Moi

[davidbennett]

What Is Success

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Even if a person was a castaway, all alone on a desert island, he or she would still have in mind the approval of people back in the civilisation. Imagine the castaway is fishing. He or she would measure his or her success as a fisher in terms of proficiency, skill, manual dexterity, as seen through the eyes of people back in civilisation. If the castaway became really proficient at making a shelter, finding food and dealing with their desert island world, he or she would imagine the admiration of others. He or she would be proud of how much more ‘real’ they were than the others back in civilisation. Even disdain is by reference to other people. There are those who devote themselves to the materials and to the task in hand. They are absorbed into the task, and the work is its own reward. How many are there like that? Many? Not many? Who even has the work in which they can become absorbed? Tell me it isn't so. The fact is that except for sociopaths, in our heads we all live in a community of other people. And nearly all of us do everything by reference to other people. So now, what is success? Is it where each person sees the others as a springboard to their own personal success? Is it where each person does not care about whether the others are successful – except insofar as a lack of success that others achieve endangers or helps their own chance of success? Is it where success means a common success? A common success means each person feels that success is only success when everyone succeeds. It means each person feels responsible for everyone else. Are we any good at feeling that kind of desire for communal wellbeing? Why should we be when the arc of human development over the past centuries has been for all of us to search for and find our individual voice. We may be polite, accommodating, civil, or pushy and grasping – with all shades in between – but in truth we are all making our individual way forward. Tell me, how is it working out? And now that we (or at least Google and Facebook) have access to big data, we learn that our precious individuality is in large part a mirage. We are predictable. We give off signals all the time. We leave such a trail of data points that we have become exposed for the predictable creatures we are. So where is our individuality that we guard so preciously? In truth we are tied to avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. Follow our trails over the years, and you will know us. So, my idea of my success – is my idea of success even mine? How far did I choose my pleasures? Keeping up with the Joneses stretches a lot further than the neighbour's new car. Suppose a person comes to realise that everything they do is built around an image of success they didn't themselves create. Or that they started with an idea and then just continued out of habit. Suppose a person comes to realise they are in a race defined by success and rejection where they themselves are the only person they care about. Suppose a person comes to feel they want everyone to succeed and not for they themselves to succeed at everyone else's expense. Perhaps the first conscious step that person can take if they feel that, is to put themselves among the kind of people who share that vision and that they aspire to be like.

[davidbennett]

Calculating Loss In Social Media

How not to mix things up in a world full of casual brushes with the truth – uncaring as to what is real and what is not. In principle it has always been the same for at least some of the population. Now, however, we have reached critical mass. Each uncaring and unthinking person has access to weapons of war. A tweet ricochets off another tweet and spins off into another social media platform. Like a pinball machine full of pinballs, the machine gets hot and melts down. Anger, frustration, good old-fashioned gratuitous annoyance – they have nowhere they want to go except deeper into the furnace. And the furnace spits them out. It doesn’t need them except as examples of persons. It doesn’t care about them except for whatever trace they leave behind in the the social weave. If they all disappeared tomorrow, their loss would be calculated in loss of engagement, followers, likes, and shares. As one of the protagonists in *Darkness At Noon* says - a dictatorship is a system where those in the driving seat see one person as simply one million people divided by one million. Unless we rein ourselves in, the future is bleak. It might pay if enough of us were to imagine what a future might look like were we to rein ourselves in. And behave accordingly.

[davidbennett]

George Lucas has reportedly bought a mansion in St John's Wood.

According to the Ham and High newspaper in a report dated 5th November 2025 Star Wars creator George Lucas has reportedly bought a £40 million mansion in St John's Wood. St John's Wood is a residential area in North London, about half an hour by tube from Oxford Street. The report goes on to say that this is one of the largest residential transactions in the UK this year, according to The Times. The sale, which took place off-market in September, was first reported by Bloomberg. The house was previously owned by a City lawyer and the deal was brokered by Savills and Aylesford International. Mr Lucas, 81, is rumoured to be critical of President Trump’s America and is said to be planning to spend more time in London. The creator of the Star Wars saga is not unfamiliar with North London. The first three Star Wars films were shot at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, with Leavesden Studios outside Watford later used. Although he has not publicly criticised the US president, Lucas wrote the script for the first Star Wars film in 1977 as a metaphor for democracies turning into dictatorships. Mr Lucas told the Chicago Tribune: "It was really about the Vietnam War, and that was the period where Nixon was trying to run for a [second] term, which got me to thinking historically about how do democracies get turned into dictatorships?" "Because the democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away."

[davidbennett]

Electric Vehicles In Norway

The population of Norway is 5.457 million with an area of 385,207 square kilometres (148,729 sq mi).

The population of Great Britain is 66.97 million with an area of 209,331 km2 (80,823 sq mi).

In other words, the population density of Britain is twenty-four times that of Norway. And when we look at the main urban centres, London has a population sixteen times that of Oslo.

Put simply, there is less pressure on infrastructure and more room in Norway. So it’s easier to make a success of introducing electric cars in Norway because it’s not just the cars, of course, it’s the charging stations.

Still, the Norwegian road federation reports a milestone this year. Electric cars now outnumber petrol cars, but are still far behind the almost one million diesel vehicles on Norway’s roads.

New car registrations, however, are 95% for electric vehicles, so it won’t be long before diesel car numbers fall.

[davidbennett]

Do You Pay For News?

According to the 13 April 2024 edition of THE WEEK only 9% of people in the UK pay for online news content, of any kind, compared with 39% in Norway, and 21% in the US.

Why is that? Is money easier in Norway? Is it cultural? What news do they pay for, exactly? Is it 'like for like'? Is the quality of news being paid for in these different countries equal? How would we measure that?

[davidbennett]

A Tale Of Two Courts: Roe-v-Wade and Prorogation

After the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the attorney general in the United States and the President of United States said the decision of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade was wrong.

In Britain in 2019, the Prime Minister said the same about a UK Supreme Court decision.

On 28 August 2019, the Parliament of the United Kingdom was ordered to be prorogued by Queen Elizabeth II upon the advice of the Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson. Britain is a constitutional monarchy, meaning that the reigning monarch has little power, and ‘on the advice of’ is a particularly British way of saying the the prime minister ordered the Queen to prorogue Parliament.

A prorogation is the discontinue a session of Parliament without dissolving it. Johnson’s purpose in proroguing Parliament for an unusually extended period was to severely limit the time that the MPs in the House of Commons had to consider the Brexit Bill that was before it. 

Concerned citizens raised a legal challenge and the Supreme Court ruled that the prorogation was unlawful.

Had Johnson’s Government given even the slimmest of reasons for their action, then the Supreme Court would not have looked to the adequacy of the reason. But the Government gave no reason, and that allowed the court to conclude that the reason for such a lengthy discontinuance was simply to deny Parliament time to carry out its function, and that that was unlawful.

Conservatives said the Supreme Court leaned too far to the Left, and was wrong to declare illegal the proroguing of parliament by the Conservative government. 

If we start to say that one court is politicised and goes against the will of the people then where does it end?

Of course, some people would say – there are huge differences in the nature of the cases between in the USA and Britain.

Dig deeper, though, and the arguments are the same. The argument in the USA is that the Supreme Court has been packed with ultra-conservative judges with an avowed intention to come to conclusions other than the known general will of the people.

The argument in the UK is that the Supreme Court consists of members who are against the will of the people to ‘deliver Brexit’.

What is the same in both jurisdictions is that one of the foundational pillars of law is being attacked. In both cases there are those that think it was right to attack the institution. There are routes to moving past unpopular decisions, but calling the court enemies of the will of the people is a dangerous road.

Originally published on

NoMorePencils

[davidbennett]

Charlie Wilson's War

I watched Charlie Wilson’s War on Netflix – a 2007 film, based on historical events. U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson got Congress to approve the funds and CIA operative Gust Avrakotos organised weapons and training to the Afghan mujahideen so they could fight the Soviets in the Soviet–Afghan War.

The film shows Wilson meeting General Zia Ul Haq of Pakistan, and setting up a deal between Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel to get old Soviet heavy weapons to the Afghans and thereby hide American involvement in the war.

It is not surprising that Ul Haq would side with anyone who could encourage the Soviets to leave, not least because Pakistan was playing unwilling host to millions of Afghan refugees.

The number of helicopters, tanks, heavy vehicles, and men the Soviets lost after the Afghans were armed was staggering.

Of course the mountainous terrain hampered the Russians and favoured the Afghans.

And the break up of the Soviet Union was not far off, so who knows what internal struggles guided the Soviet's political decision to withdraw. But still, the Afghans destroyed an awful lot of material.

I remembered that General Zia Ul Haq had been killed in the 1980s but I couldn’t remember how, so I looked up the details of how he died.

He was killed in an air crash in August 1988. He and 30 others died, including the American Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Lewis Raphel and the head of the US Military aid mission to Pakistan, General Herbert M. Wassom.

The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in May 1988, and I wonder whether that plane crash a couple of months later was payback to Pakistan and the US for the proxy war?

Pakistan and the events there may seem far away, and it would to me, save for a friend I made. For that, I have to take a step back in time.

Until 1967, the irrigation system of Pakistan depended on the seasonal flow of the River Indus and its tributaries. The problem was that there was no adequate storage for the water, so it ran off and agricultural yield was low.

The Mangla Dam was completed in 1967 to correct this. The second part of the project, the Tarbela Dam, was completed in 1976. Between them they regulate the irrigation system of the Indus Basin.

The downside of the Mangla Dam project was that upstream of the dam the reservoir submerged 280 villages and the towns of Mirpur and Dadyal, and more than one hundred thousand people lost their homes and lands and were displaced.

Some of those who lost their homes were given work permits by the Government of Pakistan to work in Britain , and as a result, in many cities in the UK the majority of the Kashmiri community originates from the Dadyal-Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir.

There are 750,000 Kashmiris in the United Kingdom, mostly in the industrial North of the country. In Bradford, many Kashmiris took up work in the textile and steel mills, and that is where I met my friend, Zaid Hussain.

I was working in an office, and on the floor below was the Pakistan Consulate. I got to know one of the staff there when he brought people to have documents sworn.

I think it was he who introduced me to Zaid, but in any event Zaid came to talk about his father who was an army officer, and about his mother. They wanted to settle in the UK and there were documents to swear.

The process went on for months and during this time I got to know Zaid, his wife, his brothers, and eventually all of his family.

Our friendship continued until he died, and when I think of him I can say that in a way, it is still continuing.

[davidbennett]

Olympics 1936-1948

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd is a book about tourists, business people, students, and diplomats who were in Germany in the 1930s.

What did they think, what did they notice? Mostly they didn't notice much. They did little mental gymnastics to avoid characterising the rise of the Nazi state for what it was.

We all know how the black American Jesse Owens was cold-shouldered when he got Gold in the Berlin Olympics.

But a snippet about the Olympics that caught my attention was a quote by Sir Robert Vansittart, a British diplomat who was head of the British Foreign Office in Berlin in the 1930s.

After the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games he said that the stupendous cost of putting on the Games made him thankful that Britain had relinquished its claim to the next Olympiad in favour of Japan.

I didn't think there was a 1940 Tokyo Games, and that led to me to this little trail of events:

First, the 1940 Olympic Games never happened. The Japanese pulled out in 1938 because they were otherwise engaged with the Second Sino-Japanese War that broke out in 1937.

The Games were then to go to Finland, the runners-up to the original bid. The 1940 Helsinki Games were cancelled, though, because of Finland was at war with the Soviet Union.

The 1944 Olympic Games were due to be held in London, but they were cancelled due to World War II.

So it wasn't until 1948 that an Olympic Games was held after the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

They were held in London and they were known as the Austerity Games because Britain was nearly bankrupted by the Second World War.

Food was still rationed, and would be until 1952. Things were so bad that the Government had to issue regulations to allow the athletes at the Olympics to be fed more than twice the UK national rationing allowance.

Some countries didn't attend the 1948 Games.

Germany and Japan were not permitted to send any athletes to the 1948 Olympics, and the Soviet Union didn’t send any athletes because of the deterioration in East-West relations. 

[davidbennett]

Fracking Causes Earthquakes

“News: Another tremor felt near the UK’s only fracking site An earth tremor has struck near the UK’s only hydraulic fracturing site. A tremor measuring 2.1 on the Richter scale was detected at Preston New Road, near Blackpool, and was felt by the surrounding area. Cuadrilla, who operate the site, say no fracturing was taking place at the time.”

If you are not familiar with fracking, it is a process of filling seams in the ground rock with slick water under pressure in order to drive the oil in the seams to the surface.

Fracking has a troubled history, and for good reason. If you are interested, I wrote a longish piece about the risks of fracking under the title The Awful Story Of Fracking, - and that is without talking about the risk of it inducing earthquakes.

So perhaps the earthquake near Blackpool was just a coincidental tremor, a tremor of the kind that Britain suffers periodically? So what does the British Geological Survey list of recent earthquakes show…

Recent Earthquakes

No, it's not listed there. But it is on the list of Induced Seismicity around the British Isles in the last 50 days. The page with the list has this statement:

“Last updated: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 14:10:00 (UTC) This list contains seismic events for which there is strong evidence that they have been induced by human activities. It is linked to a database of seismic events and locations and magnitudes may change as events are re-analysed and revised. Background, tectonic seismic activity is reported on our recent earthquakes list.”

Human activity earthquakes

So now we can say unequivocally that fracking caused the earthquake.

If you looked at the Recent Earthquakes list you may be surprised at just how many earthquakes the planet suffers - there are a few every day.

[davidbennett]

Dogger Bank

Dogger Bank is a 7,000 square mile sandbank in the North Sea about 60 miles off the east coast of England. During the last ice age the bank was part of the land now known as Doggerland, into which the Rhine and the Thames flowed and which connected Europe and the British Isles.

[davidbennett]

Where Did The Tenants Come From?

The statistic of the week in the 10 December 2022 edition of the news magazine, THE WEEK, has this little gem:

There were 1.18 million rented homes in England last year in which the lead tenant was middle-aged (between 45 and 64), a rise of 70% since 2011. The number of households where the lead tenant was older than 65 rose almost 40%, to 382,000. Paragon Bank/ The Daily Telegraph

Where did these older renters come from? They didn’t arrive magically out of thin air. I guess they could be immigrants, but the numbers don’t add up and nor do the ages. Maybe younger tenants just got older. Or maybe they are former home owners who lost their homes. The pandemic wiped out a lot of people’s incomes. So maybe they couldn’t afford their mortgages. A lot of landlords had to sell when the Government dropped the tax relief on buy-to-let mortgages. Some properties were sold to buyers who intended to live there, but some were sold to landlords with more money, who didn’t need the mortgage tax relief to make their sums work. The overall effect is to concentrate property ownership in the hands of the already wealthy.

[davidbennett]

Kathryn Stone Attacked Again

Kathryn Stone is the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards of the House of Commons.

In November of last year I wrote about The Commons Select Committee On Standards and Owen Paterson’s lobbying that resulted in him resigning as an MP. Before that happened, the then Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told Sky News that he believed she should review her position after her suspension of Owen Paterson was blocked by Parliament.

As I said then, Kwasi Kwarteng was wrong. He was wrong on facts because Kathryn Stone didn’t suspend Owen Patterson. It wasn’t ‘her’ suspension at all. She reported to the Committee and they suspended him.

So now today we have a new matter, and you would have thought that having had their noses bloodied once, the Conservatives would have learned to back off from Kathryn Stone. But no, now we have the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen. He was suspended for five days for serially breaching the lobbying rules. He appealed and failed to convince the The Independent Expert Panel to overturn the suspension.

According to the IEP report, in his appeal Bridgen criticised standards commissioner Kathryn Stone’s investigation as flawed for multiple reasons. Plainly, neither she, nor the Standards Committee, nor the Independent Expert Panel agreed. So Kathryn Stone is in good company.

The Independent Expert Panel was chaired by a retired Lord Justice of Appeal, Sir Stephen Irwin. He didn’t mince words saying the Mr Brigden offered no evidence and simply said that the sanctions were excessive. Sr Stephen said “We disagree. Indeed, in our view the sanctions for breach of the rule against paid advocacy and for the email letter could properly and fairly have been more severe.”

[davidbennett]

Germans Ships Shelled Britain in WWI

Something I didn’t know - German battleships shelled the north-east coast of England in WWI.

World War One started in July 1914 when the Germans set out to make a rapid advance through neutral Belgium and take France quickly. It didn’t happen because the Beligians refused to move aside, and the delay resulted in four years of grinding trench warfare.

In the confrontation at sea, the German High Seas fleet was outnumbered and outgunned by the British Fleet. But the ocean is big, and the Germans took advantage of gaps in the British patrols to break out on raids from its safe harbour in north Germany.

In December 1914 the German fleet sailed to the North East coast of Britain and shelled the coast.

The German ships fired 1,150 shells into the town of Hartlepool, hitting the steelworks, the gasworks, the railways, and killing 86 civilians and injuring 424 more. Seven soldiers died and 14 injured.

Not surprisingly, the British public was outraged that the Germans had targeted civilians. They also blamed the British fleet for letting the Germans slip past them.

If the raid had any lasting effect it was to harden the attitude of the British population against Germany. Four years later, at the end of the war, the German High Seas Fleet was interned at Scapa Flow. Then, through a misunderstanding over dates, the German fleet commander ordered the fleet to be scuttled.

In the years after the war, some of the ships were raised and salvaged. Three heavy battleships and four light cruisers were too deep.

The three battleships, SMS König, SMS Kronprinz, and SMS Markgraf, each displaces approximately 27,000 imperial tons and are still on the sea floor at Scapa Flow.

[davidbennett]

Over A Million Barrels Of Oil In A Storage Vessel In Danger Of Breaking Apart In The Red Sea

You may be old enough to remember the Exxon Valdez that ruptured when it hit a reef off the coast of Alaska on 24 March 1989. If you are old to enough to remeber it you will remember that it was in the news days after day for weeks and months as the authorities tried to deal with the spill.

The oil tanker, owned by the Exxon Shipping Company, spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

It caused what was then the world’s biggest maritime environmental disaster.

In terms of volume of oil released it is second to the Deepwater Horizon 20 April 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but in terms of damage it is the worst by far. Despite a clean-up that went on for years, less than 10% of the oil was recovered.

Today: FSO Safer

Now, the Floating Storage And Offloading Vessel Safer (yes, that’s its name) is sitting off the coast of Yemen, rusting with 1.2 million barrels of crude oil in its tanks.

That’s 50.4 million US gallons of oil, or more than four times the amount on the Exxon Valdez.

The FSO Safer lies 15° 07.0′ N, 042° 36.0′ E at the Ras Isa Marine Terminal (YERAI) between Yemen and Eritrea - and it has been there since 1988, rusting and abandoned.

And since 2015 it has been a pawn in a game of chicken between Iranian-back Houthi rebels and just about everyone else.

The Houthis want payment for the oil. The UN wants to avoid an ecological disaster. Heck, everyone wants to avoid an ecological disaster. But the world is seemingly paralysed to stop it happening.

Apart from the ecological damage at stake, to the south is the narrow Bab-El-Mandeb Strait (‘The Gate of Lamentations’ in Arabic) that gives out into the Gulf of Aden. Via the Suez Canal it is the shortest trade route between the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the rest of East Asia. In a word - it is one of the world’s busiest trading routes. 

So how is this going to play out? The Houthis agreed to let UN inspectors in, and then changed their minds. And meanwhile the hulk rusted on.

For months and months, and now for years - the IMO (an agency of the United Nations responsible for regulating shipping) had been trying to put a plan in place to try to make the SFO Safer safe.

They need money to do it. They went around all the countries that could afford to contribute. That left a hole in the amount needed and the UN advertised for private doners. Yes, they asked private donors to cough up because the countries of the world couldn't find enough cash to stop what would likely be the world's biggest environmental ecological disaster. And they are still short millions of dollars.

It reads like a bad dream. How could this be going on for so long? 

Google 'FSO Safer' - tweet about it, repeat it everywhere you can.  Tell your brother, your sister - tell the world, make waves, make small waves, make bigger waves. 

[davidbennett]

Is there a root cause for self-destructive behaviour?

Dostoyevsky, in Notes from Underground said that man will destroy perfection because he can.

Call it fin de siècle, ennui, cynicism, pessimism, what you will, but things are not getting better. There is more depression with every passing year. And what is this better? 'Better' has a hollow ring. In a society with great disparities in wealth we are not all in the same boat, so why should I care? We are anyway doomed by our greed - climate change, polluted Earth. So you, who are careful about your health and behaviour and every shadow of the public conscience, will end a little later than I will, but I will burn with a bright spark while you, you goodie two shoes, live a perfect life - and who knows, my genes may protect me where yours do not despite your clean and careful living. In the end we are all the same in our suffering. You have your problems and I have mine. And who are you to tell me? I can see any number of examples of so called shameless behaviour, so don't try to shame me into feeling responsible for the whole of society It is you who is living in a fantasy world, while I live life to the full. And after all, aren't we both driven by the same thing - to be sated, one way or another? And things are changing so fast, that what is good today will be bad tomorrow - and who knows where the race will take us?

Reply

We are all here against our will, and you have a responsibility not to add to the grief of those who feel responsible for looking after the wellbeing of anyone who needs it, to not add to their burden of having to decide who gets help and who does not.

It is bad for their psyche having to fight against a desire to ignore those who because of their own actions, brought themselves to be in need of help. Think about it, when you get diabetes or whatever disease you suffer from as a consequence of your profligate lifestyle, will you be so willing to live with the consequences without asking for help? I will be picking up the tab for your destructive choices.

In some societies I could say that if you don't feel any responsibility then I will leave you to the mercies of X, who had no compunction in ending your life that is a drain on all of us - a drain caused by your own selfishness.

[davidbennett]

Alexey Botvinov

Over the past few days I have listened to several versions of Rachmaninoff's Elegie op.3 No.1. Tonight, because it appeared in the sidebar on YouTube I listened to the version by Alexey Botvinov, and almost from the first note I thought it was good and was going to be good. And it is good - and he is a wonderful pianist.

Here is the link to the video on YouTube

https://youtu.be/tNYBiHgD2dE

So then I wanted to know more about the man, because I have never heard of him before. That is not a big surprise because there are many pianists and others that I have not heard of. And this is his bio - or some of it from Concert-Media

Alexey Botvinov is an exceptional pianist in our time. The most famous Ukrainian pianist, Botvinov is one of the best specialists in Rachmaninoff music worldwide. Botvinov is the only pianist who performed Bach's „Goldberg Variations“ more than 300 times on stage. He performed in over 45 countries.