Wiggia's Winter Warning

A road safety message..............

A very Merry Christmas to all our readers, may you enjoy the fruits of your labours whether it be good food, good company, the best of wines and everything you have wished over the festive season, but just one word of warning whatever else you do , do NOT drink and drive......................

Toy Car Crash GIF from Toycar GIFs

Sackerson adds:

... and watch for ice...

Goldman Sachs: Can You Spare A Squid?

They've started with the radio adverts. You can open an online savings account with as little as £1.

"Marcus" (GS was founded by Marcus Goldman in 1869) was launched in September 2018 and will take deposits up to a maximum £250,000, paying 1.5% p.a.

With British bank accounts, deposits are protected up to no more than £85,000 per person (per financial institution). This matters, as a legal case in 1848 established that money left with a bank is not held in trust for the customer, who is merely a creditor (and not the most senior) with a claim on the bank's assets should it fail.

In fact even that £85,000 (€100,000) is an arbitrary figure not an absolute guarantee; it was reduced to £75,000 in January 2015 and re-raised in January 2017 to the fanfare of "people have more financial protection for their deposits from today." Potentially, you could end up with merely a slice of the equity of a shrunk and wobbly bank.

Goldman Sachs' new-found enthusiasm for curating the cash of the "little people who pay taxes" may or may not be connected to the 1MDB scandal that has led to multibillion-dollar claims on behalf of Abu Dhabi and Malaysia. So the pennies of the poor man's savings may help clear the blockage in the vampire squid's blood funnel.

The fraud allegations involve the former Prime Minister of Malaysia (Najib Razak) and a Malay businessman called Jho Low. Singapore is extending its criminal investigation to GS, but please don't worry about the bank execs: for people at their level, the very worst outcome is a spell improving their golf handicaps in a five-star open prison. No bunking with Bubba in a 10 x 8 for them.

You may remember the MP who, some years ago, proposed the introduction of completely safe deposit accounts - ones where the bank is only the custodian of your cash and must keep it safe for you: Douglas Carswell, 2010. (He tried again in 2016, as a tabled amendment to the Bank Of England Bill.) Even if he had succeeded, you would only be entitled to your money back - not necessarily its purchasing power.

How can you store value in a world of made-up money, inflated values, fairy guarantees and swindling? When you know, do please tell me.

___________________________________________

https://www.marcus.co.uk/uk/en/savings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Founding_and_establishment
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2018/09/new-online-bank-makes-its-marcus-with-top-savings-rate/
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/prudential-regulation/authorisations/financial-services-compensation-scheme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_v_Hill
https://www.globalresearch.ca/financial-meltdown-and-the-confiscation-of-bank-savings-the-uk-eu-bank-depositor-bail-in-scheme/5475934
https://www.fscs.org.uk/news/2017/january/new-85000-deposit-limit-from-today/
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leona_Helmsley
https://www.barrons.com/articles/abu-dhabi-fund-sues-goldman-sachs-over-1mdb-1542821292
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/malaysia-seeks-7-5-billion-reparations-goldman-sachs-071652236--sector.html
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/singapore-to-expand-1mdb-criminal-probe-to-include-goldman-sachs
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/25/1mdb-scandal-explained-a-tale-of-malaysias-missing-billions
https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/457478
https://positivemoney.org/2010/09/douglas-carswell-mp-introduces-bill-to-stop-fractional-reserve-banking/
https://positivemoney.org/2016/04/23871/

Bonus track - Matt Taibbi's famous 2010 article on GS in "Rolling Stone" magazine:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-195229/

Weekend Wonders: the White Blood Cell

FRIDAY MUSIC: Christmas (Part 2), by JD

As with last week, more music you may not have heard anywhere else.

Merry Christmas!

Does The Welfare State Kill?

Scrooge would probably have welcomed the notion that charitable generosity is misguided. But in the mouse experiment described here, it wasn't because of overpopulation:

"Great care was taken to ensure the mice were taken care of, food and water was unlimited allowing mice to eat or drink whenever they pleased and there was always space and clean bedding available so females could rear young in peace and safety.

"Despite this, Calhoun noticed that after day 315 of the experiment, things started to go wrong. First of all there was a noticeable drop in population growth. While initially the population of mouse heaven had doubled every 55 days, after day 315 it doubled, according to Calhoun’s notes, approximately every 145 days. This made little sense as there was still at this time ample space to house an additional 3000 mice.

"In addition to a drop in population growth, Calhoun also noticed an abrupt change in behaviour in both males and females. Social bonds effectively broke down and male mice, without a reason to defend their territory or food source (since both were plentiful) became dejected, forming cliques that randomly attacked one another for seemingly no reason. Females similarly began abandoning young or even attacking them and slowly but surely, both males and females simply stopped breeding...

"... what’s often lost in Calhoun’s work is what came after, in which he continued to research and tweak environmental variables to try to find ways to keep the mice from going down the extinction path even as the population density grew. And, in fact, he had some success at this, for instance in one case via simply encouraging creativity in certain mice by various means. Giving them a sort of purpose here actually worked, with the “creative” mice continuing to thrive well beyond what would have otherwise been expected from the previous experiments."

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2018/12/that-time-a-guy-tried-to-build-a-utopia-for-mice-and-it-all-went-to-hell/

Conclusions?

Bell¿ngcat: ¿White Knight Or Trojan Horse?

British web investigators "Bellingcat" have published a review of the controversy surrounding the "White Helmets" organisation that claims to be a nonaligned charity helping victims in the Middle East, but which some say is a group of closet IS fellow-travellers:

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018/12/18/chemical-weapons-and-absurdity-the-disinformation-campaign-against-the-white-helmets/

Most of us, I suppose, are looking for sources of reliable information on contentious issues. Unfortunately, it is just such trusted sources that are a tempting target for those who wish to spread disinformation...

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/how-bellingcat-outfoxes-the-worlds-spy-agencies/

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/?s=Bellingcat

Alternatively, if they resist such hijacking, they are to be attacked:

"In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as “propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government.”

- John Pilger, as quoted on Eva Bartlett's website:
https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2018/09/20/john-pilger-hold-the-front-page-the-reporters-are-missing/#more-24852

The "hidden hands" of the spooks can hardly lose, for when enough confusing fog has been raised the average person will be inclined to give up and passively accept the way of the world.

Now let us watch how the Great Powers start a war in, oh, maybe the Ukraine.

No wonder so many feel helpless, pray for a light in the void, and that Good will triumph.

CHRISTMAS: All Lit Up, by Wiggia

The annual ritual of decorating the house inside and out has reached a state whereby people start to question ‘has this really got anything to do with Christmas?’ in a religious sense: very little items that started out as symbolic have developed into full-on festive fun ! And if you don’t agree with that, fine, but it is what it is. The likelihood of the years rolling back to a more contemplative time is long gone, rightly or wrongly.

This rather serious preamble is because I have dived into the decorating meme with abandon this year. There are reasons, none good, but the purchase of a new Christmas tree and new lights left me with the old lights plus two older strings with nowhere to put them.

The decorated Christmas tree goes back to Victorian times in its present form so we know who to blame for that item and of course when we were kids hours spent linking and licking paper chains was as near as we got to more colourful decorations.

But things have moved on a pace: my recent visit to the garden centre for the new tree and lights showed by how much.

It is easy (!) to get drawn in to the whole over-the top-decorating thing when presented with such choice. No longer a few tasteful items over the mantelpiece, a wreath on the door and the tree with the presents underneath on Christmas morning; this is no longer anywhere near enough.

The lighting is the most obvious big advancement in decorations. LED lights have put paid to that dusty string produced from under the stairs each year that you then spent several days trying to find the dud bulb that stopped it all working or the loose bulb that made everything flicker and eventually sent you mad and you binned the lot. Today's fail-safe lights mean we now have endless variations all of which are "put up and go."

But the garden centre showed a lot more than strings of lights. We now have laser displays: you can turn the front of your house into a permanently snowing tableau or a moving Father Christmas on a reindeer sledge going endlessly from left to right and giving you a migraine. Giant blow-up Santas and complete scenes of the Nativity filled one corner of the display area, the biggest nine feet high, all lit internally for the pleasure of passing motorists and others, and to top it all you can assemble a crib and have a menagerie of animatronics all moving. There is no longer an end to it or what you can spend - which is the point after all, none of the latter comes cheap.

Enough of this doom mongering. What to do with the excess light strings, 2000 bulbs in total? A good question. My solution or proposal was to use the branches of the cedar tree at our entrance that traverse the drive as a support for the lights and after tying in the ends of the branches on the other side of the drive, thereby creating an arch weave, the lights in the branches would create a hopeful appearance, not unlike the entrance to a grotto !

Only one problem to accomplishing this: me. Thirty, even twenty years ago it would not have been a problem, but now... I laid the supply cable, I placed the waterproof connection box at the ready and then unravelled the light strands, put my ladders in place and climbed up to start the process.

An hour later it became evident that getting up between the branches was not on. Approaching from the ground and not the trunk was also fraught, as there was nowhere to place the ladders and secure them. So after another hour I climbed down and gave up, before I had an accident and hung myself and lit up all at the same time.

This didn’t go down too well with No. 1 as the prospect of a grotto had ingrained itself on her mind and my safe alternative to light up the ten-foot-high shrubbery in front of the house (the house is elevated) was met with a distinctly muted response. I got the impression me hanging and lit up would have been the preferred option. Nonetheless less after an hour or so of continual re-jigging the lights' positions it looked half decent and it got a grudging thumbs up.

Having made a rather splendid job of decorating the tree No. 1 has started to get critical of neighbouring properties. The stretch we are on does look a bit like a scene from the film "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" with me taking on the role of the hapless Clark Griswold (played by Chevy Chase) when he did the initial lighting-up; I fear for the national grid when everyone turns the lights on.

No, it is not that stretch of the road which comes in for  opprobrium, no: it is those with a feeble ten-year-old wreath on the door, or a tatty small tree with the minimum decorations. These, she considers, are not pulling their weight in the scheme of things: “If you are going to decorate, do it properly or don’t bother at all!” I can only nod weakly in agreement; the decoration police have spoken.

As of last night, the occupant of Number 42 has  elevated himself from those that do not bother by putting a large illuminated reindeer in his porch; not so many to go now !

The house itself is only part of the total look. Those who care (*cough*) go the whole way with the table decs which must include centre piece, sprigs of holly by the dining utensils, candles (how could I forget the candles? the bigger the better), crackers, and Christmas-themed serviettes - this year we have penguins! Plus if you still feel festive after all this, a Santa hat or similar to wear during the festivities - a must if children are present or even when they are not.

And before anyone comments, taste has absolutely nothing, nothing at all to do with any of this.

I can hear the cries from the more traditional elements saying this has absolutely nothing to do with what Christmas is all about. Quite right too, but it is not going to be me who broaches that angle with No. 1,  oh no no no... I have no desire to end up like Clark Griswold.