The Slog
by John Ward
It is one of the madder tenets of Friedmanite ‘economics’ that most
people can’t do without working 8 til 8 seven days a week just so they
can make more and more money and get more and more rich. So I am always
reassured when, by 2 pm on the day before long Easter weekends begin,
every office in Britain is emptier than a Cypriot bank account.
I get the same joy from watching Boris Johnson playing Albert to Eddie ‘Wallace’ Mair’s Lion during a TV interview. BoJo’s near-total inability to offer any defence of Mair’s five charges against him was funny, but easily surpassed by the sight this morning of Darius Guppy defending him. Having Guppy (a fellow old Etonian and convicted fraudster) defend you is akin to a top Nazi pitching up at Nuremburg and discovering that his counsel is called Genghis Stalin. The piece is in The Spectator, a once fine magazine now also run by sociopathic barbarians, and Guppy’s defence is constructed in the style of Arsene Wenger being asked about a penalty decision. Not to be missed.
However, Treat of the Week pre-Easter for me had to be watching Jeroen René Victor Anton Dijsselbloem of Holland making his debut on the world economic stage. Were there any justice in that world it would also have been his Farewell Tour, but things don’t work that way in the EU which, as we all know only too well, is not of this world. I can now exclusively reveal to a shocked readership that Jeroen is a torpedophile. Whatever the situation, the Dutchman launches a torpedo.
U-BootKapitain Dijsselbloem sees a small bailout requirement through his periscope, and torpedoes it. He gets a chance to reassure the world in his sights, and he torpedoes it. He has a eurogroup document issued to help him, and he torpedoes it. After a while with Jero, you get the feeling that if he saw the Titanic, he’d torpedo it.
It’s
not as if he starts off with that many advantages of nature. He looks
like a Jeremy Hunt clone who, in desperation, went into a provincial
hairdresser and received the attentions of a a nostalgic homosexual of
immensely strong character. This is the only explanation I can offer for
his ownership of a hair-do (left) that hails from 1982, but
really belongs at the back of a family album where people laugh at how
we once looked when we were all silly.
On Wall Street (where he’s now universally known as Djissellbomb) the newest game I’m told is deciding what fundamental his U-boat will attack next: will it be gold, property, energy, or hope?
If the mordant humour of this piece has overtones of hysteria, I’m sure most Sloggers will understand why. Hits may have fallen off a cliff after lunchtime today (as everyone rushed to gain poll position on the blocked autoroutes of the Western World) but a short break to celebrate one ancient Nazarene’s largely misunderstood self-sacrifice isn’t going to change the size or destructive capacity of the accelerating game-changer heading our way.
Here too, one is spoilt for choice when it comes to descriptions. Is this approaching Thing, for example, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse surfing into town atop a giant Tsunami? Or is it a meteor smack-dab on course for Earth in a do-or-die race with a deadly solar flare to see which one gets here first? Nobody knows.
The average MSM newspaper/ratings agency/forecaster/banking firm thinks either that the meteoric Tsunami will miss us and hit Venus, or that it doesn’t exist anyway – and even if it does, they have it entirely under control. That such views are rigidly adhered to is obvious from the MSM’s output on this, the day before Jesus ran the Pharisees round in circles and was condemned to death for his trouble.
It seems, for instance, that triple-dip recession fears eased as leading economic forecaster the OECD claimed that the UK had already ‘returned to growth’, while officials reported that the dominant services sector had expanded at its strongest pace in five months. No mention therein, you will note, of fewer people having a fulltime job than ever before, and the elephantine nature of services being not so much dominant as The Only Thing We Have.
The Financial Times in turn reported that ‘The S&P 500, a bellwether for the US economy and professional investors, pushed through its record closing high from 2007 on Thursday morning, completing a strong recovery from the depths of the financial crisis’. The FT warns people giving it free publicity that we shouldn’t rip off their expertise, and that of course ‘High quality journalism requires investment’. In which case, my advice to the Pink ‘un is “invest a whole lot more, and change your dumb business model” because braindead reporting like the above could be performed by a reasonably intelligent Jack Russell terrier.
Let me just make some simple over-arching comments on the two paragraphs above. There has not been and won’t be a triple-dip recession: there is only a depression alleviated minimally by trillions in QE and mountains of media bollocks. Britain is working fewer hours per capita now than it was in 1934. Jobless growth is an idiotic concept. A fast pace means nothing if the base was zero. That insane bourses pump up stocks bearing no relation to reality is not a subject for rejoicing. A completed recovery can be demolished inside five days of a liquidity crisis. Remember what happened immediately after the 2007 high.
The trouble with rationality and empirical measurement is that it is such a miserable killjoy. It just can’t stop getting in the way of nice folks on the top table having fun. But what we face more and more at the moment is an econo-fiscal world acting out horrifying unreality through the medium of a mafiosa wedding in The Godfather. A Sicilian jolly-jolly violin and oompahpah band plays in the background as psychopaths greet each other politely, and pretend that cosa nostra is a very very very nice house….as opposed to a killing machine designed to rob, cheat and hook the population. Gentle formalities and charity cheques are exchanged between people who fire bullets into ears and then supply the body with a concrete overcoat. And the merest hint of disrespect is punished by a hail of bullets later described as “nothing personal, just business”.
I’m sure you can all detect the parallels I’m making. In fact, Easter in south eastern Europe isn’t for another month. But here in the insolvent western EU and affiliated flatlining Anglosphere, the Easter Bunny is preparing to hide all those chocolate eggs in the garden, lambs will be roasting on circotherm oven spits, the tooth fairy is standing guard by every infant’s pillow, and they’re coming to take me away hah-hah, to the Funny Farm, where life is beautiful all the time, all covers are closed before striking, and loving life has made me bananas.
Enjoy the weekend.
Raining on the Easter Parade
I get the same joy from watching Boris Johnson playing Albert to Eddie ‘Wallace’ Mair’s Lion during a TV interview. BoJo’s near-total inability to offer any defence of Mair’s five charges against him was funny, but easily surpassed by the sight this morning of Darius Guppy defending him. Having Guppy (a fellow old Etonian and convicted fraudster) defend you is akin to a top Nazi pitching up at Nuremburg and discovering that his counsel is called Genghis Stalin. The piece is in The Spectator, a once fine magazine now also run by sociopathic barbarians, and Guppy’s defence is constructed in the style of Arsene Wenger being asked about a penalty decision. Not to be missed.
However, Treat of the Week pre-Easter for me had to be watching Jeroen René Victor Anton Dijsselbloem of Holland making his debut on the world economic stage. Were there any justice in that world it would also have been his Farewell Tour, but things don’t work that way in the EU which, as we all know only too well, is not of this world. I can now exclusively reveal to a shocked readership that Jeroen is a torpedophile. Whatever the situation, the Dutchman launches a torpedo.
U-BootKapitain Dijsselbloem sees a small bailout requirement through his periscope, and torpedoes it. He gets a chance to reassure the world in his sights, and he torpedoes it. He has a eurogroup document issued to help him, and he torpedoes it. After a while with Jero, you get the feeling that if he saw the Titanic, he’d torpedo it.
It’s
not as if he starts off with that many advantages of nature. He looks
like a Jeremy Hunt clone who, in desperation, went into a provincial
hairdresser and received the attentions of a a nostalgic homosexual of
immensely strong character. This is the only explanation I can offer for
his ownership of a hair-do (left) that hails from 1982, but
really belongs at the back of a family album where people laugh at how
we once looked when we were all silly.On Wall Street (where he’s now universally known as Djissellbomb) the newest game I’m told is deciding what fundamental his U-boat will attack next: will it be gold, property, energy, or hope?
If the mordant humour of this piece has overtones of hysteria, I’m sure most Sloggers will understand why. Hits may have fallen off a cliff after lunchtime today (as everyone rushed to gain poll position on the blocked autoroutes of the Western World) but a short break to celebrate one ancient Nazarene’s largely misunderstood self-sacrifice isn’t going to change the size or destructive capacity of the accelerating game-changer heading our way.
Here too, one is spoilt for choice when it comes to descriptions. Is this approaching Thing, for example, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse surfing into town atop a giant Tsunami? Or is it a meteor smack-dab on course for Earth in a do-or-die race with a deadly solar flare to see which one gets here first? Nobody knows.
The average MSM newspaper/ratings agency/forecaster/banking firm thinks either that the meteoric Tsunami will miss us and hit Venus, or that it doesn’t exist anyway – and even if it does, they have it entirely under control. That such views are rigidly adhered to is obvious from the MSM’s output on this, the day before Jesus ran the Pharisees round in circles and was condemned to death for his trouble.
It seems, for instance, that triple-dip recession fears eased as leading economic forecaster the OECD claimed that the UK had already ‘returned to growth’, while officials reported that the dominant services sector had expanded at its strongest pace in five months. No mention therein, you will note, of fewer people having a fulltime job than ever before, and the elephantine nature of services being not so much dominant as The Only Thing We Have.
The Financial Times in turn reported that ‘The S&P 500, a bellwether for the US economy and professional investors, pushed through its record closing high from 2007 on Thursday morning, completing a strong recovery from the depths of the financial crisis’. The FT warns people giving it free publicity that we shouldn’t rip off their expertise, and that of course ‘High quality journalism requires investment’. In which case, my advice to the Pink ‘un is “invest a whole lot more, and change your dumb business model” because braindead reporting like the above could be performed by a reasonably intelligent Jack Russell terrier.
Let me just make some simple over-arching comments on the two paragraphs above. There has not been and won’t be a triple-dip recession: there is only a depression alleviated minimally by trillions in QE and mountains of media bollocks. Britain is working fewer hours per capita now than it was in 1934. Jobless growth is an idiotic concept. A fast pace means nothing if the base was zero. That insane bourses pump up stocks bearing no relation to reality is not a subject for rejoicing. A completed recovery can be demolished inside five days of a liquidity crisis. Remember what happened immediately after the 2007 high.
The trouble with rationality and empirical measurement is that it is such a miserable killjoy. It just can’t stop getting in the way of nice folks on the top table having fun. But what we face more and more at the moment is an econo-fiscal world acting out horrifying unreality through the medium of a mafiosa wedding in The Godfather. A Sicilian jolly-jolly violin and oompahpah band plays in the background as psychopaths greet each other politely, and pretend that cosa nostra is a very very very nice house….as opposed to a killing machine designed to rob, cheat and hook the population. Gentle formalities and charity cheques are exchanged between people who fire bullets into ears and then supply the body with a concrete overcoat. And the merest hint of disrespect is punished by a hail of bullets later described as “nothing personal, just business”.
I’m sure you can all detect the parallels I’m making. In fact, Easter in south eastern Europe isn’t for another month. But here in the insolvent western EU and affiliated flatlining Anglosphere, the Easter Bunny is preparing to hide all those chocolate eggs in the garden, lambs will be roasting on circotherm oven spits, the tooth fairy is standing guard by every infant’s pillow, and they’re coming to take me away hah-hah, to the Funny Farm, where life is beautiful all the time, all covers are closed before striking, and loving life has made me bananas.
Enjoy the weekend.
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