We were enjoying last night's episode of QI XL, a programme that explores interesting facts and provides opportunities for laughs, many of them a bit bawdy but reflecting on the human condition.
And then, a propos of bugger-all, Phil Jupitus had to bring Brexit into it.
The segment was about cane toads in Australia, and we got a close-up of one:
At 19:07 in: (stupid, gravelly voice) Hullo (audience laughter)... I definitely think we should leave Europe."
So, funny because the supposed speaker is old? Or ill-educated? Or white?
If I were a wokester, I guess I could have him on my checklist of offences: ageist, elitist, racist.
Bear in mind that Brexit wasn't the topic under discussion and there was no lead-in even from Jupitus. It was just something that his daft metropolitan audience (the programme is recorded in the London Studios, Waterloo) could be guaranteed to agree-laugh at. It's almost Bernard Manning for right-on bigots.
But Jupitus is not himself daft. He's a grammar-school boy, making his money off an easily pleased English fanbase although he lives in Fife.
And the TV will try to persuade us that the country thinks like these degree-holder morons.
The episode (#241) was first aired on 25 October 2019. I don't suppose the result of the General Election a couple of months later will have changed his opinions (or the opinions he affects to hold while in performance), any more than that of the 2016 Referendum.
But 'woke' is about falling for the emo-traps set for us by the real elite, who encourage us to focus on personal and sexual issues so we can't see the power-grabs going on around the world.
And there's a class of clever, well-rewarded entertainers employed to play to audience prejudice. Ordinary Brits, downtrodden by globalist forces from which educated professional smartcrackers are relatively immune, are guyed by the comparison with an ugly toad. Despicable; an easy and suitable target for us sophisticates; 'deplorables,' to coin a phrase.
I wonder how these salon sallies would play in coastal fishing communities; in the broken mining areas; in the housing estates around closed steelworks; in the built-over former car factories; on the struggling farms across the country?
Tatiana Eva-Marie is a French jazz singer based in New York. With her Avalon Jazz Band their music is inspired by the Parisian jazz scene of the 1940s: a mix of swing, Gypsy jazz and French chanson.
She appeared on French TV at the age of seven singing Flocon Papillon, a French children's song and the clip is on YouTube if you wish to satisfy your curiosity and you can read more about her here - http://tatianaevamarie.com/about/
Free trade of the sort the new government has vaguely encouraged us to welcome is potentially ruinous. The severe competition from globalism is made worse by a modern monetary system that cannot act as a self-correcting mechanism. As a result, we in the West see growing debt, inequality, creeping economic ruin and the potential for major social disorder. Instead of leaving the market to regulate itself, the political class must exercise control; Brexit is their teething-ring for learning to tackle the new world economy. Are our leaders sufficiently skilled, educated and motivated to save us?
In classical economics, free trade can be mutually beneficial even when one party is more competitive in all the things the other can do. David Ricardo illustrated his 1817 ‘theory of comparative advantage’ with a theoretical example of England v Portugal and the making of cloth and wine. When each country shifts some resources to the item it produces more efficiently at home, overall output is increased and the surpluses can be traded. Win-win!
But what if your competitor nation can make all your goods with labour costs 47 times lower – not to mention far cheaper land and equipment, currency-adjusted? Sir James Goldsmith spelled it out in a 1994 interview with Brian Walden:
Here is what he said about the effects on workers of two decades of trade liberalisation within the EU:
‘In France you had in 1973 420,000 unemployed. Between 1973 and 1993 the economy grew by 80 per cent, eight zero, almost doubling; and the number of unemployed went from 420,000 to five point one million. What can be the purpose of an economy which by doubling goes to 5.1 million?’
Globalisation and the GATT talks that enabled it threatened even – far – worse. Sadly, it was good for the blue suits and bad news for the boiler suits; the comparative advantage is now that of capital over labour. But “What,” asked Sir James, “is the purpose of the economy? It is to enrich us and therefore how do we have an economy which can provide jobs and prosperity?”
Yet even an enlightened employer may not be able to protect its workforce. In his book on the plight of the white American underclass, ‘Deer Hunting With Jesus’, Joe Bageant related (pp. 75/76) how a plastic goods manufacturer, the main employer in his home town of Winchester, Virginia was forced to succumb to globalism:
‘Wal-Mart sells by far the greatest volume of Rubbermaid products of any retail chain. Given such an advantage, in 2001 Wal-Mart’s executive management team heavied up on Rubbermaid, demanding ridiculously low prices despite an 80 per cent increase in the cost of raw materials and personal pleas by Rubbermaid CEO Joseph Galli.’
Forcing the issue, the retailer found an alternative supplier that made cheaper ‘knockoffs’ of Rubbermaid’s lines. The latter lost 30 per cent of their sales and caved in to Wal-Mart, sacking eleven thousand employees nationwide for the sake of survival. (And, I suppose, if Wall-Mart hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.)
However, when a company lays off employees, the costs (and there are many ramifications) are borne by society generally; the boost to the company’s profits and taxes may be outweighed by the burden it has thrown onto the community. And in a world where firms can reincorporate abroad, they can escape more completely (a move HSBC is rumoured to be contemplating.) Perhaps we should worry less about CO2 and more about UB40 (aka Jobseeker’s Allowance) - and PSNB.
Theoretically, the currency exchange market could help correct trade imbalances, as Investopedia explains. But China cemented its cost advantage against the USA by pegging the renminbi to the dollar in 1994, preventing the former from rising in value which would have made its exports pricier; even since 2005 it has allowed only a limited appreciation. Since the US dollar is also the world’s trading currency, the effects are not limited to America.
The wealth-sucking has continued, abetted by Western money-makers who are now beginning to fear for their own safety as society starts to collapse - some have started to buy boltholes in the Pacific.
China has recycled some of its surplus in massive purchases of US Treasury bonds, though it worries about the value of its holdings and the Americans worry about the plug being pulled suddenly (which could see damaging interest rate rises on the crippling amounts of US public debt.) She has also invested c. $180 billion in US assets, though again Americans fret – perhaps too late – about the security implications. Longer term, China is looking to urbanise fast and under President Xi has more than doubled electricity production, whatever Greta (our Joan of Aaargh!) may witter. They seem to be working on ‘endogenous growth’ of their economy in preparation to move out before the West’s roof falls in. When the dollar ceases to be the global means of exchange the flood of cash returning to the US could be greatly inflationary.
Traditionally, gold has been a hedge against inflation. The old saying is that an ounce of gold buys a handmade suit, and that’s pretty much true now. But it’s funny how while China and Russia have built up their stocks of gold, Canada has been selling off its own to the retail market and Britain’s stock, once 2,500 tons, has fallen to 310. Maybe we are going the way of Toronto, for – did you know this? - a recent (6 November) Privy Council meeting has authorised designs for a range of gold coins including one worth £7,000. I suspect that gold sales are to stop us – for a while - seeing inflationary reality. When the slowing velocity of money (how fast the cash turns round affects GDP) stops offsetting the money-printing by central banks, we may be up a gum tree in a forest fire.
That money-printing proceeds apace. The banks are still zombies, and in the US the Federal Reserve has been providing life support by hundreds of billions in the overnight lending system known as the ‘repo market.’The Global Financial Crisis is not over, it’s been monetised.
If we are to have a stable and just society, we need to get our people working. And since the money system can’t correct for globalisation, governments will have to intervene. Not that we should put down the shutters on international trade, but we should at least try to control the rate of change, to give our economies time to adjust. Otherwise many of us will have our enterprises disrupted as British weavers experienced two hundred years ago when the new spinning machines abruptly cut their livelihoods from under them.
The challenge is already daunting. The Daily Mail’s Alex Brummer wrote eight years ago about the growing foreign ownership of British businesses, and guess where the axe will fall when global recession bites? Not in the home countries of those overseas owners. Also, we are losing the capacity to rebuild: one of my clients was a firm whose business was exporting toolmaking machines from closed-down factories – selling our family silver, as Macmillan said, but not even to private British hands.
I hope Dominic Cummings’ think tank-cum-Civil Service SAS can work out a credible detailed plan.
Somebody (Lenin?) said that communism is soviet power plus electrification. Or something like that. And there's no doubt communist Russia and communist China have historically placed vast importance on electrification, along with developing heavy industry in general. (It's not just them, of course: India feels it's got a lot to do in this respect, too.)
And ... why not? As Lovelock says, civilisation is energy-intensive (with electricity increasingly the primary delivery-means of useful end-user energy). Who doesn't want the material benefits of civilisation? Who's to tell them 'no'?
So: only internal factors are going to stop China (and India) (and one day, Africa) electrifying to the full. By which I mean: China may pause, if it chooses, when excess coal-smoke is literally killing their people by the thousand. India may struggle because of its massive political and economic inefficiency. But they ain't asking permission of anyone to carry on with their electrification (etc) plans. Particularly not the Chinese who need not bow, and have no intention of bowing, to anyone else ever again. When they say the Chinese Communist Party recognises no higher authority than itself, they really do mean it.
And that includes Greta.
Today the Beeb ran an item on how China's coal-burning capacity - and concomitant CO2 emissions - continues upwards ("Is China Addicted to Coal?"). They didn't really sermonise about it; just a little wistful, I guess. Oh dear, look what's happening here; oh well ...
They said "China's economy is slowing" - which is bollocks, of course, it just isn't accelerating as much as heretofore - which they offered as the reason why coal remains in vogue. We can put it more simply (as I have been for more than a decade): when it comes to GDP vs GHG, GDP will win every time. And of course that's not just China, BTW - though we well know what's at stake for them, specifically: their tacit political settlement is that the populace will shut up and let the Communist Party have its way, provided the populace gets wealthier all the time. And the CP has no idea how they'd keep the lid on if they fail in their side of the bargain.
As the Beeb notes, China now effectively accounts for the whole globe's annual increase in CO2 emitted. So - to the extent you worry about these things - you could say: if we all go to hell in a handcart, it'll be because the Chinese CP is afraid of its own people.
ND Sackerson adds: Readers might also like to read this piece by China-watchers, about President Xi, his recent purging of a million allegedly corrupt bureaucrats, and the drive to urbanise China as fast as possible and reduce her dependence on the West for trade profits: https://www.quora.com/What-terrifies-you-about-Xi-Jinping
Some years ago the Advertising Authority drafted new regulations in regard to the promotion of goods with big discounts in the title: they had to be on sale for a specific time at what was supposed to be the ‘normal’ price for a fixed period before they could be offered at discount.
All that seemed fair, after numerous complaints over many years of items being permanently on sale that actually never had a price other than the sale price.
When the regulations came into effect there was a sort of lull in the promotion of goods with big discounts but little by little this all disappeared as they found ways round the ruling. A revolving catalogue of products is the easy way to side step the regs; that is if they are ever enforced at all - when was the last trader to be taken to court for flouting them?
And in many cases endless sales still seem to be the norm. The recent demise of Bathstore is a good case in point: the local branch of Bathstore said - and I imagine all the others never had a window display that said different - 'Up to 70% off.' 70% is not really a feasible figure for any product unless a genuine clearance and you see little of those these days. This is really misinformation: an invented retail price that is then discounted, making the product appear cheap. Household fixtures seem to be at the forefront of this ruse: bathrooms, kitchens, bedroom built-in furniture, all are in a permanent state of 50% off this January, followed by spring sale of 50% off and summer stock clearance of 50% off, ad infinitum.
Fortunately most of us are fully aware of what is going on and shop accordingly. The problem with this sort of marketing is that there is no benchmark in pricing to gauge by: all prices are false so what is the real retail price? In effect the real retail price is the discounted one; it has to be or the firms would be out of business.
The only time I purchased a new kitchen from one of these firms I was told the ‘offer’ would only last another two weeks, the usual marketing ploy to make you believe you could be missing out. When I stated I had other firms to consider first, which I had, they came back the following week with a further discount, all of course under the guise of a special special offer. Make of that what you will.
Even supermarkets use a form of this with items that almost permanently have an offer sticker or if they don’t they will next week, so in reality no one buys unless the item is on offer. The tactics are so wide spread that it is with some cynicism that you see these prices and believe they are real discounts; they aren’t.
More cynical is the approach of many non-material products such as insurance and things like breakdown cover and broadband,. The latter I have always managed to get down in price from the quote, so either the quote is bumped up or they take a median figure and expect a percentage of customers to barter down and those that don’t, don’t pay the difference.
When I phoned to get my broadband quote down, and succeeded, the girl the other end then said laughingly they would be doing the same thing next year, so the chances of anyone paying the upfront price are pretty slim, except for those who don’t bother to haggle.
Recently “Which” said this about supermarket offers….
“Which?'s Natalie Hitchins said: “Many of the big supermarkets are clearly still in the wrong, with numerous examples of dodgy discounts and never-ending offers. “These retailers must stop tricking shoppers with deceptive deals and spurious special offers - if not, the CMA must intervene to ensure that pricing guidelines are followed.”
This has of course been said before yet nothing happens and I doubt anything will this time. Which? themselves did a similar report in 2014 !
Absolutely none of this is new. However as most are aware, subtle changes to marketing to get round selling real bargains still crop up. The days when stores had January sales with genuine products being cleared for new year's stock have almost disappeared; the ‘special purchase’ has taken its place - items purchased cheaply that are not a normal stock line so no there is retail price of previous sales to go by, but you are asked to accept that the product is a bargain.
Electrical goods change models almost by the month so sales there can be a be genuine bargain as the spec rarely changes, just the outer shell, but you still need to know the original price to be able to compare.
Online buying is slowly killing the high street shop but again all that glistens is not gold: online retailers are having a huge problem with free returns, something that is necessary as faulty goods have to go back somewher. And sizing in the modern world is a huge problem as the Chinese and other Far East sweatshops seem to make up their own version of standard sizes, so customers are buying several items, keeping the one that fits and returning the rest; some returns are not fit for resale and the seller then cops for the lot.
This returns issue is costing £6 billion a year in the UK alone so the situation is slowly changing. A tighter returns policy for most is on the horizon and eventually (as the high street maybe fades into obscurity) online forms will start charging for returns. When that happens of course online shopping will no longer be so convenient or cheap; but just as smaller shops were driven out of business by the supermarkets' use of loss leaders, the sellers will be in the same position online. Personally I have never seen the sense in buying clothes whose quality / colour you cannot judge accurately and more importantly which you cannot try on; but it appears I am in an dwindling minority.
With all purchasing it is 'caveat emptor' - as it always has been.
The idea sprang out of a scientific conference in 1927 that looked at the then-new quantum theory - the behaviour of subatomic particles.
Implicit in a later 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen - and teased out by Erwin Schrödinger - was the idea of 'quantum entanglement', the possibility that a pair of photons might be intimately related even when separated from each other. When one particle is observed, so the theory goes, its characteristics are instantly - no waiting time - reproduced by the other, even if the particles are separated by galactic distances that light would take millions or billions of years to cross. This appeared to break all the rules and Einstein hated it.
Yet a scientific project in 2018 supports this impossible notion. A team studied light - billions of years old - from two widely separated, very distant objects and found much higher correlations between the qualities of the light particles from them than would happen by chance.
The implications are mind-bending. If nothing travels faster than light, how do these particles know immediately what their 'partners' are doing across unimaginable gulfs of space?
We know a lot more about the universe than we used to, but we may perhaps never know everything. As Haldane (a biologist, so not at the 1927 physics conference, but writing in the same year) said, 'I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.'
TV programmes about deep science can only do so much for us - they tend to use visual analogies that give us the illusion of understanding, but we have evolved to deal with reality at our level of the universe and there's no reason for us to be able to visualise subatomic interactions. For example. when I was at school electrons in atoms were explained in terms of solid balls orbiting a central mass, but apparently it would be closer to the truth to say they are clouds of unborn possibilities that only become real and fixed when we observe them.
And we laugh at mediaeval theologians arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
Which brings me to a different analogy. The programme reminded me of a kids' book I read many years ago, 'A Wrinkle In Time' by Madeleine L'Engle, in which the characters are able to travel across space and time. L'Engle compares their journeys to a pin put through the gathered pleats of a skirt: when straightened out, the material appears to have a series of unconnected holes; yet from the vantage point that sees the universe as folded, all the holes have been created by a single thrust.
So maybe when understood properly, the photon pairs are not separated; there is no such thing as distance or space.
Perhaps we are not meant to understand. Perhaps the attempt is impious, like the Tower of Babel. Perhaps our imagination cannot cope with the challenge and runs out like a river into a desert.
Similarly, I think there can be no scientific explanation of the coming-into-being of the universe, because everything we use in our scientific explanations relates to things within the universe itself, and so such accounts must be using circular logic.
Which brings us back to the ancient Hindus, with their contemplation of being and unbeing.
Instead of trying to summarise Trane's music and his legacy I have shamelessly borrowed Wiggia's introduction from his post about jazz saxophone a couple of years ago....
"John Coltrane was way out in front when it came to pushing the boundaries in jazz, so far out he completely lost the plot in later life but fortunately the bulk of his work remains where it should be, at the top of the pile. Influenced by Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins and later Charlie Parker he was playing with Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostik and Johnny Hodges before his late fifties association with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, a glorious period; but his debut album as leader, Giant Steps was a seminary album, it blew me away when I first heard it and the melodic chords on this were not just very difficult to play but constituted a new sound in the saxophone, much imitated later." http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2017/02/music-great-tenor-sax-by-wiggia.html
I have been watching recently the PBS series on Jazz by film maker Ken Burns. In the section about Coltrane the voiceover said that he was listening to a solo by another musician when he had what he called 'a divine revelation' which prompted him to give up heroin as well as alcohol and even cigarettes. He then began to explore other styles of music, mainly from India and Africa.
This from Wiki -
"In 1957, Coltrane had a religious experience that may have helped him overcome the heroin addiction[46][47] and alcoholism[47] he had struggled with since 1948.[48] In the liner notes of A Love Supreme, Coltrane states that in 1957 he experienced "by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. " The experience and his subsequent interest in music from other cultures eventually led to his album A Love Supreme in 1964
If you don't have the album the liner notes from A Love Supreme are here -https://web.archive.org/web/20110608155911/http://www.jindustry.com/xtra/coltrane/html/saintjohn.html
The history of music has seen fans hero worship their idols, often being driven to hysteria: in the 1930s there was a 'battle of the bands' between Benny Goodman and Chick Webb which required Police to control the crowds trying to get in to see the 'contest' (from the aforementioned series by Ken Burns), riots in the early 1940s among the young bobbysoxers 'in love' with Frank Sinatra and the more recent mass hysteria in the US among audiences for The Beatles. But Coltrane must be unique in that a religion was spawned in his name!
"For there is nothing in this world which can help one spiritually more than music. Meditation prepares, but music is the highest for touching perfection." -Hazrat Inayat Khan
