What Happened Was...
Started to wonder if Dobby was trying to keep us from going to Kennebunk!
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Started to wonder if Dobby was trying to keep us from going to Kennebunk!
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As long as everybody is OK, everything is OK. And remember that autos these days are designed with "crumple zones," that absorb forces by deformation precisely to reduce the force of shocks to people inside. It would appear that the hatch door is indeed a crumple zone! Oh, and your seat belts probably need to be checked.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading about a counterintuitive safety measure discovered by BMW (they make the mini, remember) engineers some time back (maybe 10 years now). It used to be that to do crash safety tests for different designs, they had to make a modification to an auto, crash it and see what happened--very slow and expensive. So they did their best to build a computer model of a crashing car. It told them that weakening the B pillars (the ones just to the rear of the front seats) would make it safer for the occupants. It didn't seem sensible, but going over all the modeling and calculations without finding anything wrong, they built that kind of car, crashed it--and sure enough, it WAS safer.
It should be a good lesson for the kid, too.
Thanks, Alan ... especially for the tip of having the seatbelts checked. Will do. The Mini Service crew here are excellent, which really helps. Wondering how long I’ll be without my car. Had some things I’d planned to do...
DeleteBut first, looks like a baptism this morning.
Granted that the collision reports I typically read are for far worse crashes, but I often read that the police find signs of the belts having been damaged by the arresting mechanism and vice versa--it's a way they can tell if the seat belts were fastened at the time of the crash. Most unlikely in your case, but it can't hurt to ask. Ounce of prevention and all that.
DeleteGlad you weren't hurt, but getting hit like that is still a big shock to the system.
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I continue to wonder if the DNC will find another location for the debate in Los Angeles. It's not a good time of year for a stadium, but there certainly ought to be an inside venue that is available.
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I certainly hope the Stormont talks succeed! It's a disgrace that there has been, essentially, no government in Northern Ireland for so long. I don't know who's fault that is, nor do I care. It's a disgrace.
DeleteI should have posted this on Friday.
ReplyDeleteFrom The Economist
Bagehot
Jeremy Corbyn’s crushing defeat
Don’t expect the Labour Party to move back to the centre quickly
Print edition | Britain
Dec 13th 2019
THE CONSERVATIVE party did everything it could to hand an election victory to Labour. It gestated Brexit in its womb and then failed to deliver it. It presided over ten years of austerity that strained public services to breaking point. It promoted fanatics while expelling first-raters. Yet Labour has managed its fourth loss in a row and its second under Jeremy Corbyn, and not just any old loss. As we went to press Labour was set to win only around 200 seats, its worst performance since 1935.
Under Michael Foot in 1983 Labour responded to a similar humiliation by moving to the centre. You might imagine that this would happen in double-quick time today, too—that Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and comrade in arms, would be marched out of Labour headquarters in sackcloth and ashes; and that Seamus Milne, chief strategist, and his fellow Marxists would be subjected to a suitably Stalinesque show trial. Having won three elections under a moderate leader, Tony Blair, Labour has now lost four as it has charged ever further to the left. Enough said, surely?
Not in Britain’s looking-glass politics. In a graceless speech on being re-elected to his seat in Islingon North, Mr Corbyn attacked the press and said that, though he will not lead the party into the next election, he will stay on for an interim period while it sorts out its future, probably in alliance with John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor. More important, Corbynism as a philosophy is probably here to stay for some time to come; Labour’s ideas were “eternal”, Mr Corbyn said. Potential successors will blame the messenger rather than the message. Blairism will remain in the grave.
One reason for this is that the Corbynites have been as successful in taking over the party as they have been unsuccessful in taking over the country. They dominate the National Executive Committee (NEC) which determines the rules of any leadership campaign. They have a 40,000-strong Praetorian guard in the form of Momentum, which has a unique ability to combine mass mobilisation with bureaucratic manoeuvring. In the most recent election to the NEC, eight of the nine successful candidates were Momentum-backed. The trade unions have also moved sharply to the left since Mr Blair’s day, in part because New Labour failed to cultivate the moderate unions and in part because a succession of mergers has shifted power to radical activists from the public sector. The party may have managed to elect about 200 MPs, but they are the most radical in decades.
[continued below]
In any case, the party as a whole has little desire to return to the centre. Mr McDonnell responded to the exit poll by saying that this was a Brexit election but that Labour’s policies went down well on the doorstep. There is more than a grain of truth in this. The British Election Study shows that most voters take “left-wing” positions on questions such as whether society is rigged in favour of the rich. Britain’s one centrist party, the Liberal Democrats, had an even worse night than Labour. Moreover, Labour’s intellectual and emotional energy is still on the left. Mr McDonnell has inspired a generation of think-tankers to ask fundamental questions about the machinery of capitalism. Protest movements such as Extinction Rebellion continue to radicalise the young.
DeleteEven so, how did a party created to represent the working-class manage to lose so many working-class voters in its heartland to an Old Etonian member of the metropolitan elite such as Mr Johnson? This, the biggest question the party now faces, more obviously elicits a left-wing reaction than a centrist one. Gloria De Piero, a former MP for Ashfield, argued in a pre-mortem on the election that if the “red wall” collapses Labour must resolve that these seats will never be vulnerable again. “They’re not just parliamentary seats. They are the seats of our soul...They are us”. The party will agonise whether it has let itself become so London-based that it has lost its roots in the North. It will also agonise whether its enthusiasm for a second referendum alienated its traditional voters.
The combination of institutional power and ideological fashion means that the Labour Party is a killing field for moderate leadership candidates. Liz Kendall, who ran in 2015, was humiliated; Tristram Hunt decamped to run the Victoria and Albert Museum; Andy Burnham became mayor of Greater Manchester; and Chuka Umunna left to set up a new party. Tom Watson’s decision to give up both his job as deputy leader and his parliamentary seat to become a fitness instructor was born of despair. As champion of the party’s moderate wing, he crunched the numbers, which is his forte, and decided that the future was deepest red.
Mr Watson is right. There will not be a Blairite dog in the coming leadership fight. The champions of the party’s moderate wing are Sir Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry. The leading champions of the left are Rebecca Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner. Sir Keir is the leader-in-waiting according to the betting markets but may fall at the first hurdle because the party is desperate to elect a woman. Ms Thornberry may get a fillip from the sheer scale of the humiliation but she embodies Labour’s London problem. Ms Long-Bailey and Ms Rayner both tick all the right boxes. They are working-class northerners who have powerful institutional support—Ms Long-Bailey is a protégé of Mr McDonnell and Ms Rayner is a favourite daughter of Britain’s biggest union, Unison.
Despite their shortcomings—Ms Long-Bailey is robotic in her delivery and Ms Rayner weak on policy details—both embody a powerful ideological formula: Corbynism without Corbyn and left-wing economic policies without his noxious foreign policy. Mr Corbyn was toxified by his habit of praising left-wing dictatorships, palling around with terrorists and turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism. But his broader views on the case for more public spending and unrigging Britain’s rigged economy won widespread support. Given their advance into Labour’s working-class fastness, the Tories’ worst nightmare is not a Labour Party that returns to the old centre as defined by Tony Blair. It is a Labour Party that fashions a blue-collar philosophy which combines an activist government with a return to patriotism and traditional working-class values.
Might I venture that the extinction of the mining and manufacturing (dare I say "proletarian"?) industries in the Midlands and North just might have had something to do with the attitudes of the voters thereabouts? Just as the loss of English-owned businesses such as mining, shipbuilding etc. in Scotland have broken ties and sympathy with England.
ReplyDeleteIt's complicated. Larger cities largely remain reliably Democratic whether they have replaced lost manufacturing jobs with finance-oriented jobs (Chicago, Pittsburgh) or are just starting to claw their way back from decades of severe depression (Detroit). But I get the impression things are different in smaller cities that had maybe one or two factories that no longer exist. Those are the places I'm looking for Barnie to pull back into the Democratic fold.
DeleteThe Midlands and North I was referring to are parts of England.
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