The Cad Fad
Congratulations, Boris Johnson.
You lied and cheated your way to the top.
But politics is a dirty game and you didn’t create the conflict — just amplified what was already there.
It would be unfair to pretend you aren’t a shrewd operator.
That your recent partnership with Tory PR Queen Carrie Symonds wasn’t a master stroke.
I think it important at this stage that the nation gets behind you, at least for a moment, as leader.
We all want the best for the country.
The fact that you are totally corrupt, and turn a blind eye to everything from child abuse to full scale corporate criminality is an absolute disgrace — but also a fact of life in modern Britain.
I’m not saying we should give up on exposing bad practice — but the media does a brilliant job of covering it up.
Now is the time for reading small print and holding power to account.
Never Mind the Backstop
This is my first musical adventure on this website.
Big thanks are due to John Ford Blagger for coaxing me out of Accapella and to Ｉ．Ｋ．Ｂｏｎｚｕｍｐｆｅｒｌ for all the fabulous production pointers.
This one’s called “Nevermind the Backstop” by Obstakula Vernakula.
Versailles — The Remix
I don’t believe Frau Von Der Leyen has yet been subjected to much critique on these pages.
She was crowned President of the European Commission a little later than planned.
This was due to some of her proposed Commissioners being turned down.
The original French nominee, Sylvie Goulard, was rejected due to ongoing fraud / corruption charges at EU level.
Of course this didn’t stop Christine Lagarde becoming head of the IMF and subsequently becoming the Chair of the European Central Bank.
For those of you who do not self-identify as Bank-Watchers here is a picture of Ms Lagarde on one of her first days in office, check out the ratio:
Twas pointed out that there are more painted women on the walls than real women around the table.
The reason why it is only white men in the ECB offices in this photo is that they are the sitting Chairmen of the various national European Central Banks.
They just happen to all be middle aged white guys.
Which makes perfect sense to me – but doesn’t stop the photo being a PR disaster.
The ECB and the rest of the EU institutions seem indifferent to even the notion of the real time PR disaster.
And why should they care?
They are all civil servants on pukka pensions and it is their organisation that has all the authority.
The media can dance to their tune.
But it is civil society’s ire they should do be doing more to assuage.
Which they never do.
Apparently there was a €1 trillion Green EU stimulus launched this week.
Which I’m guessing will have some impact on some bond market somewhere.
Either creating a new market and more places for pension funds to invest or cannibalising another market that would have been trying to achieve the same goal organically before the influx of EU capital.
Green finance isn’t new.
Former UK Chancellor Philip Hammond championed London as a global centre of Green Finance even as he was voting to expand Heathrow Airport.
He did this with no sense of awkwardness and no platform of note so much as batted an eyelid.
The other Phil, Phil Hogan is the new Irish Commissioner for trade.
He will be replacing Michel Barnier and has a tough reputation.
Hogan used to be Commissioner for agriculture.
How is this going to work?
Border in the Irish Sea and corporation tax competition.
Surely this will herald a race to the bottom.
Thierry Breton is the French Commissioner for the Single Market.
This means that among other things he is in charge of Defence.
Till last month Breton was head of ATOS, the firm that sent long term sick people to work, in the UK, and cut their benefits.
Breton has already therefore had a hand in killing hundreds of innocent disabled Brits.
This list of deaths can be added to the bodycount from his time at France Telecom / Orange, the company with one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
So Breton has killed the public and killed his staff.
Which makes him EU Corporate Criminal Aristocracy.
Apparently the EU Single Army and ECB QE will keep Britain entangled in EU affairs for a long time to come.
UK Column is particularly good on this.
The EU stitch up is worth returning to at some stage. . .
Patronic Relationship
There is a puff piece in the FT about MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. It touches on the killing of Jamal Kashoggi but praises MBS for “ripping up the rule book” and liberalising the country.
The re-opening of the old town Diriyah, Anthony Joshua’s recent fight there, the opening of cinemas and allowing women to drive are all seen as sign that MBS is liberalising.
But feminism itself is not welcome in Saudi Arabia. MBS has arrested many women’s rights activists despite recently bringing an end to the country’s ban on gender segregation in restaurants.
But the real news in Saudi from a business perspective has been the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of the Saudi State oil firm ARAMCO on the Saudi Stock Exchange.
Interesting to compare the EU Climate Stimulus and the Aramco Float.
They supposedly stand for the exact opposite. One to transition us away from the other.
The EU refer to being Climate Neutral. Does this mean Saudi Oil will not be penetrating fortress Europe? Likewise for Russian Gas?
Or does it instead mean that the same EU / US banks and energy trading firms are right behind both strategies which, rather than reducing emissions and consequently pollution, will instead have a net effect that approximates to somewhere around zero.
Dodgy Derivatives
Richard Sandor must be licking his lips at the chance to develop new climate futures markets. The contradiction at the heart of these ponzi schemes appears to simply go without saying. There used to be organisations called Carbon Trade Watch and CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) Watch that tracked the fraud that is Carbon Finance.
Energy-Based Currency
My friend Roger Lewis in Sweden is very good on this stuff.
He blogs prolifically.
Though I often can’t keep up with his writing, his source material is brilliant.
In conversation he always explains what he really means, which for newbies like me is useful.
Roger and I speak on Skype quite frequently and strands of his thinking often appear on this website.
We sometimes upload the chats to Bitchute or YouTube.
Roger has read a lot more than me on many different topics and will helpfully quote relevant poets and philosophers to help get me over the line.
If you like any of what I write about, do check out his work.
He currently tweets on WIKI Ballot.
Transactional Analysis
I’ve been learning how to do speech bubbles.
A friend has patiently trained me up (online) to do this using IMAGEMAGICK on the command line.
My father was a mainframe programmer (for ARAMCO) so it is nice for me to suddenly be writing out code for something i find meaningful.
That’s the thing about learning. If it isn’t useful, why would you remember?
The Toxic Sludge is Good for You line is taken from a 1994 book by John Stauber (and others). It is a study of the PR industry. I thoroughly recommend it.
John Stauber is still around and tweeted this a few hours ago.
It took me a bit longer than I would have liked to do the speech bubbling yesterday, but I enjoyed it and feel my new image policy has already given my output, and specifically my writing, a new lease of life.
Big Thanks to ImageMagick and toＩ．Ｋ．Ｂｏｎｚｕｍｐｆｅｒｌ !
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