- “Nightclub vaccine passport policy in disarray, leaked letter reveals” – Hospitality leaders say ministers have “no idea what their policy actually is” after the PM said passes would be required to attend large venues, reports the Telegraph.
- “What’s the best way to top up our immunity?” – Now we have some protection, do we need to keep boosting or can nature take its course, asks James Gallagher in BBC News.
- “Covid booster jabs: why you probably won’t get one this autumn” – “Holding back on boosters in Britain for the moment might prove to be both the moral and the smart thing to do,” writes Andrew Gregory in the Sunday Times.
- “Scientists created false narrative over suspected Covid leak from Wuhan lab, say experts” – A documentary alleges that the group “stepped out beyond” the evidence to claim the idea that coronavirus came from a lab was a ‘conspiracy theory’, reports the Telegraph.
- “Cops brace for diehard anti-lockdown protesters to flood Melbourne” – Violent scenes have erupted during Melbourne’s anti-lockdown rallies as hundreds of protesters clash with police who have used teargas, pellets and pepper spray, reports the Mail Australia.
- “Symptoms of the West – The Week in Review” – Bounrbook Magazine contributors S.D. Wickett and Luke Perry talk about Scottish lockowns, Afghanistan, Incels and more in the latest episode of The Week in Reivew podcast.
- “As U.S. Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World’s STEM Leader” – “The only path to global technological leadership is one based on a rigorous, merit-based approach to excellence in mathematics, science, and engineering,” writes Sergiu Klainerman, Percy Deift, and Svetlana Jitomirskaya in Quillette.
- “Student who tattooed Covid certificate barcode on his ARM becomes TikTok star” – A student in Italy has become an unexpected TikTok sensation after tattooing the barcode of his Covid certificate on his arm, reports the Sun.
- “Arnie’s ‘screw your freedom’ rant about anti-maskers gets him dropped by sponsor” – Days after Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered a rousing video rant about masks where he said “screw your freedom”, one of his sponsors has dropped him, reports the Sun.
- “The lockdowns Down Under betray the folly of trying to wipe out Covid” – Either you prepare to live with minimal cases or you have to lock down a whole country when even one person gets the virus, writes Douglas Murray in the Telegraph.
- “Mental health helplines see 30% spike during Covid pandemic” – Mental health helplines run by Beyond Blue and Lifeline have seen a 30% spike during the pandemic, compared to the same period before Covid forced Australian cities into multiple lockdowns, reports the Mail Australia.
- “The IPCC’s attribution methodology is fundamentally flawed” – “The IPCC’s ‘Optimal Fingerprinting’ methodology on which they have long relied for attributing climate change to greenhouse gases is seriously flawed and its results are unreliable and largely meaningless,” writes Ross McKitrick in Watts Up With That.
- “Prince Harry’s eco-warrior credentials take another hit” – “This isn’t the first time that Harry has been caught in hot (or perhaps rapidly rising) water over his eco-credentials,” writes Steerpike in the Spectator.
- “Heat pumps ‘worse’ than gas boilers for warming up homes, admits Energy Secretary” – In a Telegraph interview, Kwasi Kwarteng concedes that new green heating technology is “still in its infancy”.
- “Of course ‘house negro’ is a racial slur” – “It is incredible that anyone would pretend otherwise,” writes Katharine Birbalsingh in Spiked.
- “Sorry Huw: It’s now time to switch off the licence fee ” – “Huw Edwards wanted to pick my brains because he’d just been made presenter of the News. What I really should have said was: ‘Don’t try to cling on for too long,'” writes John Humphrys in the Mail.
- “Larkin is being cancelled for his private letters – can’t we separate the art from the artist?” – As we approach Larkin’s centenary, his awful private comments should not prevent us from celebrating the genius of his poetry, writes Simon Heffer in the Telegraph.
- “Hartpury University and College in Gloucester is the first educational institution to ban unvaccinated students from living on-site” – Calvin Robinson says on talkRADIO that the move towards mandatory vaccination is the start of a “medical apartheid”.
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550 mile range in my diesel Audi.
5 mins to fill it.
Heater on, fast as a like.
Plants get free CO2 to eat too.
Plus 12 year black kid in the Congo didn’t have to go down a mine to get the stuff that makes the silly EV work
850 on a tankful in my Renault Trafic. Heater or a/c full on
450+ in my little Hyundai i10 .. with heater, lights and radio on. £30 pa road tax; cheap to insure.
EVs are simply not a practical idea for long-distance driving. But perhaps that’s the whole point. They want us either not to travel far, or to use public transport and ditch private vehicles altogether. Remember the old prediction that people will own nothing, and be happy.
And the most galling thing is that all this inconvenience isn’t going to have the slightest beneficial effect on the climate.
Just like the attacks on Farmers harvest (pun intended) very little. This seems to be part of the Agenda 2030 push to Build Back better.
Or ‘Extract Money Faster’
“EVs are simply not a practical idea..”
You could have stopped there. If they were we would have been driving them for decades instead of ICEVs.
And you wouldn’t need to subsidise them with taxpayers cash or use taxpayers money to provide charging points.
Recall of MPs Act 2015:https://notonthebeeb.co.uk/so/c8PDZE4U1?languageTag=en&cid=426765f9-8b6f-43e7-9ca1-b318db924f5c
£1.12 per kWh is a rip off, if you convert the thermal content of petrol at roughly 9 kWh per litre & guesstimate the efficiency of your engine at around 30%. It’s like paying out £3.50 a litre.
Incidentally, at todays prices my petrol car averages about 9p per mille, with most fuel being bought from ASDA – and a lot of the total is longish M road trips.
The whole “Green Energy” thing is a rip-off. Pay more and get less. (If it’s available, that is. And with unreliables such as wind and solar, that’s not guaranteed.)
The huge question is will TPTB allow us to continue to nurse our ICE cars for as long as we can manage? Or will there be a huge bunch of taxes, ULEZ schemes and restrictions on spare parts so as to ‘drive’ us off the road?
If we are allowed to keep them going? I think there will be a big industry in keeping old ICE cars on the road. But if they force the issue and make it EVs or nothing then it is a dismal outlook. I suspect that new technologies will come along for transportation but the current generation of EVs will spell the end of happy family leisure motoring. At best us hoi-polloi may have a cheap low range Chinese EV for local utility travel.
I’m sure the easiest thing for TPTB would be to target fuel supplies. If they can find a way to stop us getting supplies of petrol and diesel, then it’s basically game over for the ICE vehicle.
And there was me thinking the Government are there to facilitate the will of the electorate!
Oh no, it’s there to shape the nation according to its own will. But first it has to hoodwink enough of the electorate into thinking that they both have the same interests.
What a quaint notion!
Let’s face it – if you remove personal transport then the leisure industry is dead. Unemployment, no tax income follows. Think of all the places that are not reachable by public transport. Think of all those who support motor vehicles who will now be unemployed. The hit to the government finances would make Rachel from Account’s imaginary black hole real by many times more.
Mileage with the heating off is not the proper mileage though. It is like saying my plate of steak and chips will fill me up but only if I eat 3 Kitkats first.
The British writer Patrick Hamiltion wrote about the horror of the motorcar. He is almost completely forgotten these days but his novels are well worth reading. Hangover Square, The Slaves of Solitude. He lives on though in one sense and that is through a play he wrote called Gas Light. There was a good Ingrid Bergman film of it. This term has found its way into modern political discourse, gaslighting, although its meaning has been distorted slightly.
One thing I like about the Brits, the common people, is that they never get all enthusiastic about a new technology like the Yanks do. They might adpot it eventually, usually out of laziness and vacantness but there isn’t any expectation that all of this crap could ever make life better. Although I have read horrible stories in educational supplements about how teachers are applauding the fact that every child in their class has an electronic tablet. Basically a zombie machine and you hear that parent give phones to children as young as ten. This is horrific just slightly less horrific than the demoniac smiles of the Yanks selling this crap.
The number of mobile phones per capita far outreached that in the USA in the 1990s.
The cost per unit of electricity obviously varies depending on which type of tariff you’re on but is at least 40p/kwh so charging the author’s Ford at home would work out as about the same cost per mile as his Honda Civic. Therefore it would be impossible to recoup the massive extra cost of the Ford. Proof that EVs are only for the well off.
It would be interesting to compare the cost per mile of an EV versus a petrol or diesel for urban driving and see if the costs work out about the same as motorway driving. Driving at speed means far more air resistance hence higher energy use per mile but urban driving is often stop start. Accelerating uses far more energy than driving at a constant speed and a lot of this energy is lost when braking so driving in traffic may result in roughly the same energy use per mile as motorway driving.
The nail in the coffin is the cost of battery replacement.
It astounds me that anyone chooses to buy an EV – apart from company car drivers who have to get one and gain some tax advantages.
“if you regularly cover high mileage in an EV, you need to travel when everyone else isn’t to avoid queuing at chargers.”
Au contraire, I see all the BEVVERS travelling in groups. It’s so they have fellow BEVVERS to socialise with while they wait together for two hours to charge their BEVs not too quickly to avoid damaging the batteries. They also get to share enlightening, heartwarming stories about how well they are saving the planet. And they MUST be friends, because fighting over chargers isn’t a very planet friendly look. Too much CO2 is emitted when you fight.
A bevvy of electric car drivers.
“Every cloud has a silver lining though. Your correspondent predicts an impending boomtime for old style garages and the market in spare parts for petrol cars for years to come.”
The Government will simply outlaw cars over a certain age, 12 years perhaps, and maybe make it illegal to sell spares apart from brake pads – all with no reference to Parliament of course.
Drugs are illegal but people get very rich selling them without too much problem.
”To eke out the range I travel everywhere with the heater off, which currently demands a substantial coat, hat and gloves.”
Yes prior to the 1970s cars required that, and many afterwards too for a number of years.
I do so love technological progress.
James May a few years back showed that the range of battery cars had barely increased since the 1890s. Yes, they are more comfortable. Yes, they go much faster….for a short while.
That’s the funniest bit for me – EV’s are not new tech. Sure lithium ion cells and 0-60 times in a few seconds is newish (and pointless day to day), however the electric BEV is over 100 years old… and we ditched them for petrol and diesel powered vehicles… until governments started bribing people with subsidies and tax breaks to start buying them again