Feeling Lucky? – HMG IQ in Doubt – Woke Jocks – Immigration SNAFU - Dying Davos – UK's Long Road – Dead Loss - Rotten Apples - Letter from Great Britain - [02-04-23]
“…doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, MSM destroy information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy”
NEWS FLASH – "The Balloon's Gone Up!" - as we used to say in the war – now it's happened again: "Balloons called top ‘delivery platform’ for nuclear EMP attack" Read on https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/02/03/dry-run-balloons-called-top-delivery-platform-for-nuclear-emp-attack/
AIRLINE TIDBIT: Do you feel lucky punk? Well do you, if you fly today? Brought to you by one of my dedicated readers, Hat Tip Nostradamus: "Deadly Skies Over America: FAA Moves Medical Goalposts for Pilots - Putting Your Life At Risk https://rairfoundation.com/deadly-skies-faa-moves-medical-goalposts-for-pilots-putting-your-life-at-risk/ Pilot Dies During Take-off in Chicago, "The Captain is Out" [6 min ATC live audio]
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK: How intelligent are our politicians? I ask this because, for the life of me, I can't figure how these cretins make so many illogical and crass decisions like the HS2 electric train set expected to consume £160Bn in the end and might be ready by 2045. They say ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee’ – read on for the proof of it:
Well, now I have an answer from this 2019 article which I have précised; the writer says: "I was given the insight of one old hand, who warned me that the collective IQ of a meeting, regardless of the above-average intellect of all the individuals taking part, was that of a typical 11-year-old. But the collective level of emotional intelligence of such a group is more like that of an 8-year-old. Boys of that age, once they get over-excited, are to say the least unpredictable. Merely a day spent in the public gallery at the House of Commons will convince you of this as fact.
This is a rating slightly more than the average horse and certainly explains the inexplicable actions of our infantile rulers. This chaotic and juvenile collective exuberance was on display in the House of Commons after the result of the "indicative votes" on Wednesday night, regarding future Brexit policy. I have to say it looked to me as if Mr Bercow (the then Speaker) was stirring it up rather than calming it down. Perhaps his emotional age is eight too!
We are not dealing with adults, but children who look like adults, as emotion always trumps rational argument. The emotions on display in the Westminster bear-pit are those of the playground: personal jealousy and rivalry, ambition and top-doggery, feuds, vendettas and ostracism, name-calling, sexism and petty spite as well as a good deal of bullying - looking at you Mr. Raab.
Children can be at least as cruel as adults. Face-saving is an equally strong factor: children hate to look silly and politicians will interminably lie and cheat to save face. This article also contains a neat look in the Brexit rear-view mirror explaining why these political infants are still arguing about it. No wonder nothing gets done these days as Britain continues its drift into oblivion: https://www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/1/1234/is-the-collective-of-iq-of-the-house-of-commons-that-of-an-11-year-old-
BREAKING NEWS: Is Scotland becoming the WOKEST country? Just how did Scotland get so Woke? We constantly hear about how unpopular Sturgeon’s mad policies are with voters, yet she continues to push the country into ever more radical territory. This week has seen her humiliated and in retreat following HMG's rejection of her crazy transgender law to allow rapist males into female prisons.
Following a public uproar, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was forced to overrule the Scottish Prison Service and order the prisoner’s relocation. But the fact that the Scottish justice system put a violent man in a women’s prison in the first place suggests a country in the grip of its own identity crisis.
Sturgeon is a disgrace and needs to be deposed as soon as possible before her psychotic malfunction infects the sane majority. Emily Carver at GB News tells the searing truth about all this nonsense with some very good advice:
But lest we get too serious about something which will pass into obscurity in due course, here's a clip which sums up these Woke SNP cretins from a BBC satirical series with 'Glaswegian Street Philosopher', Rab C. Nesbitt, having a good rant about the government and life in general in the 1980s:
IMMIGRATION HAS BEEN A MASSIVE problem for decades at Britain's Home Office (HO). We are now seeing thousands of 'boat people' arrive in droves whenever the weather is favourable in the Channel after 45,756 crossed last year. But I ask, what the hell is going on in this major ministry of the British Establishment? Something is badly wrong here. HO wants to be seen as competent and tough, yet struggles to show evidence that its policies are even functioning at all, to the extent that I am forced to conclude that HMG has a deliberate policy of inaction - something at which the Deep State are masters.
"The Home Office has “no idea” what its Immigration Enforcement Directorate’s £400 million annual spending achieves", said the Public Accounts Committee in September 2020. It concluded that: "Despite years of public debate and interest in immigration, the Department still does not know the size of the illegal population or have a clear grasp of the harm the illegal population causes". https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmpubacc/407/40705.htm
The Home Office sets policy for policing, counter-terrorism, fire brigades and border control. From the perspective of the people at the top, it has a simple purpose: keeping the public safe. It’s about “stopping bad things from happening”, quipped one former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith. But its policy departments are dwarfed by its operational arm, which is mostly dedicated to monitoring the 6.2 million foreign citizens who live in the UK, along with the many people who visit the country each year.
Of the 33,000 civil servants the department employs, 27,000 work in borders, immigration and citizenship – a section of the Home Office that is part police state, part welfare state and part money-making scheme. This section runs its own police forces and prisons. It is in charge of housing and a benefits system for asylum seekers.
It has the power to spy on people, to raid their homes, to render them destitute, to lock them up indefinitely and to deport them. It does all this on a relatively small Whitehall budget, much of which is clawed back through fees for visa, citizenship and passport applications.
For example on visas, the department is allowed to make a 103% profit! These fees are extortionate – I know because it cost me £8,000 in 2009-2014 to allow my South African wife to remain in UK. In South Africa it cost me nothing to obtain permanent residence.
At the head of this state-within-a-state – much of which barely existed 20 years ago – is the Home Secretary, whose direct personal control of the immigration divisions helps make them one of the most powerful individuals in government.
A new IT system, introduced in 1996 to speed up the processing of asylum applications, failed to work, causing a huge backlog. Case files piled so high that the Home Office had to rent out storage units to hold them all, and a chorus of dissenting voices rightly accused the government of losing control of the country’s borders back in 2001. David Blunkett was then Home Secretary (2001-04), and described his first impression of the department as a shambles. “They were losing the application forms,” he said. “They were losing the passports and the documentation.” They even lost my wife's South African passport in 2013 so clearly nothing much has changed.
In one notorious episode in 2003, Downing Street collaborated with the Sun newspaper on a special “asylum week”, a series of articles that began on a Monday with a piece headlined “Halt the asylum tide now” and ended on a Friday with a column by Blunkett promising “draconian” measures to clamp down on illegal immigration. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/13/cruel-paranoid-failing-priti-patel-inside-the-home-office . Thus why do I suspect clandestine motives here? If it's just SNAFU then everything is indeed lost for Britain - you can’t make this up!
NOW THE DUST HAS SETTLED at the Swiss orgy resort, thankfully this is my last mention of DavosMan who is oblivious of the fact that the great unwashed have lost all faith in the Establishment elites and their corrupt global institutions. I am obliged to Mike Wills at the Daily Maverick in South Africa for a final tribute (lightly edited).
"Davos is a smug, self-important, financial elites' annual talking shop held in a magical world high in the Swiss Alps that generates nothing of value except for meaningless hot air and excessive carbon emissions.
For 52 long years this pathetic Alpine waffle was yet again embraced by “the good and the great” at the World Economic Forum to ponder this year’s jargon-jumble theme — Cooperation in a Fragmented World, whatever that means, and spiced with a prominent appearance of Henry Kissinger (who at 99 is not long for this world thank God). His ridiculous proposal for Russia to withdraw its forces from all seized territory including Crimea merely indicates his continued disconnect with reality.
His world-view was outdated 40 years ago when he was awarded the most tainted Nobel Peace Prize in history for grudgingly caving into almost all the demands made by the North Vietnamese to end the war, in which he had played such a massive and secretive role, described so well in the William Shawcross book Sideshow
At least many luminaries sensibly failed to attend Davos this year but others who did have completely missed the zeitgeist. Davos is not the place to be seen. It is the place not to be seen anywhere near, precisely because it is such a monumental gathering of pretend plutocratic sex-pests with fanciful motives of world domination
Being at Davos this year was not a sign that 'you have made it', it is a very sure sign that 'you don’t get it'. “It” being a deep distrust of the established order in every form and a view that a smug, self-important, financial elite in the disconnected world of the Swiss Alps generates nothing other than bonanza profits for pimps, obscene expense accounts, hot air and carbon emissions.
Yet devoted DavosMan still doesn’t get it. Their arrogance disguises their lack of self-awareness to see how utterly useless their musings have been in the real world. In January 2008 they all pondered “The Power of Collaborative Innovation”. Shortly after, the globe went sub-primal and collapsed with Davos being non-the-wiser.
Merely a year later they were back at it again under the umbrella of “Shaping the post-crisis world”. Just check the breath-taking arrogance in the epithet that Davos are shaping the world. Such hubris gives credence to the New World Order conspiracies because the geriatric Bond villain, Klaus Schwab, genuinely believes that his 'heavyweight technocrats' can successfully manage our world on a global scale.
Schwab is just another deluded megalomaniac, in common with the likes of Sepp Blatter at Fifa, in his desire to be seen as a world leader and shaker yet failing on all counts. The best treatment is easy, just ignore them all, laugh at them and DO NOT COMPLY.
INFLATION WATCH: The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, has warned UK households that there is still a “long way to go” before the cost of living crunch is brought under control. After lifting interest rates to 4% on Thursday, the highest level since 2008, Bailey said that the UK had not won its battle against inflation. He also said: "We have started to turn a corner but there’s a long way to go and there’s a lot of risks.”
However, Bailey told reporters yesterday that pay in the private sector had been rising faster than the Bank expected with workers seeking increases to offset inflation. "The pace of wage increases will determine what future action the Bank takes", he explained.
These increases are devastating millions of Brits, even those with middle-class incomes which many would envy. Here's a typical example: For Philip (42) a police officer from West Sussex, the Bank’s announcement means his family’s mortgage repayments will soon rise by 50% and will become unaffordable unless he and his wife generate higher earnings.
He has to re-negotiate his modest £260,000 mortgage by the end of March, and is looking at a provisional rate of 4.9%, but it could go higher by then, which would add £500 to his current payments of £1,050 a month. “The increase from our current fixed 1.5% is eye-watering, and adds to our overall sense of financial insecurity, especially with household bills rising. Our joint income of £85,000pa is not enough to keep paying our mortgage. We’ve got two young children, childcare costs and no financial wriggle room,” He goes on:
"We’re unlikely to meet payments from April unless we find more work. I need to seek overtime; my wife will have to work additional hours. We may have to deploy family members to provide more childcare. We can’t save, so have no resilience if anything significant goes wrong. If inflation continues, we may have to take on a third job between us, or downsize to a smaller property."
Wow, this certainly puts depressed Brits into perspective. If you can't manage on £85k how much does a regular family need to manage these days? The median average salary for those working full-time is £33,000. The median average salary for all employees in the UK is £27,756. The median average salary for part-time employees is £12,247.
SURVIVAL MONITOR: My survival plan calls first for the defeat of Wokerism because we will need every healthy, rational strong hand to manage our local economies; it looks like reality is breaking through as Woke becomes a Dead Loss, according to a news snippet this week:
"The problem with being Woke is that inevitably, your distorted view of the world collides with reality and from there things go off the rails. Right now, the 'Woke idiots' - people who live in delusional worlds of make believe biology, economics, vaccines and more - are increasingly being hit by real world effects that are traumatizing their fragile minds.
Their friends are dying from vaccines, skyrocketing food inflation, widespread layoffs, crumbling power grids and more. All these things are fast becoming a reality as Woke cretins inadvertently find themselves stumbling through the hellhole worlds they've created with their outrageous ideas of nefarious intent.
This psychological trauma is causing many of these people to lose their grip on reality. They are snapping, often resorting to violence or suicide as the depressing reality of their collapsing artificial worlds sinks in."
THE NARRATIVE BATTLE: It's unusual for me to agree with the MSM but this week we are in accord: 'The Mirror' says the Nadhim Zahawi affair shows the Conservative Party is “rotten to the core”, quoting a key Tory as saying: “You cannot move for dirt.” It's rare to find all the apples in the barrel are rotten. With the story dominating leading papers this week, the 'Financial Times' even said the sacking represents a “significant U-turn” for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who only weeks ago insisted Zahawi had “addressed this matter in full”, while the 'Metro' assured the former chairman is “Nada sorry at all”.
Whilst Zahawi’s dismissal marks the end of this particular dump in the Tory Party cesspit, this spectacular red card has put our tastelessness, cheap and vulgar apology of a government into the communal Sinbin already marred by accusations of continual sleaze during their 13 years of misrule.
Now I invoke the memorable speech first used by Oliver Cromwell (1653) and latterly truncated to be addressed appropriately to Boris Johnson: "It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice. Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government. Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not process? So! Take away that shining bauble there [the Mace], and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!"
This 'Wreck of the Hesperus' Tory maladministration (meaning appropriately 'in a ruined state') has dug its own grave and I will be reporting more on this death march next week.
UNTIL NEXT WEEK:
For more, read: “The Financial Jigsaw”: Scroll: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358117070_THE_FINANCIAL_JIGSAW_-_PART_1_-_4th_Edition_2020 including regular updates. For a free PDF copy e-Books, Parts 1 & 2, email; peter@underco.co.uk
AUSTRIAN'S NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE: https://www.theburningplatform.com/author/austrian-peter/
COVID & FINANCE LINKS: [I will not be commenting specifically on Covid in future because my colleague covers daily updates at his websites]: SPREAD THE WORD: YOUR DAILY COVID NEWS (cmnnews.org)
BOOM Finance & Economics (boomfinanceandeconomics.com)
BOOM Finance and Economics | Designed for Critical Thinkers — UPDATED WEEKLY (wordpress.com)
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Thanks great post. The captain is indeed decapitated. We are on a planet hurtling through the universe at unimaginable speed, led by infantile adults whose maturity got stuck at middle school. Not a great plan. Will the adults in the place please stand up?
I heard a professor say on an interview she is now teaching people who never held a scissors. The odds are there is not enough competent people to operate this over worked scheme.