Bob Dylan - Must Be Santa (Official Video)
Chris Rea ~ Driving Home For Christmas (1986)
Andrea Bocelli, Matteo Bocelli, Virginia Bocelli - Feliz Navidad
Tuesday, December 24, 2024
Music for Christmas Eve, by JD
O Come O Come Emmanuel! - in Hebrew Arabic and English singing over Jerusalem!
Mary, Did You Know? (Live At Studio C, Gaither Studios, Alexandria, IN/2020) Written by Mark Lowry who is part of the Gaither Gospel band although he is not one of the singers here.
Maria, tu sabias? In Portuguese sung by Prisma Brasil. This is the same song as above but sung in a completely different style.
Christmas Must Be Tonight | The Band | OFFICIAL LYRIC VIDEO
Monday, December 23, 2024
Smiles 2
panda v pumpkin https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1716517669106753
lion massage https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=563848293099237&set=gm.508530018877505&idorvanity=342779168785925
bob and tom https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=3479814515657247
peek-a-boo ! https://x.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1870424248906625242
yes very good - WHAT !!! https://www.facebook.com/reel/954237983266667
and after the big dinner... https://www.facebook.com/reel/605013425517780
Sunday, December 22, 2024
Smiles
what scares a bear? https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1313585209856459
colour matching https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1256916652242855
lovely smiles! https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=122173497098250162&set=a.122129484122250162
dog nanny https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1100235631503345
dog takes man for walk https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=609207961619567
colour matching https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1256916652242855
lovely smiles! https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=122173497098250162&set=a.122129484122250162
dog nanny https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1100235631503345
dog takes man for walk https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=609207961619567
Friday, December 20, 2024
FRIDAY MUSIC: JD's Christmas Selection 4
Steeleye Span - Gaudete (Official Lyric Video)
John Lennon ~ So this is Christmas.
Dickens Dublin Loreena McKennitt
Fairytale of New York (edit) (feat. Kirsty MacColl)
Chuck Berry - Run Rudolph Run (Official Video)
Thursday, December 19, 2024
A furious swarm of WASPIs - PMQs 18th December 2024
The loudest buzz this week was about WASPIs - Women Against State Pension Inequality.
In 1995 the then Conservative Government raised women’s State Pension Age (SPA) by five years to equalise it with men’s - and in 2011 the Con/LibDem coalition accelerated the phasing-in. In July this year the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) found the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) guilty of maladministration in not promptly and adequately informing those affected, and recommended compensation - which Labour yesterday refused.
Four people raised this issue in today’s PMQs.
The first was the leader of the Opposition. Kemi Badenoch is not trained in law, and it shows: she has not the knack of merciless forensic drilling that allows no escape for the victim. Once again she asked a portmanteau question, in this case combining WASPIs with those who have applied for pension credit since the scrapping of the Winter Fuel Allowance.
Starmer gladly grabbed the latter alternative, boasting of his retention of the State Pension ‘triple lock’ and scoring off Kemi by noting that her Shadow Chancellor recently called it ‘unsustainable.’ It was a hit aimed at the weak coordination of her Cabinet. also instanced when her Shadow Science Minister contradicted her on NIC policy.
How much longer can Badenoch retain her grip on the perfidious Conservative rump in Parliament? She identifies as Yoruba, but that could easily mean ‘taxi’s here, Kemi!’
The next to tackle the PM on WASPIs was Plaid Cymru’s Ben Lake and Sir Keir finally gave a detailed response. He admitted that the DWP’s failures under Labour in the mid-Noughties was ‘unacceptable’ but paired that with George Osborne’s ‘equally unacceptable’ speeding up the SPA-matching process - which the ‘Austerity Chancellor’ infamously told global investors ‘probably saved more money than anything else we’ve [the Conservative administration] done.’
Starmer added that the country cannot afford the compo because of ‘the state of our economy’ and gave us one of his Killer Factoids: ‘the evidence shows that 90% of those impacted knew about the changes.’
A legally-trained Killer-Driller might ask more about the evidence, and whether the other ten per cent should not be made whole. Similarly the PM’s claim - repeated today - about the IHT threshold for farmers being £3 million, and the other one about £5 billion to be invested in farming (er, over two years, and spent on what, exactly?) both need meticulous unpacking.
This approach is vital in puncturing Labour’s dreamworld, the one in which they force us to live. For in other, non-PMQ Parliamentary hearings the Foreign Office has been squirming over the Chagos Islands giveaway, which reportedly the new Mauritian PM has rejected, and sketchwriter Quentin Letts has had sport with Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s body language during interrogation by Claire Coutinho.
A third questioner on WASPI was Ian Byrne, one of the seven Labour rebels who had the whip withdrawn for supporting an end to the two child benefit cap. A stuttering Starmer repeated points he had made earlier to Ben Lake.
Nor was the PM off the hook even then. ‘Mother of the House’ Diane Abbott reminded him ‘we did promise [the WASPI women] that we would give them justice.’ Indeed not merely ‘we’ but ‘he’: in 2021 Starmer helped two WASPI campaigners hold a sign supporting ‘fair and fast compensation’ and in 2022 he told BBC Radio Merseyside that it was ‘a real injustice’ and ‘we need to do something about it.’ So when Abbott asked ‘does the Prime Minister really understand how let down they feel today?’ all he could do was to reply ‘I do understand the concern.’
As Letts notes, thanks to the electoral landslide there are numerous Labour backbenchers with no hope of ministerial office and facing defeat in their constituencies next time round and who may begin gossiping about their ‘inept, absent Prime Minister.’
Perhaps Starmer and Badenoch make a pair of wobbly bookends.
In 1995 the then Conservative Government raised women’s State Pension Age (SPA) by five years to equalise it with men’s - and in 2011 the Con/LibDem coalition accelerated the phasing-in. In July this year the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) found the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) guilty of maladministration in not promptly and adequately informing those affected, and recommended compensation - which Labour yesterday refused.
Four people raised this issue in today’s PMQs.
The first was the leader of the Opposition. Kemi Badenoch is not trained in law, and it shows: she has not the knack of merciless forensic drilling that allows no escape for the victim. Once again she asked a portmanteau question, in this case combining WASPIs with those who have applied for pension credit since the scrapping of the Winter Fuel Allowance.
Starmer gladly grabbed the latter alternative, boasting of his retention of the State Pension ‘triple lock’ and scoring off Kemi by noting that her Shadow Chancellor recently called it ‘unsustainable.’ It was a hit aimed at the weak coordination of her Cabinet. also instanced when her Shadow Science Minister contradicted her on NIC policy.
How much longer can Badenoch retain her grip on the perfidious Conservative rump in Parliament? She identifies as Yoruba, but that could easily mean ‘taxi’s here, Kemi!’
The next to tackle the PM on WASPIs was Plaid Cymru’s Ben Lake and Sir Keir finally gave a detailed response. He admitted that the DWP’s failures under Labour in the mid-Noughties was ‘unacceptable’ but paired that with George Osborne’s ‘equally unacceptable’ speeding up the SPA-matching process - which the ‘Austerity Chancellor’ infamously told global investors ‘probably saved more money than anything else we’ve [the Conservative administration] done.’
Starmer added that the country cannot afford the compo because of ‘the state of our economy’ and gave us one of his Killer Factoids: ‘the evidence shows that 90% of those impacted knew about the changes.’
A legally-trained Killer-Driller might ask more about the evidence, and whether the other ten per cent should not be made whole. Similarly the PM’s claim - repeated today - about the IHT threshold for farmers being £3 million, and the other one about £5 billion to be invested in farming (er, over two years, and spent on what, exactly?) both need meticulous unpacking.
This approach is vital in puncturing Labour’s dreamworld, the one in which they force us to live. For in other, non-PMQ Parliamentary hearings the Foreign Office has been squirming over the Chagos Islands giveaway, which reportedly the new Mauritian PM has rejected, and sketchwriter Quentin Letts has had sport with Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s body language during interrogation by Claire Coutinho.
A third questioner on WASPI was Ian Byrne, one of the seven Labour rebels who had the whip withdrawn for supporting an end to the two child benefit cap. A stuttering Starmer repeated points he had made earlier to Ben Lake.
Nor was the PM off the hook even then. ‘Mother of the House’ Diane Abbott reminded him ‘we did promise [the WASPI women] that we would give them justice.’ Indeed not merely ‘we’ but ‘he’: in 2021 Starmer helped two WASPI campaigners hold a sign supporting ‘fair and fast compensation’ and in 2022 he told BBC Radio Merseyside that it was ‘a real injustice’ and ‘we need to do something about it.’ So when Abbott asked ‘does the Prime Minister really understand how let down they feel today?’ all he could do was to reply ‘I do understand the concern.’
As Letts notes, thanks to the electoral landslide there are numerous Labour backbenchers with no hope of ministerial office and facing defeat in their constituencies next time round and who may begin gossiping about their ‘inept, absent Prime Minister.’
Perhaps Starmer and Badenoch make a pair of wobbly bookends.
Friday, December 13, 2024
FRIDAY MUSIC: JD's Christmas selection 3
Darlene Love - All Alone On Christmas (Official Video)
Sleigh Ride
Thursday, December 12, 2024
A room full of elephants - PMQs 11th December 2024
Watching the PM and Kemi Badenoch go at each other over immigration today an independent observer might be inclined to conclude despairingly ‘they’re as bad as each other.’ And so of course they are, what with the faux Conservatives having looked at Blair ‘The Master’ and decided that was the model to follow from 2010 onwards.
Yet for all his radical talk of fixing problems at their foundation Starmer is reluctant to tackle them at that level. Instead his approach is semi-reactive, for example reaching agreements with European partners to catch and prosecute people-smugglers - Yvette Cooper made a ministerial statement about this straight after PMQs. Kemi noted that this issue was not even one of Sir Keir’s priorities in his new ‘Plan For Change.’ Yet other countries are dealing with the problem more directly - Sweden, for one.
By the way, again it seems that Starmer’s SpAds have a tin ear for propaganda: in his 28 November migration speech he said ‘mark my words – this government will turn the page,’ using a Kamala slogan just after she rode it into the biggest electoral failure in recent US political history.
Also in passing, there is another aspect that is not receiving much attention: net emigration by British nationals; 787,000 in the decade to 2021. These are likely to be people with marketable skills and initiative. Is there a 1960s-style ‘brain drain’ in progress? How will that impact our prospects for growth?
Immigration is merely one Jumbo in the room. The biggest one, the Mama Tembo, is energy.
Labour’s Noah Law soothed his boss’s nerves after the spat with the Opposition leader by pitching an easy question on how Starmer could ‘help Britain become a clean energy superpower.’
Here is a quiz for Ed Miliband: place the following adjectives for Britain’s energy policy in order of importance - ‘cheap, plentiful, reliable, clean.’ Anyone in his right mind - like India, China, the USA, Russia - has to put ‘clean’ at Number Four. Fortunately with nuclear reactors and an abandonment of Net Zero all may be achievable, as Reform’s Nigel Farage told Question Time last week.
It will be needed so we can earn a living in the world. GDP is a hopeless yardstick of national prosperity, since all it does is measure economic activity. Spend money like a sailor on shore leave and it will go up; but if you do it by increasing the population of dependant low-skilled and unemployed people the GDP per capita will decline.
What counts is energy use per capita. There has to be enough to house, feed and clothe everyone with more left over to produce goods and services for them but also for export, to keep our international trade in some sort of balance. How, with the most expensive electricity in the world, are our industries supposed to compete? What happens if they can’t? We import half our food as it is; how shall we pay for it? Is that not a sustainability question too, you Greens?
Which brings us back to another neglected pachyderm: farming. When Jerome Mayhew (Con) spoke of farms being lost and irreplaceable the PM responded as usual, with an undetailed claim about the IHT threshold for the ‘ordinary family case’ being £3 million. He also boasted that Labour will be investing £5 billion in farming over two years - the expected revenue from the new IHT rules is only 20% of that, so why do it? Why bring the tractors out in York over it?
Look more closely into that five billion pounds and see that little of it is to do with making our farmers produce more food for us. A lot is to do with Greenery, but not the kind we can eat. No wonder Mayhew called Sir Keir ‘duplicitous.’ Meanwhile, as well as the soaring costs of fertiliser and fuel for their machinery, Ed Davey noted that farmers have been undercut by the last administration’s Oz/NZ trade deals.
Starmer was also confronted with the usual queue of begging bowls for good causes and ticklish issues of diplomacy - post-Assad Syria, picking sides in Gaza, arming against Russia, freeing a Brit long imprisoned in Dubai. Somehow we have to stay out of more of the wars that have nearly eviscerated us since 1914 and keep the home fires burning.
We are in crisis. If Labour goes on playing at Johnny Head-In-Air, indulging itself in back-to-Eden crazes, fantasising about punching above our weight on the global stage and thinking other countries will always meet our needs because all we require is international law and fiat money, we are headed for a fall.
If the elephants don’t trample us first.
Yet for all his radical talk of fixing problems at their foundation Starmer is reluctant to tackle them at that level. Instead his approach is semi-reactive, for example reaching agreements with European partners to catch and prosecute people-smugglers - Yvette Cooper made a ministerial statement about this straight after PMQs. Kemi noted that this issue was not even one of Sir Keir’s priorities in his new ‘Plan For Change.’ Yet other countries are dealing with the problem more directly - Sweden, for one.
By the way, again it seems that Starmer’s SpAds have a tin ear for propaganda: in his 28 November migration speech he said ‘mark my words – this government will turn the page,’ using a Kamala slogan just after she rode it into the biggest electoral failure in recent US political history.
Also in passing, there is another aspect that is not receiving much attention: net emigration by British nationals; 787,000 in the decade to 2021. These are likely to be people with marketable skills and initiative. Is there a 1960s-style ‘brain drain’ in progress? How will that impact our prospects for growth?
Immigration is merely one Jumbo in the room. The biggest one, the Mama Tembo, is energy.
Labour’s Noah Law soothed his boss’s nerves after the spat with the Opposition leader by pitching an easy question on how Starmer could ‘help Britain become a clean energy superpower.’
Here is a quiz for Ed Miliband: place the following adjectives for Britain’s energy policy in order of importance - ‘cheap, plentiful, reliable, clean.’ Anyone in his right mind - like India, China, the USA, Russia - has to put ‘clean’ at Number Four. Fortunately with nuclear reactors and an abandonment of Net Zero all may be achievable, as Reform’s Nigel Farage told Question Time last week.
It will be needed so we can earn a living in the world. GDP is a hopeless yardstick of national prosperity, since all it does is measure economic activity. Spend money like a sailor on shore leave and it will go up; but if you do it by increasing the population of dependant low-skilled and unemployed people the GDP per capita will decline.
What counts is energy use per capita. There has to be enough to house, feed and clothe everyone with more left over to produce goods and services for them but also for export, to keep our international trade in some sort of balance. How, with the most expensive electricity in the world, are our industries supposed to compete? What happens if they can’t? We import half our food as it is; how shall we pay for it? Is that not a sustainability question too, you Greens?
Which brings us back to another neglected pachyderm: farming. When Jerome Mayhew (Con) spoke of farms being lost and irreplaceable the PM responded as usual, with an undetailed claim about the IHT threshold for the ‘ordinary family case’ being £3 million. He also boasted that Labour will be investing £5 billion in farming over two years - the expected revenue from the new IHT rules is only 20% of that, so why do it? Why bring the tractors out in York over it?
Look more closely into that five billion pounds and see that little of it is to do with making our farmers produce more food for us. A lot is to do with Greenery, but not the kind we can eat. No wonder Mayhew called Sir Keir ‘duplicitous.’ Meanwhile, as well as the soaring costs of fertiliser and fuel for their machinery, Ed Davey noted that farmers have been undercut by the last administration’s Oz/NZ trade deals.
Starmer was also confronted with the usual queue of begging bowls for good causes and ticklish issues of diplomacy - post-Assad Syria, picking sides in Gaza, arming against Russia, freeing a Brit long imprisoned in Dubai. Somehow we have to stay out of more of the wars that have nearly eviscerated us since 1914 and keep the home fires burning.
We are in crisis. If Labour goes on playing at Johnny Head-In-Air, indulging itself in back-to-Eden crazes, fantasising about punching above our weight on the global stage and thinking other countries will always meet our needs because all we require is international law and fiat money, we are headed for a fall.
If the elephants don’t trample us first.
Crossposted from Wolves of Westminster
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