The balloon goes up

Friday’s flap about a Chinese weather balloon over the USA… One rumour was that the bloon was dirigible, which is odd since it seems to have wobbled along a very circuitous route to get over those US missile sites, however briefly.

Laughable, in a Strangelove kind of way. Even the BBC news site was wondering why the Chinese would use a balloon when they already have spy satellites that could probably read the headlines on your newspaper.

The kerfuffle may have been a litmus test for the gullibility of morons, like BoJo’s claim that Putin told him in a phone conversation that he (Putin) could drop a missile on his (Johnson’s) head in a minute - we await the killer audio clip.

Why would the American elite care about morons anyway? They cost more in measly social benefits than they pay in taxes, they don’t vote and they have barely enough English to read the National Enquirer, let alone put pen to paper to castigate their Congressmen. Klaus Schwab is talking about implants in everyone’s head to read their innermost thoughts; thank goodness for AI because much of the intercept would have the spy class driven crazy by the garbage or shooting themselves out of boredom.

In reality, this petty incident is more a litmus test of the Great American Empire’s desperation to keep war fever going and pivot it towards China.

For it’s clear that Russia is winning, has all but won, the conflict in Ukraine, in conventional terms, at least; and the Russkies have been very careful indeed to avoid triggering NATO’s Article 5 - see how eager anonymous spokesmen were to accuse Russia of killing a couple of rural Poles with a missile, and the Establishment’s chagrin when it turned out the explosion had been a stray Ukrainian air defence rocket.

Again, the seeming irrationality of the Right Guys is even greater than their aggressiveness. Do they imagine that an all-out conflict would be contained within Europe? Or perhaps they hope not; maybe it’s the Great Winnowing of Morons, with the privileged few hunkered down in their bunkers, planning to repopulate the West with superior types. I don’t suppose the admission list for this breedorama will include the grossly overweight and sexually blurred; at least, not among the females. There’s a great movie to be made out of this but it would kill Hollywood to do it.

Getting information from ‘alternative’ sources is like picking peanuts out of poo, but the alternative, the mainstream news media, is almost pure horseshit, so what can you do?

I gather the Russians have been chewing though the triple-layered Maginot line that the Ukrainians built over eight years; and that the promised supplies of tanks etc to Zelensky(y) are token and if they actually arrive will be swiftly destroyed, leaving the EU/NATO even weaker. I hear that the American defensive umbrella that for so long released European finances for their social programs is failing and so EU countries will be wondering why they should remain Washington’s vassal states; especially when the US has blown up Nordstream and is now selling them expensive American LNG, and when a planned war with China (on the other side of the world) will shut off the supply of cheap finished goods.

It’ll take a lot more hot air than is in that balloon, to persuade Europe to collude in its own demise. At least, you would think so, if there was a functioning democracy, instead of types like the idiot Baerbock, contemptuously turning their backs on their electorate.

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Mazes, by JD

Here are some a-maze-ing mazes to vex and dazzle the visual cortex. I was thinking that number five could be built with stone walls to serve as a small sheepfold:

FRIDAY MUSIC: Francis Poulenc, by JD

Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963) was a French composer almost as famous for his personal life as his music, including his Gloria and piano works.

Born in Paris in 1899, Poulenc's mother was an amateur pianist who taught him to play.

Poulenc was one of the first openly gay composers, who was at ease with his sexuality in the context of his religious faith. There's still debate among music scholars who see the diverse range of styles in his music as an outward representation of Poulenc's inner moral wrestlings.

During the completion of his opera, Dialogues des Carmelites, Poulenc suffered from severe depression, but his recovery led him to compose more serene music later in life.

He died of heart failure in Paris in 1963.

https://poulenc.fr/en/biography/

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

FRIDAY MUSIC: Robert Burns, by JD

Robert Burns wrote rather a lot of songs, more then 300 as far as I can tell so this is but a very small selection!

As noted in previous posts to celebrate Burns Night, very often a Burns Supper will be held on the Friday before or following the 25th rather than on the actual day itself. It gives everyone the whole weekend to recover from any accidental overindulgence.

So for your Burns Supper this evening here are a few of his songs to set the mood.... 

Baerbock declares war on Russia

The weakling Scholtz has caved in to God knows what pressure and agreed to let Germany’s Leopard tanks roll across Ukraine, driven by Nazis. Quite like old times!

But here we’re talking about his Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, who yesterday said, "We are fighting a war against Russia.”

Baerbock seems unclear about who is meant by ‘we.’

She can’t be speaking for the EU, which has its own foreign minister, Señor Josep Borrell Fontelles. Nor for Germany, whose founding constitution the Grundgesetz declares (article 26:1):

(1) Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional. They shall be criminalised.

She does happen to be one of NATO’s thirty Ministers of Foreign Affairs, but surely she cannot be saying that NATO is formally at war with Russia, even though NATO’s actions increasingly resemble a de facto war of aggression, what with supplying the money, the arms, the training and - we may soon learn - the active involvement of some of its personnel (perhaps under the guise of having resigned and joined private military companies.)

Ironically, Baerbock was addressing the Council of Europe, which last February declared that the Minsk agreements remained ‘the only basis for a settlement of the conflict in Donbas’ and which despite its institutional commitment to human rights seemed to have little to say during Ukraine’s eight years of persecution prior to the Russian incursion, and its murder of thousands of Russian speakers there.

But then, Baerbock is a queen of ambiguity. Last September she said she stood with Ukraine ‘no matter what my German voters think.’ The irony is that Germans hadn’t voted for her, as such; she got her seat under the party-political-list part of her country’s hybrid direct-election/proportional representation system, having failed in her own person in 2009 and 2013.

A further twist is that her party is the Greens, who jointly with ‘Alliance 90’ issued a statement of principles that includes ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights and non-violence.’ Crimea has voted overwhelmingly to secede (and it had only become part of Ukraine in 1954), but that democracy clearly doesn’t count.

Baerbock is like many of our modern politicians, who as soon as released from the voters’ hands soar upwards like weather balloons, increasingly disconnected from those below and subject instead to the strong international winds of power and money.

The war emergency that confronts us is part of a wider and deeper crisis of legitimacy. Like the conspiratorial nexus of Common Purpose, they seek to ‘lead beyond authority’ and the inconvenient little people who employ them.

Historically, Britain, and after us the United States, reached up to pull down that balloon of overweening arrogance and get it back into the people’s hands.

We need to deflate it now, before it triggers 98 more:

'Burns Nicht' by JD

Republished from 2017... and still guid!

So now you want to try the national dish of Haggis?
This is how to make it-

Haggis Ingredients:

1 sheep's stomach bag
1 sheep's pluck - liver, lungs and heart
3 onions
8 ounces of beef Suet
4 ounces of oatmeal
salt and black pepper
about 10 tablespoons of stock/gravy (quarter of a pint approx)

1. Clean the stomach bag thoroughly and soak overnight. In the morning turn it inside out.
2. Wash the pluck and boil for 1.5 hours, ensuring the windpipe hangs over the pot allowing drainage of the impurities.
3. Mince the heart and lungs and grate half the liver.
4. Chop up the onions and suet.
5. Warm the oatmeal in the oven.
6. Mix all the above together and season with the salt and pepper.
7. Pour over enough of the pluck boiled water to make the mixture watery.
8. Fill the bag with the mixture until it's half full.
9. Press out the air and sew the bag up.
10. Boil for 3 hours (you may need to prick the bag with a wee needle if it looks like blowing up!) without the lid on.
11. Serve with neeps and tatties. (neeps = turnips)

If that has put you off then take refuge in a wee dram. I would recommend Ardbeg or Cardhu among the malt whiskies and the best blended whiskies are The Antiquary or Cream Of The Barley!
Slàinte mhath!

Burns wrote many love songs and none finer than 'Ae Fond Kiss'. This is a beautiful version by Eddi Reader. In her introduction she mentions 'Nancy' who was Agnes Craig for whom the song was written-
http://robertburns.org/encyclopedia/MLehoseAgnesCraigClarinda1759-1841.555.shtml

BoJo beats the drum

Today’s Daily Mail splashes with a front page article by the former Prime Minister, calling for arms for Ukraine. Most of that page in the print edition - why not online? - is a sombre, heart-wringing photograph of a woman and child walking through a battle-shattered landscape.

The accompanying text is full of grossly emotional, fustian rhetoric and dangerous assertions, such as that Putin would not dare use a battlefield nuclear weapon. This is Boris at his bullish, bullshitting worst.

Johnson is clever, charming, good-looking in a raffish, well-upholstered way - and amoral. Like many psychopaths he likes himself so much that you are almost forced to like him - he even had the priggish Ian Hislop and the rest of the HIGNFY team laughing when he chaired an episode in 2003. Beware the would-be World King: we had a few of them in the last century.

Like Macduff in ‘Macbeth’, we can tolerate BoJo’s lust and avarice - the scattering of genes like a lawn sprinkler, the need and greed for money to support his louche and intemperate lifestyle - but when Malcolm threatens to

Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell, 

Uproar the universal peace, confound 

All unity on earth 

- Macduff cries out in despair for his country; and we should now, for ours, and for Europe. 

Boris' unscrupulous essay is referenced in another piece dated the same day (23 January) by Marc Nicol, the Mail's 'Defence Editor.' Why the determination to hammer this home? 

 It's because Germany is hesitant to send its tanks to Ukraine. Chancellor Scholz was dubbed a 'cowardly leader' for it by the Mail yesterday, and at the same time Simon Jenkins in The Guardian added his paper's voice to the war-fever chorus. So much for diversity in news reporting. 

Remember that it was Johnson who flew to Zelensky last April to tell him not to strike a deal with Russia; that in 2014 the French and German premiers used the Minsk peace negotations to buy time to arm Ukraine - as Merkel admitted in an interview last December.

Boris believes nothing (I think); he pushed Brexit forward because he could feel which way the wind was blowing and saw the opportunity to seize the Conservative leadership. If he does the right thing, it's for the wrong, selfish reasons. 

Now he rushes in where angels fear to tread, presumably at the bidding of Washington, whose strategists must be convinced either that nuclear war is impossible, or that it will be confined to a geographical area that doesn't matter: ours.