Author Archives: Tim Newman

Skewered on two horns

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Two stories from the US. The first:

There has been an outpouring of anger in the US from politicians, celebrities and human rights groups over a report alleging the US policy on gender recognition could be changed.

A report in the New York Times on Sunday said a government memo proposed officially defining gender as biological and fixed.

The change would rescind previous policy which eased trans recognition.

Instead, it would define gender solely on the genitalia people are born with.

That this is remotely controversial says rather a lot about the times we live in.

The administration of former President Barack Obama adopted a definition of gender in federal policy which made it easier to allow individual choice and self-determination.

What the BBC doesn’t tell us is that Obama didn’t pass a law, it was one of his infamous Executive Orders; this is why it is so easy to reverse. The reason Obama didn’t pass a law was because it would never have got through Congress.

Activists fear the changes allegedly being proposed could in effect “define out of existence” Americans who currently identify as transgender – a community who are said to number at least 1.4 million people.

Obama’s policy dates from 2010. Prior to that, trans people existed, both physically and legally. The idea that 1.4m people will cease to exist because they’re categorised under their biological sex is the product of mental illness, which the BBC seems happy to propagate.

The report has generated an angry response from some people in and outside of the US, including swathes of the LGBTQ community.

Advocacy groups organised a demonstration on Sunday evening in New York and another protest is planned outside the White House in Washington DC on Monday Morning.

In a series of Tweets on Sunday, the National Centre for Transgender Equality described the changes as an “abomination” and “a reckless attack” on transgender lives.

Okay, let’s park that there for a moment.

The second story is this:

President Donald Trump has said the US will “begin cutting off” foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador because of a large convoy of migrants heading north.

Mr Trump criticised the countries on Monday for allowing people to leave the region and come “illegally” to the US.

The group is travelling through Mexico, but is still far from the US border.

The mid-terms were already going to be a struggle for the Democrats after their Brett Kavanaugh smear campaign backfired badly, and these two issues are just going to make things worse. Note how few Democrats are actually speaking about either; normally they’d be all over the media condemning Trump. The reason for their silence is they know full well that going into an election decrying a Trump administration for officially recognising only one’s birth gender, and reversing the lunacy of self-identity, will cost them heavily in terms of votes. They will be seen as mental, and rightly so. The trouble is they’ve made the headcases their base, who will be appalled their representatives aren’t standing up for them. Most will vote Democrat anyway, but some will stay at home while others will agitate for greater lunatics to oust their current representatives.

The Democrats have a similar problem with this migrant caravan. Only the most deranged anti-Trumpers and open-border advocates will see the footage on TV and think this mass of bedraggled humanity should be allowed to enter the US, not least because of the precedent it will set. It’s unlikely the caravan will reach the border before the elections, but this plays right into Trump’s hands anyway: all he has to do is say they’re not coming in. The Democrats, by contrast, have a choice of campaigning for the caravan to be let in, or staying silent. Neither is a particularly attractive choice in the run-up to critical elections. This is a problem solely of the Democrats’ own making: had a handful of them not backed open borders and mass illegal immigration (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama opposed both) they’d be able to support Trump’s position and campaign on other issues. But they decided everything Trump says must be opposed at all costs, and ended up supporting ludicrous policies which are now, at a crucial time, making them look as though they live on a wholly different planet to ordinary Americans. Their best bet is to therefore remain silent, but this will only upset their base.

I suspect the GOP will be happy to keep both issues in the press for as long as possible in the run-up to the mid-terms, hence Trump’s remarks:

Without offering evidence, Mr Trump has repeatedly suggested the caravan was politically motivated.

On Monday he urged people to blame Democrats for the border crisis, saying: “Remember the mid-terms”.

He also tweeted that the caravan contained “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners”. When he was later pressed by journalists on what this meant, he offered no origin for the claim but invited reporters to investigate for themselves.

The media think Trump will be discredited if his claims are questioned by the media. Trump knows most people only care about the thousands of people who are heading their way, and that the media would like to let them in. Not for the first time, by keeping it in the news they’re doing his job for him.

If the Democrats want the elections to be a referendum on transsexuals’ ideas of gender identity and whether a column of ten thousand assorted south Americans should be allowed to just walk into the United States, I’m sure the Republicans won’t object. The Democrats really have painted themselves into a corner, and it’s going to be fun trying to watch them get out.

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Horizontal Collaboration

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This is an interesting story:

Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg has issued an official government apology to Norwegian women who were mistreated over World War Two-era relationships with German soldiers.

…

Many of the Norwegian-German children were born in the German-administered Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) maternity facilities set up from 1941 by the Nazis in the country.

The women who had relationships with the soldiers became known by the nickname the “German Girls”, and were targeted for reprisals in Norway when the war ended – standing accused of betraying the country.

Punishments included being deprived of civil rights, detained or expelled from the country to Germany along with their children.

I have recommended Keith Lowe’s superb book Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of WWII before, and will do so again. He goes into substantial detail on the topic of the treatment of women in occupied countries who had relations with German soldiers, particularly in Norway:

The number of sexual relationships that took place between European women and Germans during the war is quite staggering. In Norway as many as 10 per cent of women aged between fifteen and thirty had German boyfriends during the war.

Regarding coercion, he has this to say:

On the whole European women slept with Germans not because they were forced to, or because their own men were absent, or because they needed money or food – but simply because they found the strong, ‘knightly’ image of the German soldiers intensely attractive, especially compared to the weakened impression they had of their own menfolk. In Denmark, for example, wartime pollsters were shocked to discover that 51 per cent of Danish women openly admitted to finding German men more attractive than their own compatriots.

The alt-right is fond of claiming western women support mass migration and open borders because they find their own menfolk emasculated, and any successful invader automatically becomes more attractive. The above paragraph would appear to support that argument (see also the young women who flock to refugee camps and immediately sleep with the residents). Lowe then describes the reprisals carried out on such women at the end of the war, which were particularly nasty in France and the Netherlands. Regarding Norway, he says this:

The study of Norwegian attitudes towards what they termed the ‘war children’ of German soldiers is a particularly rich area because, unlike in other countries, these attitudes are so well documented. In the aftermath of the war the Norwegian authorities set up a War Child Committee to consider what to do with such children.43 For a short time, therefore, the problem was openly discussed here in a way that it was not anywhere else in Europe.

There were good reasons why other countries didn’t want to talk about it:

In Denmark 5,579 babies were born with a registered German father – and undoubtedly many more whose German paternity was concealed. In Holland the number of children born to German fathers is thought to have been anything between 16,000 and 50,000.  In Norway, which had only a third of the population of Holland, between 8,000 and 12,000 such children were born. And in France the number is thought to be around 85,000 or even higher. The total number of children fathered by German soldiers in occupied Europe is unknown, but estimates vary between one and two million.

The treatment of children born of German fathers during the occupation of Norway included forced exile, being declared mentally unsound, and denied full citizenship and schooling. Given Norway is one of the more enlightened countries in Europe, one can imagine it was a lot worse elsewhere (in the Netherlands, some were killed outright at the end of the war). It’s hardly surprising national governments just buried the whole issue and moved on, but the impact on thousands of children must have been enormous.

There is also the question of whether the women deserved such treatment. In Norway at least, sleeping with a German soldier was not a crime, and the post-war laws were applied retroactively. As one girl complained, she was 19 and the Germans were the de facto government and had been for some time. Leaving aside the fact that teenage girls and women in their early twenties can hardly be expected to be immune from falling in love with whoever struts around town in the best uniforms, how was anyone to know the Germans were not going to be there forever? For much of the occupation it must have seemed that way to a lot of people; for how long were young women expected to wait for liberation?

The anger these relationships generated among the male population is understandable, and Lowe goes into detail on its origins. However, it’s hard to say with 70 years’ hindsight that all these women deserved to be abused, beaten, humiliated, and sometimes killed because of their relationships with German soldiers. Credit is due the Norwegian government for looking into this sordid episode of their past and issuing an apology, particularly as no other country dared even approach the subject. Surprisingly – or perhaps not, given their true intentions – the treatment of women following the liberation of Europe warrants nary a mention from feminists, outside of the mass rapes of the Red Army.

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Government by and for feminists

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This article needs a fisking:

Women and girls across the UK face “relentless” harassment on the street and not enough is being done to stop it, MPs say.

Of course.

The politicians making up the Women and Equalities Committee looked into the issue for nine months and found the amount of harassment meant it became “normalised” for girls growing up.

Similarly, anti-poverty campaigners think we live in a Dickensian dystopia, anti-racism campaigners think the KKK roam the streets looking for brown folk to lynch, and the modern temperance movement thinks we’re all alcoholics. If a committee was set up to manage unicorns, you can be sure we’d be reading reports on how many unicorns were hiding in the woods.

The MPs are now calling for the government to take action to tackle it.

The Home Office said the issue was a “key priority”.

Thankfully, immigration, terrorism, Brexit, public debt, knife crime, house prices, and every other major issue the electorate cites as priorities have been solved.

The committee heard evidence that street harassment was widespread, from being shouted at and cat-called through to sexual assaults.

In whose interests is it to lump sexual assaults together with being shouted at?

They also heard it took place in a number of public spaces – on transport, in bars and clubs, through online spaces, at universities, in parks and on the street.

So men vy for women’s attention everywhere. Who knew?

Committee chairwoman Maria Miller said: “It can make women and girls scared and stressed, avoid certain routes home at night or certain train carriages, wear headphones while out running.

With the exception of wearing headphones, this is no different to young men wishing to avoid getting into a fight. Do these idiots think men don’t avoid certain routes home at night, or certain train carriages? How many of those ending up in A&E with knife wounds are young men?

“Women feel the onus is put on them to avoid ‘risky’ situations – all of this keeps women and girls unequal.”

They feel the onus is on them, probably because they’re so wrapped up in their own victimhood they’ve not bothered to talk to any men about what it’s like for them.

The report concluded that social attitudes underpinned sexual harassment, and the normalisation of it contributed to a “wider negative cultural effect on society”.

Right, so we’re back to one of my pet topics. There was time when British men were, on the whole, rather gentlemanly and British women rather ladylike. Then feminists decided men and women were equal and women should adopt the behaviours of the worst men, and mocked the traditional, polite Englishman into extinction. Now he’s been replaced by a boorish oaf who has no respect for the women he sees around him.  So ask yourselves, feminists: who was it who demanded society should be tipped upside down and gender roles abandoned? It wasn’t men, was it?

And while the government has pledged to eliminate sexual harassment of women and girls by 2030, the committee said there was “no evidence of any programme to achieve this”.

Government programs are to feminists what Instagram likes are to teenage girls.

The report outlined seven key recommendations to tackle street harassment:

Force train and bus operators to take tougher action against sexual harassment and block the viewing of pornography on public transport

I haven’t tried viewing pornography on public transport, but I’ll assume it’s done through a phone’s 4G connection. How are they going to block that, then?

Ban all non-consensual sharing of intimate images

How are they going to enforce this? And what’s it got to do with street harassment?

Publish a new “Violence Against Women and Girls” strategy

This will certainly keep a lot of feminists employed at taxpayer expense, but I’m not convinced it will change much.

Create a public campaign to change attitudes

Because men aren’t feeling nagged enough by feminists as it is.

Take an evidence-based approach to addressing the harms of pornography, along the lines of road safety or anti-smoking campaigns

What are they going to do, put up billboards of blind teenage boys and post pictures of hairy palms in schools? It’s interesting how not so long ago progressives were preaching free love and sex, while stuffy old priests warned of the corrupting influence of pornography. Now we have gay priests talking about free love while feminists harrumph over porn.

Tougher laws to ensure pub landlords take action on sexual harassment – and make local authorities consult women’s groups before licensing strip clubs

Strip clubs? Is this really about street harassment? As someone pointed out, modern feminism is largely about maximising women’s sexual agency while eliminating that of men.

Make it a legal obligation for universities to have policies outlawing sexual harassment

Where the definition of sexual harassment will be so poorly defined men will soon learn to stay well clear of women at university, and stick to those they meet on Tinder.

Ms Miller said: “Sexual harassment in public places… is the most common form of violence against women and girls and the damage is far-reaching, and yet most of it goes unreported.

Hey girls! If you report non-violent acts as violent, people will take you seriously!

“The #MeToo movement shows that we must?confront some deeply uncomfortable?truths about our society and the attitudes some men hold.”

Twitter campaigns are an excellent basis for government legislation.

Hollaback! – an international movement tackling harassment – says there is no right or wrong way to respond.

But if you choose to speak directly to the assailant, it offers the following advice:

Be firm: Look them in the eye and denounce their behaviour with a strong, clear voice

Right.

Say what feels natural: The important thing is that you are not apologetic in your response

This contradicts what you just said.

Don’t engage: Harassers may try to argue with you or dismiss you through further conversation or by making fun of you. As tempting as it may be get into a verbal war with them, it is not recommended. The attention may feed their abusive behaviour

A second ago you said you should talk to them.

Keep moving: Once you’ve said your piece, keep moving. Harassers do not deserve the pleasure of your company

Ah yes. In the midst of being sexually harassed, an experience so traumatic the government must intervene with wide-reaching national legislation, you must never lose sight of who deserves you.

The Home Office said it had pledged £100m in funding until 2020 to help local services combat violence against women and girls.

More jobs for middle class feminists! Huzzah!

And it said it was working on an updated “Violence Against Women and Girls” strategy.

Will the new edition remove the section advising underage girls in Rotherham who are being gang-raped to shut up and embrace the diversity?

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “Unwelcome advances that intimidate, degrade or humiliate women and girls are an abuse of power and unlawful. Whether in the home, the workplace or in public, sexual harassment is unacceptable.

Presumably welcome advances are just fine, the difference being whether the guy is cute or not.

“The government has made protecting women and girls from all forms of violence, and supporting victims and survivors a key priority.”

Yes, we’ve seen your commitment to this in Rotherham, Huddersfield, and elsewhere.

It appears the government is increasingly run by middle class feminists for the primary benefit of middle class feminists. I suppose this makes a change from a government run by and for the landed gentry, but I’m not sure it’s an improvement.

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Strangers on a Plane

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A few days ago a friend posted a story on Facebook regarding an EasyJet flight she took with her husband and two boys, aged four and two. She boarded the flight to find there weren’t any seats left close together, meaning her eldest boy had to sit beside a stranger. She asked people if they would mind moving so she could sit with her children but nobody was willing, and the aircrew weren’t interested. It took about an hour for her Facebook feed to go full Mumsnet, with women suggesting she should have told her child to cough all over the innocent passenger he’s sat beside, or cite safety concerns to the air crew who, apparently, would be forced to swap people around.

So I’ll start by saying I know the family well and they’re lovely, with no sense of entitlement. The mother posted the story just because she was disappointed nobody was willing to move. As it turned out, her boy did just fine on his own (last time I saw him he was about one and he rammed me with his sit-on tractor, so I think he can take care of himself). I’ll also say that the obvious solution is to not fly EasyJet if you want your family to sit together, and instead book with an airline which lets you reserve seats in advance. But it’s a situation worth looking at in more detail.

If it were me, I would have moved. Normally I pay for extra legroom at the emergency exit or the bulkhead, and I wouldn’t move to an ordinary seat in those circumstances, but if I’m in a regular seat and travelling alone and someone politely asks me to move, I always do. I’ve moved seats so kids can sit with their parents, or couples can sit together. I’ve lived in functional societies, and I’ve lived in dysfunctional societies. I believe the difference between the two is a culture in which people make dozens of small sacrifices on a daily basis which act as a lubricant for the society as a whole to get along. So you stand aside for people pushing prams, you let people out into traffic, you conduct yourself in a way which minimises the aggregate level of inconvenience and difficulty for everyone involved in a given situation. Annecy works a lot like this. For example, everyone stops at zebra crossings, and those crossing always give a little wave to the driver. People also hold doors open for one another and stand aside if someone is carrying something heavy. By contrast, drivers in Lagos will move two metres forward and block an entire highway because it means they have gained two metres. The fact a hundred cars are now blocked in because of their actions doesn’t matter one whit: the important thing is they have advanced two metres, and to hell with everyone else. This is why Lagos is the most dysfunctional place I’ve ever been to.

Britain is slowly but surely shifting from a society where people cooperated to ease things along to one where it’s every man and woman for themselves. Unfortunately, none embody the spirit of “f*ck you, I’ll do what I want” more than young mothers after a late-night session on Mumsnet. There was a time when parents didn’t take young children into restaurants because the inevitable screaming and toddler behaviour would disturb the other patrons. Now it’s “tough sh*t, I have as much right to be here as you”. There was also a time when, if a child was causing a disturbance, the mother would feel deeply embarrassed and get her kid out of there pronto. Now her approach is “so what, he’s a child, he can’t help it” or, worse, she does nothing at all. Breastfeeding in public is another interesting subject in this regard. I have no problem with it, and I’ve sat with a friend who breastfed her boy under a blanket and it didn’t bother me at all. But some people don’t like it, and rather than seeking a compromise or avoiding conflict the position of mothers has been “I have right to breastfeed in public, it’s your problem, not mine”.

The trouble with a society where people loudly declare they have a right to do X, Y, and Z and everyone else will just have to lump it, is the give-and-take compromises which act as the lubricant to make everyone’s lives a little more pleasant dries up. Eventually people will think if you have the right to do X, then I have the right to do Y. Or, to come back to the EasyJet flight, I have a right to stay in my seat. There’s also the related issue, which I’ve written about before, of parents thinking the whole world must changed for the benefit of their brats. If you see a highly illiberal policy idea being shared on Facebook, you can be sure it has the strong backing of over-entitled middle class mothers who want everyone’s freedoms severely curtailed “for the sake of the children.” By which they mean their children. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s getting a little sick of this, and it’s not going to help matters when a mother needs too ask a favour of a stranger.

A lot of the responses to my friend’s original Facebook post complained how selfish the other passengers were, or how they despair of modern society. But this didn’t happen overnight, and I suspect one or two of them have helped bring this situation about more than they realise.

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Racism spotted, close all airspace

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This story is causing a lot of handwringing:

A Ryanair passenger who racially abused an elderly woman sitting next to him on a plane may “get away with it”, a shadow transport minister said.

The man was filmed calling the 77 year-old victim an “ugly black bastard” and shouting “don’t talk to me in a foreign language you stupid ugly cow”.

The video pretty much captures what happened. If a crime was committed, why can they not prosecute?

Labour MP Karl Turner, a qualified barrister who was once Labour’s shadow attorney general, said Ryanair had ”failed spectacularly”.

…

“Ryanair failure to deplane the alleged racist offender, handing him over to the Spanish authorities probably means that he isn’t now prosecuted.

Would the Spanish have been interested in prosecuting a British man for racially abusing a fellow passenger? Is that even a crime in Spain?

“Suspect the pressure to turn this aircraft around quickly and get it airborne meant that they have allowed this alleged offender to remain on the aircraft,” said Mr Turner. ”He may now get away with it.”

Apparently racially abusing someone is now a crime so heinous aircraft should be grounded while the police are called to investigate. Never mind the inconvenience to the rest of the passengers and the knock-on effect on other flights coming in and out of Barcelona.

Now the man in the video is likely a pr*ck of the highest order and if he said stuff like this without serious provocation, he needs a good thrashing. But the situation is a little more complicated than the media is letting on. Ryanair had an opportunity to call the Spanish police to say a passenger is being unruly, but what would they have said? One passenger is yelling at another? Unless he’s presenting a security threat, I’m not sure the Spaniards would have been interested. Better for them to let the plane depart taking these assh*le Brits with them. So they couldn’t have got him arrested for security offences in Barcelona even if they’d wanted to, and now everyone’s complaining he’s not been arrested for racism. But it happened in Spain, and:

“Unfortunately because Ryanair is registered in Dublin not in the UK the alleged offence could only be tried by UK authorities if it was ‘in flight’ to the UK. Section 92(1) Civil Aviation Act s.92(4) defines ‘in flight’.

“If this incident had have happened on an alternative airline under ‘British Control’ or it was already ‘in flight’ to the UK the prosecuting authorities could have prosecuted.”

So the outrage is really that the rest of the world isn’t as interested in prosecuting Brits for being racist as the British police are.

Essex Police said they believed the incident had taken place at Barcelona Airport.

“Essex Police takes prejudice-based crime seriously and we want all incidents to be reported,” a spokeswoman said.

“We are working closely with Ryanair and the Spanish authorities on the investigation.”

The sole justification for the involvement of Essex Police is that the plane landed in Stansted. But when racism is the issue, the entire world apparently comes under their jurisdiction. I suspect the authorities in Barcelona didn’t even answer the phone when they called.

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Mum’s Army

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We recently learned teenage cannon-fodder taking selfies with Tommy Robinson at a motorway service station is beyond the pale according to the Army top brass, who wheeled out an Imam to scold everyone.

According to this paper (pdf), which is published by a Major Tim Towler in a branch of the military calling itself The Centre for Army Leadership, what is needed in the British Army is – you guessed it – more feminism:

Last year the Army was in the Times newspaper’s Top 50 Employers for Women and won a Workplace Gender Equality Award from Business in the Community.

Who knew the Army was eligible for Business in the Community awards?

And yet, a few weeks ago, I had an eye-opening, embarrassing, and worrying discussion on the challenges still being faced by women in the Army. Eye-opening, as I was not aware how unpleasant and discriminatory we can be; embarrassing, as I had naively hoped that our Army might be better; and, worrying, as we have a long way to go. The final remark, ‘there’s not much we can do’, irritated me, and spurred me to write this Insight. I felt ashamed, and I wholeheartedly disagreed.

I’m unsure of this chap’s regiment, so I’m going to go with the Royal Army Handwringing Corps.

One example of this opportunity is shared parental leave which was introduced in the UK in April 2015. Sadly, Morrissey highlights that ‘just 3,000 couples took shared leave in the first three months of 2016, compared with 155,000 mothers taking old-style maternity leave (and 52,000 fathers opting for shorter paternity leave)’. Men and women both want to play an active role in their children’s lives, but is taking parental leave for a few months seen as consistent with having a great career? How many women’s careers currently suffer from taking maternity leave? As leaders we can change this. But this goes beyond just career progression. UK childcare is the most expensive in the world.

When you have Army officers parroting The Guardian over maternity pay, we can safely assume the Army’s not what it was.

In 2010 Helena Morrissey founded The 30% Club, a UK business initiative aimed at achieving better gender-balanced company boards. Its goal was to reach 30% women on UK company boards. Ambitious noting that in 2008, ‘fewer than 12% of the directors at the UK’s top 100 listed companies were women.’ At the start, they struggled, acknowledging ‘that leaving those in the diverse or under-represented groups in charge of solving the problem of their own underrepresentation is an impossible task.’ They needed to ‘involve men with the ability to change things’.

What’s this got to do with the Army?

Noting that women make up 9.2% of our Army (and only 6.4% of the General Staff), men need to step forward.

I’ve noticed that, of the men who are always saying we need more women in senior positions, none are prepared to resign from their own posts to hand them the opportunity they deserve. What are you waiting for, major?

It is in our interest: greater diversity of thought, increased collaboration, greater personal and professional flexibility, and the encouragement to attain a better system that will enable us all to succeed both in and out of work.

Just don’t get caught taking selfies with Tommy Robinson. We don’t want that kind of diversity of thought.

The biggest short-term effect we can all have is through challenging everyday sexism.

Okay, that’s enough for today, I think. As I’m fond of saying, it’s quite obvious that the purpose of the modern British military is to further the socio-political aims of demented progressives. It sure as hell isn’t to fight and win wars or defend the nation against foreign aggression. If this paper is any guide, they might as well turn the Army over to the sociology department at the nearest poly.

And this amused:

The views expressed in Leadership Insights are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official thinking of the British Army or the Ministry of Defence.

No? Somehow I don’t think they’d publish an article which said feminism is the biggest threat to the British Army since the Third Reich.

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The truth about self-driving cars

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Regular readers will know I’m rather skeptical about the prospect of self-driving cars (1, 2, 3) and so I listened with interest about what somebody in charge of a car manufacture had to say about them.

He first listed the five degrees of autonomy, with Level 5 – the highest – allowing the human occupant to remove his hands and switch his brain off any time, anywhere. This is what most people think of when they talk about self-driving cars, the ability to go to sleep in the back or be blind drunk leaving the car to take care of everything. At the moment, production cars are fitted with Level 1, which is basically driver assistance. Level 2, which allows the driver to drop their concentration a little, is being introduced slowly.

He then talked about five technical areas which will need to be tackled in order to have Level 5 autonomous cars. I’ll take them each in turn.

1. Computing

Modern cars currently have around 50 black boxes carrying out various functions. In a fully autonomous car, they will likely have a single computer split 5 ways, with the parts carrying out the safety-critical functions kept well separate from the bits that run the entertainment system. Raw computing power is unlikely to be an obstacle to the development of autonomous vehicles.

2. Antennae and Sensors

The number and variety of sensors and antennae an autonomous vehicle will need is mind-boggling, particularly if redundancy is considered and 2-out-of-3 voting required to avoid spurious trips. The antenna on the Google car can be seen in the picture below:

A fully-autonomous car would need about 5 of these, mostly for communication outside the vehicle. It would need multiple 5G connections as well being able to connect via wi-fi and satellite. Sensors will include radar and infra-red cameras, which must be kept clear of dust, dirt, and rain.

3. Decision Making

Here’s where it starts to get complicated. What does the car do with all this information it’s receiving? The software is going to have to come pre-programmed with every situation the car can conceivably encounter so it knows what it’s looking at. Even if we charitably assume self-learning AI will be fitted to the cars, automobile accidents are often such that the occupants, be they human or computer, don’t get a second chance. The sheer size of this task in achieving Level 5 autonomy for cars is unprecedented.

4. GPS Mapping

GPS for civilian use is accurate to around 3-15m, although considerably better when the US military is lobbing missiles through windows and cave entrances. Level 5 autonomous vehicles will need GPS mapping to be accurate to within centimeters. If the car comes with an incredibly accurate GPS map installed in its brain, what happens when the map changes? A new road could be easily updated, but roadworks? Will we rely on the South Pembrokeshire District Council to inform whoever makes the maps in an accurate and timely manner every time they dig up the street?

5. Control and Action

Once a car has figured out where it is and what’s in front of it, what action does it then take? Does it jam on the brakes, swerve, or carry on? Software that could handle this in a normal street environment is not even on the horizon, and probably won’t be for another twenty years at least.

He emphasised that these 5 areas only cover what is required in the car; the infrastructure required to support autonomous cars was an equally gargantuan technological challenge which national or city governments will have to deliver.

Our visitor compared the challenge of Level 5 autonomous cars to landing on the moon, only without the single, dedicated organisation driving it. He didn’t say whether he thought we could replicate the Apollo 11 mission today, but my guess is we wouldn’t stand a chance. For a start, there is a worrying lack of diversity in the picture below:

I asked him whether he thought, as I do, this is all just a pipe-dream and we might never see Level 5 autonomous vehicles. He replied that, in his opinion, the technology will advance while there is an obvious benefit for the additional cost, as was clearly the case for ABS brakes and traction control. So it could well be that we get to around Level 4 autonomy before the costs and effort to reach Level 5 outweigh any benefit.

One interesting thing he said was that the most obvious place to use autonomous vehicles was on motorways, where the environment is much more strictly controlled than on other roads. The trouble is, only around 3-5% of road deaths in Britain occur on motorways, with the bulk taking place in urban areas or on rural roads. This is because on motorways the relative speeds of the cars isn’t too dissimilar, so in a crash cars just tend to get bounced around a bit while all heading in the same general direction. By contrast, accidents on country roads tend to involve cars converging at speed, hitting stationary objects, or leaving the road altogether. Therefore, the easiest and most obvious place to have autonomous cars will not save many lives, which kneecaps one of the main arguments of their proponents.

He also mentioned the legal aspects of autonomous cars. Currently drivers are responsible for accidents, and individual drivers insured. With autonomous cars, it will be the manufacturers which will be responsible, and this will drastically change the legal and insurance landscape in any country which adopts them. He didn’t put this forward as a reason autonomous cars won’t happen, he just mentioned it as another thing to consider. Regarding the technological challenges, he didn’t think there was any chance Level 5 autonomous vehicles will be possible for at least twenty years. My guess is it’ll be a lot longer than that.

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About once a week I get an email from some company, usually to do with energy, telling me about some development or other which might interest me (I seem to be on some list as an energy blogger). Normally I delete them but I’d just been given an assignment as part of my studies so decided I’d reply to one I got two weeks ago. First I rang the person who’d sent it to express my interest, left a message, and they emailed me back. Then I sent this email:

Many thanks for getting in touch. I am currently an MBA student Geneva, and I wonder if I may talk to one of your spokespeople about the change. In particular, I’d like to ask:

1) Why XXX was split off from YYY and sold?

2) What opportunities will arise from XXX being a stand-alone company? For example, will they have easier access to capital for new products or research projects?

3) What, if anything, will change in terms of management style of the company? For example, will regional offices be able to act more independently within a more streamlined approval process?

My time zone is GMT+2. I’m generally available weekdays between 9am and 4pm (my time), or after 10:30pm. Are any of your spokespeople based in Europe?

I never heard back from the person I’d spoken to. So why do you reckon that is? They actually read my blog and decided they’d better stay well clear? They don’t want to waste their time with students? Or my questions were stupid of awkward?

Amusingly, I also got this email the other day from someone who definitely doesn’t read my blog very closely:

My name is Sonya, and I’m the founder of Her Aspiration. I wanted to reach out to you after coming across this page of yours: https://www.desertsun.co.uk/blog/4074/

We recently put together a piece Donald Trump’s quotes about women… an annoying subject for all of us. We think with the elections coming up, the more people we educate about his attitude towards women, the better. 

Here it is: https://www.heraspiration.com/trump-quotes-about-women/

Would you consider adding a link to it in the page of yours I mentioned above? It’d really make my day 🙂

Let me know what you think!

Well, I’ve posted it, although not in the place requested. Do you think I made her day? Answers in the comments, please.

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The truth about electric cars

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Earlier this week we had a the head of a car manufacturer visit us and give us a couple of talks. The first thing I noticed was that he didn’t immediately start apologising for what his company does or grovel at the feet of our moral guardians and beg for forgiveness. Instead, he unashamedly said his company made cars of which they’re proud, and said the automobile represented an enormous leap in personal liberty. The fact that this was refreshing says a lot about modern corporations, whose CEOs are often found wringing  their hands while preaching moralistic piffle to placate a noisy minority who think any economic activity which makes people happy is evil. This chap was doing none of that, which made me like him right away.

Rather than speak about his company’s products, he instead spoke about the two major challenges the automobile industry is facing: electric vehicles and autonomous cars. On electric vehicles, he said pretty much the same as I have (1, 2) in that the battery technology is nowhere near mature enough to make the switch now, and probably won’t be for at least 20 years. He compared the power to weight ratio of Tesla’s batteries with the internal combustion engine in his company’s vehicles, as well as their respective useful lives. He thought there will be some improvements with a move to solid-state batteries, but without some sort of hydrogen cell electric cars aren’t going to replace petrol and diesel. He also spoke about the environmental effects of making, recycling, and disposing of batteries for the 100 million cars which are produced every year, including the mining of lithium. None of this will be new to readers of my blog. He didn’t go into the amount of copper that would be required to provide charging points in domestic streets on a national scale, but he did ask where the electricity was going to come from and whether it’s not a case of just shifting pollution from cities to somewhere else. I found all this interesting because it is so out of whack with current policy, which seems to be based on the notion that electric cars are just around the corner. This is from the BBC today:

A ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars should be brought forward by eight years to 2032, MPs have said.

The government’s current plans to ensure all new cars are “effectively zero emission” by 2040 were “vague and unambitious”, a report by Parliament’s business select committee said.

It also criticised cuts to subsidies and the lack of charging points.

The government said it aimed to make the UK “the best place in the world” to own an electric vehicle.

Politicians seem to think technological barriers to electric cars can be overcome by sheer force of will, as if car manufacturers are sitting on the solutions but are reluctant to apply them. I don’t know who is advising them, but given how the hard sciences have been corrupted by environmentalists and every institution in the land captured by lefties, it’s not too hard to imagine what form government consultations on electric cars takes. Even if they roped in a few representatives of car manufacturers, they’d probably just cave in under NGO and government bullying and tell them what they want to hear (with one eye on their pension and retirement date). My guess is these efforts will run into a brick wall, government-backed schemes will be scrapped having wasted millions in taxpayer cash, and the public will be left high and dry with the cars they’ve bought as official policy collapses into a confusing mess.

What our guest said about autonomous cars I shall write in another post.

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Weakness Exposed

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Kimberly-Clark and asked:

How long do you reckon it has left under its current management?

Let’s ask that question again in light of this story:

Kleenex is scrapping “Mansize” branding from its tissue boxes after 60 years on the shelves as consumers called it out for being sexist.

The company said the tissues would now be called “Extra Large”.

One customer questioned the firm after her four-year-old son asked if “girls, boys and mummies” can use them.

60 years of branding in the bin because of a single Twitter user who was supposedly parroting her four year old. It’s not looking good for them, is it?

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