A Transsexual Coincidence

One thing leads to another. It certainly did last Wednesday, when blows were exchanged at Speaker’s Corner between transsexuals and feminists who don’t wish the former to have the rights they enjoy themselves.^[1] These TERFs^[2] don’t seem to realise how old-fashioned their prejudice is.  For transsexuals play a key part in a novel from 1960 that took nearly 50 years to get published.^[3]

Murray Sayle’s “A Crooked Sixpence”^[4] tells of an Australian journalist who comes to London following a girlfriend and manages to get a job on a newspaper, the Sunday Sun.^[5]  Largely based on his own experiences from the 1950s^[6], the book describes the underhand stratagems by which “human interest” journalists got stories to titillate their readers, regardless of the damage they caused to obscure individuals in their hypocritically moralistic exposés.^[7]

A game-changer in the tale is a transsexual who offers to tell his/her story, naively hoping for fair coverage. (This was very modern: in 1961 the Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic - the first in the UK^[8] - was still 5 years into the future. But the successful fashion model April Ashley was just about to be outed as a transsexual - in the Sunday People.)^[9]

The brutal editor, Barr, gives O’Toole his brief: offer £25 and “that bollocks about explaining his tragic plight to the public”, then turn on the trans in print:

“I see the angle like this: “This disgusting pervert has had himself mutilated to get money from the innocent British public. He even had the nerve to ask money for the revolting details of his sickening operation. You ought to be in a prison or a mental home, you're not fit to breathe the same air as the decent people of Britain, you contemptible beast.” With this twist, it ought to make a page lead.”

More than half a century later, the decent TERFs of Britain are turning on the often tremendously brave transsexuals, in a location famously dedicated to the principle of liberal tolerance.

---

^[1] http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/17/woman-injured-as-feminists-and-transgender-groups-fight-at-speakers-corner-6933812/

^[2] “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”

^[3] Originally published in 1961 but pulped almost immediately because of an attempt by a broke toff to sue the publishers: Michael Alexander was the model for “Michael Macedon”.

^[4] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crooked-Sixpence-Murray-Sayle/dp/0955823846

^[5] Based on The People, which was taken over by Mirror Group in 1961. Now called the Sunday People: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunday_People

^[6] He quit in 1956, like his fictional hero James O’Toole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Sayle

^[7] There was another book about Fleet Street - “The Street Of Disillusion” - published three years earlier (in 1958) by a man called Harry Procter. Like Sayle, Procter left the profession in disgust; but Sayle was to return a few years later and earn distinction in serious investigative journalism.

^[8] https://youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org/2016/08/30/fifty-years-on-the-charing-cross-gender-identity-clinic-and-the-funding-of-a-category-without-parallel/

^[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Ashley#Model.2C_scandal

Merkel's refugees: a twist

Germany is not inviting refugees/migrants out of love for them, for if that were so the incomers would not be kept in such degrading conditions. They are

"effectively warehoused in wholly inadequate conditions, housed twelve to a “room” in what are no more than, and indeed described as, “containers”. Existing on disgusting food, jobless and with no apparent means of emerging from these holding pens, these migrants have in effect been abandoned by the German state."

The real motive is to wipe the guilt blackboard clean so that they can get back to hating Jews, says Melanie Phillips in this review of undercover Jewish investigator Tuvia Tenenbom's latest book, "Hello, Refugees!"

FRIDAY MUSIC: Joan Osborne, by JD

This week's musical treasure is Joan Osborne: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Osborne

Maybe not as well known as she deserves to be but she is a very good 'soul' singer and seems to fit in quite happily in other genres; I first heard her on the BBC show 'Transatlantic Sessions' and one or two songs below come from that series.

Notes Towards A Blueprint For A Self-Destroying Financial Machine

There are many elements to the current economic system that threaten to tear it apart; so many that we will have to approach the design piecemeal, with the hope of eventually integrating all the pieces into one flowchart.

One aspect is the benefits trap. Undermining our domestic workforce by putting them in competition with far lower-paid people around the world has meant wages have stagnated, while in order to keep up with inflating living costs those out of work cost more to keep and those in work often need some form of in-work financial supplement.

The gap then narrows to the point where the unemployed cannot afford to work and the lower paid wonder why they bother to work. Responding to Sunday's post here, "Jack Ketch" says:

" A life on welfare today probably gives you a better standard of living than a working man had 40-50 years ago"

Bollocks does it! If I wanted to live in that kind of poverty, the soul destroying grinding poverty of Granddad's era, I'd go get a job....and yes I am genuinely on benefits. We pull in something like £1k a month cash in hand and the rent is paid. Going to work is a luxury many can't afford, that's the stone cold truth.

As the old song goes:

I was outside a lunatic asylum one day, busy picking up stones
When along came a lunatic and said to me, "Good morning Mr. Jones,
Oh, how much a week do you get for doing that?" "Thirty bob!" I cried.
"What, thirty bob a week, with a wife and kids to keep?
Come inside, you silly bugger, come inside."

"Come inside, you silly bugger, come inside, you ought to have a bit more sense.
Working for your living, take my tip, act a little screwy and become a lunatic.
Oh you get your meals most regular and a brand new suit besides.
What's thirty bob a week with a wife and kids to keep?
Come inside you silly bugger come inside."

See here from 2:05 for a visual metaphor:


Jean Tinguely - Homage to New York (1960) from Stephen Cornford on Vimeo.

Welfare State, meet your end

Peter Hitchens hits the nail on the head again today. Under the headline "Our drug-addled louts are the REAL reason we need migrants" he runs through the four plagues withering Britain:

- undisciplined, fatherless children;
- the failure of the education system to differentiate - not to access the same learning in many different ways (turning teachers into overworking, PC-ridden drudges), but to teach what is most suitable to that child's abilities, including vocational skills;
- giveaway welfare, and a laissez-faire approach to the habitual intoxication that lets youngsters grow up feckless and feral;
- courts that don't enforce the law

Michael Heseltine appears to second Hitchens' solution. While he now says "There have to be controls on immigration across Europe" - which I think is a forced change from his previous position - he points out the shortage of manpower in the public services:

"There is no alternative supply of skilled labour from our own population...It would take a decade to train up enough British workers to fill the gaps."

Fine, do it. Yes, let's admit foreign labour to remedy our shortfalls, but let's also tackle the real problems we have in our disorderly society. Because if we don't, goodbye the Welfare State.

75 years ago, William Beveridge produced his report, aiming to slay the "five giant evils of society": squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. We now have them again, but in a different guise - their modern versions are voluntary.

The long-term solution is not more immigration. The country is already incapable of feeding itself without massive food imports, which will become much more expensive for us as the differences in global pay narrow. If somebody comes in and pays less in taxes (direct and indirect) than he and his family take out, the wealth of the country declines; especially if by coming in ready and able to work he helps cement his British underclass counterpart in toxic idleness.

Our system doesn't challenge enough. The social workers I meet think that for a client to have a need is to have it met, and I'm not hard-hearted enough to say that underfed children should continue to sleep on sofas in dingy, dogbeshitten houses; but nobody seems to want to strengthen the family by enforcing marital/quasimarital responsibilities, particularly on men - but even if they did, where's the work and training? Where are the negative consequences for crime? What, other than pleading, wheedling and emotional manipulation (and they are trying, believe me), are teachers allowed to do to enforce discipline in the classroom?

People respond to game rules:

"I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread-nut to eat or a verse of a Psalm to learn, he says: 'Oh! the verse of a Psalm! angels sing Psalms;' says he, 'I wish to be a little angel here below;' he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety."

- Charlotte Bronte, "Jane Eyre", Chap. 4

The rules are long past due an overhaul. We've helped create the underclass in pursuit of other objectives: Labour and the LibDems, riding their hobby-horse of melting-pot immigration; the Tories, exploiting their opponents' Johnny-Head-In-Air idealism to bring in cheap labour and swell the bottom line of their business backers. Who defended our industry and its domestic ownership, our intellectual property, our R&D, our trade in real things?

If the decline continues, Beveridge's wonderful system will crack.

"Elitist" education and Britain's survival

James Delingpole on the famous scientist James Lovelock:

Born in 1919 into a working-class Quaker family, [...] Lovelock’s experiences at a grammar school in Brixton made him a firm believer in selective education.

‘It wasn’t the teaching, it was the kids,’ Lovelock says. ‘When I came back from the summer holidays when I was 13 there was one boy called Piercy, who said: “I’ve been spending the hols swotting up on quantum theory.” This was 1933. It was utterly new. It wasn’t taught in universities. “And if any of you are interested in discussing it…” And we did. Now this is the unique education only a grammar school could give because it had selected. No bullies. No nasties. Just kids who were intelligent enough to be interested in the world around them… Egalitarianism is utterly evil. It’s contra Darwin.’ (i)

Whereas:

"If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland."

- Anthony "Tony" Crosland, in 1965, as quoted by his wife in her biography of him. (ii) "Tony" attended an independent school (Highgate) and went on to Trinity College, Oxford, returning after the War to read PPE and become a don there.

As so many others have done, I ask, why grammar schools? Why not abolish private schools, if he was so intent on eradicating privilege?

Or was there some subtler plan? Was it to kick away the ladder of opportunity for talented working-class children like Lovelock, so that their resentments would fester and burst out when the chance of Revolution came?

Perhaps it was not so bad as that. Maybe the aim was more to blur the social boundaries by sending all secondary school children to comprehensives.

The first comprehensive I taught at - then the largest school in Birmingham - was ferociously disciplined and high-achieving in the late 70s/80s, under a whisky-drinking workaholic martinet who didn't live to pick up his pension; but he was exceptional and had turned the school around from earlier underperformance.

I was told that when the school was first "comprehensivised" in the Sixties it had enjoyed the support of the sort of parents who previously would have sent their children to grammar or private schools. Over time, as they perceived that great experiment was turning out a failure, many of them took their offspring elsewhere.

Part of the turnaround was to sort the c. 400-a-year new intake into streams and sets, with annual exams and re-setting children as appropriate. This certainly suited the many aspirant working-class parents - but I'm pretty sure that it had attitudinal consequences for those classed as being varying degrees of "failure". High - and sometime physical - discipline and staff coordination maintained order and made even unacademic children sought after by employers in the area, who wanted smartly-dressed regular attenders used to taking instructions.

But there were lots of other schools not run by overworking heads with first-class brains. Lovelock is right - there needs to be somewhere for "swots" to develop their minds, without having their heads forced into the lavatory by chippy thugs.

And we all need those grammar school children. Ironmonger's son General Bill Slim was one (iii), and without him the Japanese might have overrun not only Burma but India.

Today, as Britain continues (as it has done for decades) to be undermined by the Left and sold off piecemeal by the Right, we need to lead in science and technology again if we are to feed our overpopulated nation. Agricultural self-sufficiency is not an option.

Grammar schools; and a belated defence of our industrial base.

_______________________________________

(i) https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/james-lovelock-on-voting-brexit-wicked-renewables-and-why-he-changed-his-mind-on-climate-change/
(ii) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tony-Crosland-Susan/dp/022401787X
(iii) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Slim,_1st_Viscount_Slim#Early_years

FRIDAY MUSIC: Hiromi, by JD

The BBC Promenade Concerts are always good value and have become more varied in scope during recent years. There is now a regular evening of big band jazz but this year's offering was rather lacklustre as Wiggia pointed out in his post the other day. The whole evening was rescued with the appearance of Hiromi who gave a very hyperactive and barnstorming performance. Absolutely magnificent!

She has the spirit and the exuberance of Dorothy Donegan who featured here in January of this year- http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/friday-night-is-music-night-dorothy.html

But Hiromi is not just a brilliant jazz pianist, she plays classical music equally well having started at the age of five: from her Wiki profile:

"Hiromi started learning classical piano at age five, and was later introduced to jazz by her piano teacher Noriko Hikida. At 14, she played with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. When she was 17, she met Chick Corea by chance in Tokyo, and was invited to play with him at his concert the next day. After being a jingle writer for a few years for Japanese companies such as Nissan, she enrolled to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. There, she was mentored by Ahmad Jamal and had already signed with jazz label Telarc before her graduation."

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

Her natural talent is self-evident in the videos below but especially so in the first one, an inspired version of the famous Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel. Beginning with a metallic damping of the strings to make the piano sound rather like a harpsichord, she then weaves in and around the melody but at no point does she lose the tempo or deviate from the chord structure of the piece. This is pure genius!