouTubers. A last-chance-saloon genre, if you will. They also do the honours when it's first chance saloon. "We're here at Stirling to board the first Lumo train... etc". There's scarcely room for all their cameras, knapsacks, bespectacled girlfriends etc.

3. Taiwan is, with Singapore, possibly the most 'modern' country in the world. (What is it about Chinese people who don't live in China?) So it came as a shock to discover they've spent the last thirty years swanning about on trains built in South Africa.

4. Next, we find ourselves at Crewe station. Although Crewe is a tiddly no-account town in Staffordshire, its station is one of the most important in Britain thanks to the history of our railways. It is even being made into something of a tourist destination on account of a major Heritage Museum being built alongside. Anyway millions of pounds are being spent on Crewe station's refurbishment.

However, not one penny is being devoted to (and I know this because it was the same when I was changing trains there to attend a wedding in Anglesey a few years ago) the disposing of unsightly bits of vegetation springing up everywhere. Stunted bushes, patches of weed, straggly lines of ill-assorted plants--it's like a David Attenborough documentary on a bad day. Would you expect grass to be growing in the middle of Oxford Street?

It would take a few schoolchildren let out on a field trip to dispose of the lot. 'Get a move on, Mildred, I think that's the 11.17 non-stopper to Euston I can see in the distance.' But, apparently, it is well beyond the combined powers of the British railway and heritage industries.

[Mick Harper]

Talking of Taiwan they've come up with a nifty scheme to cut down on tax evasion. A lot of it arises out of not giving customers receipts and that allows shops to shuffle transactions out of sight of the taxman. It's effective because the customer will either not notice or they will ask for their receipt and be given one.

Since we can't police this, the Taiwanese tax hotshots argued, why not get the customers to police it? Because they can't be arsed, came the initial reply. 'Ah, but what if every receipt has a lottery number printed on it and we hold a $20 million draw every other month, then they will.' Tax intake went up 75% in the first year, according to the bloke on YouTube.

Their compatriots on the mainland have gone the other way. Shopkeepers offer a can of Coke to any customer who agrees not to ask for a receipt.

[Mick Harper]

I know what you're thinking. Who in their right mind is going to save two months of receipts and then start going through them to see if one of the lucky numbers are on any of them? You don't. You stuff your receipts in a charity box (there'll be one in the shop) and they will save them, scan them and send a poor but winsome child for a holiday in the Andamanese Islands on your behalf. You're all heart, you.

I know what you're thinking. You'd like to enliven your life and reforge the chains of kinship by holding a 'lottery party' where the whole family gets together, bringing their receipts with them. After a sumptuous repast, the lottery starts on the telly and the kids are sprawled out on the carper with all the receipts shrieking, 'Got one. It's only two hundred Taiwanese dollars but that's better than a kick up the arse by a blind man." Just like all the other Taiwanese do.