by John Ward
With clinical timing, the small circuit-board controlled paraffin heater I use during mild weather had an epi three days ago….just a year and 16 hours after I bought it. I’ll leave all of you to work out the length of the guarantee without any help from me. The appliance had been mumbling quite happily for ten minutes when it cut out and the screen displayed ‘E09’ – a sort of cross between Room 101 and Error 404 – Orwell meets Kafka while out for a stroll with Solzhenitsyn.
The manual (like everything else these days, virtual) said there must be a dust blockage, probably in the bessemer sprocket loop connection throughput filter (Fig 14). So I disassembled the single incabloc warp booster connecting the bessemer sprocket loop connection throughput filter to the internalised paraffin splash-feed and, with a small paint brush, removed five tiny bits of gunk.
Repositioning the parts carefully (avoiding the potential nightmare of warp-loop in the splash-feed, see Page 113) I switched the little chap back on again, and he worked perfectly.
What, you might ask, is the moral of this story? Well, not much actually, because seven minutes later we were back to EO9 again: and as a man who knows his paint brush from his bessemer sprocket, I’m here to tell you this usually means trouble.
So it was with a heavy heart and muttered Latin oaths that your correspondent clicked on ‘Trouble Shooting’ in the online manual. If you’ve never encountered 21st Century after-sales trouble shooting, then your life has been blessed. The title suggests a fun day out during which – armed with a solid-gold Purdey – one shouts “Pull!” and evil-looking gremlins fly into the air to be smashed by both barrels.
It’s not like that at all: more accurately, it’s like stumbling by accident into a seminar called Modern Life for Morons, (‘check if appliance is plugged in’) in which some attempt is made by the instructor to let light into the Blair-educated head; this ends in failure, whereupon the invigilator walks offstage and shoots himself. Thus he has no trouble in shooting himself, but the trouble itself remains stubbornly unshot.
This coincides with the real-life point at which the Trouble Shooting section opines as follows:
If the problem persists, take the appliance back to your local dealer
Note how the manufacturer deftly absolves himself of all blame here, by reassigning his Trouble as something that is now your Problem. There was no trouble to shoot because it turned out to be a problem, so over to you Mr Retailer.
Except of course that I live in France, and so be in no doubt: it’s my problem. An honest manual under such circumstances would proffer the advice, “Go out and buy another one”. Put your gadget into a French retailer, and you might just as well buy the bloody thing a First Class Ticket on the next Cunard round-the-World cruise; because it’ll be more than eighty days before you see it again.
So armed with my 22 years experience of French service après vente, this is what I did. I took the plug out of its socket, bade the heater goodnight and went off to bed. The next day, I used the wood-burning wall insert instead. And then yesterday, I switched on the paraffin heater….since when it has been functioning like the little Angel it usually is.
The British pre-war Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was fond of remarking, “Doing absolutely nothing is a perfectly valid strategy”. If you live in France, it has always been the best course of action.
But since Covid19, that rule has changed. As our warm October here turned into a freezing November, I toddled off to my local DIY store to purchase more paraffin bottles. It was there I discovered that we are about to enter the age of double-digit inflation. For the bottle that cost €13.95 last February now weighed in at a whopping €23.50. This is South American banana-republic stuff.
Energy inflation is upon us. And as usual, the “experts” at the pay grade below the micro-élite New Order fail to understand its uniquely dangerous nature.
There are two elementary mistakes being made by those who see only the trees now, as opposed to the wooden floor it might later become. The first is a simple mistake in basic arithmetic – and we aren’t talking pure maths here or exponential complexity. Surf around the web of Herd Opinion, and you’ll pick up this kind of fluff [my emphases]
‘The historic plunge in global energy consumption in the early months of the Covid-19 crisis last year drove the prices of many fuels to their lowest levels in decades. But since then, they have rebounded strongly, mainly as a result of an exceptionally rapid global economic recovery…global oil demand continues to recover from its 2020 lows, and prices at the pump in many countries are at or near their highest levels in years. Companies around the world are expected to continue to draw on their oil stocks to help meet demand until the end of this year.‘
Observe the highlights: plunges to lowest levels in decades have somehow produced the highest levels in years. Furthermore, with high oil stocks at the same time.
Sorry oilco apologists, but this is BS of the smelliest order: a period of just ten months does not produce historic lows turning into historic highs….especially when there’s a glut of stocks. What we’re seeing is an energy sector (facing very high costs of new exploration and dumb politicians pushing dumber alternative energy solutions) milking the age-old cow before she heads for the abattoir. And they’re being given permission to pull this stunt by the Jerome Powells and Mario Dragis of our New World because they want to see debt inflated away – and cash devalued – before the Digital Reset kicks in
Supply and demand, folks….supply and demand: yes, demand has been revitalised, but supply is more than sufficient to meet it. That will change if the 2022-2023 period continues to rip ahead with slightly overheated inflation. But that’s not what we’re going to see.
This is where the second nightmare hasn’t been factored in. Because unlike 1929 or 1972, the arrival of mass car manufacture and the internet respectively mean that energy inflation in 2021 drives everything. Nor – after either of those two historical horrors – was nothing but Bandaid applied to the 2008/9 near-disaster.
These are the only considerations that really matter: bourses are obscenely overvalued and the bankers need an escape excuse; they and their Secret State allies need hyper-inflation – preferably accompanied by a war – to excuse global theft and totalitarian control while making blocist debt disappear; they need useful idiot radical Green Leftists to approve that control; among their number are genocidal billionaire headcases who regard mechanised and transhuman developments as effectively rendering human drones expensive to feed and prone to violence; and last but not least, globalist business (not only Big Pharma) needs a guaranteed monopolous system of consumption whereby marketing overheads can be dumped in favour of top-down quasi political regimented consumption.
Energy consumption today is tied to every inflation typology – exploration, production, innovation, distribution, competition, media exposure and end-consumer usage. This represents a secular Buddhist level of connection and interpendence never seen before in recorded history. We are entering a brief mini-epoch in which none of the costs outlined above can possibly be absorbed to produce a profit margin….until such time as the top-down quasi political regimented consumption defined above enables it.
That is our window of opportunity, and it is the only one left. For after that, a world of plenty for the few who control intelligent but placid slaves is the only possible outcome.
One final point of ‘drawing together’ before we part company today. I cannot stress enough the degree to which we have arrived at where we are via an utter failure to complain about bad behaviour. I see this very much as one of the major moral dilemmas of our age. On the one hand, the breezy Freudian relativists preach the acceptance gospel of, “OK you were treated badly – but for the sake of your mental health, put it behind you and move on.” Somehow these days – if you don’t deny the past – you have no place in the future. I could not disagree more: “moving on” is another way of saying “I don’t care about the socio-cultural ramifications”. We will never get a better world until we bring manipulative exploitation to book, be that at the macro or micro level. I am often accused of being obsessive. Frankly, obsessives ensure everything from trains running on time to action against every kind of cruelty. I’m not saying everyone should be like me: I merely observe that calling me ‘obsessive’ is a veiled compliment I would replace with the word uncompromising.