Veteran China-watcher 'Serpentza' says that China is operating a massive illegal raid on fish stocks - including protected species. According to him:
Officially China has 2,500 ships in its fishing fleet, as compared with the USA's 300; but the real figure is estimated as closer to 17,000.
The ships can stay out for years because of a support system of large vessels that resupply them with fuel and other necessaries, and collect up the catches from many ships and take them back, refrigerated, to the mother country. The fishing fleets can stay on station, so foreign nations' sovereign coastal stocks are under constant siege.
The fishing is hi-tech and indiscriminate, and law-breaking: against international law, the ships play about with the transponder system that lets them be tracked, so that they can turn off their transponders, raid other countries' waters at night undetected and then go back outside the sovereign area and turn the signals back on. The leaders of corrupt countries are bribed to cooperate or look the other way.
Sensitive, protected zones such as the waters around the Galapagos Islands are being trashed, for the second year running. Species protected by law, such as the hammerhead shark, are not only caught up in the vast nets but especially prized in China, commanding higher prices as a result.
These activities are not, says 'Serpentza', illegal in China itself, so little or nothing will be done there.
Will fish and other marine wildlife go the way of the tiger, the rhino and all the rest? What will the sea be like when this 'grab it all today' madness comes to an end?
Country music star Marty Stuart was something of a child prodigy being invited to play mandolin in Lester Flatt's band when he was just thirteen. After a spell playing for Johnny Cash he then began a career as a solo artist. Currently he has a band called the Fabulous Superlatives and it is no exaggeration to say the band lives up to that rather grandiose name!
A slightly different format for this week's music with the first video being a radio concert by the band plus an interview with Stuart (approx 24 minutes) and the final video is also longer than usual ( about 23 minutes) with Stuart telling the story of his musical journey which, of course, has not yet ended!
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)
