EU: Conservative cattle farmers and Labour's blind band of brothers

http://mythfolklore.net/aesopica/crane/50.htm

Funny...

• Macmillan (1960/61) decides to join the EEC, sets Heath on to explore the constitutional issues. 
• Heath goes in (wef 1.1.73), lying about the implications for national sovereignty.
• Cameron calls the second referendum to shut up what he mistakenly believes to be a small sect of "fruitcakes and loons", then runs away when it all goes wrong. 
• May spends more than two years apparently quite deliberately time-wasting, then goes behind her Brexit secretary's back to make a plan which if anything is worse than the status quo. 

All Conservative Prime Ministers!

I can't understand why some Remainers paint Brexit as a "far-right" project, especially since some of the most vocal critics of the EU have been on the Left.

Both Brexit and Remain are cross-party stances, each having two legs:

• Some on the Right want the EU because for them it means money and power, position and pension, and it  pleases the directors of large businesses who can arbitrage workforce pay and conditions.
• Some on the Left see the EU as a socialist brotherhood, blindly ignoring what the EU has meant for the PIIGS; and for us, with our UK/EU £67 billion trade deficit. (There was only one year of our membership when we didn't have a deficit; funnily enough, the year of the first Referendum - 1975.) Over forty years of this bleeding has left much of British industry and the British workforce prostrate, and Labour's Peter Shore drew attention to it very early on, in his contribution to the Oxford Union's 1975 debate.

• Conversely, some on the Right campaign for Brexit, presenting the alternative to the EU as global free trade, which if it means even cheaper imports of food stands fair to kill what's left of our farming and fishing etc while pleasing the Institute of Directors. My guess is that under this plan the national accounts would improve for a while, then crash as the numbers of the unemployed and underpaid grew and their claims on the Welfare State took on crisis proportions; that, and/or major civil unrest.
• Then there are those on the Left who see (in my view correctly) the key narrative of British history as the people versus the Power, so that we now have in effect a republic disguised as a monarchy. It is a very imperfect republic and does not work for the interests of all, but there are many restraints on the executive, not least trial by jury (which is under attack by the Power even in this country) and the presumption of innocence. In legislation too, the Power has often attempted to free itself from Parliamentary supervision by the introduction of "Henry the Eighth" clauses that grant Ministers and organisations the right to make additional rules extempore.

In my view, the general public is insufficiently aware of what it is about to lose, possibly forever, if we do not both leave the EU and also fight TiSA, TPP, GATT and all the other supranational webs that will end in managing most of the world's population like cattle - but without the farmer's love.

There are some signs of a clearer-eyed opposition to EU-cum-globalism.

Seeing the neoliberal approach to Brexit as represented by Messrs Farage and Rees-Mogg, plus the semi-chaos of UKIP post-Farage, the original founder of UKIP has set up a Left alternative: Professor Alan Sked's Clean Brexit: http://cleanbrexit.com/

Similarly, Professor Philip Whyman has set out ideas for reclaiming national control and rebuilding the sort of industrial economy that can offer better than "Just About Managing" (bravely struggling) for the people:
http://www.civitas.org.uk/publications/the-left-case-for-brexit/ (free download).

Good luck to them; that is to say, to us.

Weekend Wonders: the Nut Weevil

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

FRIDAY MUSIC: Masters of War, by JD

Following on from last week's music post -
http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2018/09/friday-music-salad-days-by-jd.html
- America changed after those 'Salad Days'

The wave after wave of immigrants from 'the old world' brought with them their own culture and way of life to 'the new world'.

The immigrants and settlers were almost exclusively Christian; the Italians and the Irish brought their Catholicism, the Germans and Nordic peoples brought with them their own versions of Protestantism. They wished to make a fresh start, to build their own 'American Dream' and they did, based on their own traditions in the old world; of family, community and Christianity.

The 'Founding Fathers' of the new nation, on the other hand, were not Christians, they were Deists. They believed in a God but did not believe there was any sort of divine intervention in the world, and they did not accept the divinity of Jesus, rather like Islam which includes Isa ibn Maryam in the Koran as just another prophet in a long line of prophets. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Deism

Their core values were those of the French Revolution, of the 'Enlightenment' Their dream was the dream of reason and we know how that turned out. http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-cream-of-reason-revisited-by-jd.html

And as a consequence the American Revolution followed the same path as the French Revolution but much more slowly. As Goya noted, "No one is innocent once he has seen what I have seen. I witnessed how the noblest ideals of freedom and progress were transformed into lances, sabres, and bayonets. Arson, looting and rape, all supposed to bring a New Order, in reality only exchanged the garrotte for the gallows." - Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

The Founding Fathers of the USA believed in violence as a way of life. They believed in Naqoyqatsi which is a Hopi word (more correctly written naqö̀yqatsi) meaning "life as war". Naqoyqatsi is also translated as "civilized violence" and "a life of killing each other."

“I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.” - President Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p.297
https://consortiumnews.com/2011/06/11/teddy-roosevelts-bloodlust/

The USA has been at war with somebody or other for almost its entire existence and there is no sign yet of any end to it.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/america-war-93-time-222-239-years-since-1776.html













And here is an example of the aforementioned Naqoyqatsi:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ulysses-grant-launched-illegal-war-plains-indians-180960787/

"They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it." - Red Cloud

"What treaty have the Sioux made with the white man that we have broken? Not one. What treaty have the white man ever made with us that they have kept? Not one." - Sitting Bull

There are no sacred buildings or monuments in the USA, the Founding Fathers did not believe in such things. There are no sacred places in the USA because the Founding Fathers and their successors were unable to discover such locations; they did not believe in divine inspiration. There are sacred lands for sure in the USA but known only to the indigenous peoples.

"America is pregnant with promises and anticipation, but is murdered by the hand of the inevitable."
- Emerlist Davjack

Quote of the Day and a Quiz

"It is common, especially in big companies, to have an organisation staffed by ostensibly experienced and qualified people who are well paid, but simply decline to do their jobs. Instead, they busy themselves with other activities, often under the direction of a manager who never properly understood what they should be doing in the first place. It’s what happens when an organisation’s processes become divorced from the goals they are supposed to achieve, and managers are rewarded solely for following the process regardless of outcomes."

- Tim Newman, 03.10.2018

Before clicking on the link below, say:

- What field of work /organisation is under consideration here
- Where else the above comment might justifiably be applied

http://www.desertsun.co.uk/blog/8291/

Weekend Wonders: the Tardigrade

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth

FRIDAY MUSIC: Salad Days, by JD

Before he made the "Star Wars" series of films, the director George Lucas made a few low budget films. One of them turned out to be the best film he ever made - "American Graffiti" and in 1995, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The film is set in 1962 and is to a certain extent autobiographical in that it reflects Lucas' own teenage years in Modesto, California. The story line is in reality incosequential because the film is a study of the cruising and rock and roll cultures popular among the post–World War II baby boom generation. The film is a series of vignettes, telling the story of a group of teenagers and their adventures over a single night, that night being the last day of summer. The following day would see one of the principal characters leaving town to start college. The series of vignettes is set against a soundtrack of 41 popular songs of the period with the voice of radio DJ, Wolfman Jack, hovering in the background. Each of the songs reflects the story line as it unfolds which gives an operatic quality to the film, a teenage opera in fact.

It is 45 years since the film was released and I remember it well; looking at the clips it dawned on me that 1962 was a pivotal year. It was the end of an age of innocence and optimism, it was when the 'American Dream' died.

In 1963 JFK was murdered and then the country sank into the quagmire of Vietnam. Everything changed, nothing would ever be the same again.

Lucas was aware of the change of mood because the film ends with stills of the four main characters and captions telling of their subsequent fates.

But the music, ah the music. It was innocent, it was optimistic but above all it was singalong melodic and beautifully nostalgic for an oldie like me!

Killing Killing Eve

Killing Eve, an eight-part TV series made for BBC America, is successful and has been widely praised - even by Peter Hitchens*, who thereby persuaded me to have a look.

But I wonder if it is not obscene.

The 1959 Obscene Publications Act, later updated in the Broadcasting Act 1990 to include broadcast matter, makes the issue one of whether a publication is likely to "deprave and corrupt."

The test was explained - yet not fully clarified - in an 1868 case: "the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."

Note that it does not have to have this effect on everyone who accesses the material, merely those who are susceptible.

What concerns me is not only the extreme violence, though there is an incident in the first episode I would pay money to be able to forget entirely. It is the complete lack of empathy and even sadistic joy shown by the murderess, smilingly observing the suffering of her dying victims.

We are a simian species, and "monkey see, monkey do."

Film director Stanley Kubrick withdrew his 1971 film "A Clockwork Orange" from British cinemas in 1973 following a murder in Bletchley that seems to have had some connection. Kubrick denied art's power to influence behaviour: "people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their natures." But the question remains, can art influence someone who has that potential, to actualise it?

I have read - and perhaps my source, which I can't remember, was wrong - that one purpose of the ancient Games in Rome was to keep encouraging violent tendencies and lack of empathy in the Roman people so that they could continue to be the fearsomely cruel and warlike masters of the known world.

Even a libertarian is likely to draw the line at allowing freedoms that harm others. And if some susceptible person in my neighbourhood watches this kind of material and could be influenced to unleash his demon on me or mine, I have a legitimate interest in questioning the licensing of material likely to deprave.

In the UK case where Lewis Daynes murdered Breck Brednar, a boy he had groomed on the Internet, the boys had spent time playing violent video games online together, and Daynes was also ­said to have been "obsessed with videos of terrorist beheadings." Not all imagination leads to action, but don't many actions begin in imagination?

The first episode of Killing Eve is supposed to have been seen by over 5 million people in the UK so far (live or streamed afterwards). The wider the audience, the greater the chances that someone on the edge will see it and do - something.

Killing Eve is most skilfully acted and directed, with high production values. But if its effect is obscene, then the better it is made, the worse it offends.
___________________________

* "I didn't expect or even want to like the new BBC series Killing Eve, starring Jodie Comer, pictured, as a distractingly beautiful embodiment of pure evil.

"The trailers put me off. But the programme itself is an unexpected joy, looking and sounding witty, refusing to treat viewers as idiots, and, actually, a lot better than the overrated Bodyguard." 

- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6197645/PETER-HITCHENS-Norway-escape-PM-begging-Brussels.html