Osborne gives us the threepenny bits

Pic source: BBC

The proposed new-style pound coin is publicised on the day of UK Chancellor George Osborne's Budget speech to Parliament.

The 12-sided design resembles the pre-decimal brass threepenny piece first issued in the reign of Edward VIII. The resemblance is more than physical, as we shall see.

Before 1937, threepence coins had always been based on silver, but the silver content reduced over the years and the coin eventually became inconveniently small. Why? Inflation, the curse of the twentieth century.

This year marks the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War of 1914-18. The Daily Mail's purchasing power calculator shows that one pound in 1915 was equivalent to £87 today. Coincidentally, under the old coinage system, there were 240 pence to the pound, or 80 "thrupenny bits". So a modern pound coin is worth much the same as a WWI threepenny bit.

The Chancellor introduced his Budget with the words, "Our country still borrows too much. We still don’t invest enough, export enough or save enough. So today we do more to put that right. This is a Budget for building a resilient economy. If you’re a maker, a doer or a saver: this Budget is for you. "

Actually, it's still not one for savers. I'm on Day 647 of my attempts to get my MP to ask questions in Parliament about NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates. All I've had so far is substandard, ill-informed guff in written answers from three different Treasury ministers (see right-hand sidebar on the Money blog).

In Cockney rhyming slang, the "threepenny bits" stands for "the shits". Funny how all these things link up.


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Ukraine: is it just a business plan?

Were the protests really started by democrats fed up of a corrupt government? We don't seem to manage that here, so why there? These things need organising, so who organised it? Any involvement from the West?

Even if this did begin as a people's movement, France24 suggests that it may have been infiltrated by Russian agents.

Or was the whole thing set up by Russia in the first place, to provoke a crisis aimed at the annexation of Crimea, near which will run the South Stream gas pipeline?

 - and possibly, in due course, eastern Ukraine, which is also predominantly Russian-speaking and across which runs Blue Stream?

At present, according to the map below, there are two key points (one in central Ukraine, the other in western Belarus) that between them control Russia's gas exports to Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Major_russian_gas_pipelines_to_europe.png

Quite apart from empire-building and the desire for a year-round seaport, is all this fuss really about securing energy supply routes? Putin the businessman, prudently working out a plan for economic resilience? If so, Europe wants the same - all those houses to heat, gas-powered electricity generating plants to fuel.

In which case, the hooha is strictly for the punters and the fix is in already. Maybe that's why some of the South Stream construction contracts were signed last Friday.

And when Nord Stream is completed (see map), the capacity of Ukraine and Belarus to hold Russia to ransom will be very considerably reduced.

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From Sochi to Sevastopol

from Google Maps



"What Did Sochi Get for $51 Billion? Highways, Railroads and a Lot of White Elephants," scoffed Alec Luhn in The Nation last month. Don't forget the new airport, Alec. And the new port.

Further up the coast is the "Hero City" and major port of Novorossiisk. Also being developed.

 

An hour away on the M25, northeastwards, is Anapa:

 

Between Novorossiisk and Anapa is where the proposed South Stream gas pipeline will dive into the Black Sea, on its way over to Bulgaria. Here is one map of its route, which takes in part of Turkish territory:

 

(Source, if you need to look more closely)

Here is another, rather more roughly drawn, which apparently doesn't need Turkish permission:

 

(Source)

About half of Russia's gas exports to Europe go through the Ukraine (and even the South Stream crosses a bit of the extreme eastern part of Ukraine, but a little territorial snipping - a land purchase, maybe? - could put that right).

(Source)

 

So it is very useful to have a route that avoids Ukraine and Belarus; and some of the contracts were signed last Friday. Even then, it would be most inconvenient if the Ukraine accidentally did anything off the shore of Crimea that disrupted the new supply route, but fortunately it looks as if that danger has been foreseen and forestalled.

A spur of the South Stream is planned to run through Greece, which was the subject of some little local difficulty a while back. EU legislation forbids Gazprom from buying Greek gas pipelines, so step forward a Russian cat's paw outfit called Sintez to do the job instead, according to the OilPrice website last year.

 

What with sparkly new port facilities at Sochi and Novorossiisk, not to mention the docks at the M25-serviced Port Kavkaz on that spit of land opposite Port Crimea (see below), there will be lots of logistical support for the future increase in Black Sea Russian naval and shipping activity.

 

 

Why, a bridge only some 3 miles long - like, say, the Pensacola Bay Bridge opened as long ago as 1960 - might cross the gap so easily:

 

 

Poor, dumb President Putin! He simply can't see how he has wasted all that money developing Russian assets on the Black Sea.

Nor, to be frank, can I.

Watch for (a) destabilising tendencies in Greece and (b) a gradual rise in the commercial fortunes of Thessaloniki. And - who knows? - a revival of nostalgic sentiment among the descendants of Pontic Greeks (many of whom now speak Russian) in northern Turkey, Georgia and the Ukraine.

Currently, the Bosphorus Strait is 35 metres deep at its shallowest northern part.

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The better part of valour is indiscretion

Many lessons are too late for the learning.

Only now do we know what an alley-cat Roy Jenkins was, and of his (surmised, but also in those days hardly exceptional) erotic relationship at Oxford with future Cabinet Minister Tony Crosland, surely relevant to the former's campaign to decriminalise homosexuality. Should we have known this in 1967? Perhaps it wasn't essential.

But how long ago did it become public knowledge that Crosland, once his party was in power, had said, "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England"? Should we have been told that at the time? Surely.

Now, we can peruse 40+-year-old ministerial briefings that show how Heath and others (including Macmillan - we do we leave him out of it?) plotted to make us part of a European political union without our realising it; but 70+ years on, according to master blogger John Ward, we still can't read the minutes of three British Cabinet meetings from May 1940.

It seems that on every matter of importance, we are kept in the dark at the vital moment. Yet some know the truth, and others know who knows.

To what extent do the mainstream media collude in suppressing information that must be revealed if we are to make informed decisions, or accept decisions made for us?


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Domeniconi: Koyunbaba

Came across this wonderful meditative piece on a Miloš Karadaglić CD my wife just bought me. The rendition below is by George Vassilev, which a couple of Youtube commentators say is the best.




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A reply from Mr Nigel Farage MEP

It may be a form letter, but at least it's a reply to my letter of 23rd February. Perhaps Christopher Booker will also reply.

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I should be redundant

There are some children who would have special needs even if they had two loving parents at home; but they're in a minority.

We once had a boy whose behaviour was really - well, the mealy-mouthed modern term is "challenging". He was taken from home and put in foster care. He was also put in with a much younger group of children at the educational centre, so he could take on the responsibility of being a good role model. The transformation was dramatic.

As a Looked After Child, his case was reviewed every few months. Part of the process is to get the views of the child, so I asked his teacher to help. We passed her an A4 sheet with the outline of a head on it; the boy had to sketch his face and write a few things about himself around the drawing.

In the top corner he wrote, "I am loved."


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What the Rhine maidens really wanted

(From the Bayerische Staatsoper's 2012 production of "Götterdämmerung")

Synopsis:

Having lost their gold to the Federal Reserve, who in turn foolishly leased it to Alberic (the gnome of Zurich), the Rhine maidens cling to the false gold of the Euro for comfort, though it will ultimately lead to the destruction of the Gods and all Southern Europe.

Prizing wealth and power above love, they have poisoned the wellspring of natural affection and driven away their lovers so, doomed ever to remain maidens, they are left lamenting, "Viagra, Viagra" (at 4:00 below).




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Gasless

83% of UK homes are heated by gas and much of our domestic electricity is supplied by gas-powered generating stations. Some estimate future supply at 40 - 50 years, so if you have children of school age they will live to see the end of gas in the home.

What's the plan?

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Professional trouser hunters

From dailymail.co.uk

From nknews.org

An acquaintance of mine, a North Korean refugee currently living in South Korea, told me how, in the early 2000s, she broke a bone. The incident happened one afternoon when she was on the way home. A few streets away from her house she encountered a patrol of regular police and militia, and she instantly knew she was in trouble because she had done something seriously improper. She had no choice but to run, and while trying to get away from her pursuers she broke a bone in her feet. But she still escaped the hand of law.

What was the crime she had committed? She was wearing trousers while walking the streets of a major North Korean city.

This story might seem strange. As every visitor to North Korea can testify, there are a great number of women clad in trousers on the streets of major North Korean cities. Nonetheless, a theoretical ban on women wearing trousers has existed since the late 1970s. Its enforcement has, however, been rather patchy at best.

My acquaintance did not blame her pursuers for the above-mentioned incident, instead she blamed herself. She knew that patrols of professional trouser hunters could be encountered only in certain parts of the city and only at certain times of the day, and she believes she was foolhardy to venture into such a high-risk area dressed in such an “indecent” way. 


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Oceans protecting us from global warming? For how long?

Are the scientists researching climate change allowing sufficiently for the moderating role of water?

Water has a high specific heat capacity. The same energy that raises the temperature of water by 1°C, will make copper hotter by more than 10°C.

This Time article (November 2013) reports "the vast oceans carry 93% of the stored energy from climate change, compared to just 1% for the atmosphere, with melting ice and landmasses making up the rest." Some of that energy goes to raising the temperature at certain depths.

But water has other ways of processing heat. It can expand, so that could be one of the reasons sea levels are rising.

There is also water's tendency to form chains of molecules - or even rings - and presumably heat energy will be used in the breaking of these structures, and there's a lot of them in the Earth's 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of ocean.

Another energy-employing phase change is evaporation. “The atmosphere’s water vapor content has increased by about 0.41 kilograms per square meter (kg/m²) per decade since 1988, and natural variability in climate just can’t explain this moisture change," says this article.

And then there's claims and counterclaims about melting ice. The argument is plagued by complexity because of the warming, cooling, evaporating and precipitating effects of wind currents and the difficulty of measuring ice thickness as well as extent.

The thermal absorption properties of water may have bought us more time, but they don't let us completely off the hook. Just as we are learning to discount climate change alarmists, we should look more skeptically at the sanguinists. There's a huge difference between "small chance" and "no chance", as we have found in financial matters; also, between "a long time ahead" and "never".

And then there's the at present theoretical concern about all that methane currently trapped in the oceans - by the water structures known as "clathrates", structures that heat energy can break.

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Blown away by harpsichord

I've got the CD, and play it loud on the motorway. The combination of Frisch's powerful and authoritative playing, the pindrop recording and the tremendous sonorousness of the period (1751) instrument make other harpsichord recordings I've heard seem dull greyscale by comparison. This is not a geek thing - you will be hypnotised, moved, exalted. And when you've heard it, I hope you'll be fair to the artist and buy it.



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Extraordinary guitar opening

I have to share this with you, perhaps it will move you as it does me. The first minute or so of Almir Sater's "Flor do Amor":



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The future of education: £1-an-hour schoolteachers, billionaire directors

A Daily Kos article currently circulating on Facebook compares American schoolteachers and childminders and calculates that teachers are far cheaper, at $1.42 per child per hour.

How about British teachers?

The main scale annual pay for classroom teachers runs from £21,804 to £37,124 (if you break through into the upper pay scale) and the statutory minimum hours (not counting marking, preparation and voluntary self-development) are 1,265 per year. Given a class of 30 pupils, that works out at 57p - 98p per child per hour (in London, 72p - £1.20.)

Nationally, the pupil-teacher ratio is lower, because some classes are smaller (e.g. with "A"-level groups) and there are teaching roles outside the classroom. On the other hand, teachers actually work much more than the statutory hours (ask anyone who's married to one), so if the pupil-teacher ratio is a third less but teachers work 50% extra hours, the rate remains unchanged.

By way of comparison, the Daycare Trust reckons toddlercare costs average £4.26 per hour.

But we're not comparing like for like: day nurseries have overheads, and so do schools. Overall, including additional amounts for some special needs provision, "core funding" across primary and secondary schools is around £4,000 per head. Even that is an under-estimate. It doesn't take into account higher levels of special needs, or other educational expediture. Three years ago, the average spend per pupil in England was £6,199 per year.

Also, if we're using the consumer model, we need to look at children's hours, not teachers'; but they're not fixed. The old law provided for at least two hours of secular instruction in the morning and two in the afternoon (as to subjects, only religious education was compulsory); today, in England and Wales, there are no minimum school hours, only a requirement for schools to be open for 380 sessions per year. However, a child's entitlement is generally taken as 25 hours a week, which multiplied by 38 weeks equals 950 hours a year.

That suggests a cost per child (in England in 2010) of £6,199 / 950 = £6.53 per hour.

Then you have to add on the cost of capital expenditure programs. At a guess, if it were run as a business, the compulsory education system would probably have to charge something like £10 an hour.

Which brings us to the question of privatisation. As with other formerly publicly-owned assets, there is a potential bonanza in education. The trick will be to get the State to pump in resources first, then transfer them into private hands at an unrealistically low price, together with a ready-made workforce for which the new business hasn't had to pay the costs of training and recruitment.

It would accelerate the process if nominally independent inspectors ran round the country denigrating schools which have a more challenging intake, putting them into "special measures" in preparation for rebirth as semi-autonomous "Academies" and eventually, privately-run outfits.

Oh, the money to be made! For you can squash down the salaries of the teachers, cut corners in all sorts of ways, boost administrators' remuneration and maybe even organise a massive debt-funded sellout-and-run, as Southern Cross Healthcare did with old people's homes.

A fantasy? No, look to the USA, where we started this piece, and see what's happening with "charter schools", educational publishers and testers, and the banks: Yes! Magazine's infographic here is very disturbing.


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Once a generation

1914
1939
1964-ish (young v. old)
1989 - the crumbling of communism
2014 ?

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"China to merge with Russia" - Classic FM

6.30 am: the Classic FM bulletin said "China" was to have a referendum on unification with Russia. Morning eyes. But this is something Russia has long feared, so I understand, and what with Russia having the lowest ratio of population to arable land of any major nation, plus wood and water aplenty, and China heavily overpopulated in relation to their natural resources, and thinking that Russia's eastern lands rightfully belong to them...

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UKIP and low information voters

They have been called low information voters or LIVs, people who vote but know next to nothing about political trends, issues or possibilities. People who don’t even know the names of major cabinet ministers or the role of the EU in making UK law.

Yet they vote.

In my view and no doubt quite a few others, the main function of the EU has been to sideline all voters simply because the governing classes regard us as too thick and politically idle to be allowed into policy-making.

Whatever its original purpose, the EU clearly intends to sweep away the untidiness of democracy and smarten things up with a makeover of professional policy-makers. Nothing must be left to chance or the whim of voters in the fanatical pursuit of extreme, micro-managed political tidiness.

Anarchy is the enemy of liberty, and so, at its highest pitch, is mechanical efficiency. The good life can be lived only in a society where tidiness is preached and practised, but not too fanatically, and where efficiency is always haloed, as it were, by a tolerated aura of mess.

Aldous Huxley – Themes and Variations

We used to refer to extreme political tidiness as fascism, communism, totalitarianism or whatever. Take your ideological pick. Soft fascism melds well with modern trends.

Whatever we choose to call it, the EU has created a situation where the main function of national politicians is the covert implementation of EU policy. This leaves them plenty of spare time to waffle their way through faux public debates on unimportant, preferably non-EU issues.

So is democracy worth saving and is UKIP the party to give it the kiss of life here in the UK?

Well UKIP is hardly likely to resolve the LIV issue even if against all the odds it makes inroads into EU domination. So we may as well face the possibility that LIVs don’t give a toss about democratic principles because they don’t analyse political issues beyond their own superficial and largely inflexible allegiances.

It takes a lot to shift us out of our comfort zones because here in the early twenty first century those zones are voluptuously comfortable. Especially when compared to living standards of only a few generations ago.

We don’t take to the streets, agitate for general strikes or vote for a dwindling number of folk who actually want to make democracy work. Life is simply too comfortable to be bothered with all that reading and thinking malarkey.

So LIVs vote for the mainstream every time. Democracy is on the way out and what the future will usher in as its replacement is not easily guessed at. The change will be slow though, so LIVs won’t notice until it is too late.

Maybe it’s too late already and UKIP is no longer relevant apart from being a repository for protest votes – but LIVs don’t do protest votes.

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Luck of the draw

From telegraph.co.uk

Do you count yourself as lucky? I do, but I suppose it mostly depends on the comparisons we make or fail to make.

I was lucky in all kinds of obvious ways from the time and country of my birth onward. In the developed world there are millions of us living our comfortable lives with worries previous generations would have treated to a tubercular splutter of disbelief.

We have our ups and downs of course, but materially most of us are lucky. We have our personal tragedies too because death comes to all and is so often untimely or painful. Yet in spite of the omnipotence of death we are lucky compared to earlier generations.

So are some people more lucky than others? David Cameron was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, but do we count this as luck? I think we do.

What about Blair? Bonkers in my view, but lucky enough to be charming in a way I’ve never quite fathomed. Maybe if I’d met him I’d know.

I’m sure luck plays a major part in our lives. I’m lucky to have made a reasonable career decision when I discovered I was passably good at chemistry. I could have given chemistry a miss and opted for something with deeper appeal, but I didn’t yet the choice turned out reasonably well.

However I wasn’t well equipped to make the choice anyway – there was a hefty element of luck. Maybe my parents buying me a chemistry set for Christmas had a hand in it. A proper fifties chemistry set it was too, one where you could discover the combustible delights of sulphur and iron filings.

The books and comics of the time were stimulating too and my parents believed strongly in the educational value of regular reading. Another stroke of luck – I was born at a time when books were available to borrow free of charge from public libraries.

Looping back to political careers - are politicians such as Cameron and Blair talented, lucky or a bit of both? Which is the more powerful asset? Impossible to say of course, but I think with a enough talent, politicians are often able to twist lady luck around their little fingers.

Doesn’t say much for the present lot though does it?

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The rise and rise of stupidity

As the world becomes more and more complex, we are presumably obliged to become more intelligent in order to cope. Otherwise, relative to a general increase in social, political and economic complexity, we might expect to see a corresponding rise in stupidity.

Oh dear!

Intelligence is supposedly dictated by genes and upbringing – good old nature and nurture. We can’t yet improve on nature, so how does nurture respond to steadily increasing complexity?

I think the simple answer is that it doesn’t. Intelligence is a social construct and when social complexity increases, the bar is raised. As the bar is raised, we understand less and less about our own society. In relative terms we become less intelligent - less able to devise rational responses to complex situations.

To my mind this is why modern politicians seem so stupid. Increasing complexity has raised the bar beyond their capabilities. Their best bet is to look after number one as the complexity of political and economic problems takes viable solutions beyond their intellectual reach.

To some extent this is offset by more accessible sources of information, but checking sources and comparing narratives still takes time and many can't because there is already an official narrative. Political leaders and senior bureaucrats for example.

They must rely on official sources and official narratives plus the opinions of their pals and paymasters. They don’t have the time to check any of it, so the bar rises and leaves them floundering. Misinformation, irrelevance and outright lies are their inevitable coping strategies. 

Reducing complexity is a much better coping strategy, but complexity creates powerful vested interests leading to even more complexity as its beneficiaries line their nests. So what can we do about a rising tide of complexity?

Not much. It is possible to glean insights from those people who find ways to describe aspects of complex situations without pretending to have all the answers. Insights can be found anywhere, from the Simpsons to a philosophical analysis and they do give some relief from endless streams of futile narrative.

Apart from a few genuine insights, it is still possible to locate good sources of information. Another way to cope with that rising bar is a sceptical and even cynical personal philosophy. Yet how many of us have one of those?

And tomorrow the bar rises again.

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A bit rich: Richard D Hall's conspiracy club

It took two passes through Alvechurch to find; Google Maps can be a bit approximate. Having wedged the car into sort of a parking space, I went up the stairs of the Sports and Social just in time, showing my email ticket to the girl, who stood at the door with the man himself. He gave me an appraising glance: maybe I didn't quite look like his typical audience, some hundred of whom were already settled with their pints and partners.

My phone lit up with a new text. My friend, who'd long recommended Rich Hall's website to me, had come down with pneumonia again. I stood at the bar, which was already out of Banks' and the alternative ale, but still had mild on tap.

The lights dimmed, and off we went on a wild ride through conspiracy country.

There was more than met the eye about numerous killing-spree cases, including that of Derrick Bird, a balding 52-year-old man described by one eyewitness as in his twenties and with short, spiky black hair, whose taxi had its roof bar both on and off at different points in the day, and who was allegedly captured on CCTV the second time past the cab rank in Whitehaven when in his car, but (for some unexplained reason) not the first time a few minutes earlier, when the gunman had stepped out of the vehicle with his shotgun and would have been more easily identifiable.

The 7/7 bombers were innocent.

9/11 didn't happen the way they say. Flight 175, a Boeing 767, could not have been travelling at 500+ mph at that low altitude, and the steel construction of the South Tower was too strong to be penetrated by an airliner; though a cruise missile could have done it, perhaps disguised in some outer shell or hologram.

As to the last, yes, aircraft can fly faster in higher, thinner air, but according to this internet forum there is a difference between the maximum permissible speed and the maximum possible physical speed. Hall's own computerised flight path reconstruction shows the craft descending, then levelling out before impact; parts of the same internet discussion suggest that the appearance of its still being under pilot control might be given by its safety program, which automatically lifts the nose when the speed limit is exceeded. Also, even if the steel skeleton of the tower was impenetrable, the windows and cladding weren't, and thousands of gallons of volatile, burning aviation fuel travelling at half a thousand miles an hour would be quite sufficient to make a bomblike explosion.

And yet...

It was no news to the audience, or to me, that the mainstream media lie, distract and trivialise, and that the alternative media are now infested with shills, spooks and trolls; that we are in an era of competitive empire-building and the largely muslim Middle East has been targeted for systematic destabilisation.

It was also no surprise that the entertainment media have a socially disruptive tendency, endlessly picturing family squabbling and breakups as the norm. Nor that one group is set against another, as for example in the case of benefit claimants - Hall showed a snap of the Channel 5 poster that asked unemployed locals for their views, which merely suckered the volunteers: this is not the first time that I have seen the media invite people to dine without letting them know that they were on the menu. American lawyers and police confirm that you should say nothing to police, even if (especially if) you're innocent; that also goes for the apparently sympathetic interviewers for TV and radio.

Well, since my friend wasn't there and I had to work next day, I left at the nine o'clock break to catch BBC1's Question Time, another heavily steered program (told by the ever-garrulous David Dimbleby to hurry her answer, Melanie Phillips retorted that he only wanted her to come to his conclusion).

Yes, if not exactly comfortable with it, at least I'm used to the idea that we're continually lied to and bamboozled, made giddy and daft. We now have the documentary evidence that Ted Heath knowingly misled the nation about the constitutional implications of the 1972 Common Market vote; Julian Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy so that he can't be extradited by a vengeful American government furious at, not his lies, but his revelation of inconvenient truths; Edward Snowden voluntarily kissed his successful life goodbye in order to unveil the creepy surveillance of the people by over-resourced spying organisations.

There is organised evil abroad. I just wish Richard Hall wouldn't over-egg his pudding.

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