DUFF & NONSENSE!

Watts up Al Gore!

Many years ago when I started this blogging lark I was immediately drawn to the Anthropological Global Warming (AGW) campaign which was producing enough heat of its own accord to warm up the earth!  I had no strong views for or against although my cynicism (rather than scepticism, which came later) was on full alert because at my age one has learned the hard way to treat 'experts' with caution especially the more foam-flecked and eye-ball swivelling they appear.  Anyway, I started cruising round the various blogs, the vast majority of which were, so to speak, 'true believers'.  However, there were some doubters and one I came across and immediately took to was Anthony Watts's site Watts Up With That?  At the time he was conducting, with the help of volunteers from all over the USA, detailed and personal inspections of the temperature recording stations upon which the 'Warmers' were basing their 'science'.  It quickly became apparent that, like just about everything else in modern life, huge changes had occurred around these stations which might have begun their existence in rural countryside but were now surrounded by concrete and tarmac and office windows all of which reflected and increased the ambient temperature.  To re-use a tired expression, most of them were 'not fit for purpose'.  Immediately my insipient scepticism hardened into downright suspicion.

Last year, as 'evey fule do know', including and especially the 'fules' at East Anglia University, the whole AGW faith took an almighty hit below the waterline when hundreds of the e-mails circulating between the 'scientists' concerned were hacked and published.  My worst suspicions confirmed I rather lost interest which was naughty of me because one should never underestimate the sticking power of little people with a fanatical belief who have been encouraged in their madness by both Big Business and Big Politics.  And talking of which, the unlovely figure of Big ex-Vice-President Al Gore hoves into view.  This man has made a fortune from technology supplied to alternate energy producers who have been in receipt of massive government handouts 'over there'.  So he receives the tax-payers' dollars at one remove.  The other week, he was given 24 hours of prime TV time to pump out his propaganda and 'prove' that AGW is a 'clear and present danger'.  At this point, re-enter the redoubtable Anthony Watts to apply his fearsome forensic skills on one particular example of what turned out to be a 'lying lie' from a 'lying liar'!

In the film, Gore purports to show a very simple experiment which he, himself, describes as "high school physics" with the implication that his younger viewers could easily replicate in their school labs.  It involves two glass jars being heated.  They both contain thermometers but one is filled with ordinary air whilst the other is filled with CO2.  There then follows a shot of the two thermometers with one climbing rapidly faster than the other - and you can guess which one that was!  Watts remained unconvinced and decided, in the highest traditions of the very best of science, to try and replicate it.  He was minded to do this because, as an ex-TV man himself he was deeply suspicious about the sequence of film showing the two thermometers.  I will not attempt to paraphrase his disection of Gore's jiggery-pokery but instead urge you to read it yourself, or, if you are non-technical like me, then skim-read it because all will be quite clear.  Apart from anything else it will remind you that whilst a picture might be worth a thousand words it's only because it can lie just as well!

And talking of thermometers brings me on to, er, thermometers!  Well, these 'thingies' are a bit more complicated than the glass tube that 'Nursie' sticks in your mouth but they do a similar job for scientists measuring so-called 'greenhouse gases' in the atmosphere.  Alas, these instruments upon which the AGW 'Warmers' have been relying turn out to be about as much use as Watts's weather stations surrounded by concrete.  The Climate Realists site has the details:

Researchers from Canada, USA, Mexico and Britain this week announce a startling discovery that destroys 20 years’ of thinking among government climatologists.

Climate scientists had long believed infrared thermometers measured thermal radiation from the atmosphere and assumed it was 'proof' of the greenhouse gas effect (GHE). Their assumption was that infrared thermometers (IRT’s) were measuring ‘back radiated’ heat from greenhouse gases (including water vapor and carbon dioxide). But damning new evidence proves IRT's do no such thing.

Now a world-leading manufacturer of these high-tech instruments, Mikron Instrument Company Inc., has confirmed that IRT’s are deliberately set to AVOID registering any feedback from greenhouse gases. Thus climate scientists were measuring everything but the energy emitted by carbon dioxide and water vapor.

Read it and weep - with laughter!

 

Lookalikes

(This contribution from 'SoD' who should be getting on with his work!)

Has anyone noticed the startling resemblance of Peter Altmaier – the German politician supporting Merkel’s bid to save the Euro, known as the “Euro Whisperer” – and the Jerry tank commander in Kelly’s Heroes? 

Jerry tank commander in Kelly’s Heroes	Peter Altmaier

Since they both have a penchant for conniving with Americans to rob trillions from Germans in times of crisis or war, I wonder, are they by any chance related?

SoD

Heute ist der Tag!

URGENT - WATCH THIS NOW:

I finished writing the post below and then clicked over to Guido's who has a recording of last night's Paxman show in which Peter Oborne actually succeeds in driving some Euro-fanatic from the studio whilst giving Richard Lambert, former editor of the not-very-Financial Times a severe headache. NOT TO BE MISSED, GO WATCH IT NOW!

Today's the day!  Will enough of Mrs Merkel's party rebel against the idea of the Bundesbank being plundered by Greece today and everyone else tomorrow?  The measure will pass because the Left-wing opposition parties are in favour but if she is forced to accept their patronage as the only means of forcing the Bill through because her own party cannot raise sufficient votes then she will have lost all authority.  I suspect she will squeak it through because she is no mean operator when it comes to twisting arms and if all else fails she can rely on the German habit of always obeying! 

STOP PRESS:  Only 13 of Merkel's party voted against with 2 more abstaining.  Mein Gott, they're as wet as our Tories.  They wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes on the Eastern Front!

La Grande Corniche - heh!

And your Amalfi Drive.  Seen 'em, driven 'em, not a patch on our very own amazing, fantastic, stunning - er, B3157!  Alright, I admit that 'B3157' doesn't have quite the ring of La Grande Corniche but even so, in gentle English terms it has its views:

Chesil Beach looking east towards Portland Bill showing the strange, naturally-made Fleet Lagoon.  According to Wiki, the Fleet was used during WWII to test the bouncing bombs deployed on the dam-busting raids.  The shingle beach is about 18 miles long and is known today as 'the Jurassic Coast' although to date I have failed to spot any dinasours!

That's what it looked like yesterday from the, er, B3157.  Bloody lovely, and please, all you working stiffs, stuck in your offices, or in a jam on the M25, I was thinking of you, really I was, in fact, I nearly fell out of my deck-chair laughing!

This is the view looking at the western end of the beach at West Bay near Bridport. 

Yesterday was heaven, sunshine, slight breeze and best of all - all the little kiddie-winkies were in school leaving the place free for old grumps like me!

 

Ed Balls is a lying liar! So what's new?

Once again I am obliged to The Coffee House in general, and Jonathan Jones in particular, for continually conducting surgical explorations of politicians and their slithering language.  Who better to be strapped to the pathology gurney than the odious Ed Balls, and Mr. Jones slits him open with effortless ease:

Balls claimed that "we went into the crisis with lower national debt than we inherited in 1997". That is flatly untrue. Public sector net debt when Labour took over was £350 billion. In 2006-07 it was £500 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, Brown and Balls had added £62.8 billion in today's money to the national debt they "inherited" by the time the crisis started.

Of course, the reason the debt dropped in the early years of the Labour government is because Brown agreed, more or less reluctantly, to stick by the Tory spending limits set by the previous government.  Once they came to an end, it was, hey-ho, and off to the races!

Then, in his speech this week, he seized gleefully upon the fact that in March-June, the unemployment in the public sector far outnumbered the small rise in employment in the private sector thus disproving, he claimed, the government's theory that the private sector would take up the slack for public sector unemployment.  However, Mr. Jones points out that such statistics should never be judged on one quarter.  Seen over a year, like a shaken kaleidoscope, you get an entirely different picture, see diagram below:

His final lie is actually an embarrassment to the government, or at least, it should be.  Balls claims that  'Tory cuts and austerity' is the reason our growth has stalled.  If only!  The fact is, the government has been taxing (VAT!), borrowing and spending even more than, er, Ed Balls would have done!

Is there a lying competition in the Olympics?  If so, I know who should represent Great Britain.

 

Go for it in March, Dave!

'Dim Dave', doubly dim because he failed to heed my advice to pick a fight with 'Cleggon' and go to the country after the Tory party conference, has one last chance.  The Euro pot is bubbling nicely and today a really noxious smell is rising after Commision consiglieri Barroso added a dash of financial transaction tax to the stew, cheered to the rafters by all those Brit-loving Euro politicians - not.  However, more important is the almost certain financial demands to be made on this country to help the poor Germans pay for the shit storm they helped to create.  That will be 'Dave's chance to say enough is enough (my life already - well he might get the Jewish vote then!) and back the il-Lib-non-Dems into a corner.  With a bit of luck they might even split.  All he has to do is handle the coming riots strikes sensibly whilst Labour under the less-than-inspiring 'leadership' of adenoidal Ed cringe in embarrassment, then having rid himself of the 'Cleggons' he can go to the country before the pathetic but feared cuts that little George has promised actually take effect. It's a 'no-brainer'!  On the other hand, 'Dave' appears to have no brain so it almost certainly will not happen.

More random thoughts on 'Tinker Tailor"

It's difficult to write a detailed review of this terrific film without giving away too much of the story.  However, I did enjoy one sophisticated twist in the plot which I didn't remember from the original versions.  'Karla', the Russian spymaster, is feeding MI6 with what appears to be red hot intelligence but which is, in fact, totally dud.  He is doing this in the certain knowledge that sooner or later MI6 will use their possession of this as a bargaining chip to gain full access to American intelligence on the Russians, at which point, 'Karla's mole inside 'the circus' will be able to tell 'Karla' what the Americans know about his organisation.  Nothing could better describe the poverty-stricken, second-rate staus of MI6 in the 1970s, desperate to regain a reputation lost after the Blake and Philby defections, and eager to relive wartime glories.  It stands as a metaphor for the country they serve.

I was also amused at one or two incidents which throw up the stark contrast between then and now.  In the film, the top men of MI6 are treated by ministers as 'not quite gentlemen', only ever to be met with in surreptitious circumstances and that as infrequently as possible.  How unlike the way Blair kept the MI6 top dogs close by him in No. 10 during the run-up to the Iraq war, tossing them the occasional bone to show his gratitude for intelligence briefings that were, shall we say, 'helpful'.  And how they preened in the unexpected sunlight and eagerly accepted their knighthoods afterwards!  Also, I had a wry smile at a scene in which a minister complains bitterly over the price of running a grotty 'safe house' somewhere in the outer reaches of the metropolis.  How unlike today, where they would insist that it was in the middle of Mayfair because only the best would do and bugger the expense!

My God, John le Carré is a bitter, sad man and one senses the wreckage of shattered illusions and ideals around him.  Even so, despite his tears of disappointment his vision remains clear and focused.  His book/TV series/film is more than just a deliciously convoluted spy yarn, it is a slice of post-WWII social history.

PS:  We are having a nice dollop of global warming today, so I'm off to the beach to drive the young women of Dorset mad with lust for my sun-kissed body - sorry, didn't quite catch that.  Anyway, back later this afternoon.

 

'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy': dir.Tomas Alfredson

Do not, under any circumstances, miss this film - and that's order, from the top, from 'C', himself!  However, to be fair, if you know the book backwards, forwards and sideways, as for example, Peter Hitchens does, then you will hate it!  (I provide a link to his lacerating review but urge you not to read it until after you have seen the film yourself.)  I do not know the book that well, it has been years since I have read it.  I watched the TV series, enthralled, when it was on, and subsequently I have watched the DVD set of that series.  It stands, in my mind, as one the very best TV dramas of all time. 

Film, obviously, is a very different medium from an episodic TV series and must be judged on its own merits (or demerits) without comparison to TV.  Without any hesitation I place this film up there in my Top Ten all-time favourites.  Admittedly, there are approximately 20 films in my Top Ten but, hey, who's counting?  The acting is nigh on faultless.  The atmosphere of early '70s London is captured effortlessly.  The depiction of a once great service slithering helplessly into decline as a mirror image of not-so-Great Britain is executed with merciless accuracy.  I will not go into tedious detail on the many little touches which bring this complicated film to life, suffice to say that Alfredson has a very acute and sure eye for filming.  And above and beyond all that, I was moved, genuinely, gulpingly, moved, at certain points in the film.  Yes, you have to work at it because to describe the plot as convoluted is to understate it by a long way and at just over two hours it is a marathon not a sprint.  But it's worth it, honestly, it's worth every minute. 

So, you will rendez-vous at your local cinema at the earliest possible moment and remember - my spies are everywhere!

 

Attack MDS? Be afraid! Be very afraid!

I reported, 'down there' somewhere, on the creepy activities of some maggot called Joe McGinniss who has been muck-raking through the private family life of 'My Darling Sarah'.  I have no objection to that, in principle, provided that when the hack concerned comes out with his 'Shlock-Horror' revelations they are backed up with witnesses and sources.  It appears that Mr. McGinniss dispensed with such tedious necessities and Random House, who should know better, went ahead and published.

Another furtive (thanks AK!) hack, Andrew Breitbart, but one who always backs up his stories, managed to lay hands (don't ask!) on an e-mail sent by McGinniss, himself, to the owner of an anti-Palin blog who had provided much of the tittle-tattle for his book:

McGinniss reveals that his manuscript, then under legal review at Crown/Random House, could not prove its most headline-grabbing allegations. And yet, many of these “salacious stories” that lacked “proof” (in McGinniss’s own words) ended up in the book, and on televisions everywhere during the author’s current media tour … without proper sourcing, and without any apparent new evidence to support them.

McGinniss’s panicked state is evidenced by the identity of the recipient to whom he sent his email of distress. Jesse Griffin was the author of an obscure, low-rent, and now-defunct anti-Palin blog that obsessed over Trig Palin’s maternity–claiming, without any evidence, that Sarah Palin was not Trig’s mother.

Was Random House aware that its prized author was making a desperate overtime bid to save face? And if so, why did it allow him to come forth with most of those tawdry accusations without proof or proper sourcing?

You can read the full e-mail at the Breitbart link.  Random House, despite 'dissing' the manuscript themselves, went ahead and published and are now defending their decision.  They need to because the 'Mama Bear' is in attack mode and her lawyers have warned of their intention to sue for defamation.

Be afraid!  Be very afraid!

 

Oh no, anything but - The Truth!

Reading Richard North first thing in the morning on any day is the equivalent of taking a shower - a really cold shower, you know, a nut-shriveling, freezing, cold shower.  But today you have to break the ice!  To be honest, it's not entirely his fault because he is merely repeating via YouTube a broadcast from the BBC in which a very amiable cove, a 'city slicker' by trade, commits the ultimate sin, he tells - The Truth - Shlock-Horror!  Provided you have fortified yourself with a good lunch I urge you to take a look.  It's worth it just to see the rather crude but useful modern word - 'gobsmacked' - enacted by the BBC interviewers - my dears, simply too, too, delicious!

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/09/rule-of-fear.html

I'm off to see 'Tinker, Tailor' this afternoon.  Expect my report to be delivered in the usual way provided you carry out the correct protocols and remember the password!

The Germans are revolting, well, one is!

Jens Weidmann may have to be shot, er, not literally, you undestand, my goodness me, no, they don't go in for that sort of thing any more in Germany.  Who he? you ask, well he's the top banker in Germany, the equivalent of the governor of the Bank of England, and he is not a glücklich bunny, oh dear me, no!  He has yet to fight a duel with sabres against 'Kaiserin' Merkel but it cannot be far off.  He is absolutely and definitely opposed to any use of German money being used via the European Central Bank to buy up other country's otherwise unsaleable bonds.

Picture from Der Spiegel

This puts him in direct opposition to the 'Kaiserin' which is surprising because most of his career has been spent in loyal servitude to her every wish.  But not any more.  And he is not content with the role of an emminence grise quietly plotting in the background.  Quite the contrary, he is increasingly vocal and public and, according to Der Spiegel, is winning huge support inside Germany: 

On Sept. 13, for example, Weidmann swept into a packed hall in Cologne's elegant Hotel Barceló to deliver a speech at the invitation of the ASU, an association of family-owned businesses in Germany. Dozens of executives from companies based all over Germany sat on chairs with gilded frames while ASU President Lutz Goebel, the head of a motor company in Krefeld, set the tone for the event. Goebel complained that some of the teetering countries in the euro zone had "no business model" and that Germany's government was constantly throwing "good money after bad."

Weidmann's voice also grew louder as he approached the key passages in his 23-page speech. The balance sheet of the ECB is "burdened with significant risks" because it has purchased sovereign bonds, he said, adding that he would advocate against any expansion of this policy "under any circumstances."

In his closing, he stressed that "with or without others fighting by my side, this stance will remain." The speech was received with thunderous applause.

Can you imagine Mervyn King doing such a thing?  Make no mistake, Weidman is conducting an all out political campaign against the policies of his own government.  Where will it end?  Watch this space!

 

Mr Balls and Mrs Balls squabble over who's got the biggest 'mea culpa'

I hate to see a lovely married couple falling out with each other.  Take that nice Mr and Mrs Balls, or Mr and Mrs Cooper, as they sometimes prefer to be called, or she does, at any rate.  Such a handsome couple, him with his shy smile that switches on and off almost as though he had a switch and his little blinky eyes trying to look so earnest; and her, with her sweet, dimpled smile that somehow never quite makes it to her blue eys, they really are such a lovely couple.

Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley

So it's awful really seeing them trying to outdo each other in taking the blame for past mistakes.  He keeps saying sorry, over and over again, "I'm sorry for that mistake, I deeply, deeply regret it", and you know he means it because he keeps blinking hard, to keep the tears of contrition back, I expect.  On the other hand, she bravely stares into the camera and hides her pain (er, she is in pain, isn't she?) behind an absolutely straight face and just comes out with it, "We did get things wrong on immigration.  We should have had transitional controls on migration from Eastern Europe." 

There you are, you see, such an honest, straightforward couple, an example to us all.  Of course, it's taken a while for them to say it, in fact, up until now they've been saying exactly the opposite, but still, one must not be churlish with them in the face of their honesty, even if it is years too late and we're all suffering because of their criminal stupidity errors of judgment.  Even so, whilst we can forgive them now that doesn't mean we should be in any sort of rush to put them back in jobs where they might make the same mistake again.  I'm sure they wouldn't want that, either.  Would they?

So, Billski & Benski are out but Benski and Billski are in!

I apologise to my foreign readers for an even more than usually incomprehensible title to this post.  For their benefit let me explain that Bill and Ben, the flower pot men, were the staple diet years ago of very young Britons which perhaps explains why we're all such dribbling idiots now that we have grown up!  These two characters lived in two flower pots at the bottom of the garden.  They were both indistinguishable from each other and they both spoke an almost indecipherable language which sounded very like 'gobbledegook'.  Between them lived Weed whose only dialogue consisted of endless repetitions of the word "weeeeeeeeeeeeeeed" emitted in a high treble.  Now, I hope you have all marshalled those important facts because, of course, there will be a short examination at the end!

Viewing events at the bottom of the Russian garden in which 'Bill' Putin intends to swap places, again, with 'Ben' Medvedev I was instantly reminded of that charming childhood series.  However, Weed has emitted a long, plaintive squeak of protest in the unlikely form of Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin.  According to The WSJ this man has been responsible for keeping Russian finances in order by restricting budgets and banking surpluses which so far has allowed Russia to escape the woes of others in recent years.  And Mr. Kudrin is not a happy 'Weeeeeeeeeeed':

Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin had earned the respect of investors by running a string of fiscal surpluses in the boom years of Mr. Putin's first two presidential terms and then stashing oil-export windfalls into a stabilization fund that eased the shock of the 2008 financial crisis. He was said to be angling for the prime minister's job under a new Putin presidency.

But on Saturday, Mr. Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev said they had agreed to switch jobs after the March presidential election, which their United Russia party is almost certain to win. In a rare public breach with the Kremlin, Mr. Kudrin told reporters hours later that his policy disagreements with Mr. Medvedev "will not allow me to be a part of the new government."

Not the least of his disagreements with 'Benski' Medvedev was the latter's decision to allow a "$65 billion increase in military spending over the next three years" (my emphasis).  Hmmmn, glad I don't live next door to them!  Mind you, whilst it does sound frightening it must always be remembered that the endemic corruption in Russia is like a cancer through the whole society leading to gross inefficiencies and inherent feebleness.  A wiser man than me once remarked to the effect that it never does to under-estimate Russia - or to over-estimate it, either.

Meanwhile the bank used by the opposition party has been raided so that tells you all you need to know about the state of Russian 'democracy'!

 

For F's sake, who forgot the F?

Start your week with a smirk or a snigger, you choose, courtesy of The Detroit Free Press which came to us via those scallywags at IHTM.  Perhaps it was the print unions having a sly dig at their comrades in the United Auto Workers union:

Never say you never get a smile here at Duff & Nonsense!

 

"I was moved withal."

Those cryptic Shakespearean words by Aufidious in reply to Coriolanus are famous for their deep, almost inpenetrable, ambiguity.  However, I use them today in their simple, straightforward meaning - I was, indeed, moved withal!  By what, you wonder?  Well, last week I caught by accident a programme on Sky Arts 2 showing the efforts of various people in Venezuela to take and teach classical music to children living in the slums.  I had vaguely heard before of this system in operation - indeed, it is actually called El Sistema - but had not grasped quite how large and widespread it is. 

The programme concentrated mainly on the barrios of a provincial town somewhere in Venezuela.  The jerry-built shacks and houses climbed up a hill adjacent to the town's land-fill waste-dump upon which some people eke a living by scrounging anything with even a minute re-sale value.  The alleys and streets are dangerous places, one of the girls featured in the film had been wounded in the leg by an exchange of gunfire between rival gangs.  And yet . . . and yet . . .  everyday the children, washed and brushed, so to speak, make their way to the school.  In the classrooms they instantly stand when a teacher enters and reply politely in unison to her greetings.  What a contrast to so many of our own yobs and yobettes!  The children lug in their various musical instruments, many of which look as though they might have been scrounged from the waste dump and with great concentration and perseverance they set about learning the intricacies of musical notation and practice the performance of their instruments.

As I understood it from this film, all these outlying orchestra groups act as feeders for bigger regional orchestras which in turn feed into the National Children's Orchestra which has now aquired an international reputation.  Because of the competition, each step up the ladder is subject to ferocious competition at regularly held auditions.  Needless to say, 'Big Business', seeing some kudos might be earned, has stepped in with some hefty contributions to help finance these groups.  Through gritted teeth, I must bring myself to praise the Gangster-in-Chief of Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, who has ensured government support for the project.

It was particularly moving to see one of the young boys waking in his slum house and getting ready to go out.  His grandmother had been up for an hour already and was ironing his impeccably white shirt and black trousers because that day the local children's orchestra was to play at the town's racecourse.  Off he went with his school friends and they had been issued with some snazzy anoracks with the Venezuelan flag all over them.  The trumpet section played a fanfare to open the day's racing and then later the entire orchestra played a small concert, at the end of which they were told that they could keep their anoracks which produced some huge smiles.

The 'onlie begetter' of this truly splendid enterprise is José Antonio Abreu, a very great man, indeed.  It has been his efforts and perseverance which has slowly but surely built this enterprise up to amazingly high standards which are, I suppose, best exemplified by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra.  They are the fruit at the top of the tree, but it was the efforts of these 'slum dog' beginners which impressed me.  A heartening enterprise and I do wish them well for the future.

 

Why he no act like mandarin?

Lovers of irony stand by for a wry chuckle.  Let me begin by introducing you to Mr. Gary Locke who sounds about as American as apple pie but is, in fact, half Chinese by ethnicity.  Other than that you could describe him as an example of the American Dream come true.  American-born, by dint of hard work Mr. Locke gained access to Yale University and then rose to be governor of the State of Washington.  He is a Dem0crat, albeit, one who runs by his own rules.  Despite that, President Obama chose him to be the new ambassador to China - and that is where the fun begins according to The Atlantic magazine. You see, in the People's Democracy of China, run under communist principles which insist that the rulers are in fact the servants of the people (do stop giggling, I'm trying to be serious here!), in fact, the rulers are the absolutely grandest Grand Panjandrums of the world who enjoy luxoury living, perfect security, first-class travel and the very best hotel suites on offer.  Thus, the behaviour of the new ambassador from the USA drove everyone crazy!  First of all he was reported in the Chinese media as carrying his own suitcases, driving around in a minivan instead of a limo, flying economy class despite being offered an upgrade and chatting politely to all and sundry.  The Chinese people, of course, being twitter-crazy passed this information round in an instant, comparing his easy going, low key style to that of the communist mandarins who lord it over them.  This in turn produced a Party backlash via the controlled media attacking Ambassador Locke:

[N]ewscaster Rui Chenggang, after directing a rude question to the ambassador at the WEF in Dalian a few weeks ago, wrote that the ambassador is "promoting American values," and only talking about what is good about the United States. The Guangming Daily warned the Chinese people not to be "seduced by Gary Locke's façade"...after all, who is to say that it "isn't the intention of the U.S. to use a Chinese to control the Chinese and incite political chaos in China." And most recently, the Global Times has joined the fray, arguing that it is "unbelievable that Locke's casual stroll through hutongs with his family could win so much praise." Moreover, a "U.S. ambassador should devote himself to the relationship between China and the U.S. rather than play a role in Chinese media. A U.S. ambassador becoming a political star in China cannot be interpreted as U.S. respect for China."

Well, if the Chinese don't like him, send him over here, we'd love him!

 

"How long, oh Lord, how long?"

Without being too exact, or even slightly exact, it took about 60 years for communism in power to establish itself, to flourish (in the minds of ninnies, that is) and then to die.  Hower, socialism, particularly social democracy, being milder and thus more beguiling, has proved to be much hardier.  I wonder if recent events which have highlighted the folly, verging on criminality, of governments borrowing and spending on behalf of supposedly grateful electorates will shake enough people out of their ignorance and their torpor?  I noticed yesterdy that even 'Cain' Miliband, as he flourished his 'gesture' of cutting university fees, felt, unlike his big-spending predecessors, the necessity of explaining how he was going to pay for it.  It wasn't very convincing and consequently the idea, obviously dreamt up by his teenage SpAds, has already become as embarrassing as a fart at a Bishop's party.

I may be guilty of wishful thinking, and it is certainly true that you will never go broke under-estimating the intelligence of the Great British Public, but I do believe that evidence of monstrous progligacy by so many different governments, including our own, must have given even people with minimal knowledge of economics the idea that allowing governments to seize or to borrow or to print and spend too much money will end in tears before bedtime; and that blandishments from politicians that they will be "investing" (dread word!) the money for our benefit should be treated by howls of 'show us your willy'!  (Or in the case of Harriet Harperson, cover it up!)  I am encouraged in my slight optimism by that grand, old Leftie, Councillor Bob Piper, who in a post today sniffs into his hankie as with tear-filled eyes he confesses that "The early 80′s proved to be the turning point, and may well be shown to be the last throw of the dice for the Labour left".  One can but commisserate - and hope he's right!

The great battle will be won or lost 'over there' next autumn because there the two distinct philosophies are more clearly drawn.  From Wilson's great shift Leftwards the momentum has been virtually unstoppable until now when the brokers' men are banging on the door demanding their money back.  'Over here' the argument is less clear cut being bedevilled by the complexities of the European Union which 'the cousins', by contrast, were wise enough to sort out once and for all in the 19th century.  As in all things political, in a political democracy, the answer lies with us, 'The People'!  If, instead of cheering (and voting) for political poltroons who promise to 'invest' our money on our behalf, we begin to boo them knowing as we do now (or are about to find out) that it will eventually end in wrack and ruin, then a great lesson will have been learned and, at long last, wimpering and snivelling, the beast that is social democracy will have died the death.  And on its headstone we should engrave the solemn words "Governments can harm your health!"

Well, a man can dream, can't he?

 ADDITIONAL:  Leaked reports of 'Blinky' Balls's speech today indicate that he is going to admit that were Labour in government they would not reverse the coalition 'cuts'.  Apparently polls are telling them that pie in the sky promises to spend, spend, spend, are treated with deep scepticism by the public - especially coming from him.

 

The unlovely faces of impending disaster

Chancellor Merkel and Finance Minister Schäuble

If like me you find it hard to keep up with, let alone understand, the spate of explanations coming at us from all directions on the complexities of the looming financial crisis, you could do no better than read this article in Der Spiegel.  Never mind past mistakes, they tell us, the biggest mistakes are yet to come and the two people most responsible for them are the pair above:

They want to establish the unity of the continent -- but are nurturing fear and anger in donor and recipient countries alike. They want to sustain the homogenous single currency area -- but are doing everything possible to deepen the divide in the euro zone. They want to safeguard Germany's competitive edge -- but are undermining its future financial viability with unimaginable burdens.

Actually, like so many apparently complex matters when you strip them down to their bare essentials thay are relatively simple.  The current imbroglio is due entirely to an excess of borrowing - by governments, by banks and by individuals - and that means you.  Of course, it goes without saying that the lenders are also responsible for their totally irresponsible lending!  But now, even they are getting the message and one by one they are picking off those who have borrowed or loaned too much.  By refusing to lend to the weakest, like Greece, they punish not only Greece but the previous lenders to Greece, the banks.  Greece will be forced into bankruptcy but so too will many of the banks.  There is no possibility of a "with one leap he was free" scenario, someone, somewhere, will absolutely and definitely have to suffer.  So the question remains as to which is the best way to take our punishment.  Der Spiegel maintains that it is definitely not the way of Chancellor Merkel and Finance Minister Schäuble:

The first mistake begins with the terminology. The talk is and always has been of a "euro crisis." The chancellor has even made the nonsensical claim that "if the euro fails, Europe fails." It is actually possible to talk a currency into crisis and ruin.

Where, pray tell, is this supposed euro crisis? It seems that many politicians, journalists and researchers no longer distinguish between federal budgets and the money supply through issuing banks. What we are seeing is a crushing sovereign debt crisis [my emphasis], not a currency crisis. The intrinsic value of the euro -- despite the talk about the dangers of massive inflation -- is as stable as that of many other currencies.

And in one killer sentence they thrust a dagger into the reputations of recent governments - including ours:

In this debt world, finance ministers were celebrated when the new debt they took on was less than the previous year. That the total debt would continue to rise was, and is, self-evident.

Does 'little Georgie' in the Treasury, the chancellor who far from cutting anything in the last 18 months has actually borrowed even more, understand this?  Do you understand this, because these profligate wretches borrow and spend, they always call it "investment", because you applaud them, and then you reward them with your votes!

The second mistake is an example of attempting to douse a fire with a bucket of petrol:

Those countries which still enjoy good ratings think they need to rescue those with bad credit through fresh lending. They are thus violating the founding treaty of the euro zone, which excludes such aid.

So-called stability facilities are being contrived to communitarize the new debt. Then the European Central Bank jumps in. Likewise, in gross contract violations, it buys government bonds and in doing so damages its most important asset --credibility.

The third mistake is the willful obstinacy of Merkel and others to accept the only, but painful, solution - a 'debt haircut':

The solution is a so-called debt haircut, or in the words of the much maligned Rösler , an "orderly bankruptcy." The creditors who have frivolously given Greece or other states credit up to the point of an actual declaration of bankruptcy would lose so much money that the remaining losses for the debtor country would actually be manageable.

Experts estimate that this debt haircut would need to involve between 30 and 50 percent of debt, depending on the country. The second rescue plan for Greece from the summer provides a waiver of only 20 percent, but it is voluntary and so far only 75 percent of financial institutions have agreed to it.

There appears not to be too much doubt that several European banks would immediately go on the wrack but, as the author of this article points out, supporting a bank crisis would be infinitely cheaper than never-ending support for other nations:

A haircut which mirrors the debtor's real ability to meet financial obligations could, of course, leave some banks in trouble and threaten a new banking crash. But this problem could be easier to control than one outrageously expensive bailout after another. Above all, this solution would be cheaper for the countries; indeed, the burden would be borne by the lenders.

Banks which, thanks to the stress test, are known to be in a precarious position, would have to be weatherproofed before the debt haircut with fresh capital. This "recapitalization" must take place through the state because private investors would certainly not rush to take on such a risk. In return, governments would be shareholders in the banks.

There is a fourth mistake to which Der Spiegel doe not refer but I would bet the deeds of the house that our government will seize it with relief, and that is to print more money.  As palliatives always do, it will provide very short-term relief, but the ensuing problem, like a malignant growth, will be even greater and more painful because the result will be inflation which, put simply, is a way by which governments can rob you by gradually making your money worth less and less.  However, it usually takes a while for it to begin to  hurt, by which time, of course, the crooks and cowards who were too frit to take the hard decisions will long since of disappeared.

All of this is, of course, the nitty-gritty of our current, day-to-day crisis but there are, I think very much deeper and more fundamental forces at work beneath the surface.  Irritatingly, it was 'SoD' (Son of Duff) who pointed this out to me - so demeaning when you have to sit at the feet of your children and learn!  I will try and develop those thoughts a bit later.

 

'Fairy foirelighters, bejasus!'

Sorry about the cod 'Oirish' accent but I was trying to get across the flavour of the tale told by an Oirish Irish coroner, Dr Ciaran McLoughlin, as reported by the BBC:

A man who burned to death in his home died as a result of spontaneous combustion, an Irish coroner has ruled.

West Galway coroner Dr Ciaran McLoughlin said it was the first time in 25 years of investigating deaths that he had recorded such a verdict.

Well, you could 'blather my blarneystone', as the don't say in Oire... Ireland, it must have been the fairies 'wot dunnit' - and don't tell me that fire fairies don't exist!  You just go here and read all about it:

As well as the many house fairies that live in the hearth or behind the stove, there are spirits that represent the fire itself. In Northern European countries, they were called drakes, salamanders or dragons. They are said smell like rotten eggs, and their presence is usually only betrayed by the stench, though they are sometimes glimpsed as a flaming ball. They only take on the character of fire when they fly, when they look like streaks of flame or fiery balls with long tails.

So the next time the 'Memsahib' complains about the nasty smell emanating from my end of the sitting-room after dinner I shall blame it on the fire fairy!  Anyway, back to the poor old codger who, so to speak, lit up all on his own, he was found, apparently, lying burned in front of the fireplace but no trace of any source for the fire could be found by the experts.  Er, 'fireplace', 'fire', does that ring a bell? Anyway, me?  I blame the fairies; nasty, smelly, little brutes and I don't care if I am accused of 'fairyism', so there!

"Do unto others" and all that jazz!

Allow me to grumble about one particular aspect of globalisation which acts like a pebble in my shoe and that is trying to come to terms with odd-sounding and downright peculiarly spelt names.  Take Anand Giridharadas for example.  Splendid chap, I'm sure, and he seems to be a very acute observer and commentator on the American scene but, honestly, how do you get your mouth round a name like that unless, of course, you are of Indian origin.  In fact, the more I waste my time dwell on this subject, it did occur to me the other day as I watched the names of people appearing on Fox News that they must spend most of their lives spelling out their names to strangers.  Imagine, every time you order something on the 'phone, book a table, speak to a sales person or a government clerk, you have to spell your 12+ letter name, probably two or three times, too, before they get it right.  Poor old Mr. Giridharadas, he could write another article in the time he spends spelling his name!

And it would be a jolly good thing if he did because he is a good writer.  He was the one who picked up, where others failed to notice, the almost 'revolutionary' ideas proposed by Sarah Palin and upon which I remarked here.  Today he is back in the NYT with an interesting observation on current hostilities in America.  Not just the hostilities between Right and Left in the political arena, although they do seem to have risen to heights of ferocity that I do not remember from the past (although old men's memories are not to be trusted), but also the hostilities between ordinary people which have arisen, he suggests, through a decline in basic human decency.

He cites the case of Amazon which has hit the headlines 'over there' following an exposure of its work practices which would make a 19th century Lord Gradgrind dribble with pleasure.  You need to read his piece to gain a full understanding of their despicable behaviour.  But, he adds, this is merely a sympton of a greater malaise within America:

The more I travel, the more I observe that Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never it occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.

Giridharadas sums up his unease thus:

What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead. Fellow citizens become caricatures. People retreat into their own safe realms. And decency, that great American virtue, falls away.

Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own.

I simply do not, I cannot, judge his accuracy but somehow it has the ring of truth  Is he, perhaps, the Toqueville de nos jours?  If so, America is in even more trouble than it thinks it is!

 

Be honest, which one would you vote for?

'Elf  'n' Safety Warning: 

These photos should not be gazed at for too long if:

a:  You have just had a large meal

b:  You are a lady of excitable disposition

c:  You are a gentleman of odd disposition

d:  You have something really important to do like filling in your tax return

The picture on the left, courtesy of Guido, is the famous self-portrait of the Honourable 'Chris' Bryant, MP for the ancient constituency of 'Some Dump in Wales'.  For reasons which this writer has never quite understood, being as I am of a somewhat naive disposition, Mr. Bryant distributed this photo worldwide on his 'flitter-twitter-witter machine-thingie'.

The picture on the right is a very rare photo of the late Gregory Peck taken whilst shooting a film in Majorca.

Now my question is quite simple: which one would you vote for?

And that answer was completely uncalled for - you're banned!

 

Oh, no, not just when I was beginning to understand it!

Scientists - heh!  You can't rely on them for anything.  Here's me, with a book-shelf full of books purporting to explain Einstein's theories, none of which I ever finish because what skulks in my skull pretending to be my brain is actually coagulated dandruff gathered over the years, and the one single thing I do understand and therefore cling to is that the speed of light is inviolate.  You could put Lewis Hamilton on a sub-atomic particle but not even he could go faster than the photon of light running alongside.  Up until today that is!

The BBC reports that scientists at CERN have fired off some particles down their version of the Bakerloo line which runs under the Alps, and guess what, the little critters arrived early!  Which is more than London Transport ever manages.

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

Still, unlike all those climate (so-called) scientists, Antonio Ereditato, the lead author on the published paper knows how a proper scientist should behave:

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"

Good man!  And I hope those little scamps did run faster than anyone thought they could because I have always had my doubts about Einstein and his mad theory - well, my dears, that hair! - and now maybe I won't have to waste even more time and money buying books which fail to explain what the daft old codger was on about.

 

One last chew and then you can spit it out!

(This follows the subject matter of the three previous posts.)

The last bit of trickiness arising from this sad tale of the unexpected earthquake which virtually destroyed L' Aquila in Italy which I would like to dwell upon concerns the all too common disputes between experts and non-experts in the fields of science and technology.  My own very slight personal experience of this sort of thing came years ago as a teenager reading Nevil Shute's No Highway and later seeing the film with the great James Stewart.  This story written in 1949 tells of a lonely scientist's efforts to convinve the authorities that the cause of an aircraft crash is metal fatigue which he worked out using a (fictional) version of quantum mechanics.  He is an awkward cuss with few social skills and his interest in the symbolic meanings of ancient Egyptian pyramids is used against him when he tries to get people to take his ideas seriously.  In the end, of course, he is proved to be correct and the consensus opinion of the scientific hierarchy wrong.

In L' Aquila, a local man with a scientific background but no high degrees or published works to back his opinions, undertook regular measurements of radon gas emissions, this gas being endemic in the area.  I am not quite sure exactly what he was doing but it was based, I think, on his theory that the nature of the gas changed when tremors were imminent.  Consequently he warned that the chances of a big tremor hitting were very much greater than the 'experts'.  He ran his own open blog on which he published his data and his theory and so many people were reading it and becoming panicked that the authorities decided to place him under investigation.  A big-ish shock occurred the same day, and the really big one hit about five days later.

Does that remind you of something?  AGW, for instance, although in that case the concensus science is the one predicting enormous catastrophes whilst the 'maverick' outsiders are denying it.  The 'Warmers'/'Changers' (at the moment they appear not to be certain which climate they are forecasting!) have retreated into their stockade defended by 'peer review' which in practice means reviews conducted by other scientists (and sometimes friends) who agree with them.  Happily, we now have 'internet review' in which everyone and his uncle can join in, although that mass rapidly filters down to a few very expert blogs whose owners are extremely knowledgeable.

So, yet another intractable problem to add to the others I have referred to.  I certainly do not pretend to have solutions.  I only ask for complete openness on all sides so that we, the public, can best decide for ourselves.  However, I would add that a healthy dose of scepticism when it comes to 'experts' is often very good for your, er, health!  Unless, of course, it is your local cardiologist telling you that your indegestion is actually a sign of an impending stroke and the prat selling you homeopathic lichen is having you on!

'What's a body to do?' you may ask.  'Pay yer money and take yer chance', is my fairly useless reply.

 

So keep on chewin'!

(This post follows on from the two preceding posts.)

In the comment thread to my preceding post my commenters pointed up the fact that I had failed to make absolutely clear exactly what the unfortunate Mr. Fish, the weatherman, actually said on his famous night of the 'hurricane' that never was.  In doing that, of course, they illustrated exactly the next point I wished to raise, that is, the difficulties of using language correctly.  The word 'hurricane', for example, means one thing to a weatherman, that is, a wind of a particular measurable force which places it in one category, 'hurricane', rather than another, say, 'gale'.  But to the likes of me and you, those 'gales' which battered Britain in 1987 were indistinguishable from 'hurricanes', being winds of such force that none of us had ever experienced the like before.  And several people died as a result.

Returning to Italy, after the conference of seismologists which, due to the near panic developing  was moved from Rome to L' Aquila, two of the scientists and two 'civilians' (so to speak) came out to talk to the press.  It was at this point that the inherent problems of probability and possibility were doubled by the problems of language.  "Words, words, words", the gloomy Dane complained but in this context of approaching catastrophe words really did matter.  The mixture of scientists and 'civilians', each putting a greater or lesser emphas here or there merely added to the confusion.  But are there any 'correct' words in such circumstances?  I am reminded of the terrorist security gradings issued by HMG which are issued with colour grades to assist understanding.  One can imagine the man-hours invested by civil servants in parsing as exactly as they can the precise distinctions between each grade of risk.  But do they actually help?  At which point on the scale do you decide not to use the tube or an airport?  Probably the day after an atrocity which speaks volumes!

What was that?  Did someone ask what the solution was?  Haven't a clue, old boy, I always rely on gut instinct!

ADDITIONAL:  By coincidence, a good friend of mine, Mark Bannister, who combines computer 'geekery' of the highest order with a brilliantly creative musical talent - he composes music for all my theatre productions - has just written a post on the subject of the old NASA 'clunker' about to fall to earth in a shower of bits and pieces, and the liklehood, or not, of being hit.  An odd coincidence of minds pondering the same subject.  Worth a read.

 

So let's chew on it, then

(It is necessary to read my preceding post to understand this follow up.)

My title is derived from my previous post which raises an almost 'perfect' storm' of intractable problems.  First of all, should scientists be held legally responsible for forecasts they make in areas of science which are inherently 'chaotic', that is, areas in which exactitude is impossible and only probabilities can be offered?  A prime and infamous example was our very own Michael Fish from the Met Office who, back in the '80s, laughed off the silly notion of approaching storms and we all woke up the next morning with perhaps one the biggest weather disasters the country had ever experienced.  Mind you, Mr. Fish, rather foolishly, did not talk in terms of probabilities, he simply denied that it would happen. 

Returning to L' Aquila in Italy, the seismic scientists, who try to seek certainty in an equally 'chaotic' sytem, did not tell the people that there would be no earthquake, they limited their forecasts to the fact that there was a 2% chance of an earthquake.  At this point we move from science to language.  How many people truly understand the inherent meaning of 2%?  And how many can weigh that 2% against the catastrophic disaster if they 'bet' the wrong way?  I use the word 'bet' advisedly because there are far more punters than there are bookmakers and on the whole punters tend to end up poorer than bookmakers which indicates to me that very few people understand the mathematics of probability, or, 'odds', as the bookies call it.  Let me put it this way, if a seismologist tells you that the chances of an earthquake is only 2 in a hundred - but you will die if the 2% comes up, then that sets the problem in a new framework for a punter to decide.  But, I am tempted to ask, why 2%?  Why not 3%, or 1%, or even 5%?  Scientists like exactitude but is it responsible of them to provide an exact probability when in fact there can be no exactitude?

This is an important point because increasingly inexact science is being used to propel social-political aims.  I think back to the days when the anti-smoking lobby insisted that lung cancer was caused by smoking where-as even a quick glance at the charts indicated that age was obviously an important factor but somehow the slogan 'Die young and you won't get lung cancer' is hardly inspiring.   Also, sex rears its ugly head!  As you can see from this chart, smoking trends are down in men and so are the incidents of lung cancer.  But women, too, are smoking less but their cancer rates are increasing!

I have no wish to be drawn into that old debate, I use it merely as an illustration that scientific pronouncements of a statistical nature should come with a 'health warning', particularly if they are issued by scientists expert in one specialist subject but not necessarily equally expert in the arcane complexities of statistical mathematics.

But the overhanging question is, should scientists be held legally responsible for their pronouncements?  Should we, to put it crudely, have sued the arse of Michael Fish?  Here-in lies the dilemma facing the Italian judges asked to pronounce on the guilt or otherwise of the Italian seismologists whose pronouncements were wrong and 308 people died.

(Alas, I am off, reluctantly, to the dentist but I shall return - I hope! - because there are even juicier difficulties arising from this tragedy.)

Now here's a juicy wrangle to chew upon!

I do not wish to sound my usual flippant self on this topic because some 300 people have died and several men face criminal responsibility charges.  The topic has been reported elsewhere but, with other important matters playing out in the news, it has been pushed to the inside pages.  My remarks are based on the report at the Nature site.  Apart from the particular complexities of this case, there are very much wider implications for science in general and us in particular.

I will try to sum up the story briefly but read the full report for the details.  In 2009 an earthquake hit the medieval town of L'Aquila in Italy.  This town, situated in a traditional area of earthquakes, had been suffering low-level tremors for several months and the population was becoming increasingly worried.  The general tenor of the information put out by the Italian scientists specialising in earthquakes was that periods of frequent low-level shocks, known as 'seismic swarms', rarely precede major earthquakes.  Note the word 'rarely' which is not the same as 'never'!  (This is, perhaps, an example of 'consensus science', an expression all too familiar to those of us who follow the global warming (AGW) controversy.) 

However, in this case there was, as in AGW, a 'denier'.  A local man who, whilst having a scientific background, did not have any high-ranking degrees to his name and who had not published, with peer review, the results of his scientific enquiries.  Instead of analysing seismic patterns, he measured re-actions in the radon gas which is endemic in the area.  He published his results and predicted that a 'quake was highly probable.  The local authorities, irritated by the alarm his reports were causing in the local population, took legal action against him on the 30th March 2009 - and on that day a 4.1 magnitude tremor shook the town of L'Aquila.  By now the townspeople were really worried and in response the authorities called on the top seismic scientists to hold their scheduled meeting at which their latest findings were to be evaluated in L'Aquila rather than Rome, which they duly did. An announcement, of sorts, was made by two of the scientists, the mayor and a civil servant to the waiting reporters in which they attempted to translate scientific complexities into language suitable for non-scientists which would be further 'translated' by the popular press.

The result is best described as a shambles of misunderstandings, mis-statements and mistakes.  The local people were somewhat pacified but then, on the 6th April, the town was hit by a 5.1 'quake and the ancient buildings collapsed killing 308 people.  To add one further ingredient to this witch's brew, in 1985 a man in charge of civil protection in the earthquake zone was investigated after he ordered the evacuation of several villages because of the threat of a severe seismic shock - but nothing happened!

So here we have a nice mixture of professional science and 'amateur' science, language and liability, mathematics and understanding, probability and probity.  I would not wish to be a judge in this matter.  I hope to return to this fascinating and intricate tale tomorrow, provided I have recovered from having a tooth out in the morning!

 

'O-mi-Gard', as they say 'over there'!

Wonder Woman strikes again! She's poised to save the world!   And without even getting out of bed!

"I wonder which Wonder Woman the old fool's on about", I hear you ask - my spies are everywhere, you know, so have a care!  Well, of course, there is only one two (he wrote rapidly lest the 'Memsahib' be about) Wonder Women in my life and setting aside the 'Memsahib' there can only be MDS - My Darling Sarah.  And to show you what a wonder she is, let me tell you that, according to Investment Watch, the latest McClatchy-Marist national poll taken on the 13th-14th of September shows her within 5-points of Obama!  And she hasn't even declared as a candidate yet.  Mainly, I gather, her strength is derived from a sudden surge in support from independents.  Perhaps her remarkable speech, which I reported on earlier, had some effect, even if the MSM were not listening, which they rarely do to her anyway.

'Many a slip 'twixt cup and lip', as they say, but quite encouraging news, I think.

Hat tip to IHTM

 

"Music has charms to sooth a savage breast"

And let's face it, when it comes to 'savage breasts', they don't come more savage than mine when I'm in a grouchy mood - as I was yesterday with my 'frozen shoulder' and my scab-itching leg (see somewhere below for the tedious details if your social life is that bereft!)  Anyway, slumped motionless in my armchair, not out of my usual sloth but because it hurt to move, I flicked idly amongst the 3,762 TV channels that nice old Australian man sends me - well, it seems like 3,762 - when I chanced upon Sky Arts 2.  This channel is frequently an oasis in a desert of Poirot repeats, shopping programmes, a repeat of the winning match in the Outer Mongolian curling competition and, of course, the news which is always bad and getting worse!  Yesteday I caught a filmed recording of a concert at the Waldbühne arena in Berlin from 2006 featuring Anna Netrebko, Placido Domingo and Rolando Villazon.  Suffice to say that two hours later I felt as 'soothed' as could be!

I seem to remember reading somewhere that that old misery, Plato, with his daft notion of being ruled over by philosophers - philosophers, heh! - wanted to ban music because it had the power to stir men's emotions rather than their minds.  Well, the old Greek was right, of course, because my emotional mood was certainly different after listening to that concert.  And, incidentally, I think I would actually spend money (if I had any to spare - all contributions gratefully received - sound of rattling tin cup) to go to Berlin and sit in the Waldbühne for a concert, it looks like perfection.

Not being an opera buff I had never heard of Netrebko and Villazon but to my untrained ear they sounded as superb as the old master, Domingo, himself.  What I enjoyed was the sense that these three consummate performers were enjoying themselves as much as the audience sitting enthralled in the beautiful setting.  The only irritation - well, there was bound to be one given my inbuilt grumpiness - was that my choice - if anyone ever asks me, that is! - of eight Desert Island Discs has grown somewhat.  It already stood at around twenty-seven but hitherto I had not considered opera for inclusion.  It now stands at thirty-four!  (Yes, yes, I know you are only allowed eight but for a famous old 'actor' chappie like me, to say nothing of my eminence in the world of Blogdom, I'm sure an exception can be made.

Anyway, if you are stuck for Christmas gift ideas you could do no better than buy that DVD set from Amazon - and then give it to yourself!  And send a copy to me - natch!

Additional:  I thought I would show you this so you could appreciate just what a beautiful voice she has!

 

Seventeen dead or dying hands on the wheel

The 'euro-bus' careers on down the mountain pass with seventeen trembling hands pulling the wheel first this way then that.  It's like one of those Hollywood films and last weekend we actually had an American 'hero' bravely climb aboard to offer advice but he was simply told to 'eff off' in seventeen different languages.  The fact that he, personally, had helped steer the American bus straight towards the Grand Canyon did not add 'lustre to his cluster', as it were!  Meanwhile, the people not actually on board but waiting at the bottom of the ravine in direct line of the approaching smash are wringing their hands and bleating ineffectually with increasingly squeaky voices.  As usual, Andrew Alexander in The Mail tells it the way it is:

Be under no illusion: we are poised on the edge of an economic precipice, along with the rest of the Western world. The IMF has, on this occasion, got it right in warning of a ‘dangerous new phase’ in the world economy.  But make no mistake about the cause, which the IMF has underrated: the euro and its year-long crisis.  It is the principal reason for the low or non-existent growth we are experiencing and which is liable to get worse. The effects are felt from Turkey to Toronto.

He goes on to point out that so long as the uncertainty on the euro goes on then business will simply refuse to invest in new enterprises or improvements to their existing ones.  Where, oh, where is the Bismarck de nos jours?  Dreadful, fat, old Prussian bully he may have been, but he had an absolutely clear eye on the realities of life.  The current bunch of pox doctors' clerks who pretend to be steering Europe are far too busy filling their boots and will do nothing until those infamous "events, dear boy, events" destroy them, and us, in the coming crash.

However, Alexander spies a gleam of hope in the gloom:

Yet, ironically, one pleasing touch came yesterday. Italy’s credit rating had been cut on Monday but the markets were unmoved. It was, as they say, already ‘in the price’. Investors had already allowed for it.  It could be — we might hope — that the markets have already priced in the losses which various banks will experience when Greece defaults.

So, not all bad, then?  Well, probably 'yes', actually:

But that still leaves Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland to worry about.

Meanwhile, back at home  . . .  (to be continued - I'm sorry to tell you!)

 

The Art Contrarian - who could disagree with him?

Now, look here, I've told you lot before that you must bookmark the Art Contrarian site and visit regularly - and that's an order!  Er, the fact that I don't actually follow my own order is neither here nor there.  Actually, I keep forgetting Donald Pettinger, the owner, as I shoot down the 'Favourites' list every morning but on the other hand when I do remember there is lots and lots to look at and plenty of his very shrewd and balanced opinions to read.  I really do rate this as one of the very best blogs on the net.

I have just scrolled down his current page and picked out a varied sample of what's on offer, so to speak; from dictators to WWII aircraft to cartoons to illustrators.  Terrific stuff!

 

Art Contrarian

When even the 'ChicTrib' gives him the finger - he's dead man walking!

There's no honour amongst thieves and Chicagoans, er, that's if you can actually tell them apart!  Before some highly respectable citizen of Chicago sends me a letter of outrage/a legal suit/a parcel bomb - or all three, I had better make clear that I am referring only to political Chicagoans.  This stew pot of corruption and cronyism was the nurturing ground for the young Obama and became in the end his launching pad into the White House.  His mini-thuglet and former consigliore, Rahm Emanuel, now runs the joint from behind the mayorial desk.  I would advise the city authorities to count the drawers when he leaves!  Above and beyond all other things this is a Democrat city from the top of its skyscrapers down to its sewers.  So, when a columnist in the Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman, writes a long-ish piece urging Obama not to run then something is very, very, badly wrong in the White House, or at least, the nearest golf course, or where-ever the hell he is.

Chapman gives the bad news first:

The sputtering economy is about to stall out, unemployment is high, his jobs program may not pass, foreclosures are rampant and the poor guy can't even sneak a cigarette.  His approval rating is at its lowest level ever. His party just lost two House elections — one in a district it had held for 88 consecutive years. He's staked his future on the jobs bill, which most Americans don't think would work.

The vultures are starting to circle. Former White House spokesman Bill Burton said that unless Obama can rally the Democratic base, which is disillusioned with him, "it's going to be impossible for the president to win." Democratic consultant James Carville had one word of advice for Obama: "Panic."

But Chapman is not the sort to kick a good Democrat when he's down, no, sireee, he offers glad tidings:

But there is good news for the president. I checked the Constitution, and he is under no compulsion to run for re-election. He can scrap the campaign, bag the fundraising calls and never watch another Republican debate as long as he's willing to vacate the premises by Jan. 20, 2013.

And anyway, do Michele and the kids really want to hang around whilst their dad is being rubbished even harder by all and sundry?  I don't think so:

Presidential encores are generally a bog of frustration, exhaustion and embarrassment. They are famous for lowest moments rather than finest hours. Richard Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace, Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal, and Bill Clinton made the unfortunate acquaintance of Monica Lewinsky.

Administration officials get weary after four years and leave in droves. The junior varsity has to be put into service. New ideas are hard to come by.

Chapman reminds Obama and us that there is a very high chance that even if Obama wins he will face a House and Senate controlled by the Republicans which will almost certainly entail the gradual dismantling of everything he stood for and, by general consensus, Obama is not a fighter.  However, Chapman knows, or thinks he knows, of a very doughty fighter indeed and bows in the direction of - Mrs Hilary Clinton, who else?

Her husband presided over a boom, she's been busy deposing dictators instead of destroying jobs, and she's never been accused of being a pushover.

Not only that, Clinton is a savvy political veteran who already knows how to run for president. Oh, and a new Bloomberg poll finds her to be merely "the most popular national political figure in America today."

Sorry, Barack, baby, the exit's over there - and do give my regards to the Windy City and that nice Mr. Emanuel.

 

Nice to know we share so many things with the 'cousins over there'!

Well of course we share things, you know, like, er, well I know they have a constitution and we don't' but even so at least we all talk the same language, sort of, so long as their English-speaking films have, er, English subtitles . . .  OK, OK, maybe not quite so much as I thought but there is one undoubted characteristic both our nations share - our policemen, here and there, are as thick as a sack of spanners!  Ours, known colloquially as 'the plod', 'the filth', 'the old bill' and so on, are renowned for their dimness.  I seem to remember reading only a day or two ago that a huge number of constables have considerable difficulty writing and reading!  What is truly remarkable though, is that by very careful selection only the truly and monumentally stupid rise up to positons of leadership.  Of course, there are exceptions but as a general description I believe I am accurate.

Thus, it warmed my heart to read that 'Noo Yawk's finest' are equally vacant in the brain area.  Their, er, leadership have issued a booklet to train their officers and any security people involved in watching the city's night life on what to look out for.  This from the New York Daily News: 

The 27-page booklet, titled "Best Practices for Nightlife Establishments," advises owners to be cautious about nervous customers who are sweating profusely and with "bulging veins in the neck."

Yep!  I reckon that sounds pretty dodgy especially if they're carrying an axe at the time.

"Counter-terrorism security plans should include training for all staff in the detection of possible suicide bombers," the guide, released Monday, says.

Good thinking, that man!  It goes on:

On how to spot would-be terrorists, the guide recommends being alert to people with "visible wires and tape" protruding from their clothing and "individuals who are obviously disguised."

Heavens to Betsy, who'da thunk it? 

On the more mundane business of spotting drunks, the booklet suggests that officers should remember that:

they're usually the ones with slurred speech and bloodshot eyes who appear "sick, confused, abusive, profane, antagonistic or incoherent."

Crikey!  Never mind 'Noo Yawk', that reminds me of Aldershot circa 1960, place was full of 'em!

 

Huhne the humbug!

Damn, my shoulder hurt this morning so I thought, reluctantly, that perhaps I should visit the quacks and see what they have to say.  My trust in them is, shall we say, moderate; more hopeful than convinced.  Anyway, I am told that I have a 'frozen' shoulder so, as the quack put it, keep taking the pills!  Damned nuisance because typing mostly with one hand is tedious.  Then I forget about the shoulder and go to reach for something and it feels as though someone has stabbed me in the arm.  Still, I didn't cry during the doctor's examination so 'mummy' gave me a sweetie!

Anyway, returning home in a foul temper I see and hear the 'Lesbian-straightener' telling me how he is now going to straighten out the utility companies (a change from lesbians, I assume) because he thinks they are over-charging us (probably true) and he is going to insist that they make it easier for us to switch companies which will make our utilities cheaper (not true).  Of course, what this prize lying liar failed to mention was that part of the reason energy is so expensive is because of the zillions being handed over for ghastly and utterly useless wind and tide farms.  My arm is hurting so I will cut and paste from others much better informed, like Richard North who shows what a total hypocrite Huhne is, forever bleating about the condition of the poor and yet pushing a policy that will make life even more difficult for those with debt problems who are forced to have a meter which only works with cash up front:

But greatest dishonesty on the part of Huhne is in respect of those on lower incomes and those with debt troubles – now running into millions. The secretive policy of avoiding disconnections and forcibly putting people onto pre-paid meters means that for those people swapping suppliers is not an option.

Not only are these people paying a higher tariff, if they have a pre-paid meter, no other supplier wants to know them.

Few politicians seem to understand this – and even fewer seem prepared to find out. Being poor often means paying more than the better off for commodities such as energy, while there are always the predatory bailiffs hovering in the background for when they stumble.

It is easy then for multi-millionaire Huhne to posture and preen. But he clearly has little idea what being poor is all about, and obviously cares less. As long as he can get the cheap applause at his party conference – where he is running interference for his own policies – that is all that seems to matter.

Guido, as usual, was quick into action with his counter-battery fire this morning:

Chris Huhne is about to lecture you about the economy, suggesting that it’s evil “Tea Party” Tories who are threatening the economic recovery by calling for less tax and a look at our position in Europe. Of course his own raiding of the already stretched bank accounts of hard working families in order to fund his green vanity projects is perfectly legit.

I will test Guido's good nature (that's a laugh!) a bit further by copying the excellent picture from his site.  He heads his piece "Huhne's Brass Neck" but I wonder if 'Huhne's Brass Dildo' might not be more applicable these days:

Not content with that Guido reminds us of the all-wise, far-seeing, economic genius that was Huhne of yesteryear - not once but twice:

Before you take a lecture from him on the economy though, have a look at what Huhne said to the Guardian in 2002:

“The ‘no’ campaigners said the euro was doomed to failure, but all their predictions have been proved wrong”, and ”The euro is living up to the highest expectations of the economists who advocated it, and Britain is missing out.”

Oh dear, a one off perhaps? Nope = have a look at the Indy in 2003:

“The freedom to set interest rates merely according to domestic needs is a cruel mirage. Monetary union protects economies from the vagaries of speculative capital flows, enabling more stable growth and investment.”

Thanks, Guido, you're priceless!

 

The Lesbian-straightener caught between two ladies!

Damn, I nearly missed this from The Daily Mail.  Our hero - oh, come on, chaps, you have to hand it to him, how many lesbians have you ever straightened out? - was caught on camera looking a tad stiff, if you will excuse the expression, upper-lipped today when he was told that both his ex-wife and his ex-lesbian girlfriend were in town for the 'il-Lib-non-Dem' conference.

Well, to be honest, I wouldn't wish to be caught between these two formidable ladies because somehow I don't think it would quite come up to my expectations.  (Mind you, we shall owe them both a debt of gratitude if they succeed in parting him from that dreadful tie!)

Still, I do think Chris Huhne should make the most of what's on offer because if the 'Plod' feel his collar over that very unfortunate mix-up over who exactly was driving the dangerously speeding car he might spend some time at Her Majesty's pleasure in a place where female company is at a premium.  Mind you, there are, I believe, some sexually confused people inside who might need and appreciate some straightening as well!

 

An election in the Spring?

It can't go on like this, surely.  I know that politicians in pursuit of power will eat shit, smile and ask for more, but not when the shit is being shovelled by their erstwhile 'partners' in coalition.  How much more can the Tories take as, in a reversal of roles, the scrawny weakling kicks sand in the face of the big guy?  'Dim Dave' can take it, of course, just so long as it keeps his arse firmly planted in No. 10 but what about the rest of them?  Are they all prepared to be treated as harshly and rudely by their Lib-Dem so-called 'partners' as they will be by the Labour party?  If so, they're a gutless crowd of total tossers and they deserve the fate that will await them in due course.

The coming catastrophe in Europe, as well as the looming one approaching Britain as Osborne's useless tinkering is shown up as a pathetic failure to get a real grip, is all the excuse any shrewd leader would need to take himself off to the country as soon as possible and seek a new mandate quickly on the grounds that one party leadership will be required for the nation to weather the storm.  The 'il-Lib-non-Dems' will be crushed for rocking the boat at a time of national danger.  Of course,  'Dave' will never do it because deep down he is an 'il-Lib-non-Dem' at heart.  So where is the Tory 'Old Guard'?  The men in pin-striped suits capable of taking in the decanter of whisky and the loaded revolver to the PM's study?  Not a sign of them anywhere amongst the rabble of spivs, PR merchants and con-men who constitute most of the latter-day Tory party.

God, what an absolute shower!

 

The Coen brothers can't be serious!

Hitherto I have always placed Spielberg up there at the top of my favourite contemporary film makers list but recently he seems to have moved away from the cameras into the executive suites and what is called 'a Spielberg film' these days is, I suspect, in name only.  But not to worry because there is always the Coen brothers to fall back on and today I finally watched one which I have consistently missed since its release in 2009.  The film, A Serious Man, is not, I think, one of their best because it seems to me to be a very personal, even private, film.  It is just about as kosher as you can get, being entirely taken up with the family life of an orthodox American Jew.  From this film I would gather that the Coen boys are not too happy about their religion, or at least, the orthodox representatives of it.  In fact, if they weren't so damned Jewish themselves you might think they were anti-Semitic because nobody comes out of their bleak vision looking good!  Whilst there is a direct story line it is told in an episodic manner but whilst the episodes are often amusing, the smile tends to freeze on your face.  And yet . . . and yet  . . . I have a feeling that the doom-laden, ineffable schmuck, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg - superb), will remain in my memory for a long time.  A curiosity in that I guarantee you will never see another film quite like this one but still worth watching as the Coen brothers do what they love to do - take risks.

Mr. Right and Miss. Wrong dance the last waltz!

By which I mean that as the lights go out over the European ballroom so that the grand brilliance of les temps perdu fade into memories one last couple remain linked inextricably, first turning this way, then that, because neither of them knows who is leading - economics or politics!

I know, that's quite enough metaphors, but it is fascinating to watch as the economists, divorced from political realities, insist that the answer to the problem of the euro can only be found via the issuance of a euro bond which will tie the 17 nations into a supra-national governence.  Meanwhile, the politicians, who hitherto were swept off their feet by the economic union, are suddenly becoming aware of the deeply unpleasant, to them, attentions of a former jilted lover, otherwise known as - The People!  Because the fact is that whilst the idealistic politicians believed - and they really did believe because after WWII they really wished to believe - that all nationalistic yearnings would wither on the vine of plenty nurtured by the EU, in fact, nothing at all has withered, indeed, if anything, nationalistic yearnings are growing rapidly.  The Greek detestation of Germany is only matched by German contempt for the Greeks.  One thing is for sure, and was confirmed by the drubbing of Mrs. Merkel's coalition partner in yesterday's Berlin election and the sudden leap in popularity of a hitherto fringe party on the back of its stated desire to leave the EU, the German people are definitely not minded to pick up anyone else's unpaid bills, irrespective of what the economists tell them.

Hitherto, the politicians have succeeded in bullying and chivvying the people along the chosen path like so many cattle being led to a supposed open pasture but now the herd is beginning to realise that the pasture is actually a prison.  So politics and economics continue their dance until soon, perhaps very soon, the music stops!

 

Look, just don't upset me today!

I'm in a foul, snapping, snarling bad temper this morning so have a care!  I will tell you why - and you will pay attention!  Right?

Last Wednesday I had to replace a bulb in the ceiling light in our spare bedroom which doubles up as my dressing-room, although my so-called friends would be surprised to think that I required the space given what they think of the out-of-date, unfashionable grunge I slop about in.  Anyway, the light fitting is immediately above the centre of the double-bed.  No way was I going to attempt to shift that so instead I pulled over the fancy little padded stool that sits before the dressing table and using that as a step, up I went.  Needless to say, because it was in the usual tradition of absolutely everything I ever attempt in the do-it-yourself line, the bulb stuck and then I nearly ripped the shade off the ceiling trying to rectify it, and so on, as usual, so that I was in a thoroughly bad mood when the job was finished.  I crossed the bed and attempted to step onto the stool forgetting, of course, that it is a rather soft bed with the characteristics of a trampoline!  Consequently, off balance I trod on the edge of the stool which, being three-legged, immediately toppled over sending me crashing to the floor.  Fortunately, being an ex-paratrooper I immediately executed a superb side-left landing of the sort I used to do so regularly with the Regiment - or to put it more accurately, I hit the ground like a sack of shit, as my instructors used to bellow at me!

Anyway, because I cut the grass in the churchyard, obviously, God looked after me and the damage was minimal, just a long 4" graze right down the shin bone on one leg which made my eyes water!  It took the top skin off and was a bit sore but has now scabbed over nicely.  However, 3-days later I had all the symptoms of a pulled muscle in the groin to the point where I could hardly walk upstairs.  That faded away within 24 hours so that yesterday I was feeling fairly chipper and thinking I would go for a swim this morning.  But today I woke up with the most excruciating pain in my left shoulder and I am unable to raise my arm to any height.  Obviously another pulled or strained muscle but this is five days after the tumble!  Is that usual, or am I just falling to bits?

Anyway, that means I missed my swim this morning so I'm in a really grouchy mood quite apart from being reminded every five minutes by an excruciating jab of pain my shoulder when I forget to hold my arm still.  I have re-sworn my oath never, ever, to attempt any DIY jobs again.  No matter how much it costs I'd rather weep over a huge invoice than over my self-inflicted wounds.

The 'Memsahib' with her usual boundless sympathy tells me I'm a total prat.  For once I agree with her!

 

Honestly, it couldn't happen to a nicer Russian zillionaire!

Am I jealous of Roman Abramovich?  Of course not.  Do I begrudge him his gazillions?  Certainly not, most of it was nicked earned off the Russians and people have been stealing earning from them for centuries so why should I care?  Do I lust after the various gorgeous wives and girlfriends he has enjoyed?  Absolutely not, apart from anything else the 'Memsahib' would kill me if I did.  Am I irritated everytime he buys an even bigger more luxurious yacht for the sort of money that would replace the two carriers 'Dave' gave away?  I deny it absolutely.  So why, this afternoon, did I enjoy one of the most delirious bouts of utterly delicious schadenfreude that I have had since Gordon Brown was drummed out of office? 

I will tell you but first, for the sake of my foreign e-pals, I should explain that Abramovich is one of those Russian oligarchs who seems to have partly based himself in the UK.  I am delighted with that for the very reasons I explained in my previous post but, on the other hand, I would advise Her Maj to count the spoons fairly regularly!  Anyway, despite being an obviously clever and dead crafty operator, 'Comrade' Abramovich is also a total prat because he is consumed with a passion for 'footie'.  Now, you only have to watch the pictures from the slowly moving camera that trails along the terraces filming the crowd at any 'footie' match to see that the average brain cell count for 'footie' fanatics is probably somewhere between plankton and amoebas.  Well, Abramovich is one of those, except that instead of standing on the terraces eating a third-rate gristle pie, he is swilling 'Dom Pom' in the biggest, most luxurious box in the entire stadium  - because he owns the bloody thing - outright!  The club is called Chelsea and, to be fair, it has done better than it has ever done since he owned it, winning the English championship three times in the last six years.  But, and here's the rub, or perhaps, here's the itch and poor little Roman can't stop scratching it, he knows that the only thing that really counts is winning the European championship, and that, Chelsea consistently fail to do which is why a steady stream of managers come and go - usually before they have unpacked their bags!

I gather that like most tycoons, 'Roman the Terrible' is surrounded by various creepy-crawlies who do his bidding, or what they think will be his bidding.  Hence, the first skill required by any manager is best described as 'running interference' as they try to fend off sundry suits from sticking their ignorant noses into what is not their concern.  However, when it comes to interference, Roman is definitely a hands-on boss.  Consequently, last year, when Chelsea were floundering somewhat, he stepped in and, over the head of his manager, bought a centre forward called Fernando Torres from Liverpool whose two American owners were only too pleased to take the money, suffering as they were, no doubt, with a severe case of Obamanomics!  Now all the experts (honesty rather than modesty forbids that I include myself in that term but I listen to experts constantly on ''TOOORKSPOOOORT' radio) had noticed a sharp drop in form from the unfortunate Torres probably due to a series of hamstring operations he had suffered.  However, with the courage of his convictions, which far exceeded his knowledge of the game, our lad Roman steamed in and made the Yanks an offer they could not refuse. 

From then until today, Torres has scored only one goal!

Today, I watched a crucial match between Chelsea and the legendary Manchester United, run by their wily but wasp-chewing manager, Sir Alex Ferguson.  Chelsea lost 3-1.  It is true that today Torres succeeded in doubling his total scoring record for Chelsea with a rather nifty goal.  However, later in the match when a second goal would have lifted his team and given them a chance for at least a score draw, he received a perfect pass through the centre.  He skipped past a defender and there was no-one between him and the goal except the keeper and with a neat piece of footwork he side-stepped him and now there was an empty goal in front of him.  He missed!

Oh, sorry, I forgot to tell you.  'Roman the Imbecile' paid the Yanks £50 million for him.  That's £50,000,000, or, if you prefer, £25m per goal.

Oh, my God, I wept, honestly I did, I wept . . . er, with laughter, of course.

 

Please, 'Dave', why not try doing nothing?

Because I couldn't find the do-flicker-thingie I spent a depressing number of nano-seconds this morning watching sundry 'il-Lib-non-Dems' waffling on and on about the economy in the vein of 'Something Must be Done' and, of course, they were just absolutely the very best people to actually do the 'Something' whatever it might be.  I groaned!  Turning to my trusty computer-thingie I happened to click on to Cafe Hayek, always a source of wisdom, to read this lesson from history written by Thomas Sowell: 

There was a stock market crash in October 1929 and unemployment shot up to 9 percent — for one month. Then unemployment started drifting back down until it was 6.3 percent in June 1930, when the first major federal intervention took place.

That was the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill, which more than a thousand economists across the country pleaded with Congress and President Hoover not to enact. But then, as now, politicians decided that they had to “do something.”

Within 6 months, unemployment hit double digits. Then, as now, when “doing something” made things worse, many felt that the answer was to do something more.

Both President Hoover and President Roosevelt did more — and more, and more. Unemployment remained in double digits for the entire remainder of the decade. Indeed, unemployment topped 20 percent and remained there for 35 months, stretching from the Hoover administration into the Roosevelt administration.

Don Boudreaux, the maître d ' of Cafe Hayek, agrees with the general thrust of Sowell's remarks but discounts the effects of Smoot-Hawley.  Whilst it was definitely unhelpful the fact is that in those far off days American foreign trade was minimal and the raising of tariffs had only a marginal effect on the overall economy.  According to Boudreaux it was all the other things that politicans did, under the misapprehension that 'Something Must Be Done' that put the 'Great' into the 'Great Depression'.

From a strictly political point of view, of course, today's politicans are correct in not 'trusting the people'!  We are, by and large, a pretty pathetic lot of dummies forever seeking reassurance and a nice warm government teat upon which to suck for comfort.  But sometimes, I do just wish that a politician would stand up and tell it the way it is.  Something like this, perhaps:

Ladies and Gentlemen, we're fucked!  Not completely fucked but as near as makes no difference.  The last Labour government spent like drunken sailors and now you are going to have to pay it back.  This is going to be hard but there is no escape and just remember, the people who will be telling you that there is an easy way out are the same people who spent your cash and got us into this mess in the first place.  The fact is that all sorts of things which we, the politicians, told you over the years you could absolutely depend upon are not going to happen, or at least, they are not going to happen in the way you might have expected.

However, all is not totally lost.  As a nation we need to make money.  We cannot borrow any more, nor can we print any more because it will then become worthless.  So, what we need are lots of people who know how to make money, so it is vital that we make the UK a place where people who make money are made very welcome by, amongst other things, low tax rates.  Even more important, we need to encourage the money-makers who already live here by cutting their taxes, personal as well as business, so that they are encouraged to make as much money as possible and then keep the money here not overseas.  We want Britain to be a land fit for millionaires!

So, who will give me a vote?

Gadzooks, Jonathan Swift lives again!

No, really, honestly, just pop over to Pyjamas Media and read him for yourself as he proposes a solution to the problem of the lost tribes of, er, the Prussians!  As you would expect from the great man, it's very funny and very sharp!

Should Joe McGinniss be arrested for stalking?

Lest you are unaware of the arcania of political life 'over there' let me tell you that Mr. McGinnis is a 'sewer rat', by which I mean that he hunts in sewers for shit, eats it and then excretes it back out again.  This, I should add, is in the finest traditions of the hacks of Fleet Street and Wapping and should be encouraged when their, er, 'researches' are aimed at the so-called 'Great & the Good' who seek to rule over us.  But, and it's a big 'but', whilst this activity is a very dirty game, nevertheless, there are some very rough and ready basic rules.

In his pursuit of Mrs. Palin and her family the distinctly creepy Mr. McGinniss actually rented the house next door to their family home in order, one supposes, to spy on them at close quarters.  He did this openly and brazenly and forced them to erect a fence to keep his prying eyes out.  He then began a long trawl through all of her past friends and aquaintances and has now, we are led to believe, published a real SHLOCK-HORROR exposé - except that he hasn't!

I may have mentioned on the odd occasion that 'once upon a time' I worked on the lowest rung of the lowest ladder in the futile world of Intelligence.  Even at that basement level we were taught that unsourced information was not to be relied upon.  (If only that nice man who used to run MI6 as we approached the Iraq war had asked my advice!)  Such information was graded 'E:E', meaning that there was no source and no confirmation from any other source therefore the info could not be graded.  Or, if you prefer the technical terminology, it was shit and unproven shit at that!

As I understand it, Mr. McGinniss's book refuses to identify the sources for all sorts of alleged misbehaviour by Mrs. Palin.  Even, I gather, the reviewers of the NYT held the book at arm's length and read it with a peg on their nose.  However, let me be clear, just about everyone in the world does stupid, wrong things when they are young, and that includes Mrs. Palin.  A lady as stunningly attractive as her will have had temptation laid before her and the odds are that she succumbed to one or two of them.  The nature of her alleged misdemeanors seem confined to her youth when she smoked some weed, sniffed a bit of coke and had a bit of nooky with a friend - before she was married.  I repeat, none of the sources used by McGinniss are identified.  Until they are, I'm afraid he can, and must, be dismissed as just another lying liar.  At least our Fleet Street hacks have to back up their allegations lest they appear up the Old Bailey to face libel charges.  Apparently, McGinniss has form in this respect having been sued for an earlier book he invented wrote in which, eventually, his publisher had to settle out of court.

Is she backing, determinedly, into the limelight?

She keeps saying 'no', over and over again but, hey, fellas, we know, don't we, that 'no' really means 'yes' when it comes from a woman!  Alas, I have lost the link now but a few days ago she stated that as Secretary of State she is now out of domestic politics and intends that she should remain so.

But even she should know by now that her chances of government office are rapidly dwindling as Obama and his crew swill gently down the plug-hole of history.  According to Bloomberg.com (via Drudge):

The most popular national political figure in America today is one who was rejected by her own party three years ago: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans hold a favorable view of her and one-third are suffering a form of buyer’s remorse, saying the U.S. would be better off now if she had become president in 2008 instead of Barack Obama.

She even scores well amongst her opponents:

A plurality of Tea Party supporters -- 44 percent -- say the U.S. would be better off with Hillary Clinton as president, even though 59 percent of those respondents have an unfavorable impression of her.

Even more important, according to the wise-acres who know about these things 'over there', she scores well amongst independents:

Ninety percent of Democrats like Clinton, compared to 35 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of independents. (My emphasis)

Will she, won't she?  Who knows, but it reminds me of another contrary lady, MDS, who has yet to put up or shut up.  I tremble and could become over-excited at the thought of those two, er, 'sisters' going at it next summer.  Bring it on!

 

Wrong number? Ring Malcolm Pollack!

Feeling philosophical, are you?  Looking for an excuse to get out of the Saturday shopping trip with the missus, or, to avoid starting on the Autumnal garden tidy-up?  Then, pop over to Malcolm's place and waste an entire weekend on the tricky subject of whether numbers exist without Man inventing them.  I had a brief paddle in the shallow end of this deep discussion until my brain started to hurt and I retired to bed last night.  I am happy to say that although they have been hard at it 'over there' during the night no conclusion has been reached and no-one's mind has been changed.  It was ever thus with philosophy!

Today's Special Offer: TWO corkers for the price of one!

The internationally renowned 'David Duff Corker Award' is, as you know, eagerly sought after by the literati of the world.  (Incidentally, should you have been disappointed in the past please do try bribery and/or corruption, I'm not choosey!) Where was I?  Oh, yes, today two proud recipients stand ready to accept, with, I hope, suitably gushing gratitude, their DDCAs.

First, is this week's Spectator.  Alas, you will have to wait a few days before extracts are placed on their website, but that gives you all a good reason to actually go and buy the bloody thing!  Today's edition is absolutely everything that I have always liked about The Spectator, witty, intelligent, perceptive and instructive.  I intend to indulge my innate idleness by quoting from it in the fairly near future but not immediately because I want you to go and buy the bloody thing!  (Am I making myself clear?)

My second grovelling and grateful recipient of his DDCA is the multi-zillion-trillion best selling author, Scott Turow, for his novel Innocent.  (It may well be that given the incredible wealth he has accrued over the years in producing one best seller after another that he might feel impelled to show his gratitude to me in the time honoured fashion!  Well, a man can hope, can't he?)  In this book, he reprises the 'hero' of his very first smash hit Presumed Innocent which later became a film starring Harrison Ford and Greta Scacchi.  To be honest, I can't really remember the details of the first book except that the young 'hero', a budding judge, has a bit on the side, the girl is murdered and the judge is in the dock on a 'murder one' charge.  This second plot takes up the story some 20 years later and, just like the first one, the plot twists and turns and "twists again like it did last summer", or at least, 20 summers ago.  I thought I had spotted the outcome about two thirds of the way in but, guess what, I was wrong - again.  It has a beautifully constructed plot which takes some degrees of concentration to follow but it's worth it.

There you are, you lucky people, two corkers for the price of one.

 

Telling right from wrong

Sorry, but I'm in a philosophical mode at the moment.  I blame my e-pal Malcolm Pollack for starting me off this morning with an irritating conundrum concerning numbers - irritating because so many philosophical problems end up rather like driving round and round a roundabout ad infinitum!  However, it is moral philosophy I wish to ponder this morning.  It has been worrying away at the back of what passes for my mind for some time now and an article in Commentary by Peter Wehner, in which he draws from another article in the NYT by Peter Brooks, has brought it back again.  This particular conundrum is best summed up in my title to this post 'Telling right from wrong'.

According to Brooks:

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

This study confirms with depressing accuracy that whilst notions of 'right' and 'wrong' still exist people, and especially young people, are hopelessly inadequate when it comes to thinking their way through to some conclusions.  Incoherent, when they are not actually silent, when faced with moral dilemmas, almost to a man and a woman they fall back on - feelings!  As Brooks explains:

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Well, the milk was well and truly spilled years ago and a whole new debate can be 'enjoyed' in deciding exactly who the villain was who began it all - Darwin, Nietsche, Ibsen, Marx . . .  you choose!  In the meantime, we must all come to terms with the fact that, like Monty Python's massed crowd, "We're all individuals" now.  And so the question, if I may indulge in some cod-Latin in order to add a spurious veneer of learning to this post, ' qui iudicet?' (who decides?) is now of some importance.  To give but one very recent example from these 'distinguished' columns, yesterday I told the story of a young woman who murdered her baby, lied to the police and then attempted to frame an inncocent man.  I wrote of her in disparaging terms and was instantly reprimanded by one of my e-pal commenters for lack of charity.  Or, if you prefer a more social example closer to home, there was the recent sight and sound of British youth indulging in pillage and murder on our streets followed by a chorus of relative 'moralists' insisting that they were simply misunderstood and lacked love!

So the question looms, like the famous elephant in the living-room, how and who decides what is moral and what is immoral?  The youngsters who were interviewed, being intellectually crippled by an utterly useless education, were unable to use any criteria to decide other than - feelings!

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

I will now indulge myself with a couple of trite clichés: 'nature abhors a vacuum' and 'the devil makes work for idle hands - and minds'!  By which I mean to indicate that a lack of moral rules will quickly be filled by evil under the guise of being the 'New Morals' under which babies will be murdered with impunity because it 'feels' right at the time.

So, what is to be done?  Ah, well, that's the problem, you see, and because it's a philosophical problem there probably isn't an answer!

 

My hero - sort of!

Yes, I know, not exactly good looking is he?  Not likely to excite you ladies, I suppose, well, until you find out that he's worth trillions-of-zillions, that is, in which case you might find him slightly more attractive!

His name is 'Soros, George Soros' and he is licensed to kill - currencies, that is!  I am obliged to 'Publius' at Breitbart Big Government (an excellent site) for reminding me that it was 19 years ago almost to the day that 'Big George' rode to the rescue of Britain by attacking our currency.  It was in 1992 that John Major attempted to ease us into joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the first step to the euro.  Soros really rocked the foreign exchange markets and the ensuing panic resulted, not for the first time, in Britain beating a hasty retreat from the continent and ill-advised foreign adventures.

In America today, Soros is a totally malignant force for evil and it is an irony worth relishing that we have him to thank for our near escape.  Similarly, of course, we should not forget to offer our deep gratitude to GordonBrown(*), another unlikely hero, who later also dug in his heels and refused to allow Blair to take us into the euro.  Statues of both these men should share that empy plinth in Trafalgar Square.  They'd make a nice couple!

(*)  I am grateful to my commenter Andrew Duffin (no relation!) for correcting me when I originally referred to Gordon Brown as 'George' Brown.  That is the second time I have made that mistake, I really think I must consult my psychiatrist because obviously the horrors of George Brown must have deeply disturbed my id, or my wallet, or something!

 

Apocalypse now? Bring it on, baby!

No, seriously, an apocalyptic event could hit at any time.  After all we have just had one very close shave with Al Gore using up most of the oxygen in the world during his 24-hour 'Gore-a-thon' on the subject of global warming.  However, in these dangerous times, happily, we can always rely on good ol' American 'can-do' to get us out of trouble.  So, I am delighted to tell you that I have already received my specially embossed invitation to the brand new, subterranean survivalist shelter currently under construction by one of the very finest porn  adult  sophisticated film companies in California, the Van Nuys-based Pink Visual - 'gotta lurve that name'!  According to CBS Los Angeles:

[...] amenities such as multiple fully-stocked bars, an enormous performing stage and a sophisticated content production studio.

Gosh, a performing stage!  I wonder if they will enjoy my recitation of Shakespeare's sonnets?

“Our goal is nothing less than to survive the apocalypse to come in comfort and luxury,” said Pink Visual spokesman Quentin Boyer, “whether that catastrophe takes the form of fireballs flung earthward by an all-seeing deity, extended torrential rainfall, Biblical rapture, an earthquake-driven mega-tsunami, radioactive flesh-eating zombies, or some combination of the above.”

Crikey!  A "combination of the above" - hardly bears thinking about.  Mind you, I quite like the sound of all that "Biblical rapture", it's bound to have loads of  'begatting' and 'begetting' stuff in it, don't you think?

Of course, you may be wondering how I was chosen for a special invitation to this latter-day Noah's ark.  Well, it came about as a result of me accidentally, I stress that, accidentally, clicking on one of those sites inviting me to watch hours of pussy cats cleaning each other's fur - at least, that's what I thought it meant - and this totally inadvertent 'click' won me a prize!  Unfortunately, the invite does not mention the 'Memsahib', so, not a word, eh?

 

Do NOT read this on a full stomach!

Hitherto, whilst contemplating what goes on 'over there' I have concentrated on the 'good ol' US of A' and rather ignored their somewhat placid and provincial neighbours to the north.  Today, I stumbled upon a Canadian horror story which has forced me to re-appraise the entire country.  It comes from Pyjamas Media who have headlined the story, only slightly innacurately, thus:

Canada Legalizes Infanticide

A 1996 exhibit in Washington DC featured the remains of an Incan child sacrifice.

I read the story whilst sipping my morning coffee - and nearly spewed the lot over my keyboard!  There are two villainesses in this repellant tale.  The first is Katrina Effert who, in 2005, at the age of 19, gave birth to a baby son secretly in the basement of her house in order to avoid telling her parents.  When the baby began to cry - and please make sure you are not eating or drinking now - she strangled him with a pair of thongs and then tossed his little body into the next door neighbour's backyard like a piece of garbage.  When the body was found and the police began to investigate she told them it could not be her because she was still a virgin.  This was disproved and so she then tried to frame her boyfriend by saying that she had given her baby to him.  In her subsequent trial the prosecutors used her lying and framing of her innocent boyfriend to bring charges of murder rather than infanticide.  They needed that extra evidence because in Canada, that bastion of liberal opinion, infanticide is not considered to be a crime, merely a 'mental aberration' brought about by the 'suffering' that women go through in giving birth.  How billions of women have managed this feat without slaughtering their babies is not considered by the liberal judiciary of Canada to be of any importance.  Anyway, this hag was duly found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.  Personally, I would have strangled her with a pair of her own thongs!

So, exit 'Lady MacBeth', but now, enter her twin sister, in the deeply unlovely guise of Judge Joanne Veit who presided over a second trial brought about by Effert's lawyers who claimed that the murder charge was wrong and that it should have been infanticide for which, in Canada, the maximum penalty is 5 years!  From Pyjamas Media:

According to Veit the murderess is the victim:

Queen’s Bench Justice Joanne Veit rejected the Crown’s call for a four-year prison term — which she described as “essentially” seeking the maximum five-year punishment when taking into account the time Effert has already spent behind bars and under strict bail conditions.

Based on the fact infanticide has not been struck from the Criminal Code and it has no minimum penalty, Veit said she feels Canadians “understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support.

“Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother,” said Veit.(PM's emphasis) 

Alas, I cannot find a photo of Judge Veit and so any resemblance to this woman must be entirely coincidental:

Irma Greese

Only one conclusion can be drawn from this bestial story.  In my eyes Canada, as a nation, now ranks somewhere between Zimbabwe and North Korea.  If I ever hear another Canadian liberal preaching and prating on the subject of human rights I shall simply shout out "Baby Effert" and "Vile Veit" before trying to find a shotgun!

Er, sorry to have spoiled your day!

 

 

Yes, I think on the whole that Ian Welsh is a total tit!

Who he, you demand to know?  Well, for starters, Ian Welsh appeared briefly, very briefly, in my blog roll in which I indicated, using my ultra sophisticated(!) code system that I only read him occasionally and that his content was questionable.  He's an out and out Leftie, you see, so naturally I would tend to question anything he wrote.  Still, I have been searching for some Leftie blogs, civilised ones, that is, in the hope of being able to enjoy some lively conversation and at first I thought he was one.  Oh dear, wrong, again!

I left, or if you prefer, deposited, some comments which seemed to pass without too much reaction and, beginning to think that, at last, I had found a civilised North American Left-wing blog. I decided to place him on my blog roll.  No sooner done than I was censored and banned!  I sent him the following letter:

Dear Mr. Welsh,

I attempted to leave a further comment on your site but I suspect I am now well and truly banned.  In it, I wondered why, given that whilst my comments are sometimes tart, they are never personal, gratuitously offensive, use foul language, abuse or whatever, and yet you censor them? 

I am curious as to why it is that you (and others, mostly on the Left but no doubt you have your counterparts on the Right) find it so repugnant to converse with someone who has opposite opinions from your own?  I mean, why bother to blog at all?  Blogging is after all, a means of offering up a ‘space’ for public discourse so why do you shy away from it like a frightened mare? 

Also, I am curious as to how a man who no doubt considers and describes himself as a ‘liberal’ justifies to himself the act of censorship, not aimed at words considered illegal or libelous or offensive, but against ‘mere opinion’?  How do you do it?  And if you cannot face an opposite opinion, why bother to blog at all?  Surely it would be simpler to just e-mail yourself every morning! 

‘Jest askin’!’ 

By the by, only a few days ago I re-organised my blog roll and included your link and now you have gone and disappointed me – tut, tut! 

David Duff

Needless to say, reply came there none.  I should have suspected something like that from a man who describes himself as "an editor, writer and social media consultant" although the editing jobs he lists are all in the past.  And what is a "social media consultant" when it's at home?

A few years ago I used to have a running post headed "The Street of Shame" which listed all the Leftie sites which banned me.  In the end, the list became so extended I gave up.  Pity, because that's where this particular 'social media consultant' belongs.

Incidentally, the honour of American blogdom is still upheld by Fallen Monk and Why Now, both of whom, through gritted teeth, I'm sure, continue to accept my comments.