6 November: 'Heinz Felfe, West Germany's chief of counterintelligence for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), was arrested by his own agents. Felfe, a former Nazi, was discovered to have been passing secrets of the American CIA to the Soviet Union and to East Germany since 1959, revealing the identify of more than 100 CIA agents in Moscow.'
A 2013 (German-language) film about Soviet penetration of the German secret service is shown below.
7 November: 'The most damaging blaze in Southern California history, up to that time, destroyed 48 homes one of the wealthiest areas of the United States in the Hollywood Hills, including the houses of actors Burt Lancaster, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Joe E. Brown.'
Also on 7 November: 'France secretly set off its first underground nuclear explosion, and its fifth overall since joining the nuclear club on February 13, 1960. Confirmation was not given until nearly three weeks later.'
9 November: 'Brian Epstein saw the Beatles perform at the Cavern Club for the first time, and signed them to a contract by December 10.'
The above was recorded by Granada TV at the Cavern Club in Liverpool on August 22, 1962. (The next day John married Cynthia Powell.)
10 November: 'What would become the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut began nine days after Estelle Griswold of the Planned Parenthood League and Dr. C. Lee Buxton opened a clinic in New Haven, providing the means for birth control to patrons, in defiance of a Connecticut state law prohibiting the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception". Ms. Griswold and Dr. Buxton were arrested and would take their challenge to the law all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which would rule in 1965 that laws that infringed upon marital privacy were unconstitutional.'
UK chart hits, week ending 11 November 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)
If nothing else COP26 has managed to bring out the sheer lunacy of it all. It has been a jamboree of the insane, as thousands of delegates wearing products made from petroleum by-products fly in on private planes. No need to analyse just look at the tweets comments and headlines from this week; as Ronald Reagan once said…
'As government expands, liberty contracts.'
And..
Hypocrisy surfaced again in abundance this week and among the best examples are the blustering SNP loon who tweeted this on his way to the Climate Conference…
Sports people had to get in on the act...
Yet only a short while back Murray was saying this…
Other ‘helpful’ hints on how to save the world came from the Guardian…
Then we had world leaders? demanding an end to deforestation. All well and good but you then - as with red meat - selectively make those countries poorer; and the land which has been turned into agricultural use to grow soya (which is used as feed for our pigs and chickens) and also crops to use in bio fuels (which we are now told are the way forward) has to come from somewhere else' and who pays for the countries' enforced austerity. Once again, we do.
This was Boris on green matters four years ago when he was following the science!
In his lucrative weekly column he wrote: “It is fantastic news that the world has agreed to cut pollution and help people save money but I am sure that those global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation”
Still we can all change our minds when money and women are involved…
Back on planet Earth... (htp to GP)
“Follow the Science
Only 0.8% of the world’s population lives in the UK. Just 3.3% of the world’s economic activity takes place here, most of it in services rather than in high-carbon producing manufacturing and heavy industries. We consume 0.5% of the world’s coal and 1.2% of the world’s electricity. Only 0.04% of the earth’s atmosphere is CO2. According to government statistics, the 2010s were colder than the 2000s.
What happens here makes no difference to the global climate. The UK commitment to carbon zero is a farce.
Use Less
By all means, insulate your homes and save money. But insulation-max is a nonsense, requiring another layer of masonry to be built around the outside of your house. The place has to be hermetically sealed and new equipment installed to dehumidify the resulting ventilation free space. All doors and windows have to be replaced. Your house will have to be dug up to install the heat pump, wider pipes and bigger radiators. The heat pump will not heat the dwelling and residents will be buying electricity at 20p/KWh (instead of gas a 3.83p/KWh) to make up the difference. In Italy, insulation-max is budgeted at E100,000+ per family home. This is unaffordable except for a small number of government-funded virtue signalling dwellings.
Having said that, it doesn’t matter how many efficiencies are made domestically, a rising population, compulsory electric cars and replacing gas central heating with electric-powered heat pumps will suck the National Grid dry.”
Returning to more humorous items we have the begging bowl coming out…
Of course she is…
One of several nations demanding we spend to save them; from what exactly? The money if given will follow that well worn path into El Presidente's Swiss bank account via his new private jet. The Marshall Islands representative was also called before the cameras to show their low lying islands under threat from non rising sea levels; what any monies would achieve if the sea actually rose to cover a group of low lying islands which number around twenty is a total mystery. Just perhaps we should wait to see if any sea level rises actually occur before sending monies, after all the Maldives were supposed to be underwater by now but everything looks exactly the same as it always did.
Even if sea levels are rising, that has been a pattern over millennia: land, islands have disappeared and reappeared. We as a nation were connected to mainland Europe until a glacier created the English Channel and the separation started, long before global warming or whatever they call it this month.
Boris again excels himself while being interviewed by Justin Rowlatt, an equally unbelievable figure: not only does he declare he has ‘passionately believed in environmental affairs for some time’ (see above) but among other ridiculous claims he wants to see the end to commuting - this, having just decided it is open season for the builders to put up houses in green belt anywhere. This I suppose presumes all work from home and no one ever has to come into an office of any sort; not feasible, not practical and again bollox as he has to commute to various places for meetings etc. in his everyday life all the time - wasn’t it a commute to Glasgow? Total fraud.
The pit in question that the lunatic interviewer is going on about is for coking coal for our steel industry such as it is. Boris of course by stopping this coal mine is depriving a run down area of jobs and it means we either buy in coal for our steel industry or give that up and buy steel from abroad, which rather defeats the object. Are these people serious?
Justin Rowlatt(BBC environment correspondent) rips into Boris Johnson over short-haul flights & the Cumbrian coal mine.
JR - It makes you look a little bit weaselly not answering the coal question
Boris Johnson - I'm not in favour of more coal, but it's not my decision
Over in Ireland, a reaction to Bojo’s gas emission reductions...
World leaders agreed a deal yesterday to curb emissions of the planet’s second-most polluting greenhouse gas as Boris Johnson expressed optimism for success at the Glasgow climate change conference.
The prime minister said that two days of talks had given a “sense” of how the world could achieve the cuts needed in greenhouse gases.
Meanwhile in the real world:
A report by KPMG commissioned by weekly newspaper the Irish Farmers Journal found that using anticipated government targets for reducing greenhouse gases in the agriculture sector 1.3 million cattle would need to be culled, 13,000 jobs would be lost and billions of pounds in economic output lost.
Also in Scotland, an ice patch in the Cairngorms has melted for only the eighth time time in 300 years; a sure sign of climate change they say, despite the fact it first melted 300 years ago shows the climate hasn’t changed at all.
The bacon butty muncher put in a reappearance on the Andrew Marr show to talk about banning all domestic flights. No doubt he brought that up in Glasgow… after flying there.
Boris again in Rome pre Glasgow: Rome fell because of uncontrolled immigration - funny, I thought that was Conservative policy…
Greta the doom goblin has grown up, or at least would like to think that by swearing she has somehow become of age; all I see is a replica of her parents as failed actors.
Ursula von der Leyen likes flying as it is revealed after flying to Glasgow. She actually among many air taxi trips flew 31 miles in one, hardly time to buckle up; still, her moment of truth speech went down well no doubt.
Celebrities have all had a good whack at being seen as virtual signalling hypocrites, none more so than Joanne Lumley who appears to have gone full Tonto in ‘appealing’ to the British nation. Her carbon footprint, if you care about these things is probably just behind Joe Biden's, but in her latest incarnation she begs us all to do our bit; her bit will probably be getting on a plane again to do another travelogue or save some far off indigenous people - actually she is filming in Rome and travelling by coracle.
These are tough times,' she said. 'We might even have to go back to some kind of rationing, where you're given a certain number of points and it's up to you how to spend them – whether it's buying a bottle of whisky or flying in an aeroplane.'
Joanna, who has previously campaigned against single-use plastic, also said people should cut back on weekend breaks abroad and stop eating meat.
Speaking to Radio Times, she added: 'We've got to think that everything we do will make the place better – every plastic bottle you don't buy, every piece of litter you pick up, every piece of meat you don't eat. Every small thing counts.'
After reading that the only thing I want to do is open a bottle of whisky.
Meat again; the lab producers must be rubbing their collective hands together, time for farms in the sky to re emerge… And the hemp weavers' cooperative to leap into action.
Good rant on here as well….
Are they happy to hear Jeff Bezos declare that his little jolly into space made him realise how fragile the planet is? This wasn’t a mission to discover anything. It didn’t advance scientific knowledge one iota. It was a dick in a dick-shaped rocket pumping out CO2 so he could literally look down on us all. It achieved nothing more. It demonstrated that the rich can go into space for a look around, while the rest of us won’t be allowed to go into the local pub unless we obey their commands.
Mark Strong the actor has declared he wants to see more everyday climate events on TV so we get used to behaving that way, like plugging in electric cars and recycling. The latter we all do with our green bins and few have EVs for the obvious reasons. Do people want to see actors filling bins and plugging in cars they can’t afford? I think they would rather be entertained,
Another little gem in the same issue of the Times was the report from NY university about plants growing in the driest place on earth, the Atacama desert having potential for future crops in a world of high temperatures. Well yes, except the scientists are constantly working on different strains of seeds to grow well in all sorts of extreme climates; so what is new, other than more funding?
At the dinner all are waiting to see if Macron was ordering the fish!
And Carrie Nut Nuts has assumed the role we all believed she had anyway at the top table.
Plus Prince Charles is now a country in his own right.
And Joe Biden is kept as far away as possible from everyone else after his Vatican ‘bathroom incident’
Just before COP week the ever smug always right Chris Packham made his bid to ‘rewild’ Britain. This involves letting loose all sorts of predatory and destructive animals long since gone from our countryside; he also feels the royal estates need turning into replicas of Jurassic Park.
Not sure what the strange hats signify, but hey each to his own. The wild boar bit may be a step too far as this news appeared...
A slight flaw in that study is if wild boar release all that carbon God knows what farmers release world wide when ploughing fields and all gardening must cease immediately. Cheers for those two, eco loonery at its finest.
One wonders what is really said behind closed doors. Do they swap notes on impending doom, do they compare master plans to stop heat waves, rising ? sea levels and drought, or is it all a sham and the reality is much nearer to home…
It is of course all hot air and that is banned as well.
Still I leave you with this: if Greta is now allowed to swear then I can finish with something rude; goodnight!
Broad Oak's 'Backtracks' have proved to be very popular. Either readers are all oldies like me or the younger generation is looking at what we had and wondering why current music is so lifeless.
So here is my own collection of backtracks, but with a difference. You may be familiar with the cover versions of these 'oldies but goodies' and some of the covers are very famous indeed, but the versions here are the originals, with one 'cover' version thrown in at the end - but it is a cover to beat all covers!
No it wasn't written by Denny Laine or any of the other members of The Moody Blues when their version reached number one in 1964/65. It was written by Larry Banks and Milton Bennet for Bessie Banks and first released by her in January of 1964.
Written by Bobby Womack and Shirley Womack, The Rolling Stones recorded the song in 1964 and had a huge hit with it. The story is that Bobby Womack did not want the Stones to record it but when the first royalty cheque arrived he declared that they could record all of his songs if they wanted to! https://secondhandsongs.com/work/4487
Dust My Broom - Elmore James.
A classic blues riff on slide guitar most famously covered by Jeremy Spencer in 1968 with Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac.
House of the Rising Sun is 'traditional' which means nobody is sure of its provenance.
Eric Burdon and the Animals probably did their own 1964 version after hearing the Leadbelly recording or possible that of Bob Dylan
Big Joe Williams - Baby Please Don't Go
First recorded in 1935 but Williams recorded the song a second time in 1941 and it was this second version which was recorded by Van Morrison and Them in 1964. https://secondhandsongs.com/performance/18398
And just to show that cover versions can sometimes surpass the original song here is Jeff Lynne's ELO with Roll Over Beethoven which not only pays homage to the great Chuck Berry but blends the song with Beethoven's fifth symphony. Now that is pure genius!
28 October - Berlin crisis: 'American and Soviet tanks began a gradual withdrawal from stand-off positions either side of the border.'
30 October: In response to the USA's nuclear weapon superiority and greater ability to deliver, the USSR explodes a 50-megaton atomic bomb, the 'Tsar Bomba' as a demonstration of its own power, even though it was not yet capable of launching a strike against America.
31 October: Stalin's body is removed from Red Square Mausoleum, where it has lain next to Lenin's since November 1953. https://www.thoughtco.com/body-of-stalin-lenins-tomb-1779977 'Some say the writing was on the Kremlin Wall when Stalin was unceremoniously lifted off his own personal catafalque, taken outside and dropped into a nearby grave, and at the dead of night too, so as not to cause any fuss. I was there when it happened and it was all because a dotty little old lady rose to her feet at the 1961 Communist Party Congress and told delegates: 'Yesterday I asked Ilyich for guidance and it was as if he stood before me, alive, and said to me: 'I don't like being next to that man, Stalin.' They had Stalin out of the Mausoleum that very night. Lenin was alone again.' - John Miller, 'All Them Cornfields And Ballet In The Evening', Hodgson Press 2010, p. 233
UK chart hits, week ending 04 November 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)
Not only disregarding a vote but hardly anyone in the Chamber for something this important, not important to them obviously, very different scenes when it comes to discussing their own pay rises or expenses.
If nothing else, this government can be charged with not representing the people who voted for it. Hardly a thing they touch or mandate is what the people want. We have been by-passed by a group with an eighty seat majority and absolutely no effective opposition; in fact all the parties are interchangeable even if the lead characters are just a facsimile of what we once called leaders.
I can’t remember a time when so many friends, family, acquaintances, people I speak to in everyday life and elsewhere all believe we are led by self-serving cretins.
Never before have we seen so many globalists at the top table brazenly speaking of changes that must be made and our political appointees behaving like lapdogs. Johnson and Bill Gates should get a room together, how dare he give Gates over half a billion of our money towards world wide vaccines? With the track record Gates has in that area (India, anyone?) he should be shunned not feted, yet they all fall in line. It might be said Johnson is just returning the favour Gates made by financing big pharma-associated individuals and organisations here.
Soros continues to fund items in the UK after interfering in Brexit which he had no right as a foreign national to do, backing an anti Brexit organisation headed up by Gina Miller (who only wanted to make sure Brexit was legal?) Why are these people allowed free rein in our matters, when the protocol is to remain out of other nations elections and referendums? Even Obama got in on the act; was there any response from our politicians? Not a peep.
Meanwhile the climate change brigade are frothing at the mouth in case the COP26 meeting is a failure. Boris is already worried about this, but the news that his scientific advisor Sir Patrick Vallance has reiterated we must fly less, if at all, and stop eating meat to save the planet has perked him up no end.
Though doubts are emerging on the whole project in many quarters as the scales fall away.
Elsewhere more evidence no one knows what they are talking about has emerged as an old ‘scientific’ prediction has resurfaced.
The professor responsible for this prediction made a journey to the Arctic to see how much had come to pass six years after his doomsday scenario and he had to use an ice breaker to get there….
'Just to put ice on the cake (sorry) it has been reported that the icebreaker supply ship is having trouble resupplying the Polarstern because the Arctic ice is too thick, at about 5 feet. It appears that the supply ship was using too much fuel breaking the non-existent ice and after getting to the Polarstern it would need refuelling in order to get back.'
No doubt the good professor planted more trees to counter his carbon footprint!
We also have yet another branch of Extinction Rebellion spouting more nonsense: Animal Rebellion in an interview stated that using animals for foodstuff was not only harming the planet but immoral; a branch of PETA no doubt. The fact we have been eating meat since man evolved on this planet escapes them. Various claims are not justified including the amount of water needed to produce beef: the water is 'green' - it is recycled, it has no effect on drinking water.
And naturally all the by products of cattle are neatly side-stepped. When asked about milk, after a pause... ah, plant-based milk will replace it! It can’t of course and that would also mean no cheese, yoghurt and all the other food items that need milk. They are all mad, but you can guarantee that if the banning of red meat comes to pass not only will the main income of many countries, such as Argentina, be curtailed but you will see all other animal-based food products next in line for the same treatment.
It may well be as a nation we press on with this lunacy and ‘lead’ the world as our Premier thinks we will, but somehow I think we will be on our own in this; certain nations will never follow us down this virtual signalling dead end.
And yet again Boris goes along with this nonsense, no one calls him out.
It is striking that both the Climate Change Committee and the Treasury have refused to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the Net Zero project. Not really surprising: every real world article on the subject has shown huge costs against extremely vague promises; if the true cost to every man woman and child in the UK got out there would be or should be a rebellion - a real one.
Hydrogen is being pushed as an eco alternative to fossil fuels. These two charts show just how much electricity has to be used to make the hydrogen and also the amount of emissions produced from those two processes. As a commentator said it would be better to use the electricity in the first place. Battery-powered lorries, unless there is a revolution in battery design, add too much weight; that alone makes HGV using them uneconomical.
The max insulation required to make heat pumps work is not in any way doable for the bulk of the housing stock. The cost is way out of reach for the average family and offering £5000 as a grant to convert your gas boiler to a heat pump (£5000 of the same tax payers' money) is a joke. An Italian study has come up with a figure all in to make houses zero carbon: 100,000 euros.
A good explanation of why heat pumps are an expensive folly for the vast majority of properties:
Even the BBC could not ignore the obvious…
Heat pump grants worth £5,000 to replace gas boilers not enough, say critics
Meanwhile MPs get us to pay for their driving in London emission zone:
And celebrities continue to outbid each other on how virtuous they all are. The likes of Emma Thompson's well trailed hypocrisy has been joined by Joanna Lumley of Eastern travelogue fame now telling us we should not fly as she jets off to Rome for a film. She claims accusations of hypocrisy are jealousy as she and other celebs offset their carbon emission with tree planting and carbon credits (whatever they are); I would love to see proof of all this tree-planting that celebs assure us they do, many if it is true would have estates like Sherwood Forest by now.
That’s different of course, and putting in his two pennyworth is Arnie, telling us much the same and how he has ‘recently’! converted his Hummer to battery power; a vehicle that weight with an equivalent battery is likely to drain the grid, and it probably cost him the equivalent of a small house to do it. He also is slowly cutting out meat from his diet and is healthier for it he says, or his heart doctor says. Is he off-setting all that stuff bodybuilders used when competing, allegedly! They are all clowns.
COP26: Arnold Schwarzenegger angered by world leaders' climate policies
There is nothing wrong with a balanced approach to cleaning up our act, but it has to be balanced against available technology so we don’t enforce poverty on the population. That technology is still in the future; you cannot bring it forward with unwarranted panic measures over something that is really not happening in a way that is any different from weather patterns over the millennia, and taking the Canute approach will not make the slightest bit of difference.
And finally a snippet from the world of the 100+ genders, very funny but how many trans staff does Oxfam actually employ, or is one enough these days to remove items from sale or dismiss people for wrongthink?
We have taken the decision to withdraw the product Wonder Women Bingo as it has been brought to our attention that it is not in line with Oxfam’s values.’
Oxfam, which campaigns to end poverty and improve women’s rights, told The Mail on Sunday last night it had cleared the game from its shelves after transgender staff complained about it.
It added: ‘We took the decision to remove the game from sale following concerns raised by trans and non-binary colleagues who told us it didn’t live up to our commitment to respect people of all genders.’
Foxes and Fossils is a close harmony covers band which began when Tim Purcell and his daughter Sammie recorded the Simon and Garfunkel song 'America' in his home studio.
"I’d had a home studio for years and recorded all of my girls at one time or another so this wasn’t the first time Sammie and I had sung or recorded together but it was the first time I ever thought about putting an act together with her. The idea took root and began to grow. What if we added a few more pieces; a better guitarist, maybe a bass? What if both were good singers? The more I thought about it I began to realize that this might be my chance to put together that strong vocal ensemble I had always dreamed of."
And his dream has come true with some fine close harmony singing and as well as several million 'hits' for these and other YouTube videos.
They have released three CDs so far as far as I know but, being an old fossil myself, I am not sure how the business of buying and selling digital downloads works (whatever digital downloads are; that is not one of my skills!)
