What Do You Think Today?

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What Do You Think Today?

Post by peter »

There is (although precious little has been said to prepare us in the media) apparently to be a nationwide test of an alarm system on Sunday 23rd of April at 3pm.

Every 4G and 5G phone in the country will receive a message warning of an imminent threat to life (or some such).

Okay, I suppose there might be circumstances where such a warning system might come in useful - threat of imminent nuclear attack springs to mind, but what exactly we are supposed to do in this case I'm not sure.....hide under the table perhaps - but by and large I like to believe our lives are secure enough, stable enough, for such warning systems to be unnecessary. If they are not, then I wonder what it is that government is up to that places us in such a continuous state of jeopardy.

The examples of situations in which the system might be used which are given are in the cases of wildfires and floods, but I have to say that neither scenario is one I spend much time loosing sleep over - but perhaps I'm just lucky. In the main I consider this yet another behavioural nudge tactic, a little psychological poking just to stir us up a bit, to say, "Hey - it's a lethal world out there and we're (ie the government) the only thing standing between you and calamity." Because let's face it, it never hurts to just keep that little fear thing going in the background does it? They wouldn't want us to forget the lessons we learned during the pandemic, that if our government says "Get back to your house and stay there!", then it's up to us to jolly well jump to it and do what we are told. That little background of uncertainty about our security can be very useful in maintenence of compliance, and you never know when such a thing might be needed, say for example if a Corbyn like figure were to win an election or something. (I kid you not. When Corbyn led the Labour Party a leading military figure said in interview that were he to win an election, there would be soldiers on our streets before he would be allowed to assume power.)

But anyways, none of this means anything to me because I don't even have a mobile phone, so I won't be listening to the mother!

;)

---------0--------

Nicola Sturgeon seems to have got herself into a right old pickle.

The former SNP leader has recently been embroiled in a financial scandal, police investigations into which have seen her husband arrested (and released without charge), a camper van seized from her property, and boxes of documents taken away for examination. For all the world it looks as though some seriously difficult financial shenanigans are suspected, and speculation is that it was foreknowledge of this looming crisis that prompted her hasty departure from the job of First Minister of Scotland, which caught everyone by surprise a few months ago. Now there is speculation that she might quit politics altogether at an early opportunity.

Who'd have thought squeaky clean Nicola Sturgeon, the sensible voice of UK politics, would turn out to possibly have association with fingers deep in a dodgy pie, just the same as the rest of our seedy and spiv like political class. Looks like she might not be spending quite as much "time with her family" in that camper van as she intended to. The police seem reluctant to hand it back at this moment in time.

Only kidding - I'm sure she's innocent of any wrongdoing. No doubt there is an explanation for the whole mess that will come out in due course. But it would be disingenuous to say that it doesn't tarnish her image. She might be right as ninepence, but the whole look is not, by any stretch of the imagination, good.

----------0------

Rishi Sunak is saying in today's newspapers that he intends to do away with this country's "anti-maths mindset" in order to get the economy growing again.

Can I suggest Rishi, that you get to work on your own maths skills, your ability to see numbers and in particular to distinguish between positives and negatives. I say this because every economist and his mother is saying that Brexit is an unmitigated disaster, that the figures show it, that it's not even debatable any more, but still you seem unable to grasp it.

Let's start from scratch. You take fifteen billion pounds worth of international trade, four percent of GDP and throw it in the bin.......

:roll:
Last edited by peter on Wed Apr 19, 2023 1:04 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Is it just me (it's probably just me) but does anyone else have a sort of gut feeling that the development of a (long sought after) 'male contraceptive pill' which according to this morning's Times, researchers have just made a significant step towards realising, is not a good thing.

Now this probably seems a rather sexist (or something) thing to say, but wait until I explain before rushing to judgement.

The physiology behind the female reproductive system is, and has been for many years, well understood. And it is not via the stopping of the production of the ovum at source (a complicated and as yet not achievable intervention) that contraception is achieved, but rather by the mimicking of the hormonal conditions under which new ova are developed and released, or pregnancy maintained, that the desired result is obtained. In truth, I've forgotten much of the detail, but the use of progesterone (is it?) to fool the female body into not maintaining the pregnancy (or some such) or believing that a pregnancy is already in process or something, is a simple, one step intervention that is both safe and easy to reverse by simply stopping taking the pill when ultimately a decision is made to proceed with raising a family.

The development of a male pill is an altogether different animal. Because of the very non-involvement of the man in the production and maintenance of a pregnancy (other than in the obvious ♡♡ rumpy-pumpy sense) it is a much more fundamental and tricky business to halt the development of viable sperm. This is evidenced by the steps that are this morning being related, as to how the pill is being developed. It requires, according to the account, the introduction of gene editing (probably via Crisper technology) to instigate the production of deviant sperm that are unable to swim via their tail oscillations, to fertilise the ovum high up in the fallopian tubes (where the actual conception occurs). This, you will understand, is a far more radical intervention than the use of a single hormone to fool the body into thinking that a pregnancy already exists and therefore not allowing a second one to develop. It holds far more risk to both the individual and to the population more generally, as control of the 'faulty' gene, of where it goes, of how it spreads, is far outwith our capabilities to guarantee. One can easily conceive (get it ;) ) of a situation where an ovum accidentally does get fertilised by the faulty sperm, and Bob's your uncle, out it goes into the broader gene pool. Sure, it might have trouble spreading, but it's odd how genes have a way of getting round problems. Either way, it just seems not a good idea to me. (Nb, I'm perfectly aware of the existing problems of falling sperm levels in men, which some believe to be resultant from increasing levels of female hormone in our environment due to the use of female contraceptive pills, but I'm just not thinking that it's going to help by introduction of yet another, potentially far more difficult to remedy, source of risk.

I may be wrong, but I don't see lots of men, despite the prevailing cultural tendency toward everything having to be equally distributed between the male and female genders, queuing up to take this product, if and when it becomes available. Perhaps like the covid vaccination, it will be allowed to skip all of the usual safety checks and protocols; we wouldn't want anything so politically correct, so in keeping with the times and prevailing attitudes, indeed so gravid with possibilities in terms of virtue signalling to let everyone know that we, as males, are at least some of us, tuly reformed....and we will take the psychological chop just to prove it!..... no - we wouldn't want this to be held up by pesky safety protocols now would we?

But a couple of stories to finish.

Female ferrets have to be mated or hormonally induced to ovulate. This means either keeping a male ferret and producing lots of kits that either have to be reared or killed. It's a pain, but one way around it is to vassctomise a male in order to run him alongside the females such that he can mate them (without producing offspring) as they come into heat. Nb, it is the physical act of mating that causes the female to ovulate in ferrets.

In our veterinary practice, we did such an operation for a client who was very pleased with the results. For twelve months his female ovulation problems were entirely sorted out, until one day the three female ferrets turned on the male and killed him. Some inherent behavioral mechanism kicked in and caused them to eradicate the thing that was preventing them from conceiving. I'm not aware that anyone has ever recorded this phenomenon in terms of it's being a recognised behavioral attribute, but I give it as an anecdotal story of interest.

The second story concerns a postman who worked in a nearby town to our practice, who decided to go and have a vasectomy at the local clinic. A few weeks later, when I asked him how he had got on, he was upbeat. "Terrific," he said, "Smooth as can be! Went in on Saturday morning, snip, snip, and an hour later walked out with the job done!"

He paused, and a slightly puzzled look came over his face. "Funny thing though - I don't seem to want it anymore?"

:lol:

----------0---------

Shame to hear that Rupert Murdoch has broken off his recently announced engagement (his what, fifth, sixth...) because he is apparently unsure about fis new girlfriend's staunch evangelical views. Others have suggested that in truth, he just feels that he is too young to settle down.....

Boom, Boom!

;)
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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There can be little doubt that the description of the Labour Shadow Cabinet under Sir Kier Stamer's leadership as 'the Tory B team' comes something close to the truth, when even the government itself recognises that the charm offensive that he is spearheading into the Tory heartland of Corporate Britain is overshadowing even that of the Conservatives themselves.

The Financial Times this morning tells us that PM Sunak intends to concentrate his efforts on rebuilding the relationship between the Tories and the business community (and currently being swamped by the Labour gains in this area) so damaged under first Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss.

But despite the current furore surrounding the SNP, the treasurer of which was arrested yesterday in a continuation of the police investigations into the missing 650 million pounds, Sunak himself has recently been under the spotlight for his financial shenanigans - sorry, activities.

Basically, some legislation that was passed in respect of providing financial support to child care services was beneficial to some company or companies in which his wife had a financial stake, but which he had failed to declare through the normal channels of MP's declaration of interests. Sunak has claimed that he had made the situation known via the Cabinet Office, ministers apparently being allowed to operate under a different set of procedures than ordinary Mps, and the decision now is not so much whether he failed to make the declaration as opposed to whether he made it properly. In truth, the accusations don't really have legs - not in any significant way; he might get his wrist slapped at worst, and the lack of media coverage of the story is reflective of its pretty unimportant nature.

But what it does do, however, is just cement what we already know. That the entire system is shot through from top to bottom with grift and back- handers. From the PM and his benefitting from legislation that his own government is drafting, to the lowest MP twisting his expenses claims and selling his loyalties to the highest bidder; from the 10,000 pounds a day Nadhim Zahawi to the Matt Hancock's mates multimillion ppe contracts, from the SNP's missing millions to Boris Johnson's wallpaper and freebie holidays, the whole thing is rotten to the core. The people we elect to govern in our interests, who convince us with their fake smiles and empty promises to put our mark next to their names, are virtually to a man in it for one thing. Personal enrichment. If by some chance some genuinely driven individual finds him or herself actually elected to the chamber, then it will be but a short time before the corruption and poverty of spirit pervasive in the place gets to them. There are probably notable individuals who do resist (Jeremy Corbyn never seems to have garnered much wealth from his decades of presence in the House), but by and large the snouts are feeding from the trough. No matter how much effort is put into weeding it out, how much brief moral outrage is shown by the media (remember the Tory sleeze of the Major era, the expenses scandal) back it always comes. It's human nature I guess; probably the reason why communism could never work. Self interest is deep in the core of our being and only a few individuals can ever rise above it.

And so I come back to Stamer and his courting of the business community. He knows exactly where his bread is buttered, where the money to finance his route to power will come from, and once achieving the highest of offices, he knows the power and riches that will flow from it. The lure of this is the driving force behind his mendacity, his breaking of his ten pledges, his Corbynite promises to the party membership that got him elected. No doubt he tells himself that when he gets to power it'll be different; that he will revert to his socialist principles, that what he is doing now is just so that he can secure power in the first place (because what good are principles without the power to turn them into reality). But the reality is that deep within him, the same grubby maggot will be at work as it is with the rest of them. They say a fish rots from the head down - but it also rots from the inside out.
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....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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It's bunkum. We all know it's bunkum, but which one of us has not picked up a book on astrology, or read an account somewhere, of the supposed attributes of their own astrological house or star-sign (or whatever it is) and thought, "My goodness, they've nailed me! That is indeed a bit like how I am."

Similarly, take this thing with the moon.

They say that the moon is supposed to exert an influence over us, how we feel and whatever, but the science bods assure us it's nonsense and we believe them. We know it cannot be so. But I worked in a veterinary practice for decades, and I'll tell you no if's or but's, at the time of the full moon those dogs used to howl in their kennels with an increased level of volume over and above that of other times of the month. It happened.

No, we're all rational people, we know that people are not affected by the state of the moon, but still, there's that annoying little discrepancy of the origin of the word 'lunatic'. Lunar - lunartic. Get it? It's like those people of old sort of recognised something, that people somehow behaved differently when the moon was full - were more prone to fighting, more on edge - that in the mad-houses the occupants became more unruly, more unpredictable and difficult to handle. So when I feel myself going through a particularly bad day, when my stress levels seem to be that bit higher, more taut than usual, and locking up the shop, I glance up and yes, there it is in the sky, the old moon is full and round in the sky (or in fact, I've noticed, it sometimes - when I actually notice it - seems to just by a day, preceed the actual full blowing of the thing) it's just coincidence. I know it. I'm not that irrational that I could think otherwise.

As neither are the doctors and nurses, the orderlies who work in A&E departments. Statistically it can be shown that there is no connection, no rise in the numbers of incidents, no increased level of difficulty in the people who attend when the moon is full - but still they groan when they draw those shifts, still the carers in the mental wards prepare themselves for a difficult night. They also know it's all rubbish, but they prepare themselves nevertheless.

It's like the famous scientist Nils Bohr, who reportedly used to keep a horseshoe nailed to the door of his office for good luck. Questioned by joking colleagues, that surely he didn't actually believe in all that stuff he said, "No. But I'm told it works even if you don't believe." He knew, just as we do, this kind of stuff just doesn't happen. It's a throwback to a less enlightened time, a time when irrational belief preceded empirical evidence, hard facts winkled out in the cold light of day. But I'll tell you, the world is a different place at three o'clock in the morning. Somehow at that time, when you are out, alone,walking through the echoing streets or around an abandoned building (I once did a very short stint as a security guard), things are not the same. The veil between the hard world of facts and rationality, and that of things lesser understood, better forgotten about or pooh-poohed even, when they are mentioned - that veil is somehow thinner, slightly drawn aside, and briefly, until you close the door on the outside world one more, retreat into what you know is the rational way that the world actually works, that old world becomes slightly more accessible, dare I say, uncomfortably so

The same effect can be felt within deep woods at dusk. Suddenly the lovely walk you are having turns on a sixpence. The light just begins to fail ever so slightly, and suddenly your surroundings become slightly ominous, ever so slightly threatening. Yes, this is easy to explain - it's a throwback to when being out in a forest at night was truly dangerous, a feeling hardwired into us by millenia of learning........

But still. Tell me there isn't something.....otherworldly.....about it. Something not quite covered by this cozy rational explanation.

What was it Hamlet said? Something about there being more to this world than your physic and books would have us believe? Maybe he was onto something.

(Edit: I've just flipped over for my first look at the front pages and lo and behold, on the side of the 'i' newspaper is the following small headline. "Astrology debunked. And why people believe in it anyway." Now there's a nice coincidence. It's a coincidence. You know it and so do I. But don't you love these little fun gems that the world drops lightly into your day every now and again? How much more dull would the world be without them?)
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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Post by Avatar »

Empty buildings are always creepy if they are usually (or designed to be) full. :D Even in daylight.

As for the other, with 8 billion people on earth and only 12 zodiac signs, there are bound to be a significant number of people each time to whom the very generic (and usually complimentary) "profiles" or whatever seem to apply, with degrees of accuracy impacted by how we like to see ourselves. :D

--A
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Absolutely Av - we all know it. But still......

;)

At last the media and the political class seem to be cottoning on to a problem that I posted on here in these pages probably a year ago, but was clearly too much of a leap for our movers, shakers and commentators to make.

That was that more kids were being drawn into nicotine dependency via the new colorful and fruit flavored vaping devices, most never having ever smoked a cigarette, than other people across all age ranges of smokers were being aided to quit, which was presumably the grounds upon which the products get their licences in the first place.

It was obvious to me, when suddenly I got, in the space of a matter of days, a spate of young individuals asking for a certain type of bar (I assumed it to be a chocolate bar at first) that something was up. When it turned out that it was a vaping product, it was clear that somehow, via social media, the prohibition on advertising of nicotine related products had been bypassed in some manner, and a contagious trend created amongst youngsters.

Now today's papers report that ministers are concerned about the prevailing 'zeitgeist' among adolescent for use of the fruity flavored and colourfully presented products, and the drawing into the area of smoking uptake, that the products are having. Well, well done! Very quick off the mark guys! Any retailer in a seven eleven store in the country could have told you about that one, but of course no-one would have thought to speak to us.

In today's press, the fuss is all about underage kids buying the things, but this is a smokescreen for the real issue. We in retail - and I mean us serving behind the tills, not just the business owners, get eaten for breakfast if we don't do our age checks. If the kids get fake ID's ir whatever, well, we're not frikkin' detectives. We do our best. No, the real issue is the licencing of products that appear like colourful bars of candy, with flavours to match and containing nicotine, with which to introduce the youngsters lured in by the fancy packaging etc, to their first contact with the addictive substance. Nothing could be better contrived to get a youngster into smoking in the first place than products such as these. It's like they were deliberately designed to undo all of the good work that the anti-smoking advertising and the horrible packaging of cigarettes achieved in the first place.

And of course it was! That's exactly what is meant to do. And it would be nothing short of a miracle if the Big Tobacco companies themselves did not have a hand in it somewhere. For nothing could be designed to protect their long-term interests better, if you were deliberately trying to do so. And I don't believe in serendipitous side effects, spin-off advantages for the very companies that the vaping products are supposed to be fighting against.....not when it comes to the tobacco industry.

But more to the point here, something just doesn't stack up with the government's apparent nativity when it comes to the licensing of these products. We are supposed to be trying to prevent people from taking up smoking, not encouraging them into the habit via a backdoor route. Bypassing as it were, the nasty bit at the beginning of every smokers career, the bit where you are coughing and spluttering with every puff, but putting a brave face on it in front of your mates. This bit, the nasty anti-smoking advertising campaign, the filthy pictures on the front of the packaging, might be successful in getting youngsters to eschew. But skip straight to the good bit - the nicotine hit, and all laced in a fruity taste like the candy you have only barely just stopped eating, well now you are talking!

And surely the people who sit in these offices deciding whether a product is in someway flouting the anti-smoking regulations, the demands that packaging must be plain or even off-putting, the flavours and tastes kept to a minimum, surely these people must be able to see what these products are designed to do? It's almost like the government want their anti-smoking campaign to fail. That they have gotten used to those billions in generated tax revenues (and justified on the basis of 'disincentivising people to smoke' by taxing them exorbitantly for doing so) - like they don't actually want it to stop at all. Like they have even - only out of naivety, or because 'freedom demands it' - allowed this stuff onto the market precisely because it ensures the continuation of that tax generated income stream.

But no - our governments would never be capable of such mendacity. They want us all to survive into long old ages of pension receipts. The proportion that die early and never thus receive the pension they have been paying for all of their working lives, this has not the slightest impact upon their thinking. Neither does the fifteen billion pounds of tax receipts (against the four billion pounds cost of smoking to the NHS) figure in it at all. They don't want that fifteen billion pounds at all. And that these colourfully designed and fruity flavored vaping products might actually bring as many people in at the beginning end of the smoking story, as their anti-smoking campaign takes out at the other........nothing to do with it at all. No doubt they are hand-wriningly discussing the matter somewhere in Whitehall as I post. Shaking their fists at the cruel god of freedom of choice that prevents them from from stopping this abusive circumvention, this turning of the thing that was supposed to help people stop smoking, on its head!

Yeah. Right. Get real. Smokers have been used as the whipping boy for years, taxed beyond all measure of the harm they do either to themselves or others, and the government has lapped it up, reveling in the revenue that the policy generated. Now, so used to this beneficial input, they simply ain't going do anything that will really, I mean really, put a stop to it. They have no intention of stopping smoking, not while the public purse is a beneficiary of its taxes to such a degree that to do so would make the Chancellor go grey at the thought.

In short, it's just another example of executive mendacity, practiced over the years by all flavours of government, and culminating in this new trick by the tobacco industry to get around the rules. At least in the latter case we know what to expect of them. Our government's role in the matter is deceitful to an altogether different level. Or is it just me? Have they really designed a system of licencing so unfit for purpose, so incredibly transparent in its failings, that it allows for exactly the opposite effect for that which it is publicly claimed to be to achieve? Either way it's frightening. Take your pick.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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I have no particular axe to grind over the Dominic Raab resignation,one way or the other.

It seems to me that there was definitely a concerted effort, colluded in by multiple civil servants together, whose aim was to get him out of his job. By the same token I have no doubt that his managerial style would have been abrasive and at times downright rude and even intimidating.

It was essentially a contest between a Minister, put in place to oversee Departments of State, and the permanent staff who view those departments as principally their own domain, and who regard the political masters placed in by here today, gone tomorrow politicians as pretty much nothing short of unnecessary interference. These are the people who essentially run the country, with an occasional change of wallpaper at the presentational front in the form of a new frontman.

Any Minister coming in who, like Raab no doubt, has ideas for really shaking things up and stamping his or her own mark on it, is inevitably going to have to surmount a wall of quiet uncooperative behaviour, a sidelining of their ideas and disinclination to cooperate with their requests. If they respond as Raab clearly did, with aggression and intimidation, then, particularly in today's prevailing cultural atmosphere, they open themselves up to attack, and must necessarily suffer the consequences. If you are going to be brave or stupid enough to attack the people commonly supposed to be your subordinates in the hierarchical sense, then you'd better be on solid ground when you do so, or they will have the legs out from under you.

But I think the whole sorry saga has illustrated a real flaw at the heart of our system. Not for nothing is the civil service referred to as 'the blob', and what we have seen simply serves to show us how dysfunctional is the relationship between our politicians and the permanent staff they are put in place to direct. No new manager put into an existing staff structure ever goes in without there being some resistance to their presence, the new ideas that they bring, but in Raab's case it seems to have reached a pitch of painful intensity. By his assessment, people would attend meetings with little or no preparation to address the briefs they had been given, and then reacted with excessive hurt and bitterness (quite possibly exaggerated for the purposes of aiding their cases against him) when they were called out, in no-doubt brutal terms for it.

This intransigence and refusal to cooperate with a minister is bound to have a negative effect on the governance of the State. You do not want an atmosphere of contest to prevail between politicians and the civil servants who are supposed to be serving them. It isn't good for business. The proper functioning of the country can only be damaged by it. One is induced to conjure up a scenario of the old BBC comedy Yes Minister, but without the comedy and with extremely serious consequences in terms of functioning of the state, of the constitution and how it is designed to work.

It shouldn't have to be this way and it is worrying that it is.

As for Raab himself, he hasn't got much to worry himself about. After all, this is Sunak's cabinet we are talking about. He'll probably be back in it in six days or so's time!

;)

--------0-------

Do you remember the beginning of the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (or was it Thunderball?) - that one where a US space ship or satellite was swallowed up by another one? Well it appears that the old Chinese are up to it for real, if not in quite as spectacular a manner as in the film.

Today's papers tell us that they are developing state of the art technology in order to co-opt Western satellites, either to render them dysfunctional or even more sinisterly, to actively take control of them and utilise them for their own ends or to feed in disinformation and fake instructions etc, unbeknownst to 'our side'.

Well I suppose it makes good sense from a military/defence point of view: it was always going to happen that space would represent a New Frontier for warfare to stretch its legs in, and the new tech of information and data was always going to be in there somewhere. No doubt our own bods, having caught wind of the idea, will be running post haste to catch up and develop such tricky little systems of our own.

We won't hear about that side of it so much, but if the other side's activities in this area can be presented to us as evidence (if yet further were needed) of their ill-intent towards us, their designs to see us all enslaved and under their domination, then so much the better. Never miss a chance to keep the public gaze turned outward, away from what you are doing (or in this government's case are failing to do). The 'fear windfalls' are manifold if used correctly, so get your heads together with your friendly newspaper owners and see what can be done. Ideal sort of story for today's atmosphere - tailor made almost to slot into the public psyche like a jigsaw piece into its alloted spot. And a great image - that James Bond one - you can really play with that!

But the question it begs to me is why we are, as a world, wasting so much time and effort on thinking up these strategies to interfere, to deharmonize our activities with each other, when we have so much more to gain from cooperating with each other instead? We are supposed to be the clever species, the ones who have been gifted with intelligence and foresight, the ability to shape the world to our benefit, not to manufacture ways and means of hurting each other and ourselves in consequence. You wouldn't believe it on the basis of this kind of nonsense.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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This post will be a mess.

I'll tell you from the get-go, not least because I haven't got the slightest idea where it will take me and it's as much an attempt to try and sort out where I am as anything else.

It started with a YouTube post that I didn't even bother to watch. It was a Novara Media or something post, the picture of which was a woman standing on a podium at the recent Reform UK party conference, the caption to which told us how she had been proudly saying to the audience "I'm white and I'm not ashamed of it!"

Reform UK is the new version of Farage's Ukip, party and the woman one of the guest speakers. The statement she was making was such dog-whistle politicking, so populist and designed to get agreement from just about every white person that heard it, that it is irrelevant. No one (with very minor exceptions) is suggesting that we should be ashamed of being white. Acknowledgement of our historical crimes and attempting to abandon the prejudices that hobbled the thinking of our forebears is not, nor does it have to include, being ashamed of being white. The statement she was shouting out from the podium was simply for effect, a straw-man (of a kind) extrapolation that simply isn't the case. She knew it, but knew that her right wing audience would lap it up.

It can be ignored and I ignored it.

Next I saw a political post by the ex BBC political interviewer Andrew Marr, now firmly ensconced in his new role as a presenter on LBC Radio. He gave a rather restrained performance (for him) - rather sombre with a sort of warning tone almost - about a new movement that he said, we would be hearing much from and about, in the coming weeks and months. It was called National Conservatism, and was due to hold a conference in a few weeks time, at which some of the really big political figures from the Tory Party (including three or so front bench ministers) were pencilled in to speak. Basically it was the brainchild of political movers from the USA, right wing members of the Republican Party, who were keen to export their anti liberal democracy message over to this side of the pond. It was essentially a movement that wanted to get back to Tory basics, to eschew the liberal wokery (for want of a better expression) that seemed to be drawing us ever further from the course of common sense and true Conservatism of the party of old. People like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove would be speaking, and possibly even the Home Secretary Suella Braverman. The ideology it espoused was essentially a more authoritarian one, more insular and even nationalistic in nature, eschewing the globalism and increasing international interdependence that has prevailed since, well, really the fall of the Soviet Union. The world, said Marr, was retreating from this level of internationalism, since the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and this intellectual fervour on the political right - not exactly the far-right as such, but the further right elements of the established Conservative Party - were seizing on it to make the case against liberal democracy and in support of......well, something else.

There was a sort of veiled warning about Marr's post, something slightly threatening that he was skirting around the edges of actually saying (he admitted as much). It was clearly a warning that if these guys got their way, the Conservative Party would be seeing a lurch to the right that could bring us into the dangerous territory that many of us have been warning about for a good long time.

He completed the post by saying that oddly, the movement seemed to be almost entirely at odds with the position that Sunak himself would seem to represent. A product of the globalised international financial system, of immigrant stock, the PM almost embodies all of the liberal democratic values that this movement is designed to overturn. A return to a more insular, nationalistic type of Conservatism, that would have no place for the pro LGBQT, trans agendas, no looking outward towards the rest of the world, but be more concerned with battening down the hatches and protection of our borders, our national interest.

All very interesting and I decided to look into the thing further.

I went across to another post made by UnHeard, a right wing intellectual outlet, which had a post (it said) explaining why National Conservatism was possibly right for the UK at this time, what it was all about etc. A presenter, very smooth in his delivery and respectable in his appearance, was giving a talk to a clearly well heeled and high end audience. The room was tastefully decorated and suits and ties were seated respectfully listening to the talk being given.

The speaker explained how, following the fall of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy had essentially coopted all of the political space between fascism and communism, essentially saying that if you were not one hundred percent of its opinion (re the freedom of the individual as being the only consideration around which all things were essentially based), then you had to be either a fascist or a communist. There was, from the liberal democratic perspective, no other position one could take, but ultimately this failure to grasp that there were alternatives, had led the world into what he described as a "woke neo Marxism", from which there was essentially no escape. That was, he said, unless you accepted that there was, there is another way. A way that said, sure, the individual is important, but there are other things as well. Like respect and venerence for your family, your parents, the country you were born in, the nation that had produced you and your forebears. These things were, he said, things that needed to be recognised as well, as being of importance - alongside the individual and the rights thereof. We have, he told us, produced after two generations of liberal democracy thinking, of totally occupying all the space that was not extremist stuff on either side of it, a generation of people who can think in no terms other than those of 'rights'. Rights have come to dominate everything, to the exclusion of everything else. There is no place left for the basic values of Conservatism, values that millions hold and who now find themselves cut adrift from the world of interconnectedness and liberal thinking, values that look to the conservation of things that our history has granted us, the things that are of value. This is after all where the name Conservatism comes from. Conservation of family and family values, our religions, our culture and society, our essential connectedness as members of our own sovereign nation. What makes us what we are.

He put it all so well, so rationally and persuasively, that it was damn nearly impossible not to agree with it.

And here is my problem. Why should it be that the right wing should coopt all of this stuff that yes, I admit, resonates with me. Can I not believe that there are essentially two sexes, and still believe that society should be fair to all? Can I not believe in my essential Britishness - hell, even my Englishness - as being something of value, but also acknowledge that the rest of the world is important too. That our relationship with other countries should be as friends and not always as potential enemies. Can I not love my country without hating others? Why should the political right own all of the things that seem to be important to me? That I like my history, my culture, the things that our forebears have left to us? Can I not have both? Can I not look upon those others with a different skin colour to mine as brothers and sisters of our own collective nation, butstill love those things like family values, and religious heritage, and sovereignty as an independent nation state......or must I off necessity be right wing Conservative if I believe in these things. I absolutely believe in the rights any individual to choose how they see themselves, to express that in any way that they see fit, but I retain the right to think as I see fit as well. Does this make me a neo Conservative borderline fascist, that I want not to be told what I must think?

I'm for the people, absolutely and commitedly: I believe that the nation should be governed in their interest, not the interest of a small elite at the very top of our society. But I have conservative (small c) values as well. So where does that leave me. Time, I suppose, will tell.

(Edit. I also don't believe that we have the right to go out and force our values onto all the other countries of the world. To force all other nations to adopt our way of thinking, of living. They also have the right to determine their own ways, to be as they see fit, as their cultures and histories would dictate that they should be. Liberal democracy seems to have it that muscular, even aggressive proselytising of its own system until all nations of the world are converte and history is ended is the correct path, but I find myself in disagreement. Where does this leave me? As the man said, it's complicated. Oh yes, it's complicated right enough. Oddly, I begin in some sense to see where the Brexit argument comes from. Intellectually, at the level the man in the UnHeard lecture explained it, it has merit. Or am I just being fooled by a speaker much more clever than I? A man who could put his arguments so persuasively that an intellectual intermediate like me doesn't stand a chance? Or perhaps I really am a Conservative? But I can't be - I'm repelled by the mendacity and dishonesty of the government we have been subject to for the past thirteen years. I'd see an honest man of the people like Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street tomorrow. And I suspect that in some way he actually got what this message was all about. He was, after all, no internationalist. He believed in the right of self determination as a nation. Perhaps there is hope for me yet.)
Last edited by peter on Mon Apr 24, 2023 6:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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All posts should be prepared and then edited for mistakes and bad grammar before posting, and the above is a textbook example of why this is so. The spelling and grammar is atrocious, wrong words are used, too many words in places where far fewer would have served. As I said - a mess, but for entirely different reasons than I meant. I apologise for this. In my defence, all I can say is that the process of writing is not one I find easy. With 24 hours behind me, I can immediately spot the glaring mistakes and means by which posts can be tightened up, but at the point of writing this is not so easy. You become sort of 'fazed' by the act of creating the thing. Your concentration doesn't exactly wander so much as operate with less efficiency. You cannot tell whether what you have written is coherent or not, and become too tired and wrung out to expend more effort on editing (which would be beyond your capabilities at this stage anyway).

I should really go back and sort the bloody mess out, whip it into shape, for my own prides sake. Screw it, I'll do it. The site deserves it.

(Edit. It's done. Much tighter and cleaned up, I think. My apologies again. The site deserved better. )
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It's taken a while, but I think I begin to see my way through it.

The problem is that the way that liberal democracy is framed in our world leaves no place for the establishment of a worker based polity in which policies are developed for the benefit of all as opposed to the specific benefit of a select group at the top end of our societies.

Wherever you look at Western liberal democracies, you see this merry-go-round of money, power and politics, such that a small cadre at the top of our societies change caps (as it were) to slide from one position to another - one moment sitting at the tops of industry, business, the Law etc, then sliding across into politics, then back again - such that the general working population never truly get a look in, to influence the decision making process which so much determines the nature and progress of their lives.

This was the intellectual argument in favour of Brexit, the EU being as it were the absolute embodiment of this liberal democratic system, as opposed to the populist argument - the "get them bloody foreigners out of here" trope, which the Leave campaign essentially sold (though they would deny it), and which the public bought into. I never heard the former put forward by the left. Corbyn was clearly no European, though in his defence he never said much about it at all, leaving people to make up their own minds as it were. He certainly didn't buy into the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Daily Mail type coverage, and the left leaver view was certainly framed more around the business orientation of the EU as an organisation.

What the clever speaker I refer to above did, was to cherry pick the points at which many of us can resonate with, and sell them with a Conservative wrapping ( note - capital C). But they are not the preserve of the right. They are universal in their application and can as easily apply to left-wing socialism (in fact can do more so) as they can to the political right. (Oddly Corbyn with his 'return to the old values socialism approach can actually be framed as the real conservative - small c - of the piece, )

He, Corbyn, understood that from within the EU we could never implement the necessary changes to break the power based merry-go-round exchange that I refer to above. The EU was absolutely dedicated to the preservation of the liberal democratic order that ensured nothing would essentially change and that workers would never get a toe-hold on the levers of power in order to Institute revolutionary (in the metaphorical sense) change.

But you can hold with the rights and freedoms of the individual from within the belief structures of left wing policy. There is absolutely no contradiction in doing so - collectivism at the worker level in the form of trade unions etc perfectly allows for this and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise. And if the establishment of a fair, worker based polity is dependent upon our retention of our sovereign rights as a nation to formulte our own policy, then I am (belatedly) a Brexiteer. I still absolutely believe that we must get back into the single market and customs union, but only insofar as it frees us to formulte our own polity which brings workers rights to absolute parity with those of business in the development of policy.

The corrupt merry-go-round of circulating power and influence that is killing us must be brought to an end. The ever widening gap between the few and the many must be addressed, and some parity reestablished. Too long and too many times have the working population been made to carry the can for the failure of capitalism to meet the demands of government. We see it in France as I post, the Macron government saying that "we have not the cash to pay for your pensions, we will not tax the wealthy and business community despite their rocketing profits in the post-pandemic, post-inflation world. We will not stop the price gouging that has led to this inflation. Instead, you the workers must pay. You must work longer and receive your pensions later. This works for us, for the wealthy and business community, and too bad that it does not for you."

No wonder the population is pissed. I back them to the hilt and would see us as engaged as the French population clearly are, if without the destructive element of the protest. This injustice must end. Right across the board.
Last edited by peter on Tue Apr 25, 2023 4:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Quick story.

The other day, serving in the shop three small lads, eight or ninish years old were at the counter. One was putting down the sweets and candy bars they had selected and the other two were looking at the (equally) brightly packaged vaping bars behind the glass screen of my till frontage, with their exotic names, Cherry Passion Raz, Pineapple Cream Sundae and the like.

I overheard the two boys talking.

"I've smelt that one and that one," one said. "My mother has this one and that one," replied the other, pointing at a couple of the ten or eleven different flavours on display.

Need I really say more.

-------0-------

The 'i' newspaper has a front page ad for an internal article in the food section. It shows a picture of a woman holding a banana with the caption "Most people tested could not tell the difference between banana skin and bacon."

Well they must have all the taste discernment of a bottom-feeding mollusc, because I'm absolutely damn one hundred percent sure that I could! There is nothing - nothing - you could do to a banana skin that could make me mistake it for a piece of bacon. I'm willing to bet all the money I can raise on it.

------0-----

Boys are to receive lessons in respect for girls under Sir Kier Stamer's leadership, we are told in the 'i' again. In an attempt to stamp out banter and laddish behaviour (which often, we are told, morphs into misogyny) boys in schools will receive instruction on the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. My My. What a fun place Stamer's UK will be. Is this yet another sign of the narrow authoritarian leanings of Stamer's thinking, of which we have had signs in the past.

He recently gave a speech bemoaning the failure of 'the centre' to come up with a coherent message of relevance to the wider populace. One suspects that Stamer's centre would be a pretty narrow minded and bigoted one. There's nothing wrong with centralisation in terms of coordination of the machinery of state, of maximising efficiency and allocation and movement of resources to where they are most needed, but to begin to educate on behaviour is to enter dangerous waters indeed. Already our schools are more in the business of teaching kids what to think rather than how to think. This, Stamer's idea, would be yet a further step down the road of the old Soviet dream of reconstruction of the human into something other than that which it is. He is backed in his idea of introduction of teaching about respect and treatment of women into the curriculum by his education secretary Yvette Cooper. Is there no length these people will not go to in order to convince us of their virtue in all things PC related.

Boys will be boys, or so the saying goes. Importantly, they must be left alone to be boys as well. Girls for their part, are more than capable of dealing with them, bantering or otherwise. It is to demean them to think otherwise.

-------0---------

Rishi Sunak is pushing hard to revitalise the Tory relationship with business following a brutal few years re Brexit, Boris (fuck business!) Johnson and Liz (fuck up the economy) Truss, and to that end recently attended and spoke at a conference especially designed to bring the leaders of corporate Britain and the Conservative Party closer together.

But it has to be said, that while the community applauded his listening skills and his attempts to reach out and heal the breach, they were sanguine in respect of any practical steps he had taken.

Corporate tax and tax in general was way too high (they said - well, they would, wouldn't they) and the abandonment of vat claim back for tourists visiting the country was actively exporting retail business to other European capitals and away from the UK.

Sunak, clearly embarrassed by what the voices from the floor were telling him, had little more to reply with than this was exactly the reason he was here - to listen to and take on board what the community was saying - but it seems that the reception he has received is muted at best.

And why wouldn't it be. The last eight years have been the worst ones for business in the broader sense (despite the currently huge profits being made from the price gouging allowed under cover of the inflation rate, war in Ukraine, energy costs etc) in many a year. Brexit has choked off European trade and inward investment (despite Sunak and Hunt's desperate attempts to make the country more attractive for the latter), the fake pandemic brought business to its knees and to a virtual standstill, and now labour shortages and rising costs are knocking down businesses like ten-pins in every sector you can name, bar a few exceptions. And all under a Conservative watch. No wonder they are looking to Stamer and his Tory B team (laughingly called the Labour Party) in the hope of greate success there. And Stamer is rubbing up against them, purring like a Queen cat in heat.

How is the world changed. How is the world changed.

--------0--------

Finally, nice to see a report on the front page of the Telegraph into the bustards who insist on fornicating at Sonehenge. I refer of course to the Great Bustards,the UK population of which has fallen in recent years to worryingly small numbers. I'm absolutely in favour of it. Fornicating at Stonehenge would seem to be an absolute rite of passage for all of the young bustards out and about on the razz to me. But perhaps I'm just a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to these things. Perhaps Kier Stamer could find space for a lesson or two in the curriculum in this area as well.

;)
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Eh, the problem with "boys will be boys" is that it's also used to excuse behaviour that we really shouldn't be encouraging. The difficulty of course lies in separating it out...most of it is harmless, it's finding and addressing the bits that are not where the challenge lies.

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That's what a good teacher can do Av, with his/her eyes and ears, not with some lesson about respect that sits way outside what the remit of a school should be - to educate in the standard sense, on the subjects of an academic curriculum that will provide a basic understanding and grounding for future life. Respect, behaviour, common decency - these are things that are taught by example, instilled by parents from day one within the family and built on by the experience of what the child hears and sees in the world around them as they grow and develop. It's down to us, all of us, to set the example that our youth will follow, not some hollow lesson that the kids will simply switch off from. The role of the teacher in this is that of the 'stick of punishment' for infringement - it is up to society to provide the 'carrot of example'.
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So President Biden is running for a second term in the Whitehouse. Does that mean we're going to see him doing that half running thing where he sort of runs/jogs onto stages, up to podiums, not actually progressing any faster than an ordinary walk would get him there? That thing that says, "Look at me! I'm as fit as a cricket! I'm not a doddering old man, dribbling into his napkin at meal times and who needs his arse wiped!

Still, given that his opponent is likely to be Donald Trump, who frankly isn't a great deal more spry himself, at least we will have some kind of balance.

Don't they get, the world is ready for the more photogenic type of leader now? People want their own Zelensky's, with his pristine and tailored battle greens, their Sunak's, with his bright-eyed and bushy-tailed enthusiasm and signature short trousers - attractive and alluring leaders (bedable under the right circumstances), not these old men with their faint smell of urine and their nurses continually on standby in the wings in case of an 'accident'.

Only joking guys (in bad taste certainly, but these guys can take it - if they can't, they're in the wrong game). A Biden-Trump standoff would make for interesting and gripping newsworthy coverage (never mind whether it is good for the American people - they must sort that out for themselves). Especially given the rancour and bad-feeling around the last transfer of power (in which the inherent superiority of the British system was convincingly demonstrated).

I'm looking forward to it.

---------0-------

Newsflash.

Sussex is at war with Wales.

I refer of course to the Duke and Prince's thereof, not the county and country themselves.

Revelations coming out as a result of Prince Harry's long term war against the tabloid press, have claimed that Prince William trousered a huge payout from the Murdoch owned News Group Newspapers, said to be in the region of a million smackeroo's, and that King Charles (then PoW himself) put pressure on Harry not to pursue claims against the group, because it might foul up the nest in terms of his (Charles's) getting their support for taking Camilla as his Queen Consort.

This, we are told, is all going to (coming as it does a mere 10 days before the coronation) scupper any chances of a reconciliation between the estranged and antagonistic brothers, when they inevitably meet for the bunfight. This will no doubt cause much grief and consternation to many people, and will have others rubbing their hands together in anticipation of some juicy tabloid coverage to come as the embarrassing spectacle unfolds.

Me, I'm adopting my Rhett Butler position. Frankly, my dear, I couldn't give a damn!

---------0---------

Bank of England's cheif treasurer Huw Pill told us all yesterday that we all have to accept that we're poorer and just get over it.

Well okay. Most of us can handle that. Circumstances in this world do sometimes render this inevitable (I'm by no means accepting that now is necessarily one of those times, but let that go - such times do occasionally come about) and when they do, you have little choice but to go with it. But that's easy to accept if you are doing okay. What about if you are not?

While for some this might mean less disposable income for holidays, nice stuff, meals out and cinema or gym visits, for others it means hungry children, eviction notices and County Court Judgements. It means a further fall into the miseries of absolute poverty - not relative poverty.....we are beyond that stage - failure to be able to participate in society to the full and to be able to springboard your children into lives of hope and future prospect.

This is the brutal reality of Pill's careless words, that hand in hand with his bland instructions to 'get over it' come those twin vices that always shadow poverty, ignorance and crime, that as a society you don't just fetch over it, you pay the price for it, in blood and tears and desperation, in pain and misery and death.

Neil Oliver asked the other day, he wondered, had not the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump occurred on either sides of the Atlantic - expressions of popular will that flew in the face of the establishment order, of what was expected of the people - would, he mused, the subsequent events of the pandemic and the war in Europe, the rise of fear and instability that makes us all hunker down, look to our leadership to restore order - would all of this have unfolded in the same way?

Conspiracy theory territory certainly, painful and dangerous thinking undoubtedly. But don't you get, just somewhere in the remoter reaches of your perception, the feeling of at least some kind of....teleology, for want of a better word, in what is happening. That this might not be all as random as it seems. By no means do I buy it - but neither am I so closed, so sure and trusting of our leaderships (or of my own judgement), that I will not consider it. There are indisputably big changes afoot. Either you believe that these are just random, that all is just response and reaction to events.....or you believe that some ordering principle is at work behind it all.

Either someone is is in control of the careering juggernaut of world events or no-one is. Either way it's pretty fucking freaky. Are world events spinning out of control and some kind of eschatological catastrophe inevitable, or is there some kind of ordering principle behind everything? Either way pretty frightening. You decide.
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But to return from the conspiracy theory to the Huw Pill aspects of the story (see above), I imagine that the BofE chief will have dined out well on his visit to New York yesterday evening. I'm not thinking that he expects to have to accept that he also is going to be poorer. In fact that was the thing he forgot to say in his speech yesterday, that along with the fact that we're all going to be poorer and should simply accept it, he and his cohort will remain getting ever richer - and we should accept that too.

My wife, ever more grounded than me, said she had a better idea.

That he address his remarks to the upper end of the wealth spectrum saying that they must just accept that they are going to be poorer. That circumstances demand that they begin to make their far share of contributions to setting things to rights. In the form of payment of taxes in a progressive manner, scaled upwards as income increases. In the form of windfall payments when circumstances not of their making dump huge profits into their laps, beyond the normal imaginings of even the most commitedly free market thinkers in more reasonable times. In the form of legislation designed to address the rising inequalities of our societies, bad enough under usual circumstances, but vastly accelerating under the prevailing turbulent situation.

But somehow I don't think that this was his idea. No - he prefers it his way. In fact even thinking around my wife's alternative idea threatens to upset his digestion of the beautiful meal (expenses paid, of course) that he has just eaten. And we can't have that now can we!
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In a quick return to the Huw Pill story, there was a predictable outcry on radio and television news programmes yesterday in response to the story which got me thinking.

What was the purpose of running this story?

Off (of?) itself, it was of little importance. Yet it was on the front page of two newspapers, the Mail and the Telegraph. Papers have long ago given up printing stories just as informative news pieces, if indeed they ever did so. The use of the printed media to sway public opinion has rarely if ever been divorced from the daily press, simple news coverage being secondary to the use of the media to sway opinion in the favour of this or that particular interest. Lord Beaverbrook said quite explicitly at the launch of the Daily Express back in the early 1900's that this was the papers primary function, and nothing much has changed, with this or any other of the popular titles, ever since.

But why this particular clearly inflammatory story? Whose benefit does it serve for the huge number of the population to be insulted like this, by seemingly insensitive comments made by a banker with whom few people will feel they have much commonality with in the first place.

Interesting that the story should appear on two of the leading right wing papers, but not under the same ownership. This implies to me that the impetus to print the story, to give it the degree of prominence such that it would achieve maximum 'prodding with a stick ' effect, came from a source certainly in the Tory Party, but probably not from within the government itself. I'm given to wondering if it is not intended to undermine Sunak. I think that the Tories are already up to their old tricks. That having survived (and been surprisingly quickly seemingly forgiven for) the Truss debacle, they are already plotting behind the scenes to bring down the leader that none of them wanted. I posted a few posts back about this National Conservatism movement, this shifting to the right in which some high level Tories are definitely in favour, and I wonder if this is not in some way tied in with that?

I mean, certainly the guy from the Bank of England comes out as an insensitive prick - but why is the story in two titles with different owners, both of whom serve the interests of the right (and in general, further to the right perhaps than the Sunak-Hunt double act that leads us). You would expect for example, that it would be the Mirror - the pretty much only really seriously left wing title on the stands (although they are owned by the same group as the Mail) - that would run the story. This means that its intended audience was most definitely the Tory voting readership. But what effect is it, aside or subsequent to generating its 'fizz' of anger on first reading, is the story intended to achieve? This is what puzzles me.

It's by no means clear, but a gut feeling tells me that the story is not being run for Sunak's benefit, and if so that means that the powers behind these two major titles, and clearly the individuals or groups that they are communing with, are not 'on-side' with the current administration. Perhaps they are hankering for the shift to the right as expounded (or soon to be so) by the National Conservatism movement, and are giving it a shunt in some way. This story is certainly aimed at the (in relative terms) lower end of the Tory voting base, the ones who are not well off enough to ride above the current economic woes of the country, for whom the fact of being poorer really means something - ie that they are not just poorer, but pretty damn close to becoming actually poor. But what specific effect it is intended to provoke, I'm afraid is beyond me.

Interesting stuff, to me at least.
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....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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Post by peter »

There are a number of things we should all understand.

Firstly, we do not, despite all of the complex pantomime constructed to make us believe to the contrary, have an adversarial political system in this country. In its essential beliefs and actions, when in power our polity - both sides of the supposed two party divide - is in complete harmony. The oligarchs, movers and shakers behind the scenes, what we might loosely call 'the establishment' love this. Controlling as they do, both sides of the (illusory) divide, in essence it means win-win for them at every general election. They know that whichever party wins, the essential rules of the game will not change. It will be business as usual.

There is a quote, I believe belonging to Mark Twain but I could be wrong, that if voting was actually going to change anything, they wouldn't let you do it.

What we have in our system is essentially a dressed up version of this.

The moment a man stepped forward, completely by random chance - he was never intended to be more than a demonstrative presence to convey the impression of inclusivity of all sides of the 'broad church', certainly never intended to win power - who was outside their control, the establishment gathered its combined resources together and brought him down. This on the left of our so-called political divide, just as much as on the right. Certainly you would have expected the Conservative Party to contrive to unseat Corbyn, but the Labour Party? Yet it was the right wing 'establishment' figures within that Party, along with their equally establishment controlled media arms (in the form of the New Statesman and the Guardian), that mounted the most relentless campaign, and ultimately the most effective weapon in the form of the antisemitism claims, in bringing him down.

Do you need anymore evidence than that? With the advent of Tony Blair, the acceptable face of left wing politics in the UK, the establishment got its claws into the one thing that could potentially upset its cozy apple-cart, took up, as it were, the strings that controlled the marionette of the Labour Party, and ran with it. It was damned if it was going to see someone with the true interests of the working class at heart, come in like some grubby fly in the ointment of its success, and start stirring things up. This was not part of the plan at all.

And more than this, it didn't suit the political interests of our true controllers on the other side of the Atlantic either.

Because at what point since the end of the second World War has Britain really been a true sovereign entity? In truth, every time our American masters has said, "Jump", our answer has been the standard, "How high?" We did it in the case of the Second Gulf War, we're doing it now with Ukraine. Supporting proxy wars to maintain American hegemony in a world that is fast moving away from the American-centric order that has prevailed since the fall of the Soviet Union. The American influence in the continent of Europe. This is what we provide.

The rise of the left in British politics - the true left - has always been the one thing that gets the American pulses going, causes their hair to stand on end, more than anything else. The CIA didn't like it when Michael Foot took up the Labour leadership in the eighties, and they damn well won't have been happy about Corbyn either. This was not part of the play-book as written by the British American Project, a US embassy instigated grouping formed in the late eighties to bring the British left into the fold, and which has a membership to this day of Labour politicians alighned to the maintenance of the (laughingly called) 'special relationship'.

I watched a YouTube video put up by Double Down News the other day, in which the young commentator said that the idea that the route to real and effective change in this nation lay with the Labour Party had to change. I absolutely agree. They have declared their allegiance to the status quo in terms too stark, too unequivocal, to be denied. I also agree that it is absolutely time for the trade unions to disafiliate themselves from the Party which they gave birth to, but which has turned its back upon the people it was formed to serve.

It is only via the formation of new grass-roots movements, with leadership coming from the Mick Lynch's, the Jeremy Corbyn's, and via the use of alternative media sources outside the traditional legacy media, that any effective political change is going to be achieved. I believe that an effective restructuring of political groupings outside of the twin-party hegemony of the Tories and Labour could be achievable - say a progressive compromise and affiliation between the Lib-dems, the Greens and the Trade Unions - and could serve the purpose, but mayhap it would need a rethink and a return to scratch with the formation of a new party. Either way, God knows, we need it. We are in a political death-spiral as we stand, and without some radical rethinking on how we are going to reverse this, there are only a limited number of landing zones and none of them are good.

This can all be summed up in two important things that people must take on board, must be made to understand.

The Labour Party is lost to you. The Guardian is not your friend.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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When I was hired by the 7-11 shop I work in, I was interviewed by the then manager, a lady in her mid thirties and her deputy manager, a guy who was nearing retirement age.

The manager had been in situ in her position, it transpired, for something less than a year and had 'moved across' from another shop where she had served in an assistant managerial role. The move was thus a promotion for her. The assistant manager had been in the shop for fifteen years however, and had unbeknownst to me at the time, actually applied for the position of manager within the store, but had been passed over in favour of the lady who led my interview. I was of course unaware of this history, and to me, on the face of it, they seemed perfectly happy in each others company.

This was however an illusion. The second in command had over the years built up a strong relationship with the workforce within the shop (half a dozen pretty long standing members of staff), none of whom were happy that he'd been passed over for the top position.

For the first year or thereabouts after I secured my position, I saw the effects of this dynamic play out, and basically they made her life hell. The manager could do nothing right, she was subject to a constant whispering campaign and no decision or activity she engaged in was ever supported. The assistant manager, to his absolute discredit, insisted of throwing his support behind her, secretly conived with the other members of staff to undermine her management, and it came to a head with a series of spurious complaints, which ultimately led to her being removed to another shop in the demoted position of an ordinary shop assistant.

I was angry about this treatment of her, but sufficiently new in my role not to be in a position to intervene, and although I spoke to her in private about situation shortly before she left, she, by this time, was flagging in her role, and with a combination of family and health issues on top of her work tribulations, was frankly just ready to step away without a fight.

I learned from another member of staff that this situation, or something very similar, had occurred with the previous manager as well, the member of staff proudly boasting that they had "got rid of him as well!"

I was sickened by the whole business and frankly disguted that the higher management had effectively thrown my manager to the wolves without offering her even the slightest bit of support, despite an obvious pattern being observable in the way that successive managers brought in from outside were faring. Needless to say the effect of all of this on the business was a deleterious one. The deliberate policy of non cooperation and obstructivness of the staff led to failures in operational control, and a general lowering of managerial standards within the shop. Perhaps the lady herself was not the best of managers, but she stood no chance of improving herself or the shop in the environment of barely covered animosity in which she found herself.

Now why am I telling you this?

In the press and media recently, following the departure of Dominic Raab the now ex Deputy PM, there have been whisperings that the bullying accusations that brought Raab down, might apply to the Health Secretary Steve Barklay as well. Though no formal complaints have (as far as I'm aware) been mounted, his conduct has been reported as being "continually angry" and difficult to work alongside.

The reports have been sporadic and not generally with any sense of momentum about them - but this doesn't mean they won't develop into something much bigger. Both the Raab and Patel allegations started off as small stories, but both became big political events as they gathered pace. And isn't this exactly what Dominic Raab warned about. That his (effective) dismissal would give encouragement to similar kinds of concerted efforts by civil servants, grudging of the political masters put in above them and who they are constitutionally bound to serve. That spurious concoctions of perceived and exaggerated complaints would be used to hamper ministers in their activities and to unseat them if they attempt to impose their authority over the permanent staff within the ministries they oversee.

This is pretty much what happened in my place of work, but writ large and with proportionately greater consequence in terms of the efficient functioning of the state. And when an upper management becomes too obsessed with presenting the right front, with satisfying the current trend to cow to any criticism of anything that smacks of 'the old ways', then it becomes open season for actions of this type and the damaging effects that are levied upon the country therefrom.

And for this reason I think Sunak made a serious mistake in not following the example of his forbear Boris Johnson, and sticking to his support of Raab in the way that Johnson did with Priti Patel. I'm sorry, but people have to be managed, even against their will sometimes. If you are hidebound by excessive consideration of their sensibilities, then they learn from this and their sensibilities become more delicate thereby. Before long you enter an area where those sensibilities and your responses to them are being put to entirely different uses than that which their genuinely good intentions were meant for in the first place. These people at the tops of the state departments are clever people. They will be masters at the art of obfuscation and slowing down ministerial intent before this new string to their bow. There may be some snowflakes amongst them, but the bulk of them will be just as hard headed and calculating in what they are doing as the people in the shop I work in.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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What Do You Think Today?

Post by peter »

I just want you briefly to think about this.

In 2017, the Labour Party (and forget Jeremy Corbyn here for a minute) came to within a couple of thousand votes of winning a general election on a radical social democratic manifesto including nationalisation of the utilities and railways, introduction of a progressive tax system and a return to full state running of the NHS.

Yet it was denied victory by the activities of fifth columnists within the party itself, and immediately a concerted effort was swung into action involving the establishment, the media and those sitting on the right of the Labour Party, to ensure that the authors of that manifesto were discredited, turfed from office, and the manifesto itself was buried, never to return to the centre of Labour thinking ever again.

Why would they (meaning the forces that were marshalled to achieve this) have done this. Whence did this commonality of interest spring from? And why have the current Labour leadership, now maintaining so absolute a grip on both the party membership and the candidates it put's forward, have so completely turned its back on a formula that found such public resonance back in 2017?

Clearly now Corbyn with his 'antisemitis' is a thing of the past. There is no reason not to return to that progressive manifesto that the public were so clearly ready to see implemented, but yet there is to be none of it.

I want you to ask yourself why you think that is. Don't you think that for a party that was formed for the very purposes of promoting the interest of the wider working people of this country, that that is strange.

Now look at the purging of the Corbyn leadership and the left of the party that has been carried out with brutal efficiency since the current leadership took control through that lens, and tell me that the idea that all of this is simply the established powers acting to ensure that their grip on the levers of power are never so threatened again is bunkum.

If you think so, tell me why that manifesto lies buried in a grave so deep that it will never see the light of day again? Tell me that we do not have a two-party system in which there is not so much commonality between the two, that any actual differences become all but irrelevant. That behind the facade of the adversarial system so robustly created and maintained by the media, there does not sit interests, for whom it matters virtually nothing as to which party wins.

There will be those who will come back and say, but what about the trouncing of Corbyn in 2019? Is this not evidence that the people were not taken by the manifesto you refer to, - after all, it was essentially the same as in 2017?

Wrong. People do not change in their views on manifesto ideas so quickly. 2019 was an entirely unusual election. It was dominated by the Brexit question which people, in their exhaustion with the subject, just wanted done. Johnson got this; Corbyn entirely failed to. Also, the effects of two years of relentless media negativity culminating with the unfounded accusations of antisemitism had eroded belief in the Labour leader. The manifesto was not even a consideration. This red-herring of an argument is used by the current leadership to justify its eschewing of the Labour principles the party was formed to serve, but it cuts no ice.

So if you were duped into falling for the Guardian/New Statesman/establishment led destruction of Corbyn via the vehicle of antisemitism, and are cheering the downfall of the left of the party, the return to business as usual, then you may really want to consider where your credulity has taken you. Because whether Stamer does or does not win the next election matters not a jot. Nothing is going to change for you, for me, for the huge mass of the people.

Our standing in the world is going to continue to plumet. The lives of our children are going to be poorer, meaner and less fulfilled than they could have been, than ours have been before them. We are, as the man said, going to be poorer and we had just better get used to it. Stamer is going to change none of that - he's told us as much. And this is if he even wins. His popularity is plummeting, sitting currently alongside that of Sunak's in the polling. The Labour Party lead over the Tories is shrinking by the day as people begin to get that he has nothing to offer. He has taken a convincing poll lead and spaffed it away in a torrent of mediocrity. He cannot even call out the government on the Brexit fiasco, on the crashing economy statistics that are resulting from it, because he supports it.

Well, sorry - not so brief after all (these posts tend to be like that- suddenly I find I have much more to say than I thought).

One last comment, this time regarding Sunak. Nice to see him finally showing his true colours, sitting down with the far-right Italian PM, saying how much they have in common and how well they are going to work together. She who comes from a fascist early career in which she praised Musolini as the greatest Italian leader of all time. They sat together praising each others policies, especially on immigration, and agreeing that subject to getting around the pesky complaints of the EU courts, they were convinced the policies were the right ones. That would be the policies of using the media to stoke up hatred of immigrants and where possible, shipping them off to countries with appalling human rights records would it? Countries like Rwanda where twelve immigrants were killed not so long ago by police for protesting that they had no food. But like your Home Secretary, you'd rather forget about that wouldn't you Mr Sunak?

Okay, I think we can see where all of this is going. Increasingly authoritarian governments using increasingly authoritarian measures to stifle any protest by people at their falling standards, the erosion of their liberties, the ever widening divides in our societies as the have's race away further into the distance away from the have-nots. Think then of what has been taken from us, by the behind the scenes plotters that crushed the only truly egalitarian movement to have emerged in decades, and saw the return to the status quo of us being the cattle, fitted up for slaughter on the alter of their greed for ever more wealth and power.

Think and be angry. You have a right to be.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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What Do You Think Today?

Post by peter »

Here we go again.

American bank First Republic is teetering on the verge of collapse and is subject to multiple rescue packages as one expert warns the entire banking system is riddled with bad loans.

And if things over there are a patch as close to things in the UK, it will only be a matter of time before falling incomes and the effects of inflation drive millions into a state of default as they become increasingly unable to service the loans upon which their house of cards lives and lifestyles are built.

Which all goes to suggest that once again, the entire system is about to go into free fall with bank after bank being drawn in by the contagious effects of such crises. And this time there will be no bailout, no 'too big to fail' to fall back on.

In a recent interview ex Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis explained that this time around the crash will be far more serious because the previous one in 2008 had been caused by multiple structural failings within the system which had since been addressed. This time around, there would be no obvious areas in which changes could be made,to set things to rights - not that the changes made seem to have done so. The reason for the latter, said Varoufakis, was that rather than using the gazillions of pounds created out of thin air to feed into the system to create liquidity (lack thereof which seems to be central to these crises) the bankers had simply used the money to buy up their own stock, driving up the value and trousering the billions of dollars created in the process. No surprise there then. The cost of this rescue package in protection of the assets of the top few percent of our populations (because, let's face it, the bulk of people in our societies do not have money tied up in investments and hedge funds etc) had then been dumped onto the shoulders of the common people to bear, in the form of austerity and ravaged services, in shrinking wages in real terms and savage cuts to their working conditions.

But this time, said the man (and I apologise if I have misspelled his name - this being unable to navigating away from a page to check facts whilst composing a post for fear of being locked out on return is a pain) things are different. Technology now exists, as it did not back in 2008, for central banks to set up digital wallets, the cash contained therein which would be as secure as cash in your pocket and which would function in person to person transactions in exactly the same way, effectively cutting out the banks from such basic transactions, the establishment of which would allow economies to continue to function without the need for a huge bailout of the type that was seen before.

These digital wallets, run by the central banks, would pay minimal interest, and would allow for commercial banks to compete for investment by offering higher interest rates, while at the same time selling the other services which traditional banking normally involves itself in - loans, mortgages, investment and the like.

In other words, this time there will be no other option than to let the banks fail.

Which to put it mildly, is going to be rather a shock to the system at the top end of our societies.

Gone this time is the option of just printing up wheelbarrows full of cash to pump into the system. As another commentator said of the previous crash, if you could create money by simply printing it off in bundles then Zimbabwe would be the richest country in the world. The effects of all of that printing are still being realised to this day, despite the clawing back from the people - and in particular the poorest of our people who are most dependent upon the services that were slached - that was levied as a mitigation measure. We see it in everything that is happening to the world economy as we speak. So this time the system goes to the wall and they know it. The house of cards falls.

Which is why every time a Silicon Valley Bank, or a First Republic Bank starts to tremble, the entire financial establishment begins to gnaw its fingernails in fear that the whole edifice is about to collapse. Why every time a lunatic like Truss does something relatively minor in an arse-end country in the back corner of the world, the reverberations ripple outwards and the pulses of Wall Street begin to race, the sweat begins to trickle. Why (in part at least) the Tech billionaires of said Silicon Valley have got large tracts of New Zealand land set aside as private little feifdoms for when the entire bucket of collective global shit hits the proverbial world-sized fan.

And somewhere, this morning, you can be sure, some bods will be crunching the numbers, dusting down the models, eyeing the printing machines and gauging the public mood, just in case - just in case - another round of conjuring up piles of phantom money and dumping the consequences onto the proles might, just might, be possible before jumping onto those private jets to join Elon and Jeff in down-under land.

If you are like me and have fuck all aside from the bricks and mortar you live in, then none of this will probably concern you too much; you won't lie awake at night worrying about it. If, on the other hand, you've just won the Euromillions jackpot, you might want to think about it, because that nice investment banker you've just hung up the phone speaking with might be emptying his account at the very same time as you are filling yours!

(Edit; Just to put some flesh on the bones of the thing, it seems that the decline in stability of the system is much more slow-burn this time, but may be the more significant therefrom.

First Republic, from what I can gather, is more of a lending bank, with an interest in real estate lending, than a traditional bank offering services across the range. It has seen a ninety five plus fall in its share value in recent days(?) as a result of massive withdrawal of deposits over a sustained period of a year or so. This is reflective of a falling confidence in the reliability of real estate as a secure investment guaranteeing profit on invested funds. A combination of risky lending and the lower need for maintenance of large buildings as a result of the shift toward remote working is probably behind this. Whatever the case, the bank has seen falling deposits and increased withdrawal over the post pandemic period which has resulted in a falling share value.

Whether the problems they are experiencing will spread to the wider banking system remains to be seen, and if occurring, whether the decline will continue to be slow or will suddenly turn into a precipitous crash ala 2008 is also an unknown.

The setting up of central Bank controlled digital wallets into which wages could be directly paid (the modern equivalent in effect of receiving your wages in a wage-packet as of old) would effectively signal the end of the highstreet banks monopoly of financial transactions, and would usher in a new era of more remote involvement of the banks in the general transactional economy. This, I think, could only be a good thing. It would most likely be a significant nail in the coffin of physical currency (which many would be very unhappy about), but as this seems almost inevitable anyway I'm not sure that this will be much of a consideration. I'm betting that human ingenuity being what it is, people will develop new and ingenious things to use as physical measures of value, and the use of an 'underground' currency will continue in this manner whether our state authorities like it or not. But as always, this is just what I think. I live in hope that occasionally someone still pops in and reads all of this stuff I post (Av appears now and again and has my eternal gratitude for doing so ;) ) and would love to get some feedback now and again if this is the case. Chow for now. Nb I'm away for a day or two so may not be able to post, but nevertheless, enjoy the Bank Holiday and prepare yourself for all things Coronation related in the days to come! :faint: )
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
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