Here’s someone much wiser than I could ever be – and no, I don’t mean Piers Morgan
In my previous blog, I tried to show how the Russia/Ukraine war was largely the result of catastrophic misjudgement by and the over-inflated egos of our rulers.
I haven’t watched the video below to the end. But what I found interesting in Jordan Peterson’s explanation was how, once again, catastrophic misjudgements and over-inflated egos have led to the current Middle East disaster. Peterson focuses on the Abraham Accords pushed by the Trump administration and points out:
why these were reviled by the Establishment purely because they were a success for the hated ‘populist’ Trump
why Trump didn’t get the Nobel Peace prize
why Biden was so small-minded that he didn’t continue with these as he didn’t want to accord any credit to Trump
how Iran and its proxies have succeeded in sabotaging the Abraham Accords thus setting back any chance of a Middle East peace perhaps forever
But then I suppose you can look back at any historical disaster, for example WWI and its continuation WWII, and see these were caused by the egos, incompetence and stupidity of our rulers. However, when history is written by the victors, their catastrophic stupidity is inevitably and conveniently erased and they portray themselves as political and military geniuses. As for those forced into war and whose friends and family are mutilated or killed, they’re told they’re actually heroes and the whole episode is turned into a supposed national triumph.
So our useless, incompetent, self-serving rulers avoid all blame for anything. Such has it always been and such will it always be:
Rumours that the West wanted to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian
Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been rumours that the West pressured Zelensky to ditch peace talks with Russia as the West hoped that a prolongued war between Ukraine and Russia would weaken Russia making the country less of a threat to the West:
In which the writer suggested: “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement. Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
And, more recently, the brilliant The Daily Sceptic reported: “In a recent interview with Berliner Zeitung, Gerhard Schröder claims that in March of 2022, “the Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to”. According to the former German Chancellor, “they first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed” and “nothing could happen because everything else was decided in Washington”. Though given that he was previously a highly-paid board member of the Russian energy giant Gazprom, we should perhaps take anything Mr Schröder says with a pinch of salt.
However, Schröder is now the fifth person to state that the West opposed a peace deal in March/April of 2022. In April of 2022, the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the broadcaster CNN Türk: “Following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that … there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”.
An erily accurate prediction?
In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives Zbigniew Brzezinski warned:
“The most dangerous scenario [for America] would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complimentary grievances.”
Brzezinski graduated with a PhD from Harvard University in 1953 and became Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University. He was later the United States National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981, under the administration of President Jimmy Carter.
As Putin meets with his friends from China, Iran and Hamas, the only thing Brzezinski seems to have got wrong is that he didn’t include North Korea in the “coalition united not by ideology but by complimentary grievances”.
A cornered rat will always attack
One of the stories Putin has told about his childhood was an incident when he was attacked by a cornered rat:
I wrote a blog in 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine titled “Putin warned us – “not an inch eastwards”. NATO spat in his face. That was stupid!” In the blog I featured two short videos in which Putin warned the West that he would not tolerate any further eastwards expansion by NATO.
I wrote:
“For years, Putin has repeated his warnings that he would not allow Ukraine and Georgia, which both have long borders with Russia, to join NATO. In December 2021, Putin yet again warned the West that allowing Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO would be unacceptable – the first minute of this 3-minute video. In this video Putin (sensibly in my opinion) asks whether the US would allow Russian troops and missiles to be positioned along its borders with Canada or Mexico and reiterates his “not an inch eastwards” threat”.
Yet in January 2022, the US presented its written response to Russian demands on Ukraine not joining NATO and on NATO troops being withdrawn from Romania and Bulgaria, but made clear that it did not change Washington’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue NATO membership, the most contentious issue in relations with Moscow.
The reply, which was delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, repeated the US offer to negotiate with Russia over some aspects of European security, but the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said the issue of eventual Ukrainian membership of the alliance was one of principle.
Blinken was speaking hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, threatened “retaliatory measures” if the US response did not satisfy the Kremlin.
“Without going to the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks, and in a sense for many, many years. That we will uphold the principle of NATO’s open door,” Blinken said, adding: “There is no change. There will be no change.”
The West thought Putin was bluffing. But Putin wasn’t bluffing. Putin doesn’t do bluffing. After all, he has had three successful mini-wars in the last few years – the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia in which Russia routed the Georgian military; the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea without a shot being fired and the Russian invasion (sorry, I meant “peace-keeping force”) during the Armenia and Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
It would seem that Putin believed the Ukraine invasion would be just another of Russia’s quick mini-wars – charge into Ukraine with 169,000 troops, take the main cities, depose the West-friendly government and install a Russian glove-puppet regime. But Putin got that one horribly wrong and so now we have a real mess on our hands.
I guess all I’m trying to say is that NATO – due to its arrogance, short-sightedness and catastrophic misjudgement of Putin’s character – possibly bears just as much responsibility for the Ukraine mess as Putin’s nationalist aggression and misjudgement of Russia’s military power compared to Ukraine’s.
So now we have what Brzezinski predicted “a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complimentary grievances.”
I have little understanding of and, luckily for the world, no influence on what happens in the Middle East. But looking at the situation, I wonder if any of our leaders have the slightest understanding of where things may be heading either.
Has Israel missed a trick?
Israel must feel it is damned if it invades Gaza and damned if it doesn’t. If it invades, daily news broadcasts of dead Palestinians will make Israel even more of a pariah state in the eyes of much of the world. If it doesn’t invade, it risks being shown as weak which will encourage more attacks.
Personally, I think Israel has missed a trick. It should have given the world an ultimatum. It should have demanded:
all Hamas operatives leave Gaza and are resettled in another Middle East country
the whole Hamas 300 miles of tunnels is destroyed under UN supervision
all hostages are released
Gaza becomes a UN protectorate
In return, Israel would stop attacking Gaza and agree to peace negotiations. This would have put Israel on the moral high ground and taken away much of the international pressure on the country. After all, Israel’s critics would then be forced to justify the murderous Hamas remaining in Gaza and the Arab countries would have to justify refusing to resettle Hamas terrorists.
I believe Israel should have done this as the world has changed in the last few years:
the USA is led by a weak, incompetent and increasingly senile puppet president
the West is destroying itself with post-colonial guilt, ludicrous culture wars and its economically-suicidal Net Zero
mass open-borders immigration into the West by Israel-hating hordes has irreversibly and negatively changed the West’s demographics
the West’s Gen-Z are superficial, virtue-signalling and ignorant, have no understanding of history and have the attention span of an amoeba so there is no longer any natural constituency supporting democratic Israel
meanwhile a new power grouping – Russia. China, Iran and North Korea – all of whom want Israel’s destruction and ultimately the West’s collapse – is becoming the dominant power in the world
What happens next?
I fear the following scenario is more than likely:
Step 1: Israel invades Gaza with massive loss of lives on both sides. There are massive anti-Israel demonstrations in all Western countries putting pressure on politicians to distance themselves from Israel
Step 2: Hezbollah attacks Israel from the north and various other Islamic groups attack from Syria forcing Israel to fight on three fronts
Step 3: The West continues (half-heartedly?) to support Israel, so Iran shuts the Straits of Hormuz cutting off 20% of the world’s oil supply and 25% of the world’s gas supply as we move into the European winter. This causes economic chaos in the West and even more destitution in Africa
Step 4: The USA attacks Iran in order to re-open the flow of oil and gas from the Middle East
Step 5: In retaliation, Iran attacks Israel with a massive onslaught of missiles against Israel’s main cities. Turkey and Egypt come under pressure from their populations to support their co-religionists in a war against Israel and the West
Step 6: Who knows what happens next? The Samson option – nuclear war? But I suspect that none of our useless rulers have even thought this far ahead.
Will Israel exist in 5 years’ time?
Israel’s situation is made even more perilous because its PM, Netanyahu, is largely responsible for the failure to prevent the Hamas attack because he was intent on reforming the country’s laws to emasculate the country’s supreme court and thus became distracted from his main task – defending Israel’s security. Therefore Netanyahu is probably more interested in saving his own lousy career and reputation than thinking logically about where he may be leading his country. Moreover, as I have tried to explain in previous blogs, Israel’s existence hangs by less than a thread. The population of Israel is just 9.4 million including 1.7 million Arabs. The Arab world population is over 456 million. There are 48 times as many Arabs as Israelis. And Israel is rather small compared to the land occupied by our Arabian friends. The surface area of Israel is a mere 22,145 km² compared to a massive 13,132,327 km² for the Arabian world:
Although I support Israel as a beacon of democracy, enlightenment and economic progress surrounded by a massive hell-hole of ignorance, backwardness and hatred, I struggle to find reasons why Israel can survive as a country.
Sadly, I think barbarity will have won against civilisation.
Journalist ‘risking her life’
And to cheer us all up a little, here’s a Romanian journalist ducking down in fear for her life while reporting on the deadly Israel-Hamas war while people merrily cycle past:
The UK’s debt is now £2,629,377,653,182. Though it will be a lot higher by the time I finish writing this blog as it’s increasing by over £2,000 every second:
Here’s the chart of our national debt as a percentage of GDP:
(left-click on chart, then left-click again to see in glorious widescreen)
Our national GDP is about £2,154,552,486,677. So our debt is more than 122% of GDP. And our interest payments are over £71 billion a year – £2,252 per second. Our debt is equivalent to over £80,000 for every person in employment. And our interest payments are costing every taxpayer over £2,000 a year. I’ll repeat that, each employed person is being forced to pay over £2,000 a year just in debt interest.
I’m no economist. But even I can see that this isn’t healthy.
Ludicrously, I heard some pig-ignorant Tory MP claiming in an interview that the useless, waste-of-skin fake Conservative government was going to reduce our national debt. Clearly this idiot didn’t even understand the difference between deficit and debt. As long as the Government has a deficit – taking in less in tax than it spends – its debt will increase. Duh!
Can Labour be any worse?
When Labour inevitably wins the next election, they will do everything in their power to bankrupt Britain:
massive increases in public spending especially on our ‘envy-of-the-world’ NHS
massive tax increases to pay for Labour’s public spending splurge
wrecking the tiny remnants of British manufacturing with the highest energy prices in the world due to eco-crazed Ed Miliband’s frantic attempts to destroy our country by replacing cheap reliable fossil-fuel electricity with expensive, unreliable supposed ‘renewables’
But the big question is – will the bond markets allow Labour free rein? Labour will need to borrow an awful lot of money to fund its planned public-spending blowout in spite of its inevitable, inexorable tax rises. If the bond markets refuse to lend Labour the money it will need or if the bond markets demand ever higher interest on the money they lend to Labour, then Labour will be stymied in their efforts to bankrupt Britain and we may even find Britain crawling to the IMF for a bailout.
We saw what happened to the brilliant Liz ‘trussed-turkey’ Truss and her even more brilliant chancellor Kwasi ‘Khazi’ Kwarteng when they tried to defy economic gravity. I suspect that Labour’s plans to destroy our country will also hit the brick wall of economic reality. So perhaps Labour will be no worse than the abominably incompetent, useless, lying, fake Tories?
I’ll only leave this up for one day as it’s not particularly insightful and nobody is interested in my boring little life.
Not having children and doing most of my administration on the Internet, thus avoiding bank branches and call centres, I don’t have much contact with the younger generation. But I found this trivial incident, when I did interact with Britain’s Generation Z, interesting. I thought it might be worth mentioning as maybe some of you have had similar experiences.
First, the boring background
Last Friday, I had a one-year fixed-interest bond with Nationwide Building Society mature. Using the Internet, I moved some of the money to my current account to cover living expenses for the next year. But when I tried five times to put the rest of the money in a new one-year fixed-interest bond, the Nationwide system crashed five times. So I had to go to the nearest branch.
At the branch I explained what I needed done – a simple matter of a few clicks on the Nationwide website taking no more than two minutes. I know this as I’ve done this before. However, I was told that this was so complex that none of the five staff in the branch was qualified to do this unbelievably simple task and so would have to wait half an hour for the only person there capable of this task to come back from her lunch break.
Incidentally, the Nationwide area manager responsible for six branches was there. But either he was incapable of doing this incredibly simple service or else he had much more important things to do than serving a worthless customer like myself (one of the people who pays his no doubt generous salary and pension).
Given that I had to wait 30 minutes to have this two-minute task done, I asked the girl (not?)serving me if I could make a complaint about the poor level of service at the branch. She started typing heaven knows what into her computer, so I asked for a copy of my complaint. She refused saying it was against Nationwide policy to let customers see the complaints they made. As the area manager was there, I asked him for a copy of what the girl was typing. He said that wasn’t possible and if I wanted to see it, I would have to make a ‘Subject Access Request’ to Nationwide head office. Anyone who has been following the saga of Nigel Farage’s debanking by Dame Alison Rose’s Coutts will know all about this.
Things went on in this vein for about twenty minutes and I felt that the staff there were trying to obstruct everything I asked for in order to wind me up in the hope that I would lose my temper which would give them an excuse to refuse to serve me.
“You’re making me feel uncomfortable”
There were several big signs on the wall about how Nationwide Building Society would not tolerate any abuse or violence or threats against their staff or something like that. So I asked the girl, supposedly taking down details of my complaint, if I was being abusive or threatening or whatever. She answered “no”.
We’ve all met many unhelpful, bloody-minded, useless bureaucrats in our lives. Usually their attitude is something like: ‘I am superior to you, I have power over you, I consider you to be a worthless piece of dirt, I can be as obstructive as I like and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Ha-ha-ha-ha!’ Particular experts at this, I’ve found, are useless, arrogant, lazy BA check-in and cabin staff; underworked NHS nurses who feel their nursing degrees put them above menial tasks like looking after patients and anyone working employed in a phone company or Internet call centre
Like most of you, I’m used to such people and generally can handle their mulish incompetence and obstructiveness. But this girl really threw me by adding “you’re making me feel uncomfortable”. This was a brilliant move on her part. I was the customer wasting my time trying to get just the most basic customer service from an organisation which had quite a lot of my money, whose IT system was a pile of cr*p and whose branch staff were beyond incompetent. But by saying “you’re making me feel uncomfortable”, the girl immediately made herself into the victim and thus found an excellent excuse to refuse to serve me.
The limited insight I got from this was that for the snowflake, me-me-me, I-am-the-centre-of-the-world, social-media Generation Z playing the victim in any confrontational situation was a sure-fire way to win.
Next time I have to deal with some ludicrously-misnamed ‘customer service’ employee or call centre, I think I’ll try this tactic – make myself the victim by bleating about my hurty feelings and need for a ‘safe space’ rather than allowing myself to be pushed into the role of an increasingly frustrated customer trying to get the most basic level of customer service.
My complaint to the BBC
And while I’m on the subject of wasting time dealing with useless, self-serving bureaucracies, I’ve just done one of the most pointless acts of my life – I’ve made a complaint to the BBC.
Last Sunday, there was a BBC documentary on the housing crisis – how a shortage of new homes was driving up home prices making them unaffordable to anyone without a bank of mum and dad to call on. The BBC blamed governments for not building sufficient homes and evil, capitalist buy-to-letters for snapping up the homes that were on the market thus shutting out people looking to own their own homes. But no mention was made of immigration.
Here’s my complaint:
Why did the programme not mention immigration?
In a programme about the housing crisis (mainly in England) there was no mention of the effect of immigration on the availability and affordability of housing. Between 1997 and 2021, the population of England shot up from 48.7 million to 56.5 million – a rise of 325,000 a year mainly due to immigration – at a time when around 200,000 to 250,000 homes were being built a year. The fact that your programme-makers didn’t mention the effects of immigration suggests either that they are incredibly stupid (which I doubt) or that it was a deliberate result of political bias that the programme covered up the effects of immigration on housing availability and costs.
Please issue an apology and correction
I’m looking forward to being fobbed off by the usual overpaid, arrogant, waste-of-skin, wfh, Generation Z BBC tosser.
Of course we don’t know what’s going to happen in the Israel/Palestine/Hamas imbroglio. And many more much more intelligent people than myself will speak and write millions of words about the situation. But I have a worrying suspicion that Hamas has already won. Here’s why:
Whatever the Israelis do will be ‘wrong’
The Israelis are caught between a rock and a hard place. They can’t attack while supposed negotiations to free their citizens are supposedly ongoing. Yet the longer the Israelis delay, the more time Hamas have to prepare
Throughout the world, public sympathy is firmly with Hamas with many millions believing the Israelis deserved the October massacre of around 1,400 Israelis by Hamas subhumans
The Hamas attack has brought to the surface widespread anti-semitism where we have Australian mobs chanting “gas the Jews”, Stars of David being painted on Israeli homes and businesses in Germany and massive anti-Israel protests in many other countries
If the Israelis do attack Gaza, every time a Palestinian is hurt or killed, Israel will be accused of genocide and there will be massive pressure on Western leaders to distance themselves from Israel’s actions.
If Hezbollah, Jordan, Syria and even Iran decide to pitch in, hoping to finally kill all Israeli Jews ‘between the river and the sea’, it’s difficult to see how Israel can survive
The situation in the West
Demographics:
there are 3.9 million members of the Religion of Incredible Peacefulness (ROIP) in the UK, but only 0.3 million Jews
there are 5.7 million members of the ROIP in France, but only 0.4 million Jews
there are 5.6 million members of the ROIP in Germany, but only 0.2 million Jews
there are 0.8 million members of the ROIP in Australia, but only 0.1 million Jews
there are 3.5 million members of the ROIP in the USA, however there are 4 million of Jewish heritage
Moreover, while the ROIP populations of most countries are increasing rapidly due to higher birth rates and open-borders immigration from the wordls’ worst hell-holes, the populations of Jews are static or declining. Soon, the USA will be the only Western country where a political party can be elected while being supportive of Israel’s right to exist. That doesn’t bode terribly well for Israel’s future as Israel will become increasingly isolated.
Ignorance and stupidity:
It seems that the same mobs of narcissistic, virtue-signalling, West-hating, oikophobic fools who demonstrated with such passion for the utterly corrupt BLM and who bleat and moan about the supposed coming climate catastrophe are also turning out in their hordes to protest for a free Palestine. The most ludicrous of these useful idiots are the LGBTQ+++ supporters of Hamas:
They seem to be unaware of what happens to people like them under radical ROIP governments. I could post a few videos here of homosexual men joining the Fallujah Flying Club with lifelong membership. That lifelong membership being the last 4-5 seconds of their lives as they are thrown from tall buildings with their hands tied behind their back and then their bodies are stoned just to make sure they see the error of their ways. But I’ll spare you.
The West’s societal suicide
There used to be an acronym used by economists – the BRICS – referring to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa which were regarded as the fastest-growing developing economies. Perhaps we need a new acronym – the CRINKS – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and South Africa? Our enemies – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and South Africa (the CRINKS) – are uniting against the West, increasing their militaries and getting stronger. Meanwhile the West is impoverishing itself with the ludicrous Net Zero stupidity and tearing itself apart with the even more stupid culture wars – women can have penises, all Whites are inherently racist, diversity is our strength, there should be no borders and so on.
Third-world countries are watching a rising, self-confident, corrupt, democracy-loathing CRINKS and a declining, self-destructing, self-hating West and deciding which side to join. Many corrupt, kleptocrat-ruled, resource-rich but economically basket-case African countries have already enthusiastically substituted hard-won independence for subjugation to Chinese Belt-and-Road economic colonialism. Others have seen coups supported by Russian Wagner mercenaries. Most Third-World countries will choose to pitch in with the winners in the competition for global power. They will join the CRINKS and not the West. This will further isolate Israel.
Survival against the odds?
Israel has survived over 75 years almost miraculously turning a tiny patch of Middle-East scrubland into one of the world’s most prosperous, democratic, scientifically-advanced and productive countries. But the population of Israel is just 9.4 million including 1.7 million Arabs. The Arab world population is over 456 million. There are 48 times as many Arabs as Israelis. And Israel is rather small compared to the land occupied by our Arabian friends. The surface area of Israel is a mere 22,145 km² compared to a massive 13,132,327 km² for the Arabian world:
I wonder how many of those protesting against the supposedly ‘evil’ Israel actually realise how small and vulnerable Israel is?
In view of all this and more, I have a horrible suspicion that Hamas have won and Israel will not survive to reach 100 years.
As for the libtard, historically-ignorant, self-admiring, anti-semitic fools screaming their mouth-frothing support for Hamas, be careful what you wish for. Once Hamas and Hezbollah and ISIS and their chums have finished with Israel, they’ll be coming for you:
The writer puts forward a similar position to the one Neil Oliver presents in his YouTube monologues.
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And to hopefully further prove the point that our government is our enemy, here’s Dr John Campbell presenting MP Andrew Bridgen’s speech to an almost empty House of Commons about excess deaths, some of which may be linked to the experimental mRNA supposed ‘vaccines’, and our government’s somewhat anaemic response to Bridgen’s speech:
I’ll just leave this up for one day as it’s not adding a great deal to the sum total of human knowledge.
I’ve just got back from a week on the Côte d’Azur. In the flat I was renting they had Netflix on the TV and my partner started watching a series called “Emily in Paris”.
Wikipedia explains “Emily in Paris follows Emily Cooper, an American from Chicago with a Master’s degree in communications, who moves to Paris for a new job opportunity. She is tasked with bringing an American point of view and social media presence to a venerable French marketing firm. Cultures clash as she adjusts to the challenges of life in Paris while juggling her career, new friendships, and active love life.”
I realise this is just a TV programme and not reality. But I watched a few episodes as I found the behaviour of the main characters interesting. They were all obsessed with posting stuff about their lives on social media and then checking their phones every few minuites to see how many ‘likes’ each post got. Most posts seemed to be of the main person with a group of friends having a wonderful time, grinning like maniacs while whooping/shrieking/screaming with delight about how fantastic and glamorous their clothes, their friends, the places they visit and their lives were.
For this generation social status doesn’t seem to come from educational attainment or professional achievement or profundity of thought or sporting success. Instead social status seems to be mainly based on the number of exciting posts one can make on social media and the number of ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ one can accumulate.
Searching on the Internet, I came across a serious medical study titled: ‘In Search of Likes: Longitudinal Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Status Seeking and Health-Risk Behaviors’.
The abstract starts: This study introduces a new construct-digital status seeking-which reflects a set of behaviors made possible by the social media environment. Digital status seeking is defined as the investment of significant effort into the accumulation of online indicators of peer status and approval. The concurrent validity of this construct was examined, as well as the longitudinal implications of digital status-seeking for adolescents’ engagement in health-risk behaviors.
Research by one company into school-leavers’ most sought-after jobs suggested that becoming a social media influencer, an app developer or a video games developer are now the most popular dream jobs among school leavers.
There is no truth anymore. There is little search for knowledge and self-improvement. It’s only about me-me-me-me-me!
There seems to be a whole new world out there as the younger generation dedicates their lives to the pursuit of ‘likes’ in the Age of Inanity
Whenever we’re given a new supposedly ‘official’ figure by our rulers, it usually is neccessary to do a little detective work to find out if we’re being deliberately lied to.
The EV fires lies
There’s an example of this in my previous blog in which I examined a government spokesperson’s claim that EVs were no more likely to catch fire than petrol and diesel cars. I don’t know what data the government spokesperson used to support their claim. But Googling statistics on car fires, I came across a report from the U.S. that had featured in several publications that hybrids accounted for 3,475 fires per 100,000 vehicles (3.5%), ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles caught fire substantially less often, at 1,530 incidents per 100,000 vehicles (1.5%) and EV fires were significantly lower than the others, with 25 fires per 100,000 vehicles (0.2%).
Given that there are over 290 million cars in the U.S. these figures would mean that there are more than 2.9 million car fires in the U.S. each year. In fact, the actual figure is around 170,000 car fires in the U.S. each year. So the report suggesting that EV fires were less frequent was complete nonsense. What I believe (though can’t prove) is that the game the people producing the report played was to compare the number of fires by vehicle type with the number of cars of that type sold each year. Given that the population of petrol and diesel cars on America’s roads would be older and therefore more likely to catch fire than EVs, this made it look like EVs were safer. Yet a Freedom of Information request from the London Fire Brigade suggested what many of us suspect is true – EVs are actually much more likely to catch fire than ICE cars.
The ‘97% of scientists’ lies
We see similar tricks being used against us with many of the other numbers used by the climate catastrophists. For example, in my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS, I explain how the claim that 97% of scientists agree that Global Warming is caused by human CO2 emissions is complete and utter nonsense.
The ‘since records began’ and ‘most on record’ lies
A common trick used by the catatstrophists is to claim that a day or week or month or whatever is the hottest, wettest, driest, most stormy ‘since records began’. But we’re never told what ‘since records began’ means. Is it millions of years? Or the last 600,000 years according to analysis of Vostok Antarctic ice samples? Or is it since the beginning of the industrial age? Or is it just since the end of the 1970s when space satellites were first used to measure the Earth’s temperature? Who knows? But the ‘since records began’ gives the ‘scientists’ and ‘journalists’ enormous flexibility in choosing their starting point to prove that we are supposedly experiencing a climate emergency/crisis.
A favourite ‘since records began’ game is played with Arctic and Antarctic ice caps. In this case the ‘since records began’ start point is usually 1979. But 1979 was the end of a 20-year cooling period. In fact the cooling in the 1960/1970 period was so bad that even the climate-catastrophist Guardian newspaper predicted a new Ice Age:
So maybe the warming since 1979 is just a return to normality. It’s true that charts starting in 1979 do show shrinkage of the polar ice caps. Here’s a typical chart for the Arctic suggesting we face total catastrophe:
But if you start your chart a bit earlier, you get a more nuanced picture:
There is a decline in the scorching hot 1920s and 1930s, an increase in the cooling 1960s and 1970s and then a decline again since 1990.
As for the Antarctic ice, well you can choose your chart according to what you want to prove. If you take the September figures, it looks like the ice cover is declining:
But if you choose February, the situation looks pretty stable.
Also in my book, I show how the climate catastrophists are careful with their ‘most on record’ starting point in order to convince us we’re heading for a climate apocalypse. Here’s a typical newspaper report:
But when you look at the real data, you see that information showing worse fire acreage being burnt in the scorching hot 1920s and 1930s is being deliberately hidden:
And sometimes, the ‘scientists just deliberately lie. When even the infamously climate-catastrophist IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) admits there is no increase in the rate of sea level rise:
Attention-seeking and grant-hungry scientists spurred on by scientifically-ignorant journalists glibly propagandise impending doom:
It’s a tricky world out there
So, next time you come across a government spokesperson, say-anything-for-research-money scientist or write-anything-for-money journalist quoting any statistics at you in order to cower you into craven obedience to the latest attempt to circumscribe your freedoms and impoverish you, it’s probably wise to cast a cynical eye over their data as it’s likely it’s complete nonsense.
Don’t believe anything till the government denies it
Following the Luton Airport carbecue, a government spokesperson reassured us that EVs are just as safe as other types of car: “There is no evidence that electric vehicle fires are more likely to occur than petrol or diesel vehicle fires and it remains safe to have them in covered car parks.”
This trustworthy voice of the Net-Zero-obsessed establishment went on to say: “This guidance is part of our commitment to keep fire prevention, fire detection and fire-fighting under review for all vehicles and provides the industry with best practice on how to keep car parks safe.”
So, are EVs just as safe as petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles?
There seem to be conflicting figures about the incidence of fires in the main types of car.
Hybrids reflected the most at 3,475 fires per 100,000 vehicles (3.5%) . This is most likely because hybrids utilize two powertrains.
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles caught fire substantially less often, at 1,530 incidents per 100,000 vehicles (1.5%).
EV fires were significantly lower than the others, with 25 fires per 100,000 vehicles (0.2%). So of the approximately two million EVs on U.S. roads, less than two out of a 1,000 will catch fire.
Per AutoinsuranceEZ, ICE vehicles are more than 60 times more likely to catch fire than an EV, while hybrids are more than 130 times more likely to catch fire than an EV. Over the coming months and years, these are the figures our rulers are likely to quote at us to convince us of the brilliance of their plans to move us from cheap, long-lasting (10 to 15 years) ICE cars to ludicrously-expensive and short-life (7 to 10 years) EVs.
There are around 170,000 vehicle fires in the USA each year and there are around 290 million cars, So there is no way that more than 1% of cars – 3.5% of hybrids, 1.5% of petrol cars and 0.2% of EVs – more than 2.9 million are catching fire each year. With just 170,000 vehicle fires each year, that’s just around 0.05% of the USA’s cars. I suspect the figures, which our rulers are likely to use to allay our fears regarding EV safety, are just comparing the number of fires to the number of cars sold in the year. So, beware of politicians and prostitute journalists quoting figures proving EVs are just as safe as, or even safer than, ICE cars.
Moreover, there are other issues polluting the official figures:
as the EV car population is likely to be much newer than the overall car population, there is less likelihood of newer cars catching fire
owners of ICE cars are more likely to do their own maintenance and small repairs than EV owners increasing the chance of unprofessional repairs leading to fires
analysis of car fire statistics show that many are started while owners are carrying out repairs – often by careless handling of flammable materials
And, of course, there is the issue of EV fires being almost impossible to extinguish once your carbecue has got going.
Some more reliable data?
Perhaps we can get some more reliable comparison of relative car fire risks from the London Fire Brigade?
Data obtained through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request revealed that in 2019 the London Fire Brigade dealt with 54 electric vehicle fires compared with 1,898 petrol and diesel fires.
Vehicle registration numbers from the Department for Transport (DfT) show there are 50,000-plus plug-in cars licensed in the capital out of a total 4.63 million licensed cars. Looking at the London Fire Brigade data, that would suggest an incident rate of 0.04% for petrol and diesel car fires, while the rate for plug-in vehicle is more than double at 0.1%. Moreover, I imagine the risk level for EVs will increase as the EV population ages and as more EVs get small bumps and scratches which might affect battery safety.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, a top-level £190,000 McLaren hybrid sports car burst into flames last week while being taken for a test drive. The article includes some impressive video and photos of the £190,000 McLaren carbecue:
David Craig, on November 1st, 2023
