Is It Deliberate Policy to Confuse Us?

 I've been thinking of late about Government policy and how it seems to be deliberately obtuse and confusing.

I'm looking at buying another car after my latest steed blew it's head gasket last weekend after a trip to London. I've waxed lyrical before about the reliability of cars, but since 2010 there seems to have been a steady decline as manufacturers attempted to build ever more complex cars for the same or less money. Especially in the small or fleet car market, cars seem to be made to last long enough to get through the warranty or lease period and who cares about any future owners outside that. 

It also struck me whilst looking at a replacement regarding government policy on vehicles that it's pretty insane. 

I'm talking about the Vehicle Excise Duty System and Ultra Low Emission Zone Pricing.

So, let's start. I want a cheap to run vehicle. Road Tax (VED) policy is slanted towards Diesel cars. Diesels attract lower VED and so are cheaper to run on a daily basis. Great you may think, but hang on: ULEZ policy is against Diesels and prefers petrol engine cars. 

So what the government is saying through policy is that one engine is good for the global environment, but bad for the local environment? 

Or to put is another way, the government are just out to fleece the driver any which way they can. Buy a Diesel or a Petrol engine car, the government (local or national) will take their particular pound of flesh from you.

But it's not only the confusing policy over emissions that is in the mix when it comes to buying a car. For instance to meet emissions targets, diesel engines are incredibly complex. They push fuel to pressures found only at the deepest oceans. There's an incredible amount of stress involved in the high-pressure fuel system of a common-rail diesel engine. At any time a component can fail. With the pressures used contributing to the expense of the item required to fix the fault. 

High-pressure diesel pumps are less tolerant of low quality fuel. Euro-6 standard diesels, the cleanest on the market currently, require low-sulphur diesel in order to reduce emissions, but that sulphur was part of the lubrication of the pump on the older engines. So either the pumps have to be made of harder materials, or they fail more regularly.

Not only that, the Diesel Particulate filters used on modern diesels clog up if you don't give the car a blast down the motorway every so often. They also require a solution of urea injected into the exhaust to reduce Nitrogen Dioxide emissions, commonly known as adblue.  Except on some diesel cars that additive is a dealer-only replacement.

Imaging going to a car dealership every time you wanted to top up the washer fluid or fuel. It's that stupid a design decision to make adblue a dealer-only replacement.

Anyway, I've digressed. Again.

The thing is, petrol vehicles attract higher VED but get away with entering ULE Zones without penalties. Diesels pay lower VED but get stung when entering ULE Zones and they are also more complicated and expensive to repair engine faults. 

So what do I do? I'm thinking that petrol may be the best option, because it's cheaper to repair. Diesel is cheaper to tax and I don't travel into ULE Zones on a regular basis. But the eye-watering cost of repairs to diesel engines and the regularity of failure is keeping me away.

Saying that, my petrol Astra only lasted 5 months and a buttload of bills before finally expiring.

Dilemmas!

As it is, for reliability I'm going to stick with what I know: Japanese or Swedish. That's a definite decision.

Another one is a manual gearbox. Even though I have a preference for a lazy automatic gearbox, most post-2010 small cars have either Constant-Velocity Transmission, Dual-clutch transmission or semi-automatic gearboxes. All three varieties of gearboxes have weaknesses. The duel-clutch and semi-auto gearboxes (where a computer shifts a manual gearbox for you) were relatively new around the time of the used cars I'm looking at.

Annnd, there were poorly implemented. The Ford Powershift gearbox being a particularly bad example, but the Volkswagen-Audi group also had a number of DSG gearbox failures.

So much so, there are a liability in a used car with no warranty to speak of.

So, a petrol with manual gearbox it is. Definitely Japanese or Swedish. Something with load-lugging capacity. I've just done the small hatchback thing and it doesn't fit my lifestyle with 11 grandkids and a mother 300 miles away. 

Which removes about 95% of the used cars available for sale in my price bracket. Fun Times!

The Trans issue: The Extremist Hijacking of a Legitimate Issue.

Okay, I've held back on this for a while, but I think I've formulated a decent article on the current issues around the Trans phenomenon.

I've often alluded to my past, intimating that I've been involved in alternative cultures. Let's just say that I'm pretty clued up on the subject and I've seen over the decades alternative sexualities struggle for acceptance and normalisation. As a child I knew what being gay was as my mother had a gay friend who lived with his partner.  Back in the sixties and seventies that was a pretty brave thing to do. 

Later in life I was also involved in the fetish "scene" and I've also known trans people and heard their stories. So I've seen first hand how all of the following evolved. I also knew about the idea of gender-fluidity before it was a thing. I used to dress pretty androgynously back in my youth and still at 60 my dress sense doesn't always conform. 

I've also been brought up to be pretty tolerant but I do get upset when you bully or tread on the rights of others. 

Lets go way back to the early years of transitioning. 

There were a small number of men and women that for whatever reason felt they were in the wrong body. That they really, truly felt that they were the opposite sex. 

Up until the sixties, there wasn't the ability medically to appear relatively convincingly as the opposite sex. But medical science brought about hormone treatments and physical surgery to implant breasts and alter sexual organs to look like the real deal. 

The difficult process back then filtered out all but the most determined of transitioners. They were so determined, quite a few lived successful lives in their new identities. 

Over the decades transitioning became easier thanks to medical science. The operations necessary have become routine, alongside advances in cosmetic surgery. 

Those transitioning fully have never had a problem until pretty recently. They went about their transition quietly, respectfully.

In parallel, there has always been a subset of the trans community that doesn't want to fully transition. They don't want to lose their original sexual organs. In fact they may not want to appear as the opposite of their true sex full time. But for them the appearance is the thing, not the actual sexual transition.

Crossdressers, for instance are a fetish embodiment of the phenomenon of wanting to be the opposite sex.

Those into Forced Feminisation and Female domination are similarly part of the fetish scene.

Drag Queens/Kings are more involved in the entertainment industry.

She-males have in the past been linked more to the porn industry. 

There have always been those streams of opposite-sexness that have not really been involved in the transitioning debate because they don't want to fully transition. Up until fairly recently they haven't been part of the trans movement either. It's only in the last 5-10 years that these other streams have now been incorporated for whatever reason into the trans movement.

And this is where the problem with the trans movement now stems from the inclusion of these "not-quite transitioning" elements. Along with a side order of  some elements of the Gay community.

As an example, prior to the inclusion of these elements, a male for instance would go through the difficult process of transitioning. Living for a time as their chosen sex and eventually moving to surgery to then be fully transitioned in appearance. They realised that while in the transitioning phase whilst appearing as a woman they were using women's spaces very much as a guest. They were using those spaces very much secondary to those who actually owned the space: women. 

Once fully transitioned, they became full members of the female club. In appearance they were the same, in attitude they already were the sex they had chosen to be. Because by definition they were psychologically female. 

But around the late 90's and early 2000's the Gay activist community came to the fore. The "Out Loud And Proud" mantra along with serious activist organisations like Stonewall pushed the Gay agenda like never before. The Labour Government of Blair and Brown quite rightly helped Gay rights and eventually introduced Civil Partnerships in 2005. This positive evocation of Gay rights eventually ended up with full equality and Gay Marriage. 

But this positive evocation , the "Loud and Proud" movement also brought in it's coat tails and helped radicalise the trans community. Now the trans community also wanted recognition. 

But instead of recognising the rights of women to have safe spaces, that those transitioning were guests in the spaces they wanted to use, the Trans community in it's zeal to ape what the Gay community eventually after decades won has trampled over women's rights. 

The crux of the matter is the wish to have instant gratification. The inference that a man can instantly identify as a woman without putting in the hard work. The years of hormone treatment, living as a woman for years before surgery. Understanding until they fully transition they are guests in the female space.

No, the current trans extremists want it all now and to hell with the rights of others.

Well sugar, your rights don't usurp the rights of others. I have a problem with that. Not you, but your attitude and lack of respect. Women have the right not to see a man with a beard call himself a woman, a woman has the right not to see a penis in a female changing room, and has the right not to be raped in a female space by a man calling himself a woman, the right not to be offended by a man denigrating what a woman is to just a set of physical features. A woman is a magnitude more than that. But extremists and fetishists are incapable of understanding that, or deliberately ignore it in order to further their selfish cause.

To be a woman, lose the beard, lose the penis, Understand that to BE A WOMAN you need to do some work and then you can call yourself a woman. 

There's an interesting question on how far body dysmorphia or whatever the medical term involved goes. I would have thought a person with a medical condition would want to fully become the sex their brain is telling them they are. Some half-assed transition with a dangly bit still in place wouldn't suffice.

The trans extremists don't understand how they are shitting all over the legacy of the people that have transitioned before them. The people that did the work, the campaigning, being guinea pigs for the medical procedures...  

The trans extremists don't care who they upset. They want instant gratification, very, very similar to the fetish streams of the trans community.

These extremists and activists promoting their rights over others are the same adult children that act up in supermarkets, that road-rage, that demand that they have everything for nothing. They have never been told no, never been denied anything by their parents. They are as emotionally stable as young children. They have never grown up. They have no respect.

In my opinion, their claim is not valid. It's people claiming their rights usurp the rights of others. I have a real problem with that. Their wish for instant gratification is not a legitimate human right, it does not trump other people's rights. 

Their claim to female spaces and to legitimate recognition is as legitimate as a child stamping it's feet or throwing itself to the floor in the supermarket and demanding that bag of sweets even though they didn't behave properly. 

And now we come to the "straight" involvement in the trans issue. The promotion of trans in the leftist ideology. Yet again a worthy cause has been hijacked, stirred up, poked, prodded and weaponised by the left. Now we're seeing gay kids being funnelled into transitioning because supposedly being trans trumps any other sexuality. 

This is yet another offensive aspect to the extremist trans ideology. It's now saying that it's not okay to be gay. Be trans instead. Appear like the opposite sex instead of embracing same sex attraction. I do wonder why the Gay community puts up with that and doesn't speak out against it.

If the trans community can't see how offensive that is, how offensive that their other claims are, then they really need to look in the mirror and have a word with themselves. The trans community has to be introspective and really see how much damage they are doing to their cause. They have to say to those outside the community that they are wrong to do hijack it for their own ideologies. They need to state they will uphold the rights of others and understand their claim to spaces are given, not taken. 

That's the way the gay community did it and they took the nation along with them. The forceful trampling of non-trans rights and the silencing of dissenting voices is not the way to go. The trans extremists need to understand the damage they are doing to the reputation and the image of trans people. They need to understand the disservice they are doing to the people they purport to represent.

There needs to be a social debate and a consensus on when a trans person has the right to claim to be the opposite sex. Slapping a wig on a bearded man is not that point. An analogy is slapping a wig on a pig and calling it human.

The other interesting feature is that this is all caused by the Male to Female side of Trans. There seems to be no issue with the Female to male Trans side. It's almost as if there's an element of misogyny creeping in. Like women had just better put up with it or else.. That's a really ugly attitude. That's the attitude of an abuser, a woman-beater, a rapist. All of which we have seen come out of the trans activist community and their followers.

But of course me being offended by extremist trans activists is just trans-phobia. 

Yeah, of course it is you simple childish twats. 

Burn, Baby, Burn...

 It's quite clear the elite ideologues will stop at nothing in order to further their agenda. Whether it's the "great reset", or "zero carbon", their zealousness know no bounds. Literally.

They will literally watch the world burn as they tear it all down and rebuild their twisted vision of utopia. 

They have already crashed the Western economy, they are now attacking a UK government attempting to mitigate the effects of the disastrous rise in energy prices wrought by their illogical ideological focus on zero carbon.

Way back when, governments would have been prudent: they would follow a plan, but would have made sure that (a) it was affordable for everyone and (b) there was a backup plan should anything go wrong.

Instead we had the rush to renewables, every GigaWatt of which had to be backed up by a fossil-fuelled energy source. But instead of replacing the fossil-fuelled energy with renewables and having them run side by side and let the renewables take over organically as costs reduce, we instead had the idiotic green levies that just line the pockets of the energy companies. It's not like they actually use the money for it's intended purpose.

Then we also had the idiotic linking of renewable energy to fossil-fuelled energy prices. So the supposed benefit of renewables i.e. cheap or almost free energy was negated. The whole reason for the green levies was that their "free" energy wouldn't generate the revenue needed for further investment.

So the renewable energy companies claim a double-bonus: levies and the bonus of receiving higher prices for their energy than it costs to generate.

Not only were renewables badly managed to the benefit of the energy companies and not the consumer, but the backups to renewables were destroyed too. Instead of keeping the coal-fired power stations just in case of a situation like we find ourselves in now, we instead installed gas-fired electricity generation plants. These plants are required because they can come on-stream quickly, exactly matching the peaks and troughs of renewable energy generation. 

The coal-fired plants are slower to bring on-line, but they would have provided a bigger and cheaper backup to renewables. Instead they were demolished. Erased from the landscape. If anything illustrates zealous ideology, it is this. We have no way of going back. We have no way of generating cheap energy. 

Successive governments painted us into a corner, with no way out. We are now slave to the machinations of the gas price spot market. We can't say "screw that, we'll go back to using coal", because those coal-fired plants are gone.

Nope, we are dependent on natural gas, like some methane addicted junkie. We have to pay top dollar, just like everyone else.

Governments did that. Their advisors, the zealots told them to. 

Tory and Labour governments. They are all the same, they listen to the same advisors, the same high priests, follow the same zealous ideology. 

Shame on you if you vote for them ever again.