As I predicted back in August, Liz Truss has resigned.

So Liz Truss has announced her resignation as PM.  The shortest serving PM ever -- just 44 days as PM.  And something I predicted before she became PM on the 6th of August.

As I said back then:

"It's possible that Liz Truss might be one of the shortest serving, if not THE shortest serving PM, ever.  You heard it here first".

Why on earth, how on earth, she became PM eludes me.  Why on earth did Tory party members vote for her??  Let's hope that they don't get a say who our next PM is!

22/10/22 Edited to add: I discovered after publishing the above that Matthew Parris (a Tory) has very similar views on Liz Truss to my own.  Here's a clip from Newsnight that was shown the night before last.

The increase in the price of food from October 2021 to October 2022

Also see my figures for July 21 to July 22.  And click on food prices label at the bottom to get all relevant blog posts.

According to this article food prices rose by 14.6% in the 12 months to September.

I do not think this figure can possibly be realistic.  According to the chart above, food prices have gone up by around a third compared to this time last year.

I should firstly state that I almost always pay the cheapest price I can pay.  Certain food products continually cycle up and down in price with their price being labelled an "offer" at the low end of the price cycle. I just stock up on the products when they are on "offer" and never buy them when they are not on offer (although I might have screwed up with the walnuts that I bought a year ago and bought them at the high end of the price cycle.  This will explain why the chart says they've gone down 11% in price.  In reality, this seems very unlikely). And I always compare to the current bottom end of the cycle prices, even though these prices might not be what one pays on this specific date.

For nuts and cheese that I've highlighted in yellow, they're now selling the same product in smaller packets, so have adjusted accordingly.

I'm not sure if I should include the price of salt, sugar, sweets, crisps and frozen chips due to various reasons (highlighted in orange at bottom of chart). Salt and sugar will only be rarely bought. Crisps and sweets are luxury foods. Frozen chips is repetitious since I have already included potatoes. So, if we exclude these products, then the average price increase is 33.5%. More than double the 14.6% that they claim.

But could the average be dragged down to 14.6% by incorporating other foods?  This seems very unlikely to me.  Just look at the number of food products that have increased by less than 14.6% compared to those that have increased by more than this figure.

 

An article on near-death experiences

I read the following skeptical article on NDE's:

The Afterlife Is in Our Heads

These so-called scientific explanations of NDEs assume that it is entirely unproblematic that brains produce consciousness, and given this assumption, they advance speculative hypotheses about how the brain creates such experiences.

Incidentally, I wouldn't claim that NDEs give anything like proof of an afterlife. Clearly, one's mind and implicit expectations very much influences what one actually experiences. But this certainly doesn't mean that one isn't encountering some afterlife realm that one's implicit expectations and beliefs are moulding and shaping. Indeed, this to a certain extent even happens with our everyday embodied vision, as demonstrated by perceptual "illusions". Just consider that dress.

Just a few comments on various quoted parts:

The idea that near-death experiences, also known as NDEs, offer proof of an afterlife for the soul has been remarkably persistent, despite an accumulation of scientific evidence to the contrary.

 …

NDEs are … explained by physiological processes, [neuroscientists] said, which have been pieced together over the past 50 years.

I’ve never come across any of this evidence. As I said above, at best, they are speculative hypotheses.

[A] wealth of neuroscience research describes how OBE-like experiences—a loss of the sense of self and disturbed body perception or ownership—can be triggered by brain damage, epilepsy, and migraine,7 as well as by stimulation of the part of the brain where the right temporal and parietal lobes meet.

Which, as I have continually explained on countless occasions e.g here, has no implications either way, since this would be precisely what we would expect regardless of whether NDEs are a glimpse of some external reality or not.

The “dissociative anesthetic ketamine can reproduce all aspects of the near-death experience,” Jansen wrote. That includes a sense of ineffability, timelessness, that what is experienced is “real,” that one is actually dead, a perception of separation from the body, vivid hallucination, rapid movement through a tunnel, and emerging “into the light.”

So this assumes that ketamine induced experiences are produced by the brain rather than modifying the brain to allow access to other realities. So this argument only works for those that draw a distinction between the ultimate origin of NDEs on the one hand, and psychedelic experiences on the other.

The article reports Anil Seth as saying:

“If somebody with no brain activity were able to experience something and remember it later, then pretty much everything we know about the brain, about science, about physics is wrong.”

This is just nonsense on stilts. Obviously, since the physical sciences wholly leave out consciousness in their description of reality, then necessarily they can have nothing to say about the abilities of consciousness.

Average per day I spend on food.

In my previous post I calculated that the price of food has increased very roughly by 26% over the previous 12 months (and contradicting the claimed 10.6%).  I decided to calculate the average daily cost of food for myself. Chart is below. It ends in mid-August as the average is calculated over a rolling 100 day average and mid-August is now 50 days ago.

 

The average per day I have spent on food over the previous 538 days is £4.88.  Incidentally, this is just food and exclusively bought from supermarkets -- namely Asda, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Tesco. It doesn't include any non-food products such as cleaning products and whatever.

Looking at the chart, the steep decline in the price I pay from the end of 2021 to the beginning of 2022 is accounted for by my decision to try to decrease the amount I spend on food in the face of the humongous increase in the price of energy.  But, since near the beginning of this year, despite continuing to buy cheaper food, the price I'm paying has steadily increased. This will be purely down to the fact that the price of food has steadily increased since that time. Indeed, I believe that most of the 26% inflation increase in the price of food has occurred since the beginning of this year (2022).

So, anyway, at the present time, it seems I'm spending about an average £5 per day on food. That will only continue to increase whilst food prices keep steeply increasing.