WEEKENDER: It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world 2 - by Wiggia

My lack of items in the last two weeks is attributed to a combination of Windows update and Firefox going potty. One or the other, or maybe both, I will never know, has removed access to files, stopped my ability to download anything, and if by nefarious means I did manage to download a program or replacement I was not able to install it, so at great cost I have a new computer. The other one was old if still working, so I am up and running? Again.

So much passes through as news these days that keeping up becomes an Olympic sport, and the current government, if that term can still be used, have exceeded all expectations in the ridiculous and stupid category; if there were gold medals in those categories there would be a run on the yellow stuff, there is simply not enough to go round. So I wont go over ground that is constantly shifting - sink hole, anyone? - but will just make a small comment on the Conservative party's choice of Chancellor (or is it PM by proxy?) in his first speech on the tax u-turns.

One he didn’t u-turn on was the stamp duty reduction; can’t upset the parties biggest donors can we, have to keep house prices up and any cost so the DM can still add to any story that x was guilty but can be seen here in leafy ***** standing outside his 5 bedroomed detached Victorian Villa currently worth 2 zillion pounds.

They never learn. After the disastrous Ponzi scheme that resulted in the 2008 crash, banks governments lenders still want to lend to those cannot pay. Already those same lenders are revising their lending terms because of interest rate rises; well well well there’s a surprise, they have used years of low interest rates to promote house buying in the belief they would never rise again, or they didn’t care. What was normal in years gone by is now unthinkable but happening anyway.

House purchase has become like governments, reliant on low or zero interest rates. Unlimited fiat money can only ever be paid for with low interest rates, but inflation has blown that out of the water and we now have debt servicing out of control.

They still don’t get it. This morning a government spokesman, MP, was talking about the imminent drop in house prices as a bad thing! As if the constant above inflation rate of house prices has been a good thing. It won’t be interest rate rises that will lead to repossessions this time, that currently is well below those days of 16%, but a combination of energy rises and general cost of living as well will do it.

On the other hand government policies have denied those who saved all their lives of any return on said savings coupled with the lowest state pension in Europe, and again under threat of removal of the ‘promised ‘ triple lock; this sector has been to put it crudely crapped on from a great height.

Hunt, where did he come from? His failure as health minister and three failed businesses hardly makes him an obvious choice for Chancellor at this or any other time. He stated that ‘the public would not mind paying extra tax to fund the NHS’; oh yes they would, not a penny more without root and branch reform first.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/jeremy-hunt-tory-leadership-boris-johnson-nhs-junior-doctors/

On the other hand it is comforting to know the IMF will be in safe hands next year. I can’t think of a better person to run it coming as she does from one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world; along with Saudi Arabia heading up the UN's human rights committee it is a win-win for us all.

Currently we pay for an NHS that in many areas is non existent with no sign of anytime soon if ever of improving; plus many including my good self have had to pay again, as three years from diagnosis to operation for a new hip would have seen me in a wheelchair long before I went under the knife. Seven million on the waiting list and rising and a care home crisis beyond the pale with the government decision to sack 40,000 care home staff who refused the jab - a major hurdle to overcome if it ever can be. Oh wait, all these fit young asylum seekers we are told by the various charities are ready to work rather that laze around in five star hotels will plug the gap, all is well again.

In the case of the sacked care home staff, no one has been able to explain why (or not wanted to) the nurses and others in the NHS got a last minute reprieve from the same fate; or were the care home staff considered fodder for the ideology of the vaccines vis a vis the mainstream staff who were ready to sue?

It is interesting in a morose way to ask why we have such difficulty either returning these illegal, and they are so by definition, migrants, and our seeming inability to refuse them asylum despite so many destroying their documents which leaves them presumably stateless with no country to return them to. You can’t be fleeing from torture, war and threat of murder if you won’t say where you have come from, or is that naive?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-cant-britain-control-migration-3pwmrkhkm

As Mark Steyn so succinctly puts it ‘we live in a blizzard of lies’ whether it be the efficacy of masks,  lock downs or so called vaccines or the real reason we cannot say no to the huge numbers that have come to this country: 10 million officially, in the last twenty years.

Mind you it should help the travel trade as long as flying is still permitted, as a staycation will soon be impossible with the hotels full of migrants, and now we are, or Serco is on our behalf, leasing properties to put up the same; that should help those on the council house waiting lists.

Coming our way soon………..

                                                                                                                                                                            

It really is a growth business now, £2.2 billion of tax payers money to Serco alone. These contracts have guaranteed built in 5k maintenance element to them which makes them attractive to landlords, nowhere else would they get contracts like these.

Outside of all this it was good of Let's Go Brandon, who managed in his muddled way whilst eating an ice cream, easily digestible hospital food for the infirm, to tell us our tax plans are not good. His of course are marvellous as is the USA's debt mountain; good to know though we are all in it together, or that is what we are told!

A final thought from the comments…

‘Just step back a moment and consider that the Conservative Party have, in the past week, fired a Chancellor for wanting to cut taxes and a Home Secretary for wanting to cut immigration.‘

Good job we don’t have a Foreign Secretary who wants to cut aid…

FRIDAY MUSIC: Jazz Samba (Stan Getz / Charlie Byrd), by JD

I have been lost in nostalgia for 1962. Sixty years ago when I was newly escaped from school and into the grown up world of work and a whole world of new experiences. The past really is/was a different country when 45rpm vinyl records cost six shillings and eight pence, three for one pound. Imagine that! 

Among the new joys were being introduced to 'modern' jazz as opposed to the radio/TV favourites of Kenny Ball and Aker Bilk who played a sanitised version of 'trad' jazz.

And so one of the first jazz records I bought was Jazz Samba by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz. I suppose jazz plus samba could be described as a 'fusion' record but that name came much later. Byrd had already made a record with samba influences so this was a further experimentation on his part. Getz was a well established tenor sax player who had been one of the 'four brothers' in Woody Herman's band.
Listening again to this record is still a pleasure and a blessed relief in a world gone mad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_Samba




Track list:

1: "Desafinado" (Antônio Carlos Jobim, Newton Mendonça) — 5:51
2: "Samba Dees Days" (Charlie Byrd) — 3:34
3: "O Pato" (Jayme Silva, Neuza Teixeira) — 2:31
4: "Samba Triste" (Baden Powell, Billy Blanco) — 4:47
5: "Samba de Uma Nota Só" (Antônio Carlos Jobim, Newton Mendonça) — 6:11
6: "É Luxo Só" (Ary Barroso) — 3:40
7: "Bahia" (aka 'Baia') (Ary Barroso) — 6:38

Timeline:

[00:00:00] - Track 1
[00:05:49] - Track 2
[00:09:21] - Track 3
[00:11:24] - Track 4
[00:16:14] - Track 5
[00:22:27] - Track 6
[00:26:06] - Track 7

Personnel:

Stan Getz – tenor saxophone
Charlie Byrd – guitar
Gene Byrd – guitar, bass
Keter Betts – double bass
Buddy Deppenschmidt – drums, percussion
Bill Reichenbach Sr. – drums, percussion

Financial and war disaster: we must get a grip

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The disaster protocol in Western democracies has several stages:

1. ignore warnings about bad actors who threaten the public weal
2. witness the disaster and express surprise
3. take action to ‘make sure’ it ‘can never happen again’

Bill Clinton added a fourth in 1999:

       4. undo (3) so we can have a rerun of the calamity

He may not have drafted the new Act, but he signed it into law. Please don’t tell me he was too stupid to understand what he was doing.

I’ll come back to the Great Financial Crisis in a moment.

Now, in the UK, we have Liz Truss as PM. For how long, we don’t know, but she has already scored an entitlement to an annual pension worth half her salary. This applies to all PMs and ‘senior office holders’ no matter how short their service - including Kwasi Kwarteng, Chancellor for only 38 days. George Galloway calls Truss ‘thick as mince in a bottle’; well, we should all be so stupid.

Being a dim bulb is almost the least of our worries, as we will find out when the bright and slick ex-Goldman Sachs globalist Rishi Sunak takes the reins. He’s been pumping ads on Facebook for months like an Alan Sugar apprentice tasked with demonstrating PR skills. He wants the job so badly that it should disqualify him.

No, it’s her motives that concern me. I was curious when Truss’ first Chancellor cut the basic rate of income tax by one per cent: how much was that going to help poor people pay their hugely inflated energy bills? The five per cent cut to the top rate was bad optics at this time of growing hardship, of course; but the real puzzle was the complete removal of the ceiling on bankers’ bonuses - with which Jeremy Hunt will proceed. ‘What was all that about?’ as the saying goes.

I understood when I saw this information and analysis from Peter Oborne:



Truss isn’t working for the British people. She acts for the super-rich, the hedge fund managers and property developer types who party at 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair, London. This is where she held a ‘Fizz with Liz’ event last October (2021), paid for by Mark Birley, son of Lady Annabel Goldsmith’s first husband and attended by around a dozen Tory MPs.

The Mayfair millionaires do not require critical intelligence and moral probity in their servants, far from it. Oborne says they funnel money, not directly to the Conservative Party (which would have to be made public) but to ‘think tanks’ that then come up with policy proposals to suit their sponsors. They boasted, says Oborne, that they had ‘made Kwasi Kawarteng’s Budget for him’ - and, he says, KK went to one of their events straight after delivering his speech to the Commons.

This is the class that caused the incalculable damage of the GFC - estimates vary widely but run into the trillions. Beneath the financial cost is the human cost in the health and very lives of ordinary people.

But they can’t help themselves. C P Snow wrote of the ‘corridors of power’; these are the labradors of power, with no off-switch for their appetite. Someone has to discipline them.

In 1933 FDR allowed some banks to fail, regulated others and introduced legislation to separate deposit-takers from the casino-gambling of investment bankers. This time, when the GFC hit, there was no strong President to cleanse the stables.

Instead, the people responsible for the chaos were bailed out with unlimited cash. The clever-clogs guys at Goldman Sachs even counted the bail money as additional turnover and paid big bonuses on the strength of it.

Came the hour, came Barack Obama, and it is a tragedy that with the great popular support he initially enjoyed he could not or would not deal with the offenders. Their sense of entitlement has now grown into a kind of megalomania.

A fantasy moment: these rich are assembled at the Guildhall, London for the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Full of good food and wines, they watch the PM rise to make a speech. He or she smiles and tells them that mobile communications have been jammed, the doors locked and they are all under arrest for financial terrorism. They are to be held in Belmarsh under the same conditions as Julian Assange, awaiting trial at which they will appear in cages like the Mafia whom the Italians so bravely prosecuted. They will receive swift, no-nonsense judgment from someone like Judge Judy Sheindlin, with no possibility of appeal. The innocent will be released and handsomely compensated for their inconvenience; the others will be heavily fined and incarcerated for a very long time.

Of course, in real life there will be no deus ex machina to resolve our difficulties.

Nevertheless, something has to happen. Perhaps it will be debt forgiveness or default, but we cannot let our governments be the playthings (or over-indulgent uncles) of global money-shufflers.

Oborne raises another worry: like demented Joe Biden, Truss has a finger on the nuclear button. We cannot afford the process outlined at the start of this post; Stage Three may not be a possibility.

There has to be action instead of disaster, not following it.

Back into the EU? I think not!

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The Army Rumour website is discussing the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as British Chancellor: https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/jeremy-hunt-chancellor.311943/ Some there seem to think Brexit was a mistake and that the Tories will shoehorn us back in and what a good idea.

I reply:

It was the Tories who got us into 'Europe' in the first place, starting with Macmillan and completed by Heath. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/eec-britains-late-entry.htm

But the background was how the US threw money into Europe (having abandoned the Morgenthau proposals to break the Germans down into rural earth-scratchers) after abruptly shutting off vital financial support to us in September 1945. That's why Macmillan wanted to catch up the Frogs and Krauts; the effects on Britain's industry and economy of joining the EU's card game are here for us to see.

Now, the Tories are split between patriots, wet-finger-in-the-air types like BoJo, and globalists (= supporters of the American Empire.)

The Labour Party has been split for sixty years and more over the EU issue. See Hugh Gaitskell's speech to the Labour Party Conference in October 1962, warning against the enthusiasm for membership of the Common Market. https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/speech_by_hugh_gaitskell_against_uk_membership_of_the_common_market_3_october_1962-en-05f2996b-000b-4576-8b42-8069033a16f9.html

He laid his finger on the tension in the socialist movement between international brotherhood and promoting the interests of working people at home; a tension that has never been adequately resolved and which has been clouded over with dreamy rhetoric from bloviators on both sides of the Commons debating chamber.

As for our influence in the EU - please Noel Coward, I have only so many ribs. Now if we chose to become the 51st US State, *then* we might have some influence.

We've been a damn sight poorer than we are today. I remember no fridge and an outside lavvy, but we managed. It's not about money; even now we live like kings and queens compared to past ages. If you want to see what life was like in the East End of London before the ‘damn socialists’ interfered, read Jack London’s 1903 book The People of the Abyss (free online here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688 ) - this, in the heart of the world’s then richest and mightiest Empire. Every home should have a copy.

There's a hill to climb but it can be climbed, and I don't think re-entering the undemocratic EU would do us any favours. Surely we're not the only ones to feel that way: people in Italy, Greece and Hungary would be glad to exit, Macron has just pledged not to get involved in a nuclear fracas in Ukraine just to please NATO, even the Germans are tempted to look east and may feel more like it as they freeze this winter thanks to the bombing of NS1+2 by No One At All (because the Swedes won't say who.)

Does anybody else still believe in this country and its people? Or is that too Blimpish? I’m proud to be a Little Englander, i.e. an anti-imperialist. Our greatness is not in wealth but in freedom and sovereign self-government.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Sir John Tavener, by JD

 Sir John Tavener (1944 - 2013)

Tavener was an English composer of sacred music who came to the attention of the wider public for his 'Song For Athene' which was sung at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. Before then he had been well known among 'avant garde' musicians. He had come to the attention of the Beatles via Ringo and was signed to Apple Records in 1970.

I have included his biggest selling piece, The Protecting Veil which is 45 minutes long; much needed tranquility in this insane world. It was commissioned by the BBC for the 1989 Proms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tavener

Ah'm a-geddin' nervous

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________________________________________________

President Biden’s lunatic scriptwriters gave him the line about facing Armageddon and then apparently his handlers ‘walked back’ the tough talk because of the reaction.

But nobody told NATO.

NATO forces are to proceed with their annual nuclear-weapons exercise next week, entitled ‘Steadfast Noon.’ It’s said they have 100 atomic bombs in five European countries, each of which has a potential explosive capacity much more than 20 times that of ‘Little Boy’ which obliterated Hiroshima in 1945.

The Daily Mail uses this moment to publish another virulent piece by Ian Birrell about Putin’s appointment of General Sergei Surovikin, tasked with handling the escalating war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile the ultra-rich are having luxury bunkers built for them so they can - as they think - safely sit out the suffering of the rest of us. Russell Brand satirises this notion of invulnerability:

Is there still a place for Melinda in Bill’s underground castle?

I guess there are really good bunkers below the CIA’s headquarters, and the Pentagon, and various sites in Washington. Will they be recruiting nubile totty to help re-breed the human race? How diverse will the neo-Lebensborn program be?

And what are we supposed to do? How many victims of assault think ’this can’t be happening’?

Why, if I weren’t so rational and modern, I might believe that Satan existed.

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: The Devil's Wheel, by JD

 Teufelsrad München Oktoberfest

Last week YouTube had a recommendation in its sidebar, a Teufelsrad or Devil's Wheel at this year's Oktoberfest -

I had never seen anything like this before. Why had I never heard of it? 

Looking at it more closely it seemed to be a cleverly designed and executed piece of German engineering. It could also be an example of the famous German sense of humour! 

A search revealed a brief story in Wiki and these 'wheels' have been used at Oktoberfest since 1913.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_wheel

One of the links in the Wiki article led me to this Human Roulette Wheel at Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, early 1900s:

Now if I were fifty years younger and if I had consumed a stein or three, I might............ do as I'm doing now and enjoy the entertainment from behind the barriers which is also the safest way to enjoy San Fermin!