Sunday grab bag

 Our out-of-door relief cat - a slim and handsome black model with white feet - came into the kitchen to rob the resident’s plate but seeing only crunchies uttered thin pleading cries. We caved in and put a packet of superior meat on the outside dish and he laid into it lustily. “He’s eating in a way that makes his ears waggle,” I said to my wife. “So do you,” she replied. I’d never noticed, but then you wouldn’t, would you?

Who wants to be a millionaire an ex-pat? Gambling sites are missing a trick: they should say something like “WIN ENOUGH TO GET OUT OF BURNHAM’S BRITAIN!” As we are becoming poorer we are betting more - £17.5 billion in the year to March 2026. Maybe the Chancellor’s plan to balance the budget is to distress us so much that our vices supply a robust tax base. But landing the jackpot may not be necessary: this video looks at five countries that don’t need visas and could be affordable on a State pension. That said, warm weather, clean seas and seafood lunches can’t make up for losing our family, friends and culture. Nothing left for it but to stand and fight, then.

Comedy post: Dave Barry recounts what happened when he got his AI assistant to call his friends - using a clone of his voice - to tell them he was too busy watching football to do it himself…

Dave Barry’s Substack

Bernice and My Friends

A few months ago I was boarding a flight out of Detroit, standing in a long line of passengers behind a woman who was with two boys aged maybe 10 or 11. As we approached the aircraft door, the woman turned to the boys and said five words. I contend that these are five words no adult has ever felt the need to say, in any language, to two girls…

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a day ago · 980 likes · 304 comments · Dave Barry

The first UK storm this season is called Austen, after a meteorologist apparently but by coincidence the authoress Jane Austen is due to be replaced on British £10 banknotes by some animal as part of the general airbrushing out of our culture. It doesn’t seem fair to sully people’s names with destructive associations (though I could understand if the eleventh was called Karen.) Instead why not extend the wildlife theme to gales, from Aardvark to Zebu; if the latest was christened Binturong rather than Boelo I’d feel more positive about it. Or if you prefer to vent, how about terms of abuse? I’m sure you can come up with the first few.

Finally, this post claims guinea pigs have different voices. Can you tell? https://www.facebook.com/reel/1134419255934184

Why the British State is “dysfunctional”

The Lords Constitution Committee is looking at constitutional safeguards and on 14 October questioned Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Boris Johnson when the latter was PM.

Cummins gave three main reasons why our political system is failing:

1. Public service no longer attracts elite talented people, who instead have gone into money-making private enterprises.

2. Government ministers have ceased to be masters of their brief and personally accountable to Parliament for the performance of their departments. Their answerability has become a “fake charade.”

3. The Cabinet Office has grabbed political power it should never have had. It was set up during WWI to deal with crisis but at that time it was agreed on all sides that the Office should not be responsible for making government policy or for personnel and public appointments. Now it is.

We are lacking elite talent, ministerial responsibility and speed of execution (cutting through bureaucracy). All three have become “more or less unlawful”!

The problem are interconnected. “If you have duff people you will have duff institutions and it will become hard to attract talent.” Young talent becomes disillusioned and the ablest look for a way out.

Asked whether he thought the constitution was under serious threat Cummings replied that there is “a general collapse of trust in the competence and integrity of institutions” including political parties, the media, Parliament and the civil service. “Because of the internet people can see many of the lies they are told and a fundamental lack of responsibility for things.”

These difficulties are not limited to Britain but are found in other Western countries.

Russia’s President Putin is only a minor threat compared with our own Ministry of Defence (e.g. hundreds of billions wasted in procurement, resistance to learning about drones from Ukraine) and the lawyers in the Cabinet Office pursuing “lawfare” against the SAS.

Are there too many arm’s-length institutions (quangos etc) checking ministerial power? Yes, said Cummings, and it started under the Thatcher government with the idea that these bodies could run like businesses with CEOs; instead their decision-making tends to be opaque. He has been told by civil servants that the quality of MPs is rubbish and they don’t want the responsibility; ministers and MPs have become “infantilised” and are “largely happy with this process.” Fewer arm’s-length bodies would be welcome but ministers need to be made personally responsible as once they were.

…………………………………………………

A couple of thoughts:

Labour plans for decentralisation/regionalisation extend this process and the intention from Blair onwards has been to set bureaucratic socialism in concrete and so make a Conservative recovery impossible; even if it ruins the country.

The exact opposite of sclerotic managerialism and failure can be found in the way Elon Musk runs his businesses. I read recently the account of an engineer newly joined who was amazed and delighted that he could suggest an idea and see it modelled and trialed in days rather than bogged down in layers of committee approval.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Faun, by JD

Faun is a German band that was formed in 1998 and plays pagan folk, darkwave, and medieval music. The vocals are performed in a variety of languages, including German, English, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Scandinavian and Hungarian. Their instruments include Celtic harp, Swedish nyckelharpa, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes, cittern and flutes.

FAUN have played more than 950 concerts worldwide and are currently on tour with various concert programmes, including a seated, quieter programme for theatres, churches and concert halls (FAUN ACOUSTIC), a cultural programme for seated, classical concert halls and romantic summer concerts, plus a rousing and unseated festival show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faun_(band)

FAUN - Walpurgisnacht (Official Video)

FAUN - Diese kalte Nacht (Official Video)

FAUN - Federkleid (Offizielles Video)

Faun - Rosenrot (official video)

FAUN - BLOT (Official Video)

FAUN - Tamlin and the Fairy Queen

Gas flare-up in Parliament

Yesterday the Speaker of the House of Commons furiously reprimanded the Government for telling the news media about the North Sea “Jackdaw” gas drilling approval before announcing it in the House. This is not the first time that Hoyle has taken Labour to task for arrogantly sidelining Parliament and therewith the electorate. The Mail’s Quentin Letts described the telling-off as volcanic. Watch the explosion from 12:48 here: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/cbcb29bd-5303-42c8-97de-a2cd2fc79386?in=12:48:19

As a result of this breach of protocol environmental activists were protesting outside the Department of Energy even before the official announcement in the Debating Chamber:

That was a bit quick, wasn’t it? Interesting demographic, too.

At least they weren’t setting fire to the city, unlike in France - so polluting!

But don’t they realise that there is more than one path to Net Zero? While we hope to power the nation one day solely with “clean” energy we have to keep the lights on and fossil fuels are needed during the changeover.

Perhaps they truly don’t understand. And why should we expect them to, when much of the news media and the Government fails to make that case?

Is yesterday’s policy announcement a tacit admission that however imperfect our democratic system may be it does matter after all? A population sitting in the cold and dark eating bread sandwiches and baked beans straight out of the can is unlikely to vote for a Labour Party that put them in that position.

Unfortunately this unlikely to be much of a boost for the Conservative Opposition. When they were in power they had ample opportunity to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act and chose not to. Kemi Badenoch said in March last year that Net Zero by 2050 is not achievable and in the following October the Party finally pledged to ditch the Act. Too late? And they have still not been forgiven for other matters; they may wait in vain for “Buggins’ turn.”

Is the Jackdaw gas decision a signal that Labour is growing up and becoming commonsensical, or is it a misleading flirt preparatory to going to the polls while the parties of the Right are inadequately prepared and fighting each other?

FRIDAY MUSIC: The Platters, by JD

Another helping of nostalgia and why not, real singers with excellent singing voices.

The Platters, an American vocal ensemble, were one of the foremost singing groups of the early days of rock and roll and also often associated with the doo-wop style. They were managed by songwriter Buck Ram, who was taken with Williams’s dramatic soaring voice and had the singer form a group around himself in 1953 in Los Angeles.

Ram wrote or co-wrote some of the Platters’ biggest hits, including “Only You (and You Alone)” (1955), “The Great Pretender” (which topped the pop and rhythm-and-blues charts in 1956), and “(You’ve Got) The Magic Touch” (1956).

The Platters sustained their career by specializing in rock-and-roll renditions of old big-band hits, notably “My Prayer” (1956) and “Twilight Time” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (both 1958). The group also appeared in two rock-and-roll movies, The Girl Can’t Help It and Rock Around the Clock (both 1956).

Williams left the Platters in 1961, but during the late 1960s, with Turner as the lead vocalist, the group achieved moderate success with soul-style hits. The history of the Platters, however, is primarily associated with the early days of rock and roll. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Platters
https://theplatters.com/about/

The Platters - Only You, And You Alone (1955) 4K

The Platters - The Great Pretender (1959) 4K

The Platters - My Prayer- Lyrics

The Platters - Remember When

The Platters - Smoke Get In Your Eyes - Lyrics

The Platters - Twilight Time - Lyrics

Public Execution and Public Unrest

The mass murderer Nidal Hasan is to be executed by firing squad on 3 December. It is likely to be a swift and certain death unlike the recent botched administration of lethal injections to Christa Pike, now discharged from hospital and returned to Death Row.

The controversy in Hasan’s case is the proposal to livestream the shooting, though President Trump is said to be having second thoughts about it.

Journalist Peter Hitchens advises us against watching, because of the (im)moral effect on spectators. He quotes Charles Dickens’ witnessing a double hanging in 1849 and the shameful behaviour of the public.

Blood lust seems to be part of the human psyche; it is the basis of much of our entertainment. How many fictional violent deaths do we see and read about? Does that increase our homicidal tendencies? Yet even in societies that did not have books movies and TV there was plenty of war and murder in real life.

One motive for the State to worry about carrying out judicial killings in public is self-preservation. The people might begin to question the State’s right to kill.

The last woman to be burned at the stake was Catherine Murphy in 1789, as France exploded in revolution a few miles away. Less than four years later the captive French King was guillotined, together with his wife. It gave rulers pause for thought.

Five decades after Murphy’s execution Parliament rejected the Chartists’ first petition for democratic representation in July 1839 and arrested local leaders of the movement in Newport. A mass uprising there three months later was put down with lethal force, resulting in scores of civilian deaths and casualties. The three ringleaders were convicted of high treason and sentenced to the prolonged and grisly penalty set for that offence. However the British Government feared a political backlash and widespread popular unrest so the penalty was soon commuted to transportation for life to Tasmania. That was the last time hanging, drawing and quartering was used as a form of capital punishment.

But now a State agenda of war, costly energy and disruptive levels of mass immigration is being imposed on a resentful populace and tensions have increased once more. What will make the Crown in Parliament listen?

"History has taught me, that RULERS are much the same in all ages & under all forms of government: they are as bad as they dare to be," said the poet Coleridge in a letter to his brother George (c. 10 March 1798).

FRIDAY MUSIC: Dmitri Shostakovich, by JD

 Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906 - 1975) was a Soviet composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and thereafter was regarded as a major composer. Shostakovich achieved early fame in the Soviet Union, but had a complex relationship with its government. His 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was initially a success but later condemned by the Soviet government, putting his career at risk.

Shostakovich’s reputation has continued to grow after his death. Scholarly interest has increased significantly since the late 20th century, including considerable debate about the relationship between his music and his attitudes toward the Soviet government.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dmitri-Shostakovich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich - The Second Waltz

Nicola Benedetti: Shostakovich’s Romance The Gadfly Suite, Live in The Greene Space

Waltz no.6

Dmitri Shostakovich - Piano Concerto No. 2 - II. Andante