Friday Night Is Music Night: Whimsical Weekend

A merry miscellany from JD:

The Democrats won’t raise taxes on the middle class—don’t believe it

Our new contributor Jim in San Marcos says:

Just how true is the statement that the taxes for the middle class will not be raised? —They will only tax the rich? Believe that and buy the Brooklyn bridge while you're at it.

If you examine your pay check stub, you will see the full amount paid to you with the Federal and state taxes deducted. Notice that there are other deductions, that are called payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. Technically you get them back some time way in the future, so they are not really taxes. The employee pays 6.2 percent Social Security tax and also a 1.45 percent Medicare tax which add up to a total of 7.65 percent. And naturally your employer matches those amounts. In reality, the employee pays the full 14.3 percent: the employer anticipates this as part of your salary before he even hires you.

It sounds great that the employer pays half, but if you think about it, wages are a business expense. When you look at your paystub, you see Social Security and Medicare deductions at 7.65 percent. You’d look at your paystub a little different if it reflected 14.3 percent in payroll deductions.

If the administration decides to raise Social Security and Medicare rates, they can do it and this is not considered raising your taxes. It is only deducted from the first 127K of earnings. I would guess that people earning more than 127K a year have progressed beyond the middle class.

So if you are like me, with all of my 401k deductions to reduce my taxes, I still get hit with 20% income tax. Add on to that the 14.3 percent for SS and Medicare, and we arrive at about 35 percent of my paycheck is eaten up by government deductions and income tax.

Let’s throw in some health insurance, my employer contributes $11,000 a year and I contribute $5,000. I’m not even sick and if I was to get coverage privately, it would be rather pricey. Now if your employer doesn’t offer insurance, guess what? You now have to purchase it on your own, by law. Ask yourself one question: are health insurance premiums in the private sector based on how much you earn, or are they the same for everyone? And the government has a plan for you called Obamacare. If you are too poor to afford insurance, you get full coverage. If you make some decent wages, you can only afford the plans with the high deductible that render them worthless.

Now a couple of weeks before the election, the state insurance boards are announcing new increases in rates for insurers in the following states because of Obamacare. Here are a few of them; Tennessee: 44% to 62%, Pennsylvania: 33%, Oklahoma: 76%, Nebraska: 35%, Minnesota: 50% to 67%, Illinois: 44%, Georgia: 32%, Alabama: 36%, Colorado: 20% and Iowa: 43%.

So let me get this straight, employers don’t have to pay health insurance for workers working under 30 hours. And by God they deserve $15 dollars and hour. So, you end up working two jobs to get 40 hours and are forced to purchase government health care insurance at your own expense.

How do you raise taxes on the middle class when you move them to a lower class? Donald Trump can end some of this misdirection on the middle class by getting rid of Obamacare. Raising the minimum wage just insures that corporations move overseas. The minimum wage has never been a wage to elevate people above the poverty level; it has been an entry level wage for employers to train new employees.

Where to from here? I hope we end up with Donald Trump as President. He isn’t a politician, and this is what has Washington DC worried. IMHO he is what the country needs to get back into the groove of being a major power. Obama was nothing more than a tourist with an unlimited expense account for visiting foreign countries. The era of  “Obama the tourist” needs to be retired.

Jim's Note:

Normally this blog doesn't take political positions and I don't apologize for not being politically correct. But I feel it necessary to take a stand. The news organizations of this country have selectively decided to hide "The Great Depression" that we are in, and sugar coat the present economic conditions to sway the election.

Friday Night Is Music Night: A Look At Luka

JD's latest Friday selection...

Luka Bloom is the younger brother of Christy Moore and is, in my view, every bit as good as his more famous sibling.

Here is a selection from his excellent back catalogue, the first one featuring Sinéad O’Connor-








And two songs with his brother-

Drownded on Titanic

Part of a gravestone at St Mary's church, Tissington. It records the death of Frank Richard Allsop aged 43, a saloon steward on the Titanic.

Mr Frank Richard Allsop, 43, came from Devon England. When he signed onto the Titanic he gave his address as Obelisk Rd, Southampton (elsewhere recorded as Woolston, Hampshire). His sister, Mrs H. McLaren was a stewardess on the ship. 

Source.

Frank's death is recorded on his father James' gravestone as his body was not recovered. 'Drownded' seems to be a dialect word, never particularly common although I've heard it a few times.

Three art teachers

JD' offers this tribute to those who educated him in art:



The gentleman in the video is Harvey Sklair (talking to his nephew) and you can see a few of his paintings on the walls. He was the art teacher at my school and I have never forgotten him even though it was 60 years ago. And here is his potted biography and it sounds about right, matching my recollection of him -

http://beckenhamschoolart.org/News/harvey-ivor-sklair-1928-2013

I had been meaning to do this for a while so today I put the name Harvey Sklair into Google and there he was! It is such an unusual name that I felt sure that the all seeing eye of the Google would find him. He was my art teacher in my first two years at grammar school. I've never forgotten him because he was completely different from all the other teachers. He had a large beard and wore a corduroy jacket or a leather jacket. But it wasn't just his appearance that set him apart from the other teachers.

He didn't 'teach' us, he encouraged us to find inspiration within ourselves although I couldn't articulate it in that way at the time. He coaxed the ideas out of us and guided us in the right direction. And that is what education is or should be about. According to the OED the word 'education' is derived from the Latin "e-ducere" meaning to "pull out" or "to lead forth"  - http://educare.org/

Rather than fill our little heads with information, he would encourage us to do things. I can remember, among other things, making lino-cut prints by carving line drawings into lino, (all those very sharp cutting tools! - horror of horrors! Would that be allowed today?), making papier mache models and painting them, making a copy of Magritte's Empire of Light, which Magritte had painted only two years before I copied it!. And there were many other similar projects and new ideas. But then he left and in the third year art had to be dropped; that is to say, art was one of the 'fringe' subjects and deemed to be of lesser importance than more 'academic' subjects. We were allowed one 'fringe' subject only so it was a choice between art, music, woodwork and something else. I chose woodwork because I thought it might be more useful - I still have the bedside table I made. (More horror of horrors - we were allowed to use a lathe, carving round table legs. Again, would that sort of thing be allowed today?)

So Harvey Sklair left a very strong impression on me and, I suspect, on all who were taught by him. As I recall there were more than few at my school who produced some really inventive and skilled works of art. 

And then the real world intervened and I went off to earn a living and it was many years later that I returned to 'art school' in the form of part time drawing and painting classes run locally.

Firstly with a regular visit to the DLI Museum in Durham where the teacher was Linda Birch who was and still is a professional artist and illustrator. She produced, among other things, the designs for Oliver Postgate's "Bagpuss" and "The Clangers" You can read more about her here-
http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/whats-on/find-things-to-do/linda-birch-bowes-museum-3669767

 Then I used to go to one of the attic rooms in the Laing Art Gallery where Cheryl Hamer was running a painting class. Again, a professional painter who has a painting in the Laing although I cannot find any reproductions of it. This is as close as I can get- http://artuk.org/discover/artists/hamer-cheryl-b-1952

I have been very fortunate in having had three very good teachers of art and I have absorbed a great deal from each of them for which I am very grateful. Whether I live up to their standards or not is debatable but that is not the point. The end product, i.e. the painting, is not important, it is the process which matters. To become fully absorbed in the act of painting, forgetting all else, is an act of prayer a meditation. During those few moments of intense concentration the painter becomes the painting, the painting IS the painter, merged into one.

That way sound a bit airy-fairy or just plain silly but it is a reality. I have tried to explain it elsewhere a few years ago- "I was drawing a picture of a vase of daffodils. My subconscious took over completely to the point where the class tutor (Linda Birch) said she was going to demonstrate some technique and I wanted to get up and watch but I couldn’t move, so ‘locked-in’ was I in the process of looking at and drawing the subject before me. That was a very weird experience and it has me searching for some way of explaining it." http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2012/03/some-thoughts-on-epilepsy/

 Did I learn anything? Yes! Did it do me any good as a painter? I don't know - http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/jd/jds-art/

Just a little chapter on my long journey (meander?) through life.

Our national shame

New Labour in its pomp was guided by the likes of Peter Mandelson, now (like so many) a bought-and-paid-for EUrocrat. Here he is with some other Brits, simpering in the presence of billionaire Oleg Deripaska. They are almost clutching themselves with excitement.

They may kiss Deripaska's bottom, but President Putin doesn't:



The video is a treat - watch Deripaska lie about having signed an agreement, be effortlessly called on it and called up front, then like a sulky schoolboy try to take the pen with him, only to be schoolmastered by the President.

Where do we Westerners have politicians who can do that?

Now it may well be that Mr Putin is not a nice man. But remember Churchill's saying, "The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet." To dominate a pack of wolves you have to be a wolf. Has Putin enriched himself? He would probably not be taken seriously by his lupine underlings if he hadn't. But do you doubt that he works for Russian national interests, as well as his own?

This week's Private Eye - a formerly independent magazine that now appears to have taken editorial "lines" on e.g. Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn - features on its front page paired photographs of US President Obama and Presidential candidate Trump, dubbed "HOPE" and "GROPE" respectively. This tempts us to ask, what became of the hope represented by Obama - and by Bill Clinton?

Yes, the American econo-political machine has its own juggernaut course, just like the British one. Yet remember Kennedy and FDR: there is a period at the start of incumbency, especially when the nation is in crisis, when a new leader could potentially cut free of his handlers and appeal direct to the people to support significant reforms.

In 2009 I (along with millions of others) hoped that President Obama might sort out the crooked financial establishment; instead, it has sorted us out. And as for President Clinton, doubtless Congress and the Senate threw various spanners in his designs, but why exactly did he feel he had to repeal Glass-Steagall as one of his final acts before leaving office? I also hear that he earlier instituted welfare reforms that made life much harder for many vulnerable people; are there not times when the President can refuse to sign?

As with the EU referendum, in America Presidential election campaigns encourage both halves of the nation to hate and despise each other, and then we wonder why the people are not happy. And it's all Punch and Judy. "Grope," indeed. The bien-pensant media tell us what to think, and how to vote, and if we don't do as we're told there's an endless post-vote campaign to tell us we were wrong. But the big problems are not sorted.

I never thought we'd have anything to learn from the Russians.

Friday Night Is Music Night: Prime Numbers

JD has put together "A miscellaneous collection of 'misfits'; by which I mean musicians who defy categorisation, which is why I love them!"

Slim Gaillard:



Louis Prima:



Willie Dixon:



George Melly:



Marion Harris:



Cab Calloway:

Brexit - the issue has been decided

The Callaghan government fell on 28 March 1979 because it lost a motion of no confidence by one single vote (310-311), as a result of which the Prime Minister quite correctly advised HMQ to dissolve Parliament. That was a 0.16% margin of votes cast.

Had the same number of MPs (621) voted in the 2016 EU Referendum and the split been 48%/52% the government would have lost (or won) by a margin of 25 votes. Many issues have been determined by smaller margins in the House of Commons - here are a few just since the last General Election*:

Date	Time	Subject	Turnout	Majority	Margin %
20 Oct 2015	18:52	Opposition Day — Tax Credits	616	22	3.57%
26 Oct 2015	21:13	Finance Bill — New Clause 7 — VAT on Sanitary Protection Products	596	18	3.02%
19 Jan 2016	16:16	Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 — Prayer to Annul — Replacing Student Grants with Larger Loans for Students from England	599	11	1.84%
19 Jan 2016	16:16	Opposition Day — Student Maintenance Grants	602	14	2.33%
25 Apr 2016	21:26	Immigration Bill — Unaccompanied Refugee Children: Relocation and Support	572	18	3.15%
28 Jun 2016	14:30	Finance Bill — Schedule 19 — Multinational Enterprises — Publication of Country by Country Tax Strategy	571	22	3.85%

"My policy is to hold a renegotiation and then a referendum. That is what we promised in the manifesto and then to abide by what the British public say." PM David Cameron, 19 January 2016. "This is a decision that lasts for life. We make this decision and it is probably going to be the only time in our generation when we make this decision" - PM David Cameron, 23 Feb 2016.

It is time for "those who know better" to decide whether they believe in democracy at all.

__________________

* Data from http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/divisions.php - clearly there is a date error around 19 Jan 2016 but the general point stands.

Dreams of Bloomsbury at Charleston House

‘Come out and climb the garden path,

Luriana Lurilee,

The China Rose is all abloom

And buzzing with the yellow bee

We’ll swing you on the cedar-bough,

Luriana Lurilee’

From Charles Isaac Elton’s ‘A Garden Song’

I remember the dizzying chimes of this poem from when I first read Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’, where the stanza sways through the consciousness of a group of intellectuals dining in the flowing light of the lighthouse. I was 14 years old and quite unaware that this poem would stream through my mind many years later, as I ambled the blooming garden paths of Charleston Farmhouse.

Charleston is the house museum of the Bloomsbury group’s country retreat in East Sussex, and to this day it looks as if its radical tenants are about to clatter through the door with easels and ink pots. In the dawn of the 1900s, the gifted sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (neé Stephen) became part of an eclectic circle of modern painters, writers and free thinkers, who oscillated around their avant-garde home in Bloomsbury. This new group, named the ‘Bloomsbury set’ was a radical backlash to the oppressive wake of the Victorian era. Bell, trained to classical ideals at the Royal Academy, broke free of restrained British art which largely clung to limpid realism and narrative symbols. In her paintings she defied symbolism and the Victorian taste for sombre colours, creating a new visual language of Post-Impressionism in England. With her sister, modernist genius Virginia Woolf, a new freedom was unleashed on Edwardian society.

There were many fascinating ‘Bloomsberries’, such as Duncan Grant, exquisite painter and ‘pacifist anarchist’, Maynard Keynes, crucial economist and first chairman of the Arts Council, Roger Fry, who brought Picasso and Matisse to an astounded British public and Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband and art critic. All of these visionaries, together with Bell and her children, stayed at Charleston over the years, making it a hothouse of art, ideas and bohemian living in the 1900s.

The first glimpse you have of Charleston is its ochre gable, rising with a stately yet rural simplicity from the South Downs, its violet grey windows of the attics gleaming like a painter’s eyes to the landscape.

As you enter through the door trailing with heavy fuchsia, you pass not just through a threshold but into another world. You are submerged in the greatest appreciation of the senses, with an aging gilt mirror throwing your reflection into a painted room, with Vanessa Bell’s whimsical flowers blossoming in chalk paints on the window reveal, Persian rugs trodden by bohemian feet, flowers dancing jealously outside the sash window with walls lined by portraits of the Stachey’s and a fireplace painted in gaudy circles which, if thought about, would seem to jar yet bring the whole room into a state of avant-garde suspension. As you leave the room your eye is caught by a Duncan Grant mural of an acrobat falling languidly through the heights of the circus, his wan limbs raised with a sense of hedonism against the night…

You are led through, as if by hand, like an exquisite game of blind man’s buff, imagining Vanessa composing a still life on the lavishly painted dining room table, a beautiful ceramic form by Quentin Bell throwing dots of light across the ceiling and falling towards paintings of a cat curled up in pleasure by Duncan Grant and quirky porcelain plates collected by the ‘Bloomsberries’ on their travels. Then up, up, as if pulled by spirit along the womb-like corridors to the bedrooms, with the most magnificent light streaming in from the misty Downs…

But first, Clive Bell’s library, with worn copies of ‘Intimacy’ and great hardbound collections of Byron which match the elegant sensuality of the nude drawings that hang above his painted bed in the next room…. The Bloomsbury group are renowned for their adventurous affairs and new romantic boundaries, a motif which playfully dances through the décor. Each everyday object is turned into an objet de plaisir, being either playfully obliterated with paint or produced by the artists at Omega Workshops. The house is a complete piece of art, sculpture, and in fact living. I think the most beautiful thing about Charleston House is not just how its quirky inhabitants mastered their paintbrushes, but actually how they mastered the art of life; loving, freely and with great abandon in all things.

I would like to return to the dreamy blooms of Charleston’s garden paths with the end of Charles Isaac Elton’s poem, borrowed via of Virginia, who swings back to us on the cedar-bough…

‘Swing, swing on a cedar-bough!

Till you sleep in a bramble heap

Or under the gloomy churchyard tree,

And then, fly back and swing on a bough, 

Luriana Lurilee’

by Catherine Beaumont

Bibliography

‘A Garden Song’, Charles Isaac Elton

‘Among the Bohemians’, Virginia Nicholson

‘The Angel of Charleston’, Stewart MacKay

‘To the Lighthouse’,Virginia Woolf

‘Vanessa Bell’, Frances Spalding

Good enough for China

From aeon comes an interesting piece on what in China is referred to as chabuduo - close enough.

Chabuduo implies that to put any more time or effort into a piece of work would be the act of a fool. China is the land of the cut corner, of ‘good enough for government work’.

In our apartment in central Beijing, we fight a daily rearguard action against entropy. The mirror on my wardrobe came off its hinges six months ago and is now propped up against the wall, one of many furnishing casualties. Each of our light fittings takes a different bulb, and a quarter of them are permanently broken. In the bedroom, the ceiling-high air-conditioning unit runs its moisture through a hole knocked in the wall, stuffed with an old cloth to avoid leakage, while the balcony door, its sealant rotted, has a towel handy to block the rain when it pours through. On the steps outside our door, I duck my head every day to avoid the thick tangle of hanging wires that brings power and the internet; when the wind is up, connections slow as cables swing.

The apartment is five years old. By Chinese standards, it’s far better than the average.

Read the whole thing - it is a fascinating alternative slant on China as a global industrial powerhouse. It may be an industrial powerhouse, but perhaps there are growing pains too. Severe ones if this piece is any guide.

‘There’s a Tianjin-level explosion every month,’ a staff member at a national-level work-safety programme told me, asking for anonymity. ‘But mostly they happen in places that nobody cares about.’ Careless disasters are buried all the time; when a chemical plant exploded in Tangshan in March 2014, a friend there told me of the management’s relief after the Malaysia Airlines flight 370 went missing the next day, swallowing up all other news and making sure nobody but them noticed, save for 13 widows.

Is software getting worse?

An interesting piece in The Register asks Is Apple's Software Getting Worse Or What?

Comment For over a year, Apple's software has been the subject of more derision than might be expected for a company of its size.

Developer Marco Arment took Apple to task early last year, arguing that OS X (recently rebranded macOS) is full of embarrassing bugs and that the company is trying to do too much on unrealistic deadlines.

Arment subsequently disavowed his post because of the widespread media attention it received. But there was blood in the water and the feeding frenzy has continued at Apple's expense, at least in part because controversy, manufactured or not, drives online traffic.

It continues to this day. On Tuesday, one fiction writer – who asked us to keep him anonymous – voiced his dissatisfaction, eliciting agreement from a few others. "I just need things that work, and that I can rely on working," he lamented. "I say this with the utmost regret, sadness, and no small sense of betrayal: Apple doesn't seem to make those things anymore."

The comments suggest it isn't only Apple churning out buggy software in the rush to add bells, whistles and intrusive data-trawling within excessively tight timescales. How many users want the bells and whistles anyway? 

"I just need things that work, and that I can rely on working". So do I and on the whole we get it, but have we reached peak software utility for home users? One comment which chimes with me is this.

little to do with apple

The fail fast fix fast mentality of software development is insane. (Have worked with software dev teams for 16 years now). Sounds fine if you are working on some new thing. But should not be used on core products. Whether it is apple (not a customer so can't say from personal experience ), Microsoft struggling with their updates, MANY others as well.

The focus has been shifting towards faster delivery of lower quality stuff because they believe they can just fix it later. Though in many cases later never comes because they move onto something else new and shiny.

It is possible of course to release things often but it requires more care than just doing it.

Too often agile is used as an excuse to ship faster and not need quality control.

Windows 10 seems to be turning into the largest scale agile fail in the history of software.

Companies like apple and MS have absolutely no excuses each having 10s of billions of dollars in the bank.

Friday Night Is Music Night: Velvet Violins

JD introduces "a selection of virtuoso violinists, some of whom you may know and some you will not":

NoCrows Crowswing (Steve Wickham)



La Feria de Manizales (Lizzie Ball, violin; Graham Walker, cello; Ivan Guevara, piano)



Dave Swarbrick



Sharon Corr



Jay Ungar



Rachel Bostock



And a post about violinists would not be complete without Grapelli and Menuhin

Bruges Group meeting

"Brexit: Winning the Peace - Charting a new course" - meeting on Monday, 3rd October 2016
Dickens Conference Room, Birmingham & Midland Institute, Margaret Street, Birmingham B3 3BS
__________________________________________________________
Some notes:

The first speaker was Professor David Myddelton. He said that the EU referendum was a political choice, not an economic one, and went through 6 points on his agenda for us:

1. Complete the process of withdrawal from the EU
2. Make free trade deals
3. Replace the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and fisheries policy with our own
4. Get control of our borders and immigration
5. Withdraw from the European Court of Justice
6. Restore the sovereignty of Parliament

He noted that when in Opposition, both Margaret Thatcher and Jeremy Corbyn had been pro membership of the EU. He also regretted that the Office for Budget Responsibility had been silent during the Referendum campaign, when its founding purpose in 2010 had been to stop economic lying. He said that if anyone were to be foolish enough to try to rerun the Referendum they would get the "biggest raspberry" ever from the public. He cited PWC's campaign forecast that real GDP would rise 29% by 2030 if we stayed in the EU, but 25% if we left: the price seemed well worth it.

He reminded us that Edward Heath had been in favour of ever-closer union, but between a small number of nations with similar living standards. Widening membership militated against this, causing strains between richer and poorer countries. The EU could not survive without reform. He quoted Hume on free trade and how he (Hume) looked forward to it increasing the wealth of other countries also - "even the French".

The Professor sketched out some ideas for reform:

1. The UK to join with other countries outside the EU, e.g. Denmark and Sweden, to form an "EDU" - a European Democratic Union.
2. The EDU to entice other EU countries to join then: Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland.
3. The EU divided nations along several lines: North-South, democratic-authoritarian political cultures, poor-wealthy. We should not put up barriers to the "free movement of labour", but that is what the movement should be about - so perhaps we could have some system for work permits, like the Visegrád Group.

In his view, the Prime Minister's idea to import all existing EU laws into British law, as a temporary measure, was a good one, giving us time to modify them as best suits us.

Next up was Breitbart editor/writer James Delingpole. He noted that after leaving the EU we will still have a framework of regulation, since we will be trading under WTO rules. But we will be able to make our own trade deals more quickly and efficiently, compared with the EU which takes on average 7 years to agree a deal.

He revisited June 24th - his "happy place" - recalling how he had gone to bed the previous night in despair, especially since Nigel Farage was quoted as saying he thought Remain had "just edged it" - and woken to the scarcely-believable news that Leave had won.

So, since all the EU Establishment including "Christine "Ronseal" Lagarde" were united in saying the market would crash, he bought shares, focusing on ones with "British" in their names. He made £500.

What had we learned?

1. After most of a lifetime feeling like an outsider, he had realised "We are the majority."
2. The Establishment elite does not represent us. Remarkably few of the well-breeched and well-educated were on "our" side, despite being landowners, aware of our nation's history and so on. Yet they couldn't clearly explain why they were on favour of Remain - they had no principle or ideology. They were like those ancestors who had wanted to treat with Napoleon, whatever might then happen to the rest of England.
3. The problem of the Remainers was not going to go away. Now it was an attempt to muddy the waters with a newly-minted distinction between "soft Brexit" versus "hard Brexit" - a distinction which, his Google Trends researches told him, was first made by... the BBC.

He had thought there was no hope, what with so many people having become clients of the State. When Jo Cox MP was murdered he had though it was over; but "real people" weren't swayed so easily by events as focus and policy groups might think. The People - the Demos - had spoken and made the right decision.

Last up - or first, as the other two had spoken seated - was Charles Moore. He, too, referred to the hard vs soft Brexit pseudo-debate and quoted a worker at his hotel: "It's got to be divorce."

He told us that Mrs Thatcher had begun to resist the EU in the late 1980s but was told, "This is the way the world is going." It was a ratchet effect. She had realised that EMU would make Germany the supreme power. Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum campaign hadn't succeeded, but politically it had stopped EMU.

The EU was not simply a market, but a "single regulatory regime."

Our national division over the EU referendum needed to be healed; we had to "widen the tent" and Mrs May, who had been "a tepid Remainer", was well placed to do this.

Now, the ratchet effect was in the other direction. Other nations would also wish to leave. Leaving the EU was "the only game in town", as Mo Mowlam had said to him (though he had disliked it) re the Good Friday Agreement.

In questions after, Professor Myddelton was sanguine about Brexit technicalities; he respected Christopher Booker's expertise but noted that the EU gave itself licence when it wished. He was similarly relaxed about global regulatory frameworks such as TTiP and the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement. An audience member involved in defence raised his concern about our relationship with the EU's military.

Comment

My feeling was that the glow of post-Brexit delight has not yet faded sufficiently for the experts to focus on the implications and the national and global issues we still face as we come out of the eye of the financial hurricane. The sovereignty question is, for me, not merely about principle (though that is vital), but about enabling us to begin considering how to restructure our warped and vulnerable economy.

Two Trumps

Here are two interesting attempts to ease Donald Trump into some kind of explanatory narrative.

Firstly we have Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams who sees Trump as a master persuader.

Economies are driven by psychology. If you expect things to go well tomorrow, you invest today, which causes things to go well tomorrow, as long as others are doing the same. The best kind of president for managing the psychology of citizens – and therefore the economy – is a trained persuader. You can call that persuader a con man, a snake oil salesman, a carnival barker, or full of shit. It’s all persuasion. And Trump simply does it better than I have ever seen anyone do it.

Secondly we have James Williams who sees Trump as an undeserving master of clickbait attention seeking.

Trump is very straightforwardly an embodiment of the dynamics of clickbait: he is the logical product (though not endpoint) in the political domain of a media environment designed to invite, and indeed incentivize, relentless competition for our attention. In fact, Trump benefits not only from the attention and outrage of his supporters, but also that of his opponents. So you already are, in a sense, ‘voting’ for Trump every time you click that link to see what zany antics he’s gotten himself into in today’s episode. (Yes, I am aware of the ironic implications of the previous sentence for this article as a whole — more on that shortly.)

Of the two I find Scott Adams more convincing, but that’s mainly because I tend to find him moderately convincing anyway. At least he seems to think through his ideas and tries to remove personal biases.

Yet if the election turns out to be close then presumably both Trump and Clinton are master persuaders and both are master clickbait populists. There is no significant predictive power to either position. One goes with them or one doesn’t. It is merely a matter of taste yet the feeling persists that it shouldn’t be.

However - try this from Adams. To my mind this is genuine insight - not a common feature of the Trump Clinton battle.

Pacing and Leading: Trump always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders like me see this as something called pacing and leading. Trump “paces” the public – meaning he matches them in their emotional state, and then some. He does that with his extreme responses on immigration, fighting ISIS, stop-and-frisk, etc. Once Trump has established himself as the biggest bad-ass on the topic, he is free to “lead,” which we see him do by softening his deportation stand, limiting his stop-and-frisk comment to Chicago, reversing his first answer on penalties for abortion, and so on. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump look scary. If you understand pacing and leading, you might see him as the safest candidate who has ever gotten this close to the presidency. That’s how I see him.

Friday Night Is Music Night: Galicia Delicia

JD says: Some music from Luar na Lubre with a couple of links to Wiki and their own web page. Just realised there are seven videos and then thought, why not! :)

No apologies for inflicting more Celtic music upon you because it is wonderful! This time by the excellent Luar na Lubre from Galicia:

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

http://www.luarnalubre.com/

You will recognise the first two tunes and will enjoy, no doubt, the variations on familiar themes.

Luar Na Lubre - The sailors hornpipe / Pasacorredoiras:



Luar Na Lubre - Romeiro Ao Lonxe (Con Diana Navarro)
(video slightly out of synch):



Luar Na Lubre - Hai Un Paraiso:



Luar Na Lubre - Canto De Andar:



Luar Na Lubre - Chove En Santiago:



Luar Na Lubre - Leabhar Gabhála (Torre de Breoghán)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breog%C3%A1n


Luar Na Lubre - BRITONIA



Hope that pleases everyone :)

Bill Whittle got it wrong about Hillary Clinton

... slightly. And anyway, that's not the point.

He analyses a series of lies by Mrs Clinton relating to her off-site storage of classified information on not one, but many insecure devices, and then quotes the law:

"... the simple admission that she did not turn in all of her work-related documents – for whatever reason -- was an open admission that she was in violation of U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 101, Section 2071, Paragraph a: which in fact is a felony. And of course, if you’re running for President, a felony looks bad on the resume."

* https://www.billwhittle.com/firewall/clinton-lie-ratchet

Here is the paragraph to which he refers:

"(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."

But that crack about a résumé is wide of the mark. What Mr Whittle should have quoted is the next paragraph (emphasis mine):

"(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States."

* https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071

So, if this is proved against Mrs Clinton, no application is needed or wanted.

I'm not American and if I were I should have a hard time choosing between Mrs Clinton and Mr Trump, for different reasons. However, in my view Trump is a symptom and Clinton part of the malaise. The USA and the UK, as well as other Western countries, are in a systemic crisis foreseen long ago by the late Sir James Goldsmith:

* http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/system-part-2-there-really-is-class-war.html

The theatre of the Presidential candidates' debate may make good emo-TV, but the underlying issue of untrammelled "free trade" and its socio-economic effects has its own narrative, irrespective of the Godzilla-versus-x franchise. It seems from reports of last night's set-to that Mrs Clinton is for it and Mr Trump, like President Coolidge's preacher re sin, is "agin' it".

It's still possible, of course, that the egregious Mr Trump could win the national vote and lose the Presidency, thanks to the workings of the Electoral College - he wouldn't be the first.

Time for the real democracy that you and I love so much. Perhaps, if we little Brits could have a referendum on EU membership, Americans  could have one on TPP, TiSA and all the rest? After all, the EU is just a scale model of globalism. And then, like us, you could have the fun of watching whoever takes the leadership try to get out of the plebiscite's result - or be thwarted and subverted in attempts to honour it.

I was getting ready to go down the Ecuadorian Embassy behind Harrod's and ask for asylum - move over, Julian Assange - but June 23rd took me by surprise. In Churchill's words after Alamein: "We have victory - a remarkable and definite victory. A bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers."

Cling on to hope, and remember it's not about them, it's about you.

___________________________________________________________

Also posted at Talkmarkets: http://www.talkmarkets.com/contributor/rolfnorfolk/blog/economics--politics/bill-whittle-got-it-wrong-about-hillary-clinton?post=107440

Why we need to lose 50 MPs

It's the desperate overcrowding:

(Pic source)

Let's call it a cat

As we waited for a traffic light on upper Broadway, I saw a sporting extra headlined with the score of the game. The green sheet was more real than the afternoon itself--succinct, condensed and clear:

PRINCETON CONQUERS YALE 10-3

SEVENTY THOUSAND WATCH TIGER TRIM

BULLDOG

DEVLIN SCORES ON YALE FUMBLE

There it was--not like the afternoon, muddled, uncertain, patchy and scrappy to the end, but nicely mounted now in the setting of the past:

PRINCETON, 10; YALE, 3

Achievement was a curious thing, I thought. Dolly was largely responsible for that. I wondered if all things that screamed in the headlines were simply arbitrary accents. As if people should ask, "What does it look like?"

"It looks most like a cat."

"Well, then, let's call it a cat."

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis--a molding of the confusion of life into form.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Bowl (1928)

An unusually long quote but the context is important - an American football game - muddled, uncertain, patchy and scrappy to the end, but nicely mounted now in the setting of the past. And here again is the conclusion Fitzgerald's character draws from all the tidying up so that everything is nicely mounted.

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis--a molding of the confusion of life into form.

Not particularly easy to generalise as an insight into the essentially artificial nature of achievement because there are obvious caveats. Eliminating hunger globally would be more than a mere placing of emphasis. So expanding Fitzgerald’s observation to wider achievements is not so easy. As well as the caveats it requires a kind of lateral cynicism, a willingness and even a desire to step away from the social clamour and focus on the artificial aspects of achievement. Perhaps it is also easy to see such an attitude as overdone, as envy or misanthropy taken too far.

And yet... and yet all achievement is a placing of emphasis because it must be. We have to define what counts as achievement and what does not, even if we are eliminating hunger or aiming to cure cancer. We have to emphasise the necessary qualities of achievement before it counts as achievement, even if that emphasis is perfectly obvious to the entire world.

Staying with sporting achievement - suppose the rules of soccer were to be changed. Smaller or bigger pitches, a different number of players, changes to the scoring, kick-ins instead of throw-ins, no offside rule. Whatever we do we have to say how the game is to be won or lost, we have to define the achievement of winning by a placing of emphasis. As we all know the emphasis on winning has become so overblown that even the idea of football as a sporting contest seems naive. The emphasis has shifted.

A more tricky example might be Jeremy Corbyn winning the general election for Labour in 2020. That would certainly be a remarkable achievement by conventional standards, yet the man probably doesn’t expect to win. His notion of achievement may be centred around a different placing of emphasis, shifting the Labour party towards the more totalitarian politics he and his supporters favour.

The internet is a remarkable achievement by conventional standards, but again we could step aside so that this too becomes a placing of emphasis. The power of almost instant global communication is emphasised over a range of more sedate alternatives such as talking, doing and taking part. This does not imply that the internet is a malign influence. It merely reminds us that popular emphasis is merely that – emphasis - and that one achievement often precludes another. 

Friday Night Is Music Night: Mood Blue

JD writes:

"Can blue men sing the whites?"

That's a very good question. In the late fifties and early sixties many of the British musicians who were part of the 'beat boom' were greatly influenced by America's blues singers and soul singers and this influenced the way the music developed. Some of the more pompous music journalists at the time were scornful of these 'white' boys trying to sing in the style of their idols saying that they were not 'authentic' whatever that means. In response to such silly journalism and possibly agreeing with them, you never quite know with Vivian Stanshall, The Bonzo Dog Band recorded a song called "Can blue men sing the whites?" Very whimsical and very British, of course.

But there are indeed not a few 'blue' men and women who really can sing blues or R&B with great feeling and 'soul' At least three of these singers here earned the respect of, and were fully endorsed by, the very singers they were trying to emulate!

Joe Cocker - Ray Charles said Cocker had one of the best voices he had ever heard.



Ottillie Patterson



Christine Perfect



Bonnie Bramlett was from 1963 to 1966 an 'Ikette', a backing singer for Ike and Tina Turner. She wrote this song with Leon Russell. It was originally recorded as 'Groupie' (with rather more explicit lyrics)



Miller Anderson



And three from Sir George Ivan "Van" Morrison, OBE

Spurious signals

One of the pleasures of modern language is the invention of particularly apt, powerfully descriptive phrases such as ‘virtue signalling’. This seems to be a recent one. According to Google Trends it first appeared as a blip in 2009 then rose from obscurity in 2015. In spite of claims by James Bartholomew it probably originated within signalling theory. Google Ngram Viewer isn’t aware of it at all.

Virtue signalling is the expression or promotion of viewpoints that are especially valued within a social group, especially when this is done primarily to enhance the social standing of the speaker. For example, expressing a hatred of the conservative newspaper Daily Mail might be an example of virtue signalling on the British left. The term is chiefly used by commentators to criticize the platitudinous and empty or superficial support of socially progressive views on social media, but has also been used to describe analogous behaviour in other groups, such as pro-gun rights grandstanding among the American right, and by signalling theorists to discuss conspicuous piety among the religious faithful as well as agnostics and atheists.

A real stonker of a phrase, it is extraordinarily powerful as a concise term for vast swathes of unedifying human behaviour. Yet the idea of signalling is hardly new - Strindberg saw it in art.

...for my art was incapable of expressing a single idea; at the most it could represent the body in a position expressing an emotion accompanying a thought—or, in other words, express a thought at third hand. It is like signalling, meaningless to all who cannot read the signals. I only see a red flag, but the soldier sees the word of command: Advance!

August Strindberg – The Red Room (1879)

In which case and given that it is now so obvious that virtue signalling is a vital aspect of human behaviour, what prevented us from describing it in such a powerfully accessible way before? Perhaps it is because, as we well know, forceful phrases soon become overused, lose their vigour and slip off into the land of cliché.

Which would be handy for those who rely on virtue signalling because it cuts so deeply into the social fabric. It exposes the manipulative mechanisms of power, the screen behind which personal interests hide.

Celebrity culture, mainstream journalism, drama, political allegiances, the EU, the UN, major charities, environmental drama, major sporting events and international businesses all lean heavily on virtue signalling. They cannot say so or folk might expect some genuine virtues instead of being caught up in the nonsense themselves. We can’t have that can we?

Dangerous Gaslight

"I told you to put that cigarette out, but would you listen?"

We've all heard the music, but has anyone seen the film?

Corbyn: if that's fair coverage, I'm one of these

Phrase here, images adapted from here and here

I don't support Mr Corbyn. I don't even vote Labour, yet, though I may if this sort of thing carries on. It's all a bit like Trump: the Establishment is in hysteria at the appearance of a not-business-as-usual candidate.

Judge the OTT language in this tidbit from the Mail on Sunday (pp 12-13):

"Secret... wipe out... plot... savage new purge... stranglehold..."

Oddly, the side article by Simon Walters about Mark Sandell's "Hard-Left plot" to unseat MP Peter Kyle is not available online, as far as I can see.

Now if the Middle East millions killed and made homeless with the help of Mr Blair and Mr Cameron are a success story for centrists, it is difficult to imagine what extremism must be like. Elsewhere (page 27) is a whinge by John Woodcock MP, who complains of being on a "hit list" but who voted for airstrikes in Syria - perhaps he should moderate his language so that real "hitting" can be seen in a true light.

And Dan Hodges! The picture editor had the nerve to repeat the photo online, but here's the truly awful eye-catcher in the print edition (p. 39):

Mr Hodges has his own wordmark; "Incendiary. Incisive. In the corridors of power". Some modern journalists are so far up themselves that they can see through their own back teeth. Incendiary, yes. Insane, perhaps, if he cannot tell the difference between a wet Labour MP and Ivan Denisovich; or between Stalin, as is implied here, and Hitler, as below.

Let's now turn to a nasty, desperate, unjustifiable piece of innuendo, a touchstone for MSM discussion of radical Labour. On the same double page as the first article there is a smear: A heard B say something nasty about Holocaust ovens to C, and although it has nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn, it is made to sort of appear that it does:

Hard copy - Mail On Sunday 18.09.2016, pp 12-13

Note:

1. The remark was made not at a Labour meeting, but at the Proms!
2. The alleged offender was not a Labour politician or wonk, but Dr Leslie Jones, the deputy editor of a right-wing magazine called The Quarterly Review
3. The alleged victim was Henrietta Foster, a BBC journalist, who is not Jewish, not related to Michael Foster (of whom more below) and not involved in the Foster-related Twitterspit/spat with Mr Bright. However she had appeared in a film, questioning the son of a Nazi, and is writing a book about Hungarian Jews. At a previous reception, she had previously told Dr Jones to "**** off" - because the latter had voted to leave the EU!
4. The alleged witness was Martin Bright, a former Observer journalist and former worker for Tony Blair's Faith Foundation, therefore dubbed in the headline as "Blair aide", i.e. not.
5. Michael Foster - not involved in the incident - is or was a donor to the Labour Party, is Jewish, and compared Jeremy Corbyn's leadership group to the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA), because (so I understand) Mr Foster supports the State of Israel and wishes it to continue in the Middle East; I also understand that Jewishness and "Zionism" are not the same thing and that there are Jews who are also not "Zionists" [for example, please see the True Torah Jews website, run by Orthodox Jews]
6. On an unrelated matter, Mr Bright criticised the suspension of Mr Foster from the Labour Party some days ago and some people said supposedly nasty things to the former on Twitter, such as (a) Mr Foster encourages anti-Semitic sentiment by his actions [? support for Israel and/or intemperate language classing non-Zionists as Nazis] and (b) the suspension was a good decision and Mr Corbyn should also remove other activists for Mr Foster's chosen cause. Looking closely at the "tweets", I cannot see anything actionable in terms of anti-Semitism, but perhaps I do not see things as a lawyer can. Also, though the tweeters are described as "Corbynista", the article does not show that they are members of the Labour Party, Labour voters or indeed that they are Corbyn supporters rather than false-flag trolls. Not, of course that the twittling has anything to do with this particular bit of nonsense, anyway.

So, a person who is politically on the opposite side from Labour is abominably rude to another person who was previously abominably rude to himself because of a completely unrelated issue, and is overheard by a third person who was not, pace the headline, politically a "Blair aide" but an ex-worker for one the ex-PM's private organisations. The offensive exchange was not to do with a suspended Labour Party donor or political differences over the State of Israel. Mr Corbyn and his Parliamentary colleagues and co-workers were not involved in any way.

But by golly the link had to be made, even if it didn't exist. The fake tear-out visual says "Corbyn purges top Jewish donor over MoS article... and reignites race row". It is a moot question whether Jews are a race or a religion; also, exactly what either has to do with a political/nationalist issue called "Zionism"; but this tangential scrap is used to complete a papier-mâché parody of Mr Corbyn and his leadership of the Labour Party.

I assume drink had been taken on all sides, but I begin to wonder about the reporter and editor also!

The article is piffle, and so utterly misleading as to remind one of the term "doublethink". Not surprising, when you consider that the MoS' editor is Geordie Greig, a Scot who campaigned in the MoS for the independence of Scotland and against independence for the UK, and continues to do so now. A bovinely stubborn and logically incoherent Mr Greig; an oxymoron, perhaps.

In the oo-er-perhaps-we-need-to-amend-it-a-bit online avatar of the same article, the body text and tear-out are the same, but the headline is changed, and bullet points added. In an egregious (e-Greig-ious?) piece of weaselspeak, the word "separate" is newly introduced in order to admit in passing that two connected things are not connected:

Holocaust film-maker is told to 'get back in the oven' by literary magazine editor as witness reveals separate anti-Semitic abuse by Corbynistas 

• Dr Leslie Jones, editor of the Quarterly Review Magazine, launched rant
• She told BBC's Henrietta Foster to 'get back in oven' at Proms reception
• Witness Martin Bright said he has been targeted with anti-Semitic abuse
• He criticised Labour Party for suspending Jewish donor Michael Foster 

Online, there is also a lovely photograph of the fashionably tieless and unshaven Mr Bright, adding nothing to the core matter but contributing to that all-important visual miasma of victimhood and social justice, for those who find words difficult to read and interpret.

And, presumably realizing that they may be open to a counterattack because of their possibly libellous implications of anti-semitism (a hate crime) against Mr Corbyn, the editors have now included a video clip of Mr Corbyn condemning it. This is the Youtube link, though it seems it's the same as the one accessed through the Mail:




The MoS: for the deranged, by the deranged. I wouldn't get it at all, except for the column by Peter Hitchens who, by the way, though he supports Israel and does not support Mr Corbyn, respects him. I think the MoS would sometimes like to get rid of Mr Hitchens, too - it did for a while, last year:

http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/spoiled-papers-strange-disappearance-of.html

Milo's sweetly preening video here rejoices in Trump's humiliation of the biased and manipulative mainstream media. As he says (2:19), "Here's what no journalist in America seems to understand: everyone hates you!"



Not just in the USA, dear Milo.