Trump and the Untouchables

The recent raid on former President Trump’s home has renewed doubts about the political impartiality of government agencies. Elements in the news and social media seem threatened by this slant and are countering it by rehearsing Trump’s many flaws and past sins. The implication is that he is so dangerous that he must be stopped at any cost, even if it means breaking the rules (not that such is admitted.)

The cost may be too high, if it entails the general breakdown of public trust and support for the State. This is especially important in a nation historically founded on a deep mistrust of arbitrary executive power, on the even-handed administration of law and the regular revalidation of government by the people’s express will.

The modern state has acquired almost limitless resources and the citizen is correspondingly far weaker and more vulnerable. Even an individual with substantial private means can have difficulty in seeking a legal remedy against official wrongdoing. For years, Trump had to defend himself against what now seem false allegations of conspiracy with Russia, yet his case against certain FBI officials said to be involved in the frameup was thrown out just this 22 July, on the grounds that they were protected from personal liability by the 1988 Westfall Act, which indemnifies Federal employees carrying out duties in their official capacity.

Was it with a similar sense of impunity that those working behind the scenes selected federal magistrate Bruce Reinhart, who recused himself on June 22 from overseeing a Trump lawsuit against Hillary, to issue the warrant for the search of Mar-a-Lago; and included in the search party some FBI agents who are said to have been personally involved in the ‘Russiagate’ affair?

Appearances matter and ‘the optics’ are bad in this case. In suspicious eyes it seems plausible that the justice system has strayed from impartiality, so confident in its invulnerability that it can afford to be careless in its choice of servants. People are beginning to ask themselves, ‘If they can do these things to him, is anybody safe?’

Has the Leviathan become too big?

If the US intelligence community were set up as a separate State of the Union, it would be a sizeable one. Its annual budget is $85.6 billion, which ranks it parallel with the GDP of Idaho and above that of ten other US States; and more than the GDP of two-thirds of the world’s countries.

Leaving aside that part - about a quarter - of the overall Intelligence budget that is allotted to military and foreign intelligence, the FBI consumes some 17% of the (domestic) National Intelligence budget. Its Director, Christopher Wray, lists many serious ‘Key Threats and Challenges’ in his $10.7 billion request for 2023.

Yet, how do we do a cost-benefit analysis?

Say we looked only to save lives (though the FBI seeks to do much more.) A 2003 study set the value of a statistical life (VSL) in the US at a median $7 million, which adjusting for inflation is around $10.5 million today. How many lives does the FBI save each year, but how many more could more be saved per dollar spent, by e.g. national safety regulations, medical interventions, guidance on food and drink?

Tough one. Black SUVs and squads of agents with high-powered firearms are so much more dramatic, visually. But what do they achieve, other than to remind the little man - even a Trump - how small he is? Why go in so mob-handed - or at all?

As to impartiality, why by contrast was Hillary’s off-workingplace storage of classified information glossed over as mere carelessness?

As to timing, why now? Is it because the dust and noise raised by this Eliot Ness-style gangbusting raid may help give Trump’s political opponents some advantage in the runup to this autumn’s mid-term elections?

And what exactly was included in the 15 boxes of documents removed - surely not anything relevant to Trump’s lawsuit against Mrs Clinton, or against government agencies that made false claims about him? Did the FBI indulge itself in what is known as a ‘fishing expedition’ in the hunt for something, anything to help convict him of some felony, or at least serve to charge him pro tempore until the ballots are cast? Is the process the punishment, for a disruptor, a maverick, a challenger to a corrupt status quo (even granting that he himself is a cheating, brass-necked blowhard)?

Optics: so important, yet not so easy to manage. For every one rubbing his hands in glee at Trump’s discomfiture, there is another dreading what the State is becoming.

In the information age, there is already widespread concern over the government’s mass surveillance of its citizens, with all the implications for controlling us collectively and individually. Experience has shown that these cyberspying powers are apt to be misused:

Section 215 [of the PATRIOT Act] at the time authorized the FBI to obtain [telephone] records, but in this case, the FBI obtained nothing: the records instead went to the NSA, which was not mentioned in the statute. The statute said any records obtained had to be handled pursuant to FBI guidelines; they were not, and instead were handled pursuant to NSA guidelines…

The State has powerful civil pals in the Silicon Valley giants (note how Mr Zuckerberg has renamed Facebook’s parent company ‘Meta’, brazenly advertising its use of metadata to discover our connections to everything and everyone we know.) Further, already every social media conversation can be monitored, ‘corrected’ by ‘fact-checkers’, drowned in assertive counter-propaganda or just plain censored. Even talk in the domestic setting can be spied on by ‘smart speakers.’

How do we avoid the world of Franz Kafka (how reluctant they were to release the affidavit that triggered the search warrant!), of ‘Minority Report’, of a Chinese-style social credit system? Is liberty only the freedom to be ‘good’?

Opening up the ex-President’s house has opened a can of worms for us all.

P.S. I can't compete with a pro - read Matt Taibbi on this (subscription required for the full text but as far as I am concerned it's worth £1 a week, I've just signed up):

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/sweeps-week-on-fbi-tv

Fifteen years and whadda you get...

Lessons from history

The Debt Offensive began in 2007: Charlie hit us with everything he had. Cadres of underpriced risk were tunnelling under our lines, popping up when least expected and decimating our defences. We fought back hard, dropping cash from the Hueys, first $700 billion, then trillions, but it was no use. Sure, we beat him back for a while, took down a few banks; but the public couldn't take seeing it all on TV. It was the turning point. We had lost the will to win.

--------

Republished from 2009

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Cheap shots, by JD

For this week's Sunday Colour Supplement a few more 'cheap shots' from cheap cameras as previously featured here four years ago. Not the same photos of course, just another selection which are sitting doing nothing in the archives. I suppose I ought to print these pictures before the inevitable day when the politicians realise we have run out of electricity and all our digital records disappear.

https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2018/02/cheap-cameras-great-results-by-jd.html

WEEKENDER: A tsunami of bad news, by Wiggia

This was taken at Ardingly reservoir in 2011, showing that capacity was inadequate even before the drought we have this year.

It is hard to believe, but every day appears to have another story of doom and gloom, and all fall into that category of problems with no obvious answer.

I wrote a while back about how the failure over decades of this country to build new infrastructure in almost every category was going to come home to roost; that moment has come in spades.

And almost without question you can lay the blame for 90% of it at the door of successive governments who have been totally derelict in putting right the obvious, in exchange for short term advantage.

The very real threat of power cuts this winter, something that has been on the cards for some time pre the gas and oil crisis, was not something the government would be likely to shout about from the rooftops. Nonetheless the likelihood is staring us in the face. What was buried on page 26 of whatever paper you read is that Norway with whom we have an interconnector may not be able to supply us at all this winter as the hot weather Europe-wide has depleted their reservoirs and the hydro plants are being seriously affected. Despite having nuclear they rely on a large hydro scheme and the usual surplus is sold off mainly to us; not this year, as they are looking after their own.

Our hurry to bulldoze all coal fired plants to make the government look as though all was well with our new renewable strategy and the concreting of the fracking test site just show how ridiculous our energy strategy has been for decades and now we are about to find out. A mild winter and we might scrape through and the fact that the cost of energy will dampen demand will also help; the latter can hardly be called a policy and will have consequences for health especially among the elderly, among whom many already cannot afford with inflation to put the heating on. Welcome to the 21st century.

“The National Grid has said that it is worried that we will fall short of power as early as December. This is partly because of our reliance on green power and partly due to gas problems. The grid had put what few remaining coal-fired stations we have on stand by. But these shortages are basically of our own making, we have closed down coal-fired stations and replaced them with intermittent wind turbines and solar panels. We have run down nuclear power stations and not replaced them. We have decided not to frack the huge volumes of gas we have under our feet and import more of it as we have run down our North Sea resources. We have closed down our gas storage facility. We have partially relied on inter-connectors to France, but they have been importing from us as their nuclear stations have problems. So now put what little coal plant we have left on standby, but we have closed down all our mines and will have to import the coal. This whole policy is mad, we need to frack, mine coal and build small modular nuclear power stations today.“

Elsewhere in the Ukraine, a corrupt regime is now wanting to prolong the war and get Crimea back into the fold. Naturally the Ukraine has no money, nor do we, and is banking on the successor to Boris to further impoverish the UK by giving arms money indefinitely, much of which is seemingly disappearing once it crosses the border. I am sure our betters will oblige, under the banner of ‘it is the right thing to do’

Back in Blighty the DM, obsessed with house prices, warns of the hurt that rising interest rates will have on those with mortgages:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11083777/Average-UK-house-prices-FALLEN-month-June-2021-amid-rate-hikes.html

Many of the problems with house buying or to be exact the ability to buy, stem from measures taken over many years to stimulate the market and ‘help’ those who want their own house onto the so-called housing ladder.

Nearly all help has itself fuelled house price rises. Make the money easier to get and the house prices go up; give people deposits and easy start schemes so they never have to save, the house prices go up; increase earnings ratio, house prices go up. 

All and everything has fuelled house prices and kept the financial sector happy and housebuilders too, they of course are major donors to the Conservative party.

It is interesting that through all this the quality and size of new builds has remained largely p*ss poor, both items ensure bigger profits for the builders, yet they still sell to a gullible and malleable public, in a market that is supposedly cooling! 

And it has to be said, how on earth during the last two years has the only thing to make a profit been a house? Apart from pent-up demand, house prices have escalated on such a scale they are in a parallel universe to everything else. In reality we don’t need more houses, the indigenous population remains largely static, so any extra demand is by way of government policy on immigration: every year the failure to curb immigration brings another half a million that need housing, health care, social services etc. that a hard pressed taxpayer has to fork out for, the same taxpayers who mainly want a stop to this unfettered policy on immigration.

And now building societies in an effort to keep the ball rolling are proposing 50 year mortgages that can be passed on to one's children, should they want to live there and if they don’t then the mortgage becomes no more than a rent as the difference will still have to paid by selling the place. With six times and more earnings ratio now the norm this Ponzi scheme is heading for a fall one way or another, but we have said that in the past. Yet miraculously another wheeze to keep it all rolling along seems to appear and save the market.

https://news.sky.com/story/government-considering-50-year-mortgages-that-could-pass-down-generations-to-tackle-housing-crisis-12644368

An extra factor emerged linking the lack of housebuilding with the energy crisis when in west London a major building project has been pulled because the grid could not supply the needed energy in the area and wouldn’t be able to for several years. They all of course blame one another for the fiasco.

This could spread with the lack of energy to other areas where large building projects are planned: no power, no houses.

GPs are now looking for the sympathy vote. Full time GPs are at the lowest level for in five years after doctors complained of being stressed; so few work full time now that stress must be being gauged by a different system from the rest of us - with a few noticeable exceptions GPs have long since stopped putting in a shift like their forebears did. A quarter of all GPs last week did a 37.5 hour week and that would include in many cases extra earnings outside the surgery; stress!

The water companies are starting to impose hose pipe bans. These are the same companies that have milked their customers and totally failed to increase capacity in line with the population. The fact they are leaking 2-3 billion litres of water a day does rather increase the cynicism they bring on themselves when making demands on others.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1653406/water-firms-sold-reservoirs-could-have-eased-drought-latest-news

Selling off reservoirs has been despite a growing population been going on for decades. On many occasions when asked about capacity the answer has been ‘we have over capacity’ and the surplus reservoirs are sold off; no one, who could have done, pointed out the obvious in line with all other infrastructure failings.

A letter in the Times spells out the facts…

“Water leakage rates in the South are about 25 per cent. So of the total water supplied only 75 per cent is available. Commercial and agriculture use 90 per cent of that water. This leaves 10 per cent for domestic customers. A hosepipe ban saves only 10 per cent of that water or 0.75 per cent of the water supplied.

My thanks to Mr Armistead of Hampshire also for pointing out that in 1976, there was talk of building a national water grid to bring water from the North to the South. Naturally, nothing happened.”

The unions are not going to be left behind in all this. Various strikes are planned and some have started in a bid to raise wages in line, some hope, with inflation. Why not? For once I am with them: the MPs got their rise without so much as a sneeze; though the Felixstowe dock one, should it start (Felixstowe handles 50% of container traffic) will have a big impact on already stretched supply lines.

To finish a tale of government profligacy, 12 fig trees gifted by Jeb Bush erstwhile governor of Florida (though there seems some doubt about this as other sources say they are rented and others they were purchased for £150,000) stand outside Portcullis House at the entrance to Parliament. In essence the trees were unsuitable for the position in which they were planted and grow sideways. Efforts to keep them upright have resulted in a two-decade battle to to stop them from falling over. Between 2001 and 2012 the Commons spent £400,000 on maintaining them, it then cut costs and spent a further £137,000 on them. The solution is to remove three trees? No, the solution should be to remove all trees for obvious reasons, as not too far into the future further thousands will be required apart from maintenance costs, to remedy an error of their own making. Nice contract, though...

Just listen and look at the cringing MPs defending this in 2012 at the end of the first contract… they don’t give a fig!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-17755792

FRIDAY MUSIC: Manu Chao, by JD

This week it is the turn of Manu Chao who is Spanish but was born in Paris. His music is a mix of Spanish, French, African, South American with lots of other influences besides. 

And a song for Diego Armando Maradona, they always like to include a clip of his 'hand of God' goal against England!

"Manu Chao helped begin the Latin alternative movement way back in the '80s -- although it had no name then -- and in his later work he cut a cross-cultural swath across styles and geographic boundaries. Chao was born on June 21, 1961, in Paris to Spanish parents -- his father, Ramon Chao, a respected writer, comes from Galicia, his mother Bilbao. Growing up bilingual, he was also influenced by the punk scene across the English Channel that happened while he was still in his teens."

• https://www.allmusic.com/artist/manu-chao-mn0000674161/biography
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manu_Chao

 

Alcohol and the State

From my Substack files:

In 1911, when California held a referendum on the question of women’s suffrage, the writer Jack London surprised his wife Charmian by saying he had voted in favour, because:

"When the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition. It is the wives, and sisters, and mothers, and they only, who will drive the nails into the coffin of John Barleycorn.”

In his 1913 book ‘John Barleycorn’ he claimed that few men were born addicts to alcohol; the real driver was its availability:

It is the accessibility of alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol. I did not care for it. I used to laugh at it. Yet here I am, at the last, possessed with the drinker's desire. It took twenty years to implant that desire.

Sure enough, the Constitutional amendments introducing Prohibition and granting women’s suffrage were passed within six months of each other, in 1920. Women did not vote directly for Prohibition - there was no referendum, though by 1918 fifteen States had already legalised the female franchise - but the two movements ran in parallel. Women have been ‘blamed’ for Prohibition, though perhaps ‘credited’ is a better term, seeing the practical benefits of the experiment.

London’s accessibility argument is borne out by British history. When the Government deregulated sales of gin in order to turn people away from importing brandy from the enemy, France, the result was an epidemic of drunkenness that forced the passing of the 1751 Gin Act to reduce the damage.

In 1830 there was a second deregulation, of beer houses, to draw people away from spirits; the consequence was another spate of intoxication:

A fortnight after the passage of that Act, Sydney Smith, renowned for his idealism, who, previously, had been a strong advocate of it, wrote: “Everybody is drunk. Those who are not sinking are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.”

Since then there have been various episodes of regulatory tightening and re-loosening of licensed hours and premises, from e.g. Sunday pub closures in Wales (1881) to the nationwide availability of 24-hour licenses (2005.)

Outlets have proliferated: today, I would be hard put to count all the places within a mile of our (suburban) house where I can buy alcohol; not just pubs and off-licenses but supermarkets, post offices, garages and convenience stores.

In our post-industrial country, the home is an increasingly important venue for consumption:

The main change in the structure of capital during this century has been the relative stagnation of industrial capital and the growth of the service sector of the economy. This trend, which has been most marked in the south of England, has had consequences for inner city working class areas: de-industrialisation, mobility of labour, and post-war rehousing policies have combined to dislocate the pattern of community based upon local work and extended families and associated cultural traditions...

Population has been decanted to the New Towns, and more generally, to the suburbs, where social life has focussed upon the nuclear family, and the home is increasingly regarded as a place of leisure, recreation and consumption. It is in this context that off-licence sales have become more important. The 1961 Licensing Act relaxed restrictions on the opening of off-licences, and the 1964 Licensing Act facilitated supermarket sales. By the late 1970s, most beer was still sold in public houses, but one third of all wine and half of spirits were consumed at home.

From ‘Alcohol, Youth, and the State’ by Nicholas Dorn (RKP, 1983)

The State is conflicted on the subject: on the one hand there are the health and other costs of alcohol; but on the other there is the fact that the sales taxes represent something like 2% of total Government revenue (not counting the taxes and National Insurance Contributions provided by all those employed in the drinks industry.)

Whether it is to do with the 1961 and 1964 Acts or the general increase in prosperity, there has been a clear (re-)increase in alcohol consumption since the 1950s:

Males drink more than females, though the latter are catching up. On average, men in 2018 were drinking the equivalent of 17.8 litres of pure alcohol per year - in spirits terms, more than five 70-centilitre bottles a month. Bear in mind that around 20% of the adult population doesn’t drink at all (among the young, there may be a switch to drugs instead, especially when beer is retailing at close to £5 a pint in pubs) and according to this survey:

… the very heaviest drinkers – who make just 4% of the population - consume around 30% of all the alcohol sold in the UK.

Even if the State decided to crack down on alcohol abuse, there are powerful commercial interests involved; strong enough to defy the Government, as they did in 1991 over Sunday trading restrictions.

Those who call for further controls over alcohol, tobacco, gambling and drugs will often be accused of ‘nannying’, though the State Nanny is one that has been making it easy for her charges to get the things that harm them, and who gets backhanders from the suppliers; a Satananny, if you will.

Libertarians dislike having anyone say no to them; the line starts behind me on that one, but let’s have no illusions about our supposed complete rationality and freedom of the will: there’s not that many Buddhas in the world. Jack London ended his 1913 book with a personal commitment to a more measured approach to alcohol:

No, I decided; I shall take my drink on occasion. With all the books on my shelves, with all the thoughts of the thinkers shaded by my particular temperament, I decided coolly and deliberately that I should continue to do what I had been trained to want to do. I would drink—but oh, more skilfully, more discreetly, than ever before.

He didn’t live past 40.

We may not get booze and fags back into Pandora’s box, but maybe we can do more about the plague of gambling - so heavily advertised on TV at the moment - and think twice about liberalising drug laws.

Archie vs the NHS

I republish below a post from my Substack account (June 15.) Tragically the boy, Archie Battersbee, died yesterday after his life support was switched off, against his mother's will. Her request to move him to a hospice was also denied and permission to take the legal case further refused by the Court:

Three judges, sitting at the court of appeal in central London, ruled on Monday that the decision of a high court judge to reject the plea by the parents of Archie Battersbee for him to be allowed to die a “natural” death had been based on the child’s best interests.

What we suspect it's really about: resources, especially money.

Tiger mothers

... or should they just be sensible and listen to experts?

A British boy currently lies comatose in hospital; doctors say there is ‘no brain activity’ and a High Court judge has ruled that he can be taken off life support. Yet his mother says he has gripped her hand; she believes he is ‘still there’ and she will fight on.

Intensive care is very expensive and so there can be a financial element in medical professionals’ judgment that there is no point in continuing. They may or may not be right in this case; yet ‘miracles’ happen.

Lady Anne Glenconner’s autobiography ‘Lady In Waiting’ (chapters 14 & 15) gives reason to hope against hope. In 1987 she learned that her 19-year-old son Christopher had had a motorcycle accident (helmetless) in Belize; after emergency surgery he was flown to Miami in a deep coma. Fortunately she had bought travel insurance for him and he was taken on to London in a private plane, still unconscious and on life support.

After Christopher had been unresponsive for weeks in the Wellington Hospital a doctor with long experience in this field told Lady Anne:

‘Christopher will be a vegetable all his life. There is no hope of recovery for him. If I were you I would forget about him improving and get on with your life.’

There are two kinds of explanation. One is to enable you to understand a phenomenon; the other is to explain it away, preferring it not to be real. I’m no preacher - I doubt everything; but this is what Lady Anne says and I believe she is being truthful:

Already religious, she had begun engaging with God and praying hard. At the point of giving up she heard of a Christian healer in Scotland, a Mrs Black, and got help from her by telephone. Then Mrs Black came down several times to work on Christopher in person. Lady Anne thought she could see tiny improvements, but she told Mrs Black she herself was exhausted. Back in Scotland, Mrs Black told her to prepare for a session next morning:

‘Suddenly, to my amazement, I felt as if champagne was flowing through my veins. I felt invigorated. It’s the only time in my life when anything like that has happened to me.’

With renewed energy and commitment she sought out a doctor whose own son had been in a coma; he stressed the importance of doing things with the patient and engaging all five senses. Christopher would need to be stimulated ‘fifteen minutes in every hour every day for weeks.’

Lady Anne set up a rota with the help of friends, to use the doctor’s ‘coma kit’ - smells, music, singing, talking, reading aloud, brushing Christopher’s skin with different textures and temperatures.

‘We even persuaded the nurses to let us take Christopher out of bed [still wired up to many machines] and nurse him on the floor so I could cradle him: I was sure that if he could feel my heartbeat it would have a positive effect on him.’

The breakthrough came when after Christopher had come off the ventilator a friend arrived with a baby’s bottle. A skeptical nurse let them try and eyes still closed, Christopher started to suck. Eventually, after four months in a coma, he woke up, and began rehabilitation.

If Lady Anne hadn’t accepted Mrs Black’s help, she would very likely have followed the hospital doctor’s advice and given up, sensibly.

There’s the choice.

WEEKENDER: A View From The Past, by Wiggia

Probably THE party anthem of the Sixties

As with so much with us of the older generations we get berated for opinions that are dated, do not take in the advances made since our youth and being stuck in a supposed ‘golden age’ that never really existed, except in many cases as with all else it did.

Anyone who was in their late teens or early twenties and lived through the Sixties would probably agree it was the best decade in modern times, we had it all.

The music that exploded across the world was nearly all our making and changed the landscape of popular music. It was without a precedent, nothing before or since has matched it.

British fashion was a bad joke until the Sixties. Suddenly an explosion of talent changed all that and we led the world in fashion design: the mini skirt became an icon of the age, Mary Quant hairdos, and barbers became hairdressers much else in design such as promoted by Terence Conran, and innovators appeared and were hugely successful in that same decade.

And through it all up till the present day Twiggy represented the age with style:

And alongside Twiggy a bevy of photographers changed the way the camera recorded the age: David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy and the photojournalist Don McCullin, and Tony Ray-Jones the social photographer changed the way in their respective fields how Britain was seen, here and worldwide.

Bailey could almost be accused of making the Krays ‘popular’,

 such was the success of his portraits of them.

Our way of life changed, not necessarily all for the better as ‘free love’ via the contraceptive pill, came with certain problems but the earlier prudish approach to relationships was swept away in that decade. Women advanced their case more in the Sixties than all the decades before, equal pay after the Dagenham Ford strike was demanded and started to be accepted as the norm, even though the resistance to it stayed for years after.

We started to venture abroad for our holidays and those weeks at Butlins started to became a faint memory for many.

There was full employment, good wages and working conditions were being transformed. At the beginning of that decade hardly anyone owned a motor car at the end of it nearly everyone did, and we got the E-Type Jaguar and the Mini.

And pre-EU we were successful as a nation. The old nationalised industries were slowly being privatised and became more competitive, we led the world in nuclear fusion, had a more than competitive aircraft industry and still had armed forces that could be a force anywhere should the need arise.

Concord first flew in ‘69 and to this day is a marvel of aviation. Anyone who saw it could not help but be amazed something like that was actually flying. Yes, I am aware it never made money but at the time who cared.

Entertainment through the medium of television created the first stars of the screen, pubs and working men's clubs provided entertainers who went on television and became household names, who without that medium would have remained undiscovered.That Was TheWeek That Was broke new ground in the presenting of news and satire with brilliant writers and presenters.

Sporting achievements were capped when we won the football World Cup, we had our first world road race cycling champion in ‘65, we had a whole raft of innovative race car and engine designers who changed the whole way that race cars were built and we won world championships on two wheels and four. John Surtees won the world drivers championship in ‘64 and became still the only man to have won world titles on two and four wheels' Hill Clark and others cemented our position at the top of Grand Prix racing. Lynn Davies and David Hemery made gold in the ‘64 Olympics

No decade is perfect. We went from Harold Macmillan 'You've never had it so good' to Harold Wilson 'From now on, the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. That doesn't mean, of course, that the Pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued' - quite………….

You could see your GP at any time and he would visit if necessary in the middle of the night. The hospital system was more rudimentary but it worked and there were no real waiting lists.

Prices in ‘65 adjusted to today's allowing for inflation:

A pint of beer £1.70, newspaper 25p, average house price £50,000 and you got space inside and out, Ford Cortina 9,500. Not all was cheaper: new technology was much more expensive than now inline with the first mobile phones, and some food items are much the same, but transport was cheap.

Posting a letter cost 19p adjusted in ‘68 compared with 67p today.

Petrol per gallon - see here for how it has gone upwards ever since the motor car became a tax gift.

http://www.citroenhyonline.co.uk/resources/AA%20Petrol_Prices_1896_2012_gallons.pdf

Eating out, something that simply did not exist in the Fifties started to happen in the Sixties. Rudimentary it may have been, nonetheless although Chinese and Indian restaurants had been around for decades they were never really a pull for the general population. That all changed and with the change came food with taste, and along with the spicy food came lager. So much before had been so bland as to be instantly forgettable. As usual not all was good, Wimpy bars arrived!, and Bernie Inns, but it nonetheless got people out to eat in a way not seen before.

We really did not eat out, even the pubs only had a plastic cheese roll under a glass dome that had been perspiring for days and a choice of crisps: salted and unsalted.

Wine started to appear on menus. Till then wine had been something that Colonels drank in the shires; Mateus Rose and Blue Nun changed all that - basic, but a start.

Among other technological advancements in the sixties, carbon fibre was invented at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in ‘63.

The touchscreen was another British invention in ‘65, who would have believed then what an influence it would become in later years.

Barclays Bank saw the first ATM in action in ‘67 - a British, in its final form, invention; and James Goodfellow a Scottish engineer pioneered the PIN system which incorporated in with the credit card made cash withdrawals from ATMs a part of normal life in ‘66.

Technological advancement meant people had more leisure time. The microwave appeared along with transistor radios and colour TVs; Radio Caroline opened up a whole new a whole new world with DJs who promoted popular music.

Film mirrored the age and actors like Michael Caine, David Hemmings and a list that seemed endless advanced on the world stage, plus the films that were made when we sill had a functioning film industry, many remain classics and icons of that time.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls033305044/?sort=moviemeter,asc&st_dt=&mode=detail&page=1

- and Michael Caine introduces the Sixties:

My Generation | Official Trailer from Photon Films and Media on Vimeo.

People spoke to one another in the street down the pub. Today all you see is people glued to mobile phones. The art of dating has been lost as all go online to meet someone of the opposite sex, and same sex! - can’t think of a worse way to set out in the world with a new partner, it’s like colouring by numbers, you get a result but they are all the same.

Nobody gets married any more and single parents prevail, a backward step on all counts for the child especially, and a further burden on the taxpayer.

Being unemployed during the Sixties carried a stigma with it, no one wanted to go on the dole; today you can’t get a large percentage of the population weaned off it, it has become a lifestyle choice and is aided by the State.

And our ruling class of all colours gets ever more ridiculous and incompetent, yet people still vote for them.

As is the case younger people with no knowledge of earlier times are inclined to sneer at what was a golden age sans smart phones, it’s all they know, which is sad as they missed something they could never envisage. Who knows they might even have enjoyed it, the music was certainly better.

Politics has changed as well, no longer any orators or even speakers with any authority, who today could emulate this from Harold MacMillan:

Or this….

Or this…

Instead we are reduced to this, though it could have been any one of dozens today of the self-serving dross that is foisted upon us: https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1551998877053624321

"I am Kamala Harris. My pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit." Second in command of the most powerful nation on the planet. God help us.

The Sixties was Britain pre-EU,  a world that we left behind to join a trading bloc? Something else the later generations would not have a clue about. It was on reflection a decade we largely took for granted at the time such was the speed of change, but there has not been a decade like it since.

“If you remember the ‘60s, you weren’t really there.”

That line though with some basis of truth for a small section of society was not of the time, it was first uttered by American comedian Charlie Fleischer in ‘82 and he would be just ten when the Sixties started so probably knew little about the decade. It assumes everyone at the time was on something, that was also not true but it makes a good punchline.

Tottenham Royal with the Dave Clark Five on stage, a regular haunt of mine during the Sixties.
Many top bands played there as they did up the road at the Astoria Finsbury Park (later the Rainbow.)

FRIDAY MUSIC: Cab Calloway, by JD

Cab Calloway (1907 - 1994) was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, bandleader, conductor and actor. He was associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, where he was a regular performer and became a popular vocalist of the swing era. His career more or less spanned the 20th century, he led one of the most popular dance bands in the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. 

Calloway had several hit records in the 1930s and 1940s, becoming known as the "Hi-de-ho" man of jazz for his most famous song, "Minnie the Moocher", originally recorded in 1931. He reached the Billboard charts in five consecutive decades (1930s–1970s). 

In 1980 he appeared in the film The Blues Brothers (performing Minnie the Moocher, of course) Not many people can look back on 65 years in the showbiz limelight!

https://www.biography.com/musician/cab-calloway

Please drink, smoke, gamble and take drugs responsibly

Last Tuesday's C4 documentary 'Alcohol, Dad and Me' may have helped reopen the debate on addiction and whether it is really enough for the State to stand back and let so many individuals be trapped and flounder.

Businesses and government have a two-part strategy to exploit your weaknesses:

• make profits and raise taxes from your self-indulgence
• say it is your choice so they can’t be blamed and sued

Companies will do whatever is profitable and are tempted to reduce ethical issues to relative-cost calculations. For example in 1970s USA Ford produced a model, the Pinto, known to be fire-hazardous, but worked out that the estimated $50 million compensation for 180 anticipated deaths was less than half the expense of modifying the vehicles to make them safer.

The State is expected to take a wider, less commercial view; besides, at first sight the figures seem to argue for stringent control of alcohol and tobacco:

• UK alcohol taxes in 2021/22: £13.1 billion, vs ‘health, social and economic consequences, estimated at between £21 and £52 billion a year.’
• UK tobacco duty 2021/22: £10.27 billion, vs ‘£14.7 billion per year’ cost to the economy.

That said, the revenues quoted above don’t include the income and corporation taxes and National Insurance contributions generated by the industries concerned. Taking them into account, perhaps ‘Pinto maths’ might win the argument after all.

[In the case of gambling, coldly considered, it already looks like net profit for the country - c. £3.1 billion in tax receipts, vs ‘annual economic burden of harmful gambling … about £1.27 billion.’ Does that make it right?]

Moral issues can’t be simply resolved by analysing cashflow; that’s the sort of thinking that could even be used to justify killing unproductive people, which is exactly what the writer and socialist George Bernard Shaw advocated in 1931 - and again in 1948.

Keeping the debate on the ethical level, liberty is a strong counter-argument to puritanical bans, though one has to weigh freedom in one’s personal habits against the harm and expense they cause to others.

A test case for that assessment was America’s experiment with Prohibition (1920-1933). Note that the Eighteenth Amendment did not forbid drinking alcohol; it proscribed the ‘manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.’ The term ‘manufacture’ implies large-scale production, so technically ‘home brew’ might be considered unexceptionable. The real target was the commercial exploitation of these products.

It’s often been supposed that Prohibition was a failure, but that may not be so. Not only were there definite health benefits but the popular idea that crime and violence increased may also be mistaken, as this 2019 article on Vox suggests. What brought it all to an end was the Depression: in 1933 the revival of the alcohol industry increased employment, made profits for associated businesses and raised much-needed revenue fot the Government.

On the other hand, if the 1933 Banking Act that curbed investment banking had been introduced when Prohibition started, maybe America would have been both more temperate and much wealthier, and there would have been no Depression.

Obviously there are challenges in trying to uproot well-established enterprises that batten on the vulnerability of individuals, but Prohibition was introduced on the back of much popular support and clearly did reduce alcohol consumption. The clampdown might have worked even better if Canadians had not helped to undermine it; it was this that hardened the previously porous border between the countries.

In the UK, the three vices discussed so far are money-makers and the costs to the NHS are only a fraction of the overall disbenefits, which are diffused throughout the economy, so the Government may not be so motivated to take action as if all costs impacted directly on the Treasury.

Tax hikes on alcohol and tobacco may sometimes be justified in terms of dissuading overconsumption, but one has yet to hear of many people giving up drinks and smokes because of the expense. My father started his tobacco habit when the local shopkeeper sold children a cigarette and a match for a penny; once addicted, his generation might have cheerfully called fags ‘coffin nails’ but it didn’t stop them buying packets of ten and twenty at a time as adults.

What would happen if drinkers and smokers all ‘went on strike’? It could be argued that the State is hooked on the income; and our political representatives are liable to be lobbied by powerful interests, too.

So the official strategy is to legalise, regulate and tax; and to try to keep the damage down to some acceptable level (measured how?), without going all-out for abolition.

Another element in that policy is to throw the responsibility back on to the addict. ‘Please drink responsibly’; ‘smoking kills’; ‘when the fun stops, stop’ - there. we told you! It was your free choice; we wouldn’t dream of interfering with your liberty; and there are organisations to help you - Drinkaware, ASH and NHS Stop Smoking, GambleAware - more fool you if you don’t seek help.

This plays on our perception of ourselves as free and rational, but the long-term recovery rates for the seriously addicted make for discouraging reading.

Even if we give up hope of turning the tide on the first three vices, should we also give in to the clamour for legalising currently illicit drugs? There is tremendous pressure to normalise cannabis use, even though the modern, genetically modified strains are so much stronger than what was around 50 or 60 years ago; and now one sees articles linked from social media suggesting the health or mental benefits of LSD.

The discussion of disbenefits needs to widen. It’s not enough to talk about serious illnesses and fatalities, or increases in criminal behaviour. A major objection to letting the young be ‘stoned’ - even if that doesn’t happen in their school years - is the tiredness and apathy that hold them back in those crucial years of early adulthood.

I saw that last when working in a scheme to help 15-year-olds who had been out of the education system for some time. One was falling asleep at nine in the morning, during the group session designed to raise morale and aspirations. He didn’t last there.

Another, a very nice lad who habitually referred to cannabis as ‘bud’ or ‘bud-dha’ and was desperate to stop even though his friends and family were a constant temptation, turned to religion, praying five times a day as Islam expects, and listening to beautifully-sung hymns to help his meditation. It’s not his fault that the amateur makers of the CD waited a few minutes into the light hypnosis to begin their perorations on the wickedness of Jews; I hope he made it through one temptation without falling into the other.

It’s not just poor fallible individuals who should be expected to behave responsibly; the State cannot disclaim its own share of responsibility.

That drone strike: a teeny-tiny query

UPDATE: apparently it was a new, horrible slicing-up weapon, one of a family of ghastly new inventions as discussed here: https://theconversation.com/bladed-ninja-missile-used-to-kill-al-qaida-leader-is-part-of-a-scary-new-generation-of-unregulated-weapons-188316

_________________

Two intelligence sources tell Fox News Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahiri was killed in the CIA drone strike. "Over the weekend, the United States conducted a counterterrorism operation against a significant Al Qaeda target in Afghanistan," the senior administration official told Fox News. "The operation was successful and there were no civilian casualties." 

- https://www.fox5ny.com/news/biden-announces-counterterrorism-operation-al-qaida-afghanistan

Why is the qualifier 'civilian' there?

Does it imply that there were others? Another account I hear said he was standing on a balcony - all alone in a big house?

If there were other casualties, what would make them non-civilian? Being members of his family?

A fuller account, please.

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Back to Mono 2

Back to mono again…but this time in painting not photography. My exceedingly excellent tutor said to use a single colour only plus white to help learn about tonal values. She is a really good teacher.

Herewith the results of my efforts: top one is in oils and the bottom one is acrylic both using burnt sienna plus titanium white (the EU banned flake white in the weird belief that artists might mistake it for toothpaste.)

WEEKENDER: The push for sustainability, by Wiggia

It was browsing through some drinks-related articles that sparked my piece off this week, I came across this…

https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2022/07/one-in-four-uk-adults-willing-to-pay-more-for-sustainable-packaging/

The headline quotes 1 in 4 as willing to pay more for sustainable packaging; that is, 1 in 4 said they might be willing to pay more whilst 3 out of 4 don't want to pay more or can’t afford any more price increases on anything, but that isn’t mentioned, they don’t matter as they don’t support the narrative.

As with so much today corporations are following the agenda for all things climate change, for that is what this is actually about, it has nothing to do with saving precious resources. What all these aims have in common is more expense for the consumer, at a time when inflation is at its highest in thirty odd-years, earnings are falling in real terms and basics in particular energy are not only becoming a very expensive necessity but will naturally mean the general public will cut back as they have already started to do on various items.

Sometimes I wonder what planet these people and organisations are on. During a period of financial stress for the many they faff about adding costs to items that may well be off the agenda all together in the next year; what is the advantage for them in that?

Already in the magazine a piece on Philip Schofield, yes him, whose own wine brand (wine brands are the new celebrity cause célèbre, all must have one) is going to promote for the same reasons cardboard packaging i.e. bottles. No quibble with that but its sustainability advantage over glass is doubtful; will it also be cheaper? No comment on that point - with glass techniques producing thinner and much lighter bottles the advantage is not that obvious. 

I have to admit I can’t stand Philip Schofield, my problem, a modern day version of the obsequious  Uriah Heep, but plenty do like him as his endless appearances prove.

It seems that along with diversity managers, sustainability managers are now onboard most big firms. It seems sometimes as though the private sector is mirroring the public sector in creating jobs for the boys. If sustainability is something they deem necessary why not use one the agencies who specialise in the subject? No, can’t do that, they need the name of their own sustainability manager on the letter heading to prove how worthy they are, so another layer of management is created that we all pay for one way or another.

Sustainability is just another arm of the climate change industry, and it is an industry. Oil producing firms are changing to sustainable forms of energy not because they are particularly of the belief that they are polluting the planet but because having their arm forced by green led governments simply means they switch to an alternative way of producing profit that allows them to stay in business. 

Companies like Shell have moved into a range of businesses that enable them to use their huge resources and carry on making money. The fact that the man in the street has had to dig ever deeper just to stay afloat is not their or the green lobby's concern and so it is with the extension into sustainable products.

This quote from a Conde Naste article is taken out of context but you can tell from it which way the wind is blowing:

‘with the promise that the current climate crisis can be turned into a business opportunity through innovation, engineering and eco-modernisation.   If many of these schemes come to pass they will be lucky to have anyone left to afford their ‘business opportunities.’

Conspiracy theories aside there can be no doubt now that the green lobby has infiltrated the government hierarchy and workings of state,  not just here but throughout much of the western world.

Another part of the same document:

‘Last year, poor social and environmental performance caused the CEO of the world’s largest mining company to resign; the stock of three chemical giants plummeted; and corporations were called to the carpet for poor emissions offset programs. This shows that climate action is no joke among the public, and the stakes are only going to get higher.’

The truth is the public would likely know nothing about it, What happened was a leak on the performance and the threat from woke banks and institutions threatening the funding of further projects unless they comply, so the part about the public apart from the green blob is disingenuous.

They don’t want you to travel, yet apart from a few asides will not  come out with that fact outright and we see the creeping agenda: EVs that few can afford, the subsidy to the same EVs being withdrawn and the edge they have in running costs now evaporating with other ways of taxing.

It can’t be a coincidence that world wide we are seeing airports in chaos and ferry ports blocked. All the excuses have only a modicum of truth, as the fact that people would want to get away after two years of lockdown was obvious, yet here we are with everyone conveniently blaming everyone else.

The utter disconnect between what they wish for and what is possible, and it isn’t with current technology, is highlighted here; as he says at the end, we are being led by political science:

https://thecountersignal.com/toronto-pearson-international-airport-ranks-as-worst-airport-for-flight-delays-in-the-world/

Not only do they not want you to drive, they don’t want you to fly or travel unless it is by public transport. It will be made as difficult as possible in the short term by the mandating of vaccine passports; even if we in the UK are slow to this others will lead and all will follow. Only private jets as already will be exempt for the elite and the rich, anyone who thinks this will not happen is kidding themselves. The lying and scaremongering will continue unabated as it has been shown to work.

Schipol Amsterdam airport has just announced it will restrict the number of flights by ten per cent; interesting, as it is in the last phase of building a terminal to increase passenger numbers. So where did this bad business decision come from? It comes of course from the Dutch government who own the majority of the airport's holdings, the same government who are wanting to stop 50% of Dutch farming.

Were the Dutch public when they voted for this lot aware what was in store for them? If they were then on their collective heads be it, but I doubt that any political party would be shouting these policies from the rooftops, it will if at all be buried in the small print.

https://www.timeout.com/news/this-is-the-first-airport-to-limit-flights-to-combat-climate-change-072622

Sustainability has already been voiced by no other than the clothing industry which now has advocates of so called sustainable materials at much higher prices as the way forward despite years of the Primarks of this world dominating the industry. This philosophy is being applied to everything, in a recession of which we are on the edge, a lowering of living standards, and with wage stagnation over the last ten years. Simply, few will be able to afford this new way forward; in a growth economy there may be some justification for it in some areas, but that is not the case and won't be for years with the debt that has been forced on us.

Yet none of this will make the slightest bit of difference as outside the western woke world no one is listening. The climate change argument has no traction in places like China and India so we are impoverishing ourselves for nothing.

Remember this?

https://twitter.com/i/status/1552198551148576768

(President Trump warning in 2018 against overedependence on Russian energy supplies)

- Not laughing now, are they?

And finally, for those who believe that Britain should be turned into a version of Jurassic Park we have smug ‘conservationist’ Chris Packham at odds with smug SNP windbag Ian Blackford over Sea Eagles carrying his lambs away. My wish would be for the Sea Eagles to up their game and carry both of them away.

Blackford said this awhile back:

“Blackford’s calls come less than three years after a non-native mink killed his three-year-old ducks — named Mrs McGregor, Mrs Campbell, Mrs Morrison and Mrs McFarlane“

The price that’s paid for all this re-wilding and moves to sustainability have a price that is worth paying - until, that is, it affects you.

We will all be scavenging soon if this lunacy is allowed to carry on.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Darrell Scott, by JD

I first became aware of Darrell Scott when he appeared on the BBC's Transatlantic Sessions many years ago. Last weekend he popped up again on SKY Arts as one of the members of Robert Plant's Band of Joy in an hour long concert recorded in Nashville and very good it was too! I believe the whole thing is on YouTube somewhere. 

Anyway, Scott is an exceptionally fine musician and songwriter of American folk music loosely categorised as Americana or Roots music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_Scott

Conservative leadership? by Sackerson

From my Substack column...

----------------------------------

Now that the contest for the Conservative leadership has been whittled down to two candidates, we should look at what qualities might make a good leader.

Intelligent and hard-working?

In 1933 the chief of the German Army was quoted as saying:

Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.

Erstwhile Chancellor Rishi Sunak humblebrags that his greatest weakness is working hard. Potentially that could be a problem, if as PM he allows himself to get over-involved in minutiae to the detriment of ‘helicopter overview.’

With Liz Truss we have the problem of deciding whether she is stupid or lazy; or even both. For example, in the runup to the invasion of Ukraine she walked into a meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and told him ‘that the UK would never recognize Moscow’s sovereignty over the Voronezh and Rostov [Russian!] regions.’ It was hardly her first gaffe, but this one was huge: if you are going to confront a potential enemy, you absolutely must get your facts right. Lavrov accused her afterwards of being ‘unprepared.’

Truss has tried to ‘channel’ Margaret Thatcher, e.g. by the tank photo-op, and her choice of clothing for this leadership debate, thereby inviting damaging comparison, as Edwina Currie pointed out. At the least, this self-undermining image policy argues an inability to foresee presentational pitfalls, in a profession that relies so heavily on appearances.

Ability to dominate others

When General Montgomery first met Winston Churchill, the latter offered him alcohol. Monty replied, ‘I don’t drink and I don’t smoke, and I’m one hundred per cent fit.’ Churchill leaned forward and said, ‘I drink, and I smoke, and I’m two hundred per cent fit!’ Smiling at the memory decades later, Monty told the interviewer, ‘I thought then, we’ve got our man,’ i.e. someone with the aggression to lead the country to victory.

I may be wrong, but although Truss is ambitious, she doesn’t seem to have Thatcher’s intimidating diligence, force of personality and social skills, all necessary to bring the (still mostly male) serpents around the Cabinet table to order. I can imagine her as PM being briefed against, early and often.

Sunak is certainly clever - he used to be an investment analyst for Goldman Sachs (aka the ‘vampire squid.’) Like Gordon Brown, perhaps, he may come up with strategies, schemes and flowcharts - but can he lead? Like Truss, I think he’s a bit of a stiff, a natural big-corporation tie-wearer who chimes wrong when he tries casual as in the debate:

Image: Yahoo!

Ability to inspire

When Sven-Göran Eriksson chose David Beckham in 2001 to lead England in the World Cup, he said (and I wish I could find the quote) that Beckham had a winner’s state of mind that he could instinctively communicate to the rest of the team. That was borne out by England’s 5-1 victory against Germany in the qualifying rounds.

Beckham has often been guyed as apparently slow-minded or semi-inarticulate, but some people put one off by seeming too glib or ‘too clever by half.’

Does either Sunak or Truss pass the Beckham test?

Long-term vision

It’s been a long time since British politics has had a statesman at the helm. We stumble from one crisis to another; even Margaret Thatcher, voted in to ‘sort out the unions’, needed to cast about for a wider econo-political strategy and had to be guided into monetarism by Sir Keith Joseph.

In a way it can be an advantage not to have any beliefs. One of the reasons for Johnson’s entry to Number Ten is that his eyes had been fixed on personal greatness since childhood, irrespective of any moral or political principles. Rackety and sloppy, he was allowed to take over because he could see which way the political tide was turning, even while PM Theresa May was trying to hold it back, Canute-like.

Johnson’s egregious sense of entitlement, noted at Eton, is to many an attractive quality, even though perhaps it shouldn’t be. He has always felt that the rules needn’t apply to him; he is in a way a modern, a posh version of Neal Cassady. He is irrepressible - his resignation statement (7 July) and Parliamentary speech during the subsequent confidence debate (18 July) were amazingly bullish. Nothing will keep him down; goodness knows what further personal triumphs are ahead of him.

But what of our future?

The UK and the US have been systematically weakening themselves for what? forty years? while the East has been rising so rapidly at our expense and with the support of our multinational companies and globalist political class.

What will Sunak or Truss do to turn the tide? Do they want to?

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Fractal art 2, by JD

'Liquid landscapes' created with ChaosPro fractal generator - http://www.chaospro.de/index.php The last update on the ChaosPro page is 2011 so I am not sure if the program is still downloadable.

These images were created using either Windows Vista or Windows XP but subsequent versions of Windows produce much less elaborate images. A clear case of Hutber's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutber%27s_law