Why was Grenfell covered in cladding? Climate targets

There is a refusal to acknowledge the role green policy played in this tragedy.

Article by James Heartfield.

Excerpts:

Yesterday’s phase-two report from the inquiry, led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, rightly highlights Rydon and Harley Facade’s evasion of basic safety oversight, and the complicity of both Kensington and Chelsea council and the UK government’s housing ministry. What it does not do is ask the obvious question – why was the cladding installed in the first place?

Grenfell Tower was part of this trend. In 2012, engineer Max Fordham wrote a report on renovating Grenfell for the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council with sustainability in mind. His aim was ‘to identify how, as part of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment scheme, the current energy and environmental-comfort problems can be addressed, and how the chosen solutions sit within the London Plan’s aim to bring existing housing stock up to the mayor’s standards on sustainable design and construction’. ‘The poor insulation levels and air tightness of both the walls and the windows at Grenfell Tower result in excessive heat loss during the winter months’, Fordham explained, and ‘the London Plan July 2011 aims to conserve energy’. Fordham argued that the council should have a ‘hierarchy’ of goals for the renovation. At the top of that list, it should: ‘Be lean: use less energy, in particular by adopting sustainable design and construction measures.’

After the overcladding was completed, the council boasted that it had clad ‘a high-rise block in the north of the borough’ – namely, Grenfell Tower – as part of a ‘greener housing’ strategy to ‘mitigate’ the causes of climate change. It admitted that because of the borough’s ‘limited capacity for new housing, we acknowledge the importance of seeking reasonable alterations to the existing building stock to mitigate the causes… of climate change’.

Since the Grenfell Tower fire, no new cladding has been put on to tower blocks to reduce climate change. Presumably, those CO2 targets were never quite as important as they seemed. Indeed, millions of pounds have since been spent removing dangerous cladding from these blocks. Billions more has been earmarked to complete the de-cladding of more than 500 buildings that are still considered dangerous.

There is no doubt that 72 lives were lost mainly because unscrupulous companies and legislators cut corners to slap cheap and dangerous materials on the sides of large working-class estates. But as wicked as the cost-cutting surely is, we cannot ignore why it was felt at the time that this cladding was necessary. This was a disaster fuelled by climate targets.

The Unholy Essence of Qu**r

Jordan Peterson speaks with Logan Lancing.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with author, speaker, and founder of ItsNotinSchools.com, Logan Lancing. They discuss the deceptive terminology of the postmodern Left and how the linguistic game hides a severe lack of substance, the true heart of Marxism as a theology, the indoctrination of our children at the institutional level, and the sacrifices it will take to truly right the ship.

Logan Lancing is an author, speaker, and the founder of ItsNotinSchools dot com. He is best known for his public lectures on critical race theory, culturally relevant pedagogy, and queer theory. Lancing’s website explains what these “woke” theories are, identifies where they come from, and exposes how they show up in children’s classrooms nationwide.

This episode was recorded on July 30th, 2024

Snippets:

The Left have the social and emotional levers. We have kittle defence against these, and they are rusty and dusty.

Resentful, hedonistic and power-mad against everyone else.

What Ludwig von Mises Meant by “Democracy”

Article by Ryan McMaken.

Excerpt:

“Democracy” is one of those terms that is essentially useless unless the one using the word first defines his terms. After all, the term “democratic” can mean anything from small-scale direct democracy to the mega-elections we see in today’s huge constitutional states. Among the modern social-democratic Left, the term often just means “something I like.”

The meaning of the term can also vary significantly from time to time and from place to place. During the Jacksonian period, the Democratic party—which at the time was the decentralist, free-market, Jeffersonian party—was called “the Democracy.” By the mid twentieth century, the term meant something else entirely. In Europe, the term came to take on a variety of different meanings from place to place.

For our purposes here, I want to focus on how one particular European—Ludwig von Mises—used the term.

Although many modern students of Mises are often highly skeptical of democracy of various types, it is clear that Mises himself used the term with approval. But, Mises used the word in a way that was quite different from how most use it today. The Misesian view contrasts with modern conceptions of a “democracy” in which majority rule is forcibly imposed upon the whole population. Because modern democratic states exercise monopolistic power over their populations, there is then no escape from this “will of the majority.”

Misesian democracy is something else altogether.

Mises’s vision of democracy must be understood in light of his support for unlimited secession as a tool against majoritarian rule. For Mises, “democracy” means the free exercise of a right of exit, by which the alleged “will of the majority” is rendered unenforceable against those who seek to leave.

Continue reading here.

The Fatal Conceit

That’s the title of Friedrich Hayek’s final book (published 1988).

According to the Wikipedia page of the book, the title drives “from a passage in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), though the exact phrase does not occur in Smith’s book.”

Here is that Adam-Smith quote, according to Wikipedia:

‘The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. … He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces on a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces on the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse [choose] to impress upon it.’ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1984, VI.ii.2.17: 233-4.

Prelude to ‘Lohengrin’

One of my favourite music pieces

This (mostly) serene yet powerful and profound piece of music was composed by Richard Wagner sometime between 1845 and 1848.

Here it is, with an orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle (9 minutes).

Here‘s the Wikipedia entry on the whole opera.

Here‘s the synopsis on the same page.

Summary of the synopsis:

The people of the Brabant are divided by quarrels and political infighting; also, a devious hostile power left over from the region’s pagan past is seeking to subvert the prevailing monotheistic government and to return Brabant to pagan rule. A mysterious knight, sent by God and possessing superhuman charisma and fighting ability, arrives to unite and strengthen the people, and to defend the innocent noblewoman Elsa from a false accusation of murder, but he imposes a condition: the people must follow him without knowing his identity. Elsa in particular must never ask his name, or his heritage, or his origin. The conspirators attempt to undermine her faith in her rescuer, to create doubt among the people, and to force him to leave.