Football Fiasco

In a better and saner world Prince William’s handlers, along with the speechwriter, who made the nation squirm, would be confined to a hulk in the Thames awaiting transportation to New South Wales.

The business in Zurich was a fiasco and those who are in the Heads of State trade should keep away them, especially when they could see it coming if their people had enough wits to analyse the who, what, why, where and when. But they did not, being caught up in that weird strange media world of London where all is fantasy.

If Prince William was going to be seen out anywhere this week the place to be was in some kind of vehicle or conveyance that was defying the elements to help the sick, disabled and vulnerable in difficulties or perhaps helping to ferry medic’s and nurses to the hospitals.

It is becoming clearer by the week that the same kind of celebrity driven media bungling is attending the plans, correction shambles that is likely to be the Royal Wedding. This is not an accident waiting to happen it is a huge pile-up.

He and his fiancé have been an item for some time now. They do not need it. We do not need it. The wise way in 2011 is to have a low key, strictly limited family do in a village church.

The Cotswolds are littered with lovely little churches and if you want something a little bigger then there is one in Cirencester. My bet would be on the simplicity and quiet of somewhere like Edgeworth. If not then one place could be St. Andrew’s, it is where they met and at least Prince Andrew would be usefully occupied.

As for David Cameron, one of the worst things a politician can do is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is beginning to have “form” on this which suggests that either his judgement or his media lackeys are at fault. Given the problems building up in the world he needs to start thinking.

Beckham did what he could but with others scoring own goals he was on a loser. He would have been better off with Sir Michael Parkinson, Nobby Stiles (with or without teeth) and a couple of leading lights from the present or recent England sides who are proficient in media work and can talk.

At least they could lay claim to a football pedigree.

Football Crazy? More Insanity And Stupidity

Am I mad, or just ordinarily deranged? I am looking out of my window at a main road that is now free of traffic. A couple of furlongs away is a railway line that is now silent. The local airports are all shut. The motorway up the road is blocked. The ports to which they go are severely disrupted.

This is not local, it is now happening across much of the UK as communications, communities, public services and ordinary work struggle to maintain any real activity. There is a real crisis here waiting to happen.

What is BBC and Sky telling me? There is a meeting in Zurich to fix the dates and locations for some football matches to be played in 2018 and 2022. In the news this has absolute priority and we are told what interest Spain and Portugal might have and who has spoken to who and which person has made promises to others.

The BBC is taxpayer funded. Why has it not used all its resources to maintain a rolling service of information and advice to the UK concerning the conditions across the country about what is happening where and what people need to know and think about?

It is simply not good enough to tell people to go to the web because what is there is not co-ordinated or full enough to do the job.

More to the point whilst nearly everyone has access to TV or radio very many people do not and cannot use the web. Also, many people on the move cannot use the web.

So what exactly is this meeting? It is being held in Zurich. See my “Racking And Rolling The Swiss” of Thursday 9 July 2009. It is a major tax haven within a tax haven. Many of the most vicious thieving elites of the world have transmitted their loot through here and adjacent Cantons.

Also it is where football’s governing body FIFA is located, made up of a number of self appointed people from…..say no more.

Where is our Prime Minister, David Cameron? Is he in London or Edinburgh or Cardiff or Belfast overseeing the efforts and direction of dealing with the present weather crisis and other crucial financial issues?

He is not, after a fleeting visit for Questions in the House of Commons he has returned to Zurich, not just to check out one of the family Trusts, but to butter up and grovel to the financial elite running FIFA to beg them to stage their football matches in England.

Where is Prince William? Is he out with the over stretched and vital Air Rescue Services we are told he is a key member of? Nope, he too is in Zurich and not just checking out some of the lesser known family bank accounts. He is doing even more grovelling and schmoozing than Cameron around these greasy grotesques.

Add to them the mob of other people, virtually all with serious financial interests in the matter and the well equipped brigade of BBC people, better equipped alas than any of our troops serving abroad and England certainly does expect some return for its money.

And, dear taxpayer, it is you and I who are paying for all this, as we are for the costs of the present weather situation. Also, if the games are allocated to England then we will be paying yet again. None of those doing the talking in Zurich will pay.

None of all the money launderers and other big money people running our Premiership will be paying. None of those very rich people or corporate representatives or politicians yelling Prestige and Economic Growth at us will be paying either.

I repeat, you will pay and the snow is still coming down.

The Eye Of The Needle

In the wonderful 1955 film “The Ladykillers”, see the picture above, set around Kings Cross the gang led by Professor Marcus tries to launder its stolen money through the use of Mrs. Wilberforce, a most respectable lady.

One of the themes is the thesis that the insurance companies won’t really mind, they will simply put up their premiums.

In this flight of fiction the gang ends up dead and Mrs. Wilberforce ends up rich. In our modern world it is not as simple as that.

The Tax Justice Network blog has an item on the subject of money laundering based around an interview of John Le Carre talking about his latest book “Our Kind Of Traitor”. This is featured on the link to Democracy Now dot org.

The interview lasts about an hour on the embedded video but the full text is given on that blog and can be read more quickly.

http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2010/11/john-le-carre-on-laundering-havens-and.html

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/25/british_novelist_john_le_carr_on

Here are a couple of extracts below for anyone interested.

JOHN LE CARRÉ:

First

Now, this isn’t fiction. That part of it isn’t fiction. Money laundering is simply everywhere. On the grand scale, it’s endemic to banking. You have to bear in mind that when Lehman Brothers wasn’t going to function anymore and the big banks weren’t lending to one another, back at that terrible time, $352 billion of illegal money were then tacitly released upon the market, and that was about the only money people were lending to one another.

So, money laundering is not some distant fantasy. It’s actually how you handle the profits of extortion, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy and huge quantities of drug money, how you get that into the white sector. And what we are gradually learning from these little exposés that come to light is that there is almost no way of denying people, in the end, the profits of their crime, which is a tragedy.

And it’s also a frightful annoyance, because we pay vast sums of money across the way here to agencies that are supposed to stop money laundering. It doesn’t happen.

Second

Well, I think that my anger still stands. I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed.

We’ve always got to be careful of that. I think that—I wasn’t speaking as a prophet, I was just speaking as an angry citizen, I suppose. I think it’s true that we’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.

One of the problems, surely, is that victims never forget, and the winners do. And they forget very quickly.

If people knew basically, for example, what we had done in Iran when we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, the SAVAC, if people understood the extent to which we had humiliated Iran, then they would understand the later developments in Iran and Iran’s posture now.

If people would look at the map and see the extent to which Iran is encircled by nuclear powers, they wouldn’t take it perhaps quite so seriously that Iran is seeking to arm itself with—if it is—with nuclear weapons.

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies. Mussolini, I think, defined fascism as the moment when you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between political and corporate power.

He assumed, when he offered that definition, that media power was already his. But I worry terribly that the absence of serious critical argument is going to produce a new kind of fanaticism, the new simplicities that are as dangerous as the ones which caused us to march against Iraq and as misunderstood.

Unquote.

So if London is one of the money laundering centres of the world then who has been and who is getting the benefit?

Tales Of The Unexpected

You may already be bored with the Wikileaks fuss. Had you rummaged around diplomatic documents of the 19th century you would not find much different. In 1882 over the Egypt crisis the Foreign Office were saying very different things to different people. Look where that got us.

What is more to the point is the nature and scope of the decline of the USA, why and the situation is. If you have time to spare this one says a great deal that you do not hear about in the media.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=7783

Also, there is the ongoing debate about migration. The UK position at the moment on the whole is misinformed, subject to too much dialectic and too little thought.

The whole business of demographics, migration, population change and DNA is far more complex than we think and was so in the past.

One migration tale is that of Roman Legions who were said to have left their descendants in a corner of north eastern China.

This article takes a more complicated and wider view. The story is a nice one but the truth may be a lot more difficult. The article is not long and clearly written.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/11/no-romans-needed-to-explain-chinese-blondes/

What lies behind all the movement etc. is not simply shifts of power or economic migration of the modern type. There have been geophysical and climatic causes, famines, epidemics and the growth and decline of population groups.

Why should these two be linked? Because the USA could be at the start of a real migration crisis; both from within its borders and from outside.

As the science of genetics progresses it can investigate DNA in greater depths to discover more about human development.

Apparently, in Iceland they have detected in a small number of people a trace of American First Nation ancestry which cannot be Inuit, estimated as occurring about 1000 years ago.

Could Thorfinn Skullsplitter be related to Geronimo? Do I recognize some of the faces in the picture above?

Defining Allergy & Toxicity

THE RATS SCALE OF ALLERGY & TOXICITY

The Reaction to Allergy and Toxicity Scale (RATS) is a scale of one to five of the severity and impact of a physical and neural reaction to any substance or combination of substances.

The scale is a broad indicative measure of relative effect. It is not diagnostic and at the margins of the central three parts of the scale the distinctions may be variable or not clear cut.

The intention of the scale is to enable both those affected and those involved in any treatment to have a common perception of the degree and extent of the problem.

Also where an individual has reactions to more than one substance either separately or concurrently it will help to estimate a simple differentiation of effect between one substance or another.

The RATS Scale is:

Mild
Moderate
Serious
Severe
Extreme

Extreme (RATS 5)

This is a reaction that is potentially terminal within a short period of time or induces a collapse with loss of consciousness or brain or muscular control. It includes anaphylactic shock or coma or toxic shock.

It will require immediate emergency treatment and probably hospital admission.

A person vulnerable to this level of reaction will have restrictions, safeguards and monitoring at a constant and high level.

It will be critical to determine both the cause of shock and the extent of other issues and vulnerabilities.

Severe (RATS 4)

This may begin in many cases with a lesser form of shock but may arise from either persistent or cumulative reactions. It is when the condition is debilitating with some loss of bodily or neurological function that may be recurrent or chronic.

The impact on function and management of life will be extensive and will require continuing monitoring and safeguards to prevent the risk of a RATS 5 attack.

It will require testing of a number of substances and possibilities to determine any immediate cause of shock and to ascertain whether more than one substance may be involved in the nature of the vulnerability.


Serious (RATS 3)

The impact and extent of the reactions will require continuing medical intervention, treatment and monitoring.

The nature of the reactions will have adverse effects on the individual’s ability to control their environment and in the making of life choices.

Commonly, at this level it will be necessary to impose restrictions, safeguards and active avoidance procedures and measures.

Impairment of mental and physical functions will be evident and disruption of life management.

Moderate (RATS 2)

The reactions will cause marked effects and have more than nuisance value. They will be more evident and medical advice should be sought on the actual and potential causes to try to avoid the risks of increasing severity of reaction.

They will require specific treatment and may be continuing in effect.

Mild (RATS 1)

The reactions will be noticeable and a source of either discomfort or minor medical issues.

They will not be such as to disrupt or to badly impact on life choices or activities but need an awareness of their risks.

In many cases minor medical treatments will be needed or helpful together with an awareness of possible causes.

Notes

There is a great deal of information about allergy and the many reactions that can occur. This can be helpful and confusing at the same time.

An issue is that the word “allergy” is used extensively for many types and levels of reaction and as a colloquial descriptive word for any effect and sometimes opinion.

Attempts are made to distinguish reactions by the use of words such as “intolerance” and “sensitivity”, which can be useful to assist recognition in terms of the Mild Level 1 RATS effect but are too wide in their meaning to deal with severity.

The issue of “toxic” effects is less recognised and may be difficult to define without
Immunological analysis but the word can be used in broad terms especially at RATS
Levels 4 and 5, Severe and Extreme.

Possibly “toxic” is more applicable to effects that are immediate and powerful.

There are two matters that interconnect. The first is that allergy, medically, is one set of reactions and toxicity is another. However there may be areas of uncertainty and overlap. The other is the difficulty of assessing cause and effect.

One real and major problem is that most ordinary science is concerned only with a linear approach to research or investigation; that is the search for a single cause with an identifiable single effect.

This dominates the handling of cases and treatment. But allergy and toxicity issues are likely to be far more complicated.

Reactions may have complex causes and in turn particular causes might have complex effects. Medical services at present cannot cope with complexity and are reluctant to admit them.

Dealing with any complexity requires rigorous monitoring, assessment and analysis normally over a period of time. What appears to be a cause may only be a means for another cause to take effect notably in post viral reactions.

Wackyleaks - Presidential Briefing

From:

The Office of the Decahedron
Presidential Intelligence Security Survey
10 January 2009

Mr. President,

In the last three days we have received 4,892 telephone calls from 10 Downing Street in London, England which have been of PISS interest. We judge that the present lead political figure in the United Kingdom (you will know it as Britain or England), Mr. Gorgon Brown is keen to meet you early in your term of office.

He is the head of the English Labour Party and currently termed Prime Minister as that party holds a majority in Parliament (a primitive form of Congress that has limited function). This means he runs the country, but is not Head of State, who is The Queen, this will be explained in full later.

He is from the Scotland part of England of which London is the capital. The Scotlanders take pride in being different. From the USA point of view this is bad news. They make whiskey having stolen the recipe from Tennessee before we were able to establish intellectual property.

London does not take its name from the London’s you know in Texas, Ohio or Kentucky but a case has been made that it is the other way round. It would be wise if you were to concede on this point in any negotiation.

There are a number of matters outstanding in the USA connection to the UK that do need attention. There is the war in Afghanistan, also Iraq in respect of which the USA’s earnings ratio on capital invested are in dispute, maybe Iran and a few other places. Given present UK policy they could start a new war anytime anywhere.

There are trade disputes, the collapse of world trade, the financial crisis which began in London (Goldman Sachs will brief you on this) and our mutually hopeless levels of debt but the chief matter for Brawn will be to be seen to be a good friend in as many photo shots as possible because he is facing election by 2010 at the latest.

That being the case he will concede almost anything for a good media response. You do not need to spend a lot of time on this; our photoshop operators will cover most of the ground. He has claimed to save the world but we do not need to involve in this either because of the potential downsides.

There are a lot of them. There is strong evidence provided by Google that anything that is either approved or supported by Broun will suffer disaster or catastrophe within a limited period. The list is astonishing. The most striking feature of this and an indication of his personal capability is that his attention to detail is overkill in the fullest meaning of the term.

As with most other world leaders you must expect him to be evasive, untruthful bad tempered and prone to hissy fits without warning. We recommend that you just smile and speak softly and a punchbag will be made available for private use in your office afterwards.

So his communication skills are not good. These have been taken in hand by the Dowager Duchess of Kinnock, Glenys, who was once a teacher of remedial children and therefore fully qualified to assist British politicians in simple tasks, like claiming expenses.

In the election sometime in the next year Bruno will be opposed by the Preservative Party led by a David Kamerad, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal. They will fail because he is a no hoper and will be replaced.

Our analysts suggest that the only member of his party likely to command strong support and respect by late 2010 will be an Ann Noreen Widdecombe. We are working on this.

In any dealings with this rogue state and its leaders it is imperative that you continue taking the PISS.

Respectfully, Sir,

Homer Simpson,
Executive Director.

Leading Labour From The Front

Perhaps all is not quite lost. Through the letter box this morning along with a lot of other strange communications, people wanting their bills paid and such, came a flyer for the Irish Lotto, £172 million a year is said to be for the taking. If you have the right numbers, that is. So our £7 billion will be going to a good cause.

This will be largely to help people who had the wrong numbers in their particular games of Bankers Lotto. Unluckily, I am instructed by HMRC that the amount of taxes I will be paying this year means that I cannot afford to invest in the Irish Lotto as the Banker’s one is short in Ireland by £172 billion, or thereabouts, nobody really knows, we will find out, or perhaps not.

The address given for returning the card is Exchange Buildings in Liverpool. At one time there was a fine terminus station there for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and I made many journeys in and out of Liverpool. Liverpool Exchange was also the name of Bessie Braddock’s constituency, a prominent Labour backbencher of the 1950’s and one of the ruling family in Labour’s local elite of the period.

She was a formidable lady and as the picture shows, where she is staging a mock bit of fisticuffs with Frankie Vaughan, a top singer of the day, she led with the right. However, in Liverpool it was well known that you had to watch out for her left hook. See Wikipedia for an interesting entry, not only for the reference to Winston Churchill but the fact that she gave Peter Carter-Ruck his start in libel actions.

One of Liverpool’s leading boxers in her period was Nel Tarleton who did lead with the left. He was British and Empire Featherweight Champion and allegedly was never knocked out despite well over 100 contests. Nel contended for the World title against Freddie Miller in 1934 and 1935, losing on points on both occasions.

My father was one of his key sparring partners at the time. Fighting under the name “Butcher Bill”, nothing like a touch of class in the family, he could lead with either right or left and switch without warning. It made him difficult to “read” or beat and even in his 70’s was very fast. During trade union problems in the 1960’s some big TGWU “heavies” made the mistake of trying it on. The ambulance men couldn’t stop laughing.

What would Bessie make of Blair, Brown’s or Miliband’s Labour Party? Not much, I suspect. Her socialism was a world away and on a different intellectual basis from theirs. My opinion is that Bessie had a lot more political nous for her people and for that matter a sharper and better brain, honed in debate with people who were both well read in history and aware of the realities of life.

And she knew how to fight.