Happy New Year!

 Hi All,

Shabbat Shalom and Happy New Year !

UK's oldest Black bookshop to close

 Hi All,

How terrible 

Although I'm not sure having an excusive bookshop which focuses on one's racial identity rather than selling good stories and academic works for all people is actually the best idea in the world.

To Stop the NHS from collapse ... when it already has

 Hi All, 

The real rationale for lockdowns is that we have to stop the NHS from collapse at all costs: none one wants to see hospitals overwhelmed with patients and people being left on trollies to die. Why would be get into this in the first place? Because the  NHS is actually like a old Soviet Style industry in that it can do outputs (production), but doesn't respond to inputs (response to patients) : the Soviet bloc might have been able to produce a million tractors a year, but it couldn't cope with the fact people didn't need or want that many tractors, but might have wanted loo roll or jeans instead . Likewise the NHS is good when it is in full 'command economy' mode as we see when it was tasks with the vaccine rollouts, but bad in coping when patients come to them for treatment on an individual level.

Where the NHS is less good at is the input from the patient  side or the consumer if you like : if you are lucky to get an ambulance in time (and the call centres get drunks calling up demanding ambulances to take them home as they don't want to pay taxi fares)  you might survive a heart attack . But beyond this 'emergency' treatment it is appalling at follow up care. A friend of mine, his father had multiple heart attacks during the pandemic, was taken to A&E department, kept overnight and discharged on multiple occasions . To cut a long story short he was supposed to have stents and then pacemaker fitted (which also came with a monitoring set). Because of covid it took over a year and more heart attacks  for these operations to be done. 

Thus in order to 'cope' with covid and even with a lockdown in force, the NHS itself was forced into a lockdown. From friends who work in the NHS it went like this : GP's just went to ground and were MIA, in hospitals they were cancelling most of what they actually does on a day to day basis and more . It allowed its managers and secretarial staff to go and 'work from home' and where it actually needed help was in the form of 'health care assistants' or nurses as they used to be known in the twentieth century,  before it was decided to try and elevate  nurses into cheaper variants of Doctors. When they did  redeployed staff  from other services which were shut down, it was as healthcare assistants, who had to suffer under the nurses whilst their own services were in effect closed. I think though, the fertility and abortion departments were allowed to remain open. 

When it came to the spring and summer, all of a sudden the directive went out to reopen these 'non essential' services aka 95% of the NHS and because they'd been closed down for so long, a massive backlog was created which like the production of loo roll in the Soviet Union was suddenly a priority because the papers were now picking up on the fact that people were dying of non covid stuff too and that could have been prevented. 

Thankfully that was last year and this year people say to me that shutting down the NHS as it was last year isn't the way they are going to do things, the vaccine and booster jabs have helped in that respect . But to my mind, it seems that the NHS wasn't actually 'saved' by a lockdown because it was already collapsed, for the only way it did survive was to recast itself as a covid health service. 

Now the left will want to throw more money at the NHS. The right will talk about 'reform'. Neither approach will work. Throwing money at a Soviet style industry won't make things better. The right wing view of 'reform' is not privatisation, but something worse which is outsourcing, wherein more and more parts of the NHS are contracted out to private companies for them to make a nice juicy profit, but at taxpayer's expense and not out of their own efforts. For example patient transport is outsourced to private companies as are things like cleaning and maintenance.. the same thing happens in local government and of course railways . The stories I've heard about how these  contractors totally rip off the public purse and no-one does anything about it is unbelievable and it is one of the worse aspects of libertarian conservative dogma. In fact none of this is actually libertarian or conservatism, but crony rentier corporatism. 

The House of Commons isn't a Creche

 Hi All, 

Stella Creasy is yet again making news with the idea that she should be able to  take her 13 week old baby into the House Of Commons Creche, Chamber; having been told she couldn't she has now been told she can, if the chair of the day agrees to it. Creasy didn't like this suggestion. 

But why should this nonsense be entertained in the first place : the House is our legislature, debating chamber and national platform for ideas and policy: the place wherein the government of the day is called to account for what it does and doesn't do. It is not a creche and it is not a 'normal' workplace, if there is anything such as normal workplace. I don't think anyone, for example, would agree that you could take a child into a mine, if you were a miner. Or if you were a soldier to take your child into combat.

Creasy's counter to this is the usual thing about  having pay for child care, which is a good point and welcome to the real world. I know several mums who  are middle-class and want 'it all' i.e. career continuation  and 2.4 children, a 4 by 4 and 2 holidays one abroad, one at the holiday cottage, with £2,000 wigs and the like. These 'types' actually spend most of their money on child care and seem quite bitter & think like Creasy the state should either force businesses to have creche's or to pay for childcare so they don't have to make difficult choices about what they want to do in life. The other mums I know go to work because they have NO CHOICE, either because they can barely keep a roof over their head (even with a partner/spouse/husband also earning) and also have to pay child care costs, but don't moan about it, as they'd love not to be working in Primark, Tesco and the Pub. 

I really have no time for this idea, because whilst being a politician is work and they have a working environment, to my mind this is like suggesting clergy have 'a job' and not a calling for leadership in the community which goes well beyond a usual 9-5: politicians don't of course work 9-5 and this is part of the deal and it is a deal almost every politician knows they're getting. Yes they are seemingly either a work in the chamber, in their constituencies and having to do tv anytime, but that's part of the MP's role.  They get £80,000 a year, plus expenses and expenses which enable you to own a house in London and a house in your constituency (which is a brilliant retirement pot right there), plus 100% final salary pension  and as for the work place you have subsidized bars, pubs and restaurants wherein the prices are the same as a student common room £3 a pint , compared to almost £10 pint in central London. If they loose their seats or retire, then boardrooms beckon, not just in the private sector, but also in the multiple QUANGOS and other government agencies. 

Shabbat Shalom!

 Hi All,

Open thread as usual.

Happy Christmas, Merry  Chrismukkah and Seasons greetings!

Chrismukkah/Winterville and Happy Holidays

 Hi All, 

How much 'Wokery' can I squeeze out of this?  😎

What are you reading during Chrismukkah?

 Hi All,

Right now I have three books on my reading list and a summary of each: 

1. Crashed - a reasonably highbrow book written by Adam Tooze about the financial crisis of 2008 and how it also caused the European crisis, Trump and Brexit. This is the one I'm reading now and it is fascinating to pick up on the fact that no matter how much Germany and especially France bash 'anglo -saxon' banking, they were in the trough of greed and stupidity as much as anyone else and were in fact bailed out by the same 'anglo-saxons' they like to publicly criticise. 

2. Billion Dollar Whale- this focuses on the actions of Jho Low, who became a billionaire by helping himself to the cookie jar of a Malaysian Wealth Fund and who is currently on the run from the FBI.

3. Trump Revealed - got this at the bargain price of £1 from WH Smith's 'clearance' shelf. It focuses on Trump up to the point of him becoming President. I haven't read it yet, but it will be interesting to read because of the lack of retrospect that taints some biography,  to see how people thought of him before his term of office started and finished. 

But what are you reading this festive season? 

G20 love island

 Hi All,

LOL!

Shabbat Shalom!

Hi all, 

Open thread as usual.

New Reichskanzler und Fuhrer For Europa live from the Volkshalle (Brussels)

 Hi All,

Great News you  Europa VOLK ! Europe has a new Reichskanzler und Fuhrer after the wonderful Merkel has finally gone (tearful guardian types - if Merkel had been in Britain you'd have hated her as a vile Tory,given her own 'austerity' and balanced budget ideology  but a she's not British, but  European, so let's make her into a sainted figure!).

Ban Fags but legalise other drugs : New Zealand's socialist hypocritical madness

 Hi All, 

News from the Colonies  and it is grave  : New Zealand's bonkers socialist regime has gone full middle class native, ban fags, but allow recreational and hitherto illegal drugs, i.e. champagne socialist middle class acceptance of drugs, but dislike of having a good old fag:   New Zealand has decided to ban fags, but is easing laws on illegal 'recreational' drugs. 

Ridiculous socialist control freek  nonsense!

Prohibition will only give the trade to criminals and mafia types...

Poor old New Zealand. 

The Bling of The Old Lady

 Hi All,

WOW!  Despite the fact that arch-moron Gordon Brown flogged off a lot of our gold at rock bottom prices in the late 1990s, we've still got billions worth of Gold in the secret vaults and labyrinths of the Bank of England, 

Here's a  look at the Bank of England's vaults of Gold Bricks and Bars  - interesting about how the New York Fed has a different shape of gold bar because of the Fed is on 'bedrock' vs our clay and that Canada served as a deposit for gold during the war .  : 

Well cool!

UK divided

 Hi All, 

There are many different dimensions, parallel and alternative universes. This is just one of them

1st August  2020

After 4 years it was all done : the UK was out of the EU and the UK was out of the UK, one nation indivisible was now 3: Gweriniaeth Cymru, The Kingdom of England, The Republic of Scotland. Northern Ireland had been absorbed into the Irish Southern Republic.

There was a refugee crisis brewing on the Cymru-English border, as thousands of English people fled Wales and its new language law and police, pouring out into the Herefordshire and Shropshire counties with nothing other than their vans and cars. Cymru itself was facing decades of austerity after joining the Euro, which put an end to any dreams of a socialist revolution and the mass exodus of the English resident in Wales, which didn’t bother nationalists, although it did bother those who had to make a living by other means than fanning faux nationalist sentiment.

In Northern Ireland, the Southern leadership cursed the day that the voters in that province had voted to join with them: it was one thing to use Irish nationalist romantic  propaganda especially in the EU or in New York, but when it actually came to it, Northern Ireland need so much, too much money, there was talk of another IMF bailout.  Violence had already broken out in the North and the UN- peacekeeping force led by the Peruvians were dismissed as a ‘Papal Legion’ and the ‘Pope’s Jackboots’  by the Province’s now minority Protestants, even though the Peruvian Brigadier in charge  was in fact of Japanese -Mormon heritage.

In Scotland it was a time of merriment, not just because it was late December, but because they were in the EU, with the Euro as a safe haven currency, lots of funding, and looking elsewhere a chance to gloat: especially against the English Sassenachs ,although nationalists had no idea what to do with the “48ters” who still opposed the creation of their republic, the austerity budget that Brussels had given the Scottish finance Ministry and the problem that Scotland was now responsible for 2 banks whose balance sheet was as big as America’s GDP: the government hadn’t told its anti-war, pro woke -and if it had still existed- anti-NATO membership that it had been forced to agree to give to the Europeans, numerous military bases including Faslane, where the French intended to base their 3^rd fleet of nuclear submarines, which was strange as when it was British subs over there…. There was no public comment on the plans by Brussels that would mean conscription into a Euro-Defence Force.

What then of Merry olde England? England was facing threats on numerous fronts: at the UN there were calls for her to loose her permanent seat at the top table, Spain and Argentina were beating the drums of war over Gibraltar and the Falklands. The English were more or less at war with the French, who were letting refugees across the channel and arming their fishing trawlers.  The Defence forces, what was left of them,  had lost all of their bases in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which was especially a problem for the nuclear missile armed submarines. Whilst England had held the space colonies, they too were being threatened by a coalition of vultures when seemingly wanted to pick on the bones of a now third rate power.

 The economy was doing badly as well : to balance the budget and reduce the national debt to under 100% of GDP came at a cost of an austerity bill that made Greece look like they’d saved a couple of pence. With the Pound linked to the liquidium standard, to maintain the peg,  interest rates remained incredibly high at 35%, which meant that unemployment was 50% of the workforce and rising.

Politically the country had seem 5 Prime Ministers come and go over 5 years, with the Conservatives and Labour forming a ‘grand coalition’, that sometimes included the liberals and greens. Those on the Brexit right and left, who’d gone off to form multiple parties, were kept out of power, which galvanised them to form ‘the English Way’ party, which predicably was decried as ‘fascist, alt right, xenophobic’ etc. It was assumed that in the election being held today, Labour would win, especially since it had finally managed to find a ‘moderate’ soft left  leader that the BBC and Guardian could rally behind.  For their part, the conservative party was split and divided and in all honesty couldn’t have formed a coherent government if it had won.

The results therefore came as a stock to the Metropolitan elite, especially in London. The exit poll had predicted a narrow Labour win, but when the first results came in from the North East, The English Way party took Sunderland South from Labour. By the end of the night they’d stormed the ‘red wall’ of the Labour North, did well in the Midlands and blown a gap in the Tories Southern ‘Blue barns’, but London was the nut they couldn’t crack, only wining 1 MP there. The final result was tallied at English Way 267, Labour 139, Conservative 117, Liberal Democrat 9 and Green 1.  Whilst this was a majority of only 1 seat, the English Way had done what no other political party had ever done and that was to smash up the two party system and become a governing party within 1 general election.

The English Way was of course instantly dismissed by the left as ‘not my government’ on social media with the predictable  ‘racist, homophobic, xenophobic, fascist, Nazis like nativists who are also colonialist  Zionists’. However of its 267 MPs, 67 were BAME, 22 were gay or Lesbian and there were 11 non-human British citizens: religiously its caucus contained 176 Christians, 25 Jews, 20 Hindus, 10 Muslims, 4 Buddhists, 8 atheists, 2 Mormons and 22 ‘other’.  Exactly what it wanted to do was vague, other than ‘no to economic welfare leeches, end austerity, get England back to work’, but the country would soon find out.

A-team/Trek Crossover

 Hi All,

LOL!

Oh What a Fight!

 Hi All,

A parody song of the famous Kirk-Gorn fight of Star Trek the Original Series. Whilst the Gorn only appeared in this episode and one other, in the 'extended universe' they are recurring villains and allies in Star Trek.