FRIDAY MUSIC: Alfred Schnittke, by JD

In the 80s and 90s there were many excellent magazines on the market and one I bought each month was ClassicCD, their first issue was June 1990. All of those magazines, for one reason or another, have ceased publication.

The ClassicCD magazine usually had a CD attached to it with selections of music from newly issued CDs which were reviewed within the pages of the magazine. From the reviews and the CD I discovered a lot of new composers and artists; new to me that is.

One such was Alfred Schnittke who first came to my attention playing piano on Arvo Pärt's composition 'Tabula Rasa' (a fabulous minimalist piece of music which also features the violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Schnittke

It was after buying that CD that I discovered, via ClassicCD magazine, that Schnittke was also a composer. The following videos are a representative selection of his varied work.

Note: video 4 here is the opening of Schnittke's Requiem set to a film excerpt from Fritz Lang's 1921 film "Der Müde Tod". Videos 5, 6 and 7 are the five movements of 'Suite in the old style' (that's what Google translate tells me!)

New post on The Conservative Woman: 'Out of the EU and on to a hard road ahead'

On the TCW site here: https://conservativewoman.co.uk/out-of-the-eu-and-on-to-a-hard-road-ahead/

THE Withdrawal Bill has passed all its Parliamentary stages, received Royal assent and we’re out on Friday. Allegedly. The Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration are not that much altered from the versions Mrs May failed to get through and I fear that the new PM may be telling himself that a compromise that satisfies nobody has the most chance of shutting up the malcontents on both sides.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope there is a way to ensure that we don’t leave ourselves under EU legal jurisdiction, we don’t put our armed forces at risk of being embroiled in EU military adventurism, we don’t dash the hopes of our fishing communities, and we don’t continue to pay out monstrous amounts of money. Is there any other way than ‘crashing out’ without a deal?

But despite all these daunting challenges, are we too concerned with shorter-term matters? Perhaps we need to step back and see the big picture. The industrial Revolution that Britain pioneered multiplied human effort and, coupled with the development of international trade, allowed our population to increase to six or seven times what it was in 1801, the last time we were anything close to food self-sufficiency.

 To get by in World War Two, we ‘dug for victory’ and slaughtered most of our food animals, which left us short of natural fertiliser, and the land was reportedly ‘losing heart’ towards the end. Starvation was a possibility.

Since then, we’ve been building on agricultural land and flood plains, while a lunatic New Labour deliberately lost control of immigration in order to teach their political rivals some idiot point about diversity; now we don’t actually know how many people are in this country.

Today we import 80 per cent of our food (the 50 per cent figure is a fudge – food processed here from imported materials is counted as British) and according to Sunday’s BBC1 Countryfile programme, our farmers depend on the Common Agricultural Policy for 61 per cent of their income; otherwise many of them would be goners. Even if we cut out dietary luxuries, if anything seriously interrupts the system, we’re up a gum tree.

Since we can’t feed ourselves, we have to pay the world for our board. Food is cheap (for us) because of modern farming methods that ultimately depend on fossil fuels in various ways; and also because of relative currency values that make the pound buy a lot more in many foreign countries – for now. So, make-and-trade it is.

Except it isn’t. In the 1970s, a Conservative government signed away our fishing rights and plugged us into an EU-regional trading system that undermined our industry; the damage showed up in unemployment and underemployment –  both carefully disguised – imbalance in visible trade, gradual personal financial impoverishment for much of the populace, widening wealth inequality, growing public debt and neoliberal rules that allow rich individuals and powerful corporations to flee if taxes become too burdensome. And then it went global.

All this was foreseen long ago, as we see here:

In the recording above, Sir James Goldsmith was speaking to Brian Walden in 1994, not long after the signatories to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) had agreed to form the World Trade Organisation. The billionaire warned that globalisation would harm the interests of the Western working classes, as on a smaller scale the EU’s internal market had done already, and he began by citing the experience of France, where he had recently won a seat in the European Parliament:

‘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 5.1million. What can be the purpose of an economy which by doubling goes to 5.1million?’

He went on to say that a similar situation pertained in Britain. Had it not been for North Sea Oil and monetary expansion (BoE and the mortgage boom), I’m not sure Conservatives would be looking back on the Thatcher years with such unmixed admiration.

Some say, get completely free of the EU and let’s trade on WTO terms. In that case, we need to examine the latter more closely, too. It’s a topical issue, for despite his domestic political travails, President Trump took the opportunity last week at Davos to call for reform of the WTO since China, though now the world’s second-biggest economy, is still benefiting from preferential terms relating to its WTO status as a ‘developing’ nation.




Bloomberg explains further here, but the takeaway for us is that although several other countries have agreed to give up that status in future talks (see point 7 in the article), China is digging its heels in.

There’s a reason for that. Although the Middle Kingdom has the highest Gross Domestic Product in the world in terms of local spending power (Purchasing Power Parity), it has a vast population and per person its income isn’t even in the top 100. During President Xi’s term of office (and he has no intention of leaving soon) electricity production has more than doubled and he seems determined to continue industrialising and urbanising his country, whatever Greta, Sweden’s Joan of Aargh! may say.

Who runs the WTO anyway? The makeup of its secretariat is interesting: headed by a Brazilian, with deputies from Nigeria, the USA, Germany and China – so, two developing countries, one superpower, a wannabe superpower (already interfering in Africa and compromising Ireland’s constitutional military neutrality) … and the huge Chinese axolotl, neither primitive nor developed. (By the way, note that the latter’s WTO deputy, Yi Xiaozhun, is in charge of intellectual property issues: Mr Xiaozhun must have so much to discuss with his American counterpart!)

Post-Brexit, shouldn’t the UK also have representation at a senior level in the WTO, as a major global trading economy and freshly-liberated nation? For his part, Trump has more than once indicated a preparedness to withdraw from the WTO if necessary, but I wonder whether even our new UK government is capable of fighting its way out of a wet paper bag, let alone triggering WTO-exit. The next 11 months of EU trade negotiations will be a key test of its general will and skill.

But we ought to reassess our policy towards the WTO – another one that likes to give orders from very nice offices far away – because remote supranational quangos practically guarantee trouble for the little people, aka ‘the many.’  

Take the Airbus dispute: The EU subsidised the makers ‘illegally’ and the WTO ruled that the US could impose retaliatory tariffs on EU goods. This is to hit exports of Scotch whisky. Irish ex-EU beef exports could also suffer and at the same time the South American trade bloc Mercosur has agreed with the EU a deal allowing it to send annually 99,000 tons of beef to Europe.

Irish MEP Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan told the EU Parliament that the agreement ‘paid the most sustainable beef farmers on the planet to go out of business: We don’t want that type of support. At the end of this, farmers have got to come out of it all right. It’s very hard to believe how they will, though, because they usually are the ones who – both in a literal sense and in a metaphorical sense – end up with the shit on their hands’.

I hope I’m right in thinking that Dominic Cummings’ recent job advert is for a team to tackle much more than Brexit and if so, I fully support him. The detailed planning to get us out of this nexus of potential disasters will need the geniuses and weirdos he’s looking for.

A bug’s life (coronavirus)

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/what-new-coronavirus-n1119081

The death toll from the coronavirus continues to rise in China, and with it the conspiracy theories. Amidst all the horse-pucky in the latter you will often find a seed or two of truth.

For example, we now know that Wuhan, the city where the outbreak started, is also the location of China’s only level 4 biological research facility, or the only one we’re allowed to know about.

Someone connected this with the escorted departure of some Chinese scientists from a similar laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada. Nonono, said CBC: ‘online chatter’… ‘disinformation’ (watch for that word with Google Alerts, there’s an organised official counterattack against social media infospread)… before reminding us of one of their earlier stories that revealed the National Microbiology Lab had sent live Ebola and Henipah viruses to Beijing on an Air Canada flight last March. Good job planes never crash.

The Chinese probably didn’t need shipments of coronavirus, though. After all, their SARS epidemic eighteen years ago was another version of the same class of virus. The earlier one was traced back to cave bats in Yunnan; the latest has also been blamed on bats and a Chinese vlogger has had to apologise for commending them as a delicacy (like almost everything else: if its back is towards Heaven you can eat it, is the old Cantonese saying) – or is that explanation itself official disinformation?

Could it possibly have been an Andromeda Strain-type accidental lab release? The 1975 (effective date) international Biological Weapons Convention prohibits the military development, production etc of germs and viruses, and China signed up in 1984. Yet given the fallen state of mankind and especially governments, I shouldn’t be surprised if it hasn’t continued undercover there, as this writer claims.

Asked where the UK does its bio and chemical research, most of us could only name Porton Down (I remember the Aldermaston marches, but when did the public march against germ warfare?) However, we have another facility in Hertfordshire, three in Surrey and three more in Greater London. I hope it’s all white-hat stuff, though I can imagine Whitehall arguments for developing nasties in order to find defences against them if ‘the other side’ tries to use them.

There’s two in France and another French-supported one in Gabon. They do like to do things their own way, do the French; unlike us, they don’t need US authorisation for their nukes, either. A reason I pick on our Continental cousins here is a story that caught my eye in 2016, about the opening of a level 3 (allegedly) bio-safety laboratory in French Polynesia. Funnily enough, that Tahiti News article has since disappeared. The Institut Louis Malardé (ILM) opened it, not on the main island of Tahiti or in Pape'ete, but on a tiny two-square-mile atoll called Tetiaroa. Supposedly it is for research into mosquito-borne diseases and having it locally would save processing time, according to France.tv. Google flagged up an article on the ILM site with a snippet under the link - ‘Lutte contre les moustiques. Une expérimentation innovante à Tetiaroa’ - that now I can’t find there.

Colour me sceptical, but we have every reason to distrust our rulers and their massive military establishments. Humans aren’t grown-up enough to play with such toys; the trouble is getting them back into the box.

It’s easier to keep us in the dark, I guess. New definition of a British D-notice: ‘dis information must not be released to da public.’

Caning the toad: redefining 'woke'

WOKE: awake, but with your eyes closed

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:

View recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XJRoKzrA5rVpB-gblUQ48Z-QNOFHYbtN/view

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?

FRIDAY MUSIC: Tatiana Eva-Marie (French jazz), by JD

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/

National economic salvation: the task before us

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.

The Electrification of China, by Nick Drew

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