Storage

Inside Dymon Storage, Ottawa, Ontario

It’s 4 am and I’m alone at a Dymon Storage facility in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.  Storage facilities like this have been springing up like mushrooms throughout the Western world for the last few decades.  Dymon has eight locations in Ottawa alone, and that’s just one firm’s locations in one city.  There must be hundreds of thousands of them throughout Europe and North America.

Indigenous people generally have few possessions, but consider the ones they have to be very valuable because they are mostly hand made and a great deal of time, skill and love goes into making them.  We, on the other hand, have so many mass produced possessions that we don’t know what to do with them, so we put them into storage facilities like this one.

I’m on the third floor of the building and there are maybe a couple of hundred storage units on this floor.  Same again on the floor below me.  There’s a grid of corridors with hundreds of storage pods leading off them, protected by hundreds of identical metal shutters.  The whole thing is bathed in soft, uniform white light, it’s very quiet, and the atmosphere reminds me of the back room of an undertaker’s parlour, the part the public never sees, where the bodies lie on identical metal shelves.  Maybe this where our civilisation goes to die?

I’m not usually up and about at 4am, but I’m here trying to sort out our stuff, the stuff we put into storage in Canada before moving to the Isle of Man.  We dithered for months trying to decide whether to give it away, dump it or ship it to the Isle of Man, and in the end we decided to do all three: give some of it away, dump some of it and ship the rest.  So I’m here sorting it out.

Back home it’s 9am, but here it’s 4am, I’m still running on Isle of Man time, hence the unearthly hour.  I’m the only human being in the building.  In earlier times, there would probably have been a custodian or nightwatchman, but now with the march of progress, s/he has been replaced by a central computer which controls all the building’s functions.  Being the only person in the building at 4am plays strange tricks with the computer’s algorithms.  It is programmed to assume that if nobody presses any buttons anywhere in the building for half an hour, the building is empty and it should switch off the lights to save energy.  So every half an hour, all the lights go off and I have to walk to the elevator in the dark and press an elevator button to signal to the computer that I’m still here and it should switch the lights back on again (there are no human-controlled light switches).  A real custodian wouldn’t have made that mistake: he would know that human beings don’t just disappear.

So I’m sitting in my storage pod surrounded by the debris of nine wasted years in Ontario: photograph albums, a wedding dress, Christmas tree ornaments made at school by the kids, the obligatory six years of tax papers, you know the sort of thing.  Then my mind starts to play strange tricks on me.  Do the things in this storage facility know they have been abandoned by their owners?  Are they, in some way, sentient?  Do they have souls?  Stupid questions I know, but that’s what you do when you’re three thousand miles from home, lonely and jet lagged to hell and in one of the world’s most unlikely buildings with only a dysfunctional computer for company.  You think stupid thoughts.

I know a tax return doesn’t have a soul – that would be absurd – but how about something more personal like a wedding dress?  And what happens if, over the years, the two people who got married drift apart, maybe separate, maybe find other people to be with?  Does the wedding dress lose its soul and become just an ordinary piece of fabric again – does it stop being special?

My contract with the storage company says that if I stop paying the rental on the unit, after 30 days the company has the right to clear out the unit and dispose of the stuff.  I expect that happens quite a lot.  You can’t bear to part with your stuff, but you have nowhere else to put it, so you put it into storage intending to come back for it.  But that time never comes, and you get busy with other things, lose interest in it, run out of money, get sick, maybe even die, and then the junk removal people come and take it away.  If things have souls, that must be the biggest possible disappointment – being abandoned by your owner.

I wonder what is behind those hundreds of other steel shutters which line the corridors of the building.  Drugs, guns, cash, stolen goods, dead bodies, God knows what all could be in there.  But mostly I expect it’s just stuff like mine, of sentimental value to the owner but little use or interest to anyone else.

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin

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Monumental destruction

Rushen Abbey, Ballasalla, Isle of Man

In 1536, Henry VIII of England began his infamous “Dissolution of the monasteries” in which he disbanded monasteries, priories, convents and friaries in England, Wales and Ireland. One casualty of this process was Rushen Abbey in the Isle of Man, which was dissolved in 1540. Today, the romantic ruins are a magnet for tourists who can enjoy a presentation of the abbey’s history followed by a strawberry tea in the restaurant, and perhaps some wedding photographs.
On 21 June 2017, the retreating forces of ISIS destroyed the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul with explosives. The mosque was built in the 12th century by Noureddine al-Zanki, a famed commander and a contemporary of Saladin, and was a significant holy site in Iraq.
On 12 August 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist protesters descended on the town to protest against the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee. The bronze statue has stood in a public park in the town since 1924. The white supremacist protesters were met by anti-racist protesters, violence was used by both sides, and the event culminated in a car being driven by a white supremacist protester into a group of anti-racist protesters, killing one and injuring 19 others.
Three monuments in three countries, with apparently little in common. And yet…
On this blog I generally try to avoid commenting on foreign affairs. Goodness knows, we have enough domestic crises of our own to worry about, with loose sheep on the mountain road, horse trams obstructing traffic on Douglas promenade, and Ramsey Pier falling into the sea, and we don’t have time to worry about goings-on in far away countries about which we know little, like the United States. However, there are worrying similarities between these three events which I felt were worthy of comment.
In all three cases, monuments were destroyed or slated for removal for basically ideological reasons. Henry VIII wanted to consolidate his power as both Head of State and Head of the English Church, and the Catholic monasteries, with their allegiance to the Pope, stood in the way of that and had to be removed. ISIS destroyed the mosque because it held symbolic importance to them: its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi used it in 2014 to self-declare the “caliphate” and to let it fall into enemy hands would have been unthinkable. They have destroyed numerous other monuments and historic sites for being insufficiently aligned with Sunni Islam. The statue of General Lee symbolises freedom of speech and racial segregation to the white supremacists; to the anti-fascists it symbolises racial oppression and abuse of human rights.
Cycles of ideological tolerance and intolerance come and go, and I don’t think the time we are living in now is much less tolerant than previous times – yet. Some pretty unpleasant things were done in the name of ideology in medieval times. For example, here on the Isle of Man in the 18th century, if you solemnised marriage without a licence you were liable to have your ears nailed to a post and subsequently cut off while still attached to the post. Read all about it here:
http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/fulltext/folklore/ch09.htm
However, there are signs that the pendulum may be starting to swing back from tolerance towards intolerance. The statue of General Lee has stood in its current place since 1924, and the al-Nuri mosque since the 12th century, and nobody had thought of removing either of them until now. That suggests that what is happening now may be different from what has gone before.
It may seem presumptuous for the Isle of Man (pop. 83,000) to be giving advice to the United States (pop. 323 million) about ideological tolerance, but I’ll try anyway.  General Lee was apparently a talented and brave soldier who rose through the ranks of the Confederate army to become one of its generals, and then general in chief. He was also a cruel slave owner who encouraged his overseers to severely beat slaves captured after trying to escape. He appeared to have a confused moral stance on slavery, writing in a letter to his wife that slavery was “a moral and political evil.” Like many other historical figures, he had contradictions, imperfections and inconsistencies, and a moral compass which was probably not unusual for the period of history he lived in, but different from our own. For better or worse, he played an important role in history, and he can’t be airbrushed out of history by removing his statue.
So my diplomatic Manx solution to this problem would be to leave Lee’s statue in place, and to erect opposite it a matching bronze statue to the Union General Ulysses S. Grant, to whom Lee surrendered in 1865. As far as I know, there are statues to Grant in Washington and New York but none in Virginia. There you are, problem solved, mine’s a pint. Now I’ll get back to sheep herding.
Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin

Beware of the Sheep

www.postpeakmedicine.com

Post Peak Medicine book is completed

A sign of things to come? – opium poppies on Douglas Promenade, Isle of Man, planted by the Department of Infrastructure.  They are legal to grow here, but don’t try this at home.

The book “Post Peak Medicine” which I started in May 2010, is now completed.  At least, it’s as completed as it ever will be; I will keep tinkering with it around the edges and trying to improve it, but it’s now substantially in its final form.  You can download it here.  Here are some of the things which have changed, or haven’t changed, in the latest edition.

My original intention was that the book would be a collaborative effort, that physicians and nurses would write sections on their areas of interest and that I would merely compile and edit it.  With the exception of the section on nursing, that hasn’t happened and I have ended up writing most of the book myself.  That is largely because in the last few years, the concept of peak oil has fallen off the public radar compared to its high point around 2008, with many people believing that it has gone away, or it was a mistake to begin with, or it has been solved by fracking, renewable energy, Elon Musk’s hyperloop pods or some such nonsense.  I believe that is not the case, peak oil is very much here and it will start to bite increasingly severely in the next few years, but I don’t think we can afford to wait until people wake up to finish the book.

One thing which hasn’t changed is that it’s still free to download.  However, there is now a Paypal “donate” button on the download page.  I am not trying to make a profit out of this, merely to cover the annual website hosting fee which I have paid myself for the last seven years.  A suggested donation is three US or Canadian dollars or two British pounds, but nobody is checking whether you donate or not.

People sometimes set up a Facebook page for this kind of thing, in the belief that Facebook is free.  It isn’t: the product which is being sold on Facebook, dear reader, is you.  Post Peak Medicine carries no advertising, and nobody is going to harvest your details with the idea of trying to sell you something.

There are a couple of new sections in the book since the last edition: a quite lengthy Author’s Preface explaining why the book was written, and a section on Surviving the Dark Age – A User’s Guide (OK, a bit tongue in cheek, but if there’s a Dark Age coming you might as well at least try to enjoy it).

I have written, re-written and re-re-written the chapter on Herbal Medicine which was by far the most difficult chapter in the book.  Most herbal medicine books place too much emphasis on “traditional knowledge” and too little emphasis on whether the remedies actually work, and most herbal remedies have had little or no formal testing.  I have used a few general principles in deciding whether to include a herbal remedy or not:

If a medicine has been widely used for thousands of years, I have given it the benefit of the doubt and included it without looking too hard for scientific evidence.  Examples include alcohol, opium and cannabis.

If there has been a scientific study which has validated a medicine, I have tended to include it, even if the evidence is weak; however, I have excluded medicines where multiple studies have shown no effect.  An example of the latter is colloidal silver, beloved of survivalists.  Don’t waste your silver trying to dissolve it in water: buy some proper medicine with it instead.

If a medicine is thought to have some toxic effects on some people, I have tended to include it on the basis that it probably has some biological effect as opposed to being just a placebo.  Example: Kava has been implicated in liver damage including some deaths, and is banned in Europe and Canada for this reason, but still used in the USA.

Finally, I am dividing herbal medicines into a “must have” core list and a “nice to have” list of plants which grow locally.  The latter is obviously going to vary according to your own local area so you are going to have to compile your own local lists.  I am starting work on a slim companion book “Medicinal Plants of the Isle of Man” for readers who live on the Isle of Man.

I have tried to liven the book up a bit by adding more hyperlinks, particularly to short YouTube videos.  This may seem a bit odd for a book which is supposed to outlive the Internet, but as time goes by, the videos can be embedded in the book, or the book can be printed on paper without any significant loss of meaning.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome.  Good luck.

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin

Brexit 2 – Will They Never Learn?

Theresa May does not look happy

Greetings from Brexit Land, the country which gave you Brexit 1 and is now pleased to present the sequel – Brexit 2. If you’ve been paying any attention to the mainstream news lately, you may have heard that the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, recently called a General Election and that this resulted in a hung Parliament (a Parliament where no single party has an overall majority). Before the election, Mrs May had a good working majority and two years of her term left to run. She didn’t have to call the election at all, but did so in the expectation that the people would return her to power with a bigger majority, effectively giving her a vote of confidence in the Brexit negotiations. They didn’t. She has singlehandedly managed to derail her party, the country and the Brexit negotiations with scarcely any help from anyone else at all.

As if this wasn’t incredible enough, it’s even more astonishing that she should be repeating exactly the same mistake made by the former British Prime Minister David Cameron a year ago. If you remember, Cameron decided, for reasons best known to himself, to seek an unnecessary referendum on whether the UK should leave the EU, expecting that the people would vote the way he wanted them to (to remain in the EU). They didn’t. They voted to leave, giving rise to the Brexit we all know and love today.

Maybe there is a virus lurking in the fabric of 10 Downing Street (the British Prime Minister’s residence) which causes strange mental health symptoms in successive occupants. However, a more likely explanation is that we are in the early stages of what Kathy McMahon has called a “slow, sucky collapse” and what John Michael Greer has called a “stair step descent”. Let’s look at this through the “slow collapse” lens and see if we can make sense of it.

The main issue which derailed Cameron was immigration. The British public were uneasy about the flood of immigrants into the country, mainly economic migrants from eastern European Union countries and refugees from the wars in the Middle East. We were obliged under the terms of the EU treaty to accept an unlimited number of the former, and there was public unease about the limited controls on the latter and whether a proportion of them might be Islamic extremists. Cameron failed to read the public mood correctly and did not appreciate the strength of those concerns. He resigned immediately after the Brexit vote was announced.

The reason for the large number of economic migrants is because of the differential between the poor economic conditions in their home countries, and the better (although still not great) economic conditions in Britain. This is because economic growth is faltering across the world, but patchily, faster in some places than others. Although economic conditions in Britain may look relatively good to someone who is living in Poland, we still have to borrow money every year to plug the gap between Government spending and income.

The current round of wars in the Middle East, and the rise of ISIS, have their roots in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the political and economic chaos which followed. The US invasion of Iraq, in turn, had its roots in US domestic peak oil in 1970, the point at which the US stopped being self sufficient in oil production and became increasingly dependent on Middle East oil. After all, if the US had enough domestic oil of its own, why would it waste blood and treasure invading Iraq? And if political and economic conditions in the Middle East were good and everyone had decent jobs, homes and incomes, why would anyone be interested in supporting ISIS?

Fast forward to last week, and Theresa May’s general election fiasco had two principal causes: the fact that, like Cameron before her, she had failed to read the public mood correctly, and the fact that as Home Secretary in 2010 she implemented budget cuts which resulted in the loss of 20,000 police officers. The budget cuts were made as a result of adverse economic conditions and the need for the Government to rein in public borrowing.

Unfortunately, in the run-up to the election there were two major terrorist incidents in Britain: a suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester on 22 May and a van-and-knife attack on London Bridge on 3 June, both inspired by ISIS: see above. This focused the electorate’s attention on the need for sufficient police numbers to provide adequate security, and Theresa May’s mistaken action while Home Secretary in cutting those numbers, with predictable results.

What we are looking at here is a gradual and patchy economic decline in Britain, Europe, the Middle East and the USA which is producing chaotic and unexpected results as the various parts interact with each other. In my last post just after the Brexit referendum, posted on 30 June last year, I said that “…there will be continuing political and economic instability for several years…” My prediction going forward is for more of the same and quite likely another British general election in about a year’s time.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

The Post Peak Medicine website, book and email account have been offline for the last few weeks due to technical difficulties related to my recent international relocation, and various other existential crises which I won’t bother you with right now. If you have sent me an email recently and I haven’t replied, please accept my apologies, but I haven’t been able to receive any emails for weeks. I hope to have things up and running with a new hosting service in the near future.

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin

Putin did it – right?

OK, I said I wasn’t going to do any more blog posts, but this subject is so compelling that I had to write just one last post about it before I shut up. It’s about the recent meme which has taken hold of the world’s media, that Vladimir Putin hacked into Hillary Clinton’s email server and published her emails in an attempt to influence the course of the recent US presidential election. American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Putin was behind the attacks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html

They have presented their conclusions, which they expect us to believe, but not the evidence, which is secret. In response, President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the US on 29 December. Putin denied any involvement in the security breach and has declined to respond by expelling a similar number of US diplomats from Russia. The mainstream media seem to have mostly swallowed the story without question. Everyone knows that Putin did it.

All righty then. Let’s put all that on one side for a few minutes and look at how the Internet really works. Here’s a personal anecdote of my own. In 2002 I was the victim of an attack by a spammer in which about 10 million emails were sent out by the spammer with my name and email address on them. I received about 10,000 “replies” from recipients of the emails asking to be unsubscribed from my (non-existent) mailing list, as a result of which my email inbox was swamped and I couldn’t receive my own genuine emails for a few days until it was sorted out. This was a type of denial-of-service (DOS) attack and I learned a few valuable lessons from it:

1. It’s very easy to “spoof” an email (make it appear as though it came from somebody else).
2. It’s very difficult to identify the perpetrator. This one was never identified, although I had my suspicions who it might have been.
3. The general public are very naïve about the way the internet works. Did 10,000 people really believe that a spammer would put his own genuine return address on an email? Apparently, yes.
4. Once 10 million people are convinced that you sent an email, it’s pointless to deny it because nobody believes you. After all, your name and email address are on the email so that proves it, right? Case closed.

Next let’s look at the apparently unrelated topic of child pornography on the Internet. This is depressingly prevalent even on the Isle of Man, as this news item shows:

http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/former-hospital-worker-jailed-for-possessing-indecent-images-of-children-1-7965673

The way such people are normally prosecuted is as follows: The police set up a covert “sting” operation in which they pose online as people interested in downloading or distributing child pornography. When they have drawn a few suspects into the net, they monitor their activities online for a while, then perform a surprise dawn raid on their home, seize laptops and other electronic devices, and if these are found to contain child pornography, that’s enough evidence to secure a criminal conviction because it meets the legal standard of “beyond reasonable doubt.” That seems to have been what happened in the news item above.

Note, however, that the evidence gathered during the initial Internet surveillance is NOT the evidence which is used to convict, because it’s not strong or reliable enough. It is only used as a basis for forming a “reasonable suspicion” that the suspect may be engaging in criminal activity, which justifies further evidence gathering such as an arrest and questioning or dawn raid. That’s the main reason why the police are opposed to amateur internet paedophile vigilante groups: they may be able to entrap and “out” paedophiles and publish their details on social media, but by the time the police get involved, the suspect has destroyed the physical evidence so no conviction is possible.

Next let’s look at the phenomenon of “ransomware”:

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/ransomware-now-billion-dollar-year-crime-growing-n704646

This is where a criminal installs malware on your system which encrypts and locks all your files and you have to pay a “ransom” for the key to unlock the encryption. It is a billion dollar a year crime in which 65 percent of end users pay the ransom. It is almost impossible to trace and prosecute the perpetrators because they are so good at covering their Internet tracks.

And finally, let me tell you about the Tor browser. I am using it to publish this blog post right now, it is available for free download from https://www.torproject.org/ and its purpose is to “spoof” your location so that you appear to be in a different place from where you really are. As I write this in the Isle of Man, the browser’s control panel is telling me that to any outside observer who is trying to track my location, I will appear to be in Norway (and the spoof location changes at random). Try this for yourselves if you don’t believe me.

The point of all these examples is to show you that things on the Internet are rarely what they seem, identities and locations are easily “spoofed” and information is unreliable. Therefore, for the US intelligence agencies to claim that they have concluded with “high confidence” that Putin was behind the recent security breaches is completely implausible. They can’t possibly know that without doing a dawn raid on Putin’s office and seizing his computer equipment, and as far as I am aware they haven’t done that. The most they can have is something less than “reasonable suspicion”, let’s say just “suspicion”, and that doesn’t seem enough to justify expelling 35 diplomats. There are numerous other suspects for the security breach, none of whom can be proven to have done it without physical evidence. I think it was more likely an inside job by one of Ms Clinton’s own staff, possibly with some help from outside, but my guess is as good as anyone else’s.

Repeatedly poking Mr Putin in the eye with a stick seems a dangerous game for the US to play, and I hope for all our sakes that Mr Trump is able to tone it down when he takes office.

Herbal medicine, and going dark

Herbal medicine and going dark

This blog is going to “go dark” (go offline) for the next few months, possibly permanently.  I am sorry if this is a disappointment to those of you who follow it regularly, and I am flattered that so many of you have signed up to follow it and seem to think I have something useful or entertaining to say.  I don’t want you to think that I have been arrested, or hospitalised with severe depression, or changed my mind and become an economist, so here is the reason.

There seem to be many events occurring which are pointing towards some sort of global crisis in the near to medium term: Brexit, Trumpism, the rise of nationalism and religious fanaticism around the globe, continuing global economic instability, continuing political instability in the Middle East, imminent peak oil in Saudia Arabia, the imminent collapse of the US shale oil fracking industry, and so on…   I feel a bit like many people probably felt in 1860, or 1913, or 1938: there is something big and bad just around the corner, even if it’s not clear exactly what and when.  Or in the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, I sense “a great disturbance in the Force”.

I would like to do something useful in response to this.  One (arguably) useful thing I have done is relocate myself and my family to a large rock in the middle of the Irish Sea.  OK, I know some of you are not on board with that one, but let’s move on.  The other thing I would like to do to benefit my fellow citizens is complete a project which I started in 2010, which is my book on Post Peak Medicine.  You can download it here:

http://www.postpeakmedicine.com/download.htm

It is still very much a work in progress.  I would especially like to finish the section on evidence based herbal medicine.  This is intended to be a bridge between traditional and orthodox medicine, or herbal medicine rewritten in a form which conventionally trained physicians can understand and have confidence in.  Too many herbal medicine textbooks state “Plant X is reputed by (insert name of indigenous people) to be a cure for diseases A, B, C, D and E” but no evidence other than “traditional knowledge” is put forward to support these statements.  I would like to research the controlled trials which have been done and try to sort out the herbal medicines which have a genuine physical effect from the ones which have only placebo effect.  This is going to be a marathon task as there are hundreds of herbal medicines to sort through, it is going to take a lot of time, and I’ve decided I don’t have the time to do that and also keep writing a monthly blog.

Here are a couple of examples of why this is useful.  Take a look at this article on making your own colloidal silver, beloved of survivalists:

http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/silver-colloid-generator/

It’s reputed to have antibacterial properties.  The trouble is, controlled clinical trials show it doesn’t work.  So you can save yourself the time and trouble of making colloidal silver, and use your silver for something more useful like bartering for food.

On the other hand, the herb Valerian has been shown in controlled clinical trials to be an effective hypnotic and sedative.  And that’s what we’re going to need going forward into the Long Emergency: not cholesterol lowering drugs, or antihypertensives, or appetite suppressants, but lots and lots of sedatives.

“Evidence based herbal medicine” started life as a chapter in the Post Peak Medicine book, but it now looks as though it is such a large subject that it needs a separate book in its own right.  Therefore, if you visit the Post Peak Medicine downloads page (see above), you will now find two download links, although the second one is currently empty.

Splitting the book into two has the additional advantage that I can show “Evidence based herbal medicine” to more people than “Post Peak Medicine”.  Herbal medicine is an acceptable topic for mainstream discourse, even if it is still viewed as a bit eccentric.  Discussions about the end of economic growth, or peak energy, or the collapse of industrial civilisation, are definitely not acceptable in mainstream society (yet), and I would guess, probably won’t be until the facts are so obvious that it’s impossible to continue to ignore them.

If you want to know about the progress of the book you can download the latest version from the website or email me at PeakDoc  (at) postpeakmedicine.com.  And with that, I’m signing off.  Have a Merry Christmas, a sedated New Year, good luck, and as always:

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin

The US Election

Sitting here atop a large rock in the middle of the Irish Sea, I have a similar feeling about the US election that the local Spanish fishermen probably felt in 1805 as they witnessed the Battle of Trafalgar taking place off their shore. They would have marvelled at the sound and fury of the British, French and Spanish navies duking it out, they might have had a vague feeling that they were witnessing some historically momentous event, the significance of which they didn’t fully understand, and they would probably have guessed that regardless of who won, it wouldn’t benefit them. Which it didn’t: the British won but Napoleon still invaded Spain. I didn’t get to vote in the recent US election (not being a US citizen), but as half the talking heads on the planet are now analysing the election result, I’m going to throw in my tuppence worth.

There are many similarities between Trump’s election victory and the recent vote for Brexit. In both cases, the ruling political and economic elites wanted a continuation of the status quo, the ordinary people wanted anything but that, and the will of the people prevailed over that of the elites. In both cases nobody is sure what happens next.

Immigration seems to have been a major factor in both results. The ruling political and economic elites want more immigration, because more immigrants means low wages which means cheap stuff which means higher profits which means higher share prices. The ordinary people, who mostly don’t have shares, stock options and profit related bonuses, can see that more immigrants means fewer jobs and lower wages for them, and that it has a distorting effect on local communities. You can easily assimilate a handful of Syrian, Mexican or Polish families. However, when hundreds or thousands of such families move in, this changes the nature of communities as mosques replace churches, halal supermarkets replace butchers’ shops, and Polish instead of English becomes the dominant language in the community centre. This isn’t what people want and it’s not what they signed up for when they moved into the community. Also, despite humanitarian concerns about people from war zones seeking asylum, it’s not physically possible to relocate all refugees from all war zones from the Middle East and North Africa into the West – the scale of the problem is just too big.

People have compared Trump to Hitler. It’s true that both men came to power on a wave of popular sentiment fuelled by adverse economic circumstances, but there the similarity ends. Hitler was a brilliant orator and he had a plan, even if it was an insane, perverted plan. Trump can’t seem to open his mouth without putting his foot in it, and I haven’t been able to discern any coherent plan so far. So I’d like to offer you my own historical comparisons.

Clinton I would compare to Henry the 7^th of England. You know what you’re going to get: a member of the hereditary ruling aristocracy who is going to continue broadly similar policies to those of Henry the 1^st though to 6^th. That’s why the majority of people didn’t vote for her.

Trump is more difficult to place. I would liken him to a second-rank player who is swept to power on a wave of popular emotion, or who finds himself in the right place at the right time, but who doesn’t have the talent or intellectual capability to consolidate his grip on power in his own right. I would liken him to Mussolini (shot by communist partisans in 1945), Robespierre (guillotined on the order of the French National Convention in 1794) or the teenage Roman emperor Romulus Augustulus (appointed by his father and deposed at the age of 16 by the Roman general Odoacer just before the collapse of the Western Roman Empire). I wish Mr Trump well with his endeavours, I really do, but I have a deep foreboding about it, because as you can see from the historical examples I have cited, second rank political leaders in times of great change often come to a bad end.

I think the best outcome for this election would be if Trump can quickly assemble a group of competent, trusted advisors who can craft a coherent set of policies for him on immigration, foreign policy, the economy and women’s rights, out of the mess of incoherent speeches which he has made over the last few months. He could then act as a figurehead while the policies are implemented in the background by people who are more politically experienced than he is. If this is done I think he is more likely to bring about “hope and change” than Obama ever was. If this isn’t done, I have a bad feeling about where this whole thing is going.

Good luck – we’ll all need it.

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin