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Friday 23 April 2021

Harness The Power of Dumb: Embrace Your Doom!

Fuck it. You labour night and day, learn your lessons, do your homework, get your tickets, play the game by the rules, then along comes a self-entitled prick like Boris-screw-anything-that-moves-Johnson to sweep it all away. How? By being Dumb. You failed to learn the Power of Dumb.

I'm not talking about the inability to speak, or write, or add up.

I'm talking about Wilful Stupidity. 

I'm talking about knowing the right path and deliberately choosing the wrong one and selling it as the right path.

On a massive scale.

Fraud on a small scale just gets you jail. Hell, the Post Office will even frame you for its own mistakes, and the executives who do that to you will walk away free.

Don't talk to me about Bernie Madoff. He made-off with his investors' money for decades, promising them highly improbable returns and leaving them nothing. Jail was his retirement plan.

Boriskovich 'CovidBrexidiot' Johnson has pulled off the biggest electoral fraud in British history and his victims made him Prime Minister. That's all he wanted. Job done. The endless grifting is just a bonus. A free-for-all for the Dumb Club.

You might console yourself with 'It Won't End Well' etc., but you're just telling yourself what you need to get through the day playing by the rules. Low-lifes like Johnson are off to the races and they don't care a damn.

So, ask yourself: what might people really, really, really want? Dream big. Dream Enormous. A bridge to Ireland over a vast munitions dump has already been taken, as has a new UK sat nav system that probably won't work.

Once you've decided on your goal, ask yourself two sets of questions - hell, you might even write two taking opposite sides:

What would be the Right Way To Get It? The Right Things To Do? The Right Path? The Smart Path?

What would be the Wrong Way To Get It? The Bad Things To Do? The Wrong Path? The Dumb Path?

Choose the Dumb Path.

Get Elected.

Harness the Power of Dumb.

Make everyone else regret it, not you!

Sure, they'll all be angry and some will be desperate for vengeance. 

But that only means you won, right?

Embrace your Doom!


Wednesday 7 April 2021

A Strange Speech From The Governor

The Governor of the Bank of England has a key leadership role in the UK financial system, so it's important to understand his vision for Britain's new role in the wider world. Hence my interest in his strange speech on the "future of financial services".

In keeping with his political masters' devotion to nostalgic sense of entltlement he harks back to events just after the second world war and a commitment to an 'open world economy'. He points "with pride" to the fact that the Bank of England chairs two of the four main standard setting bodies of the international financial system – the Basel Committee for banks, IOSCO for markets, the IAIS for insurance, and the CPMI for payment and markets infrastructure. It is in this context that he launches a veiled attack on the EU for failing to grant equivalence to regulation in various UK financial sectors, despite the UK leaving the trade bloc. He suggests that Britain does not participate in forming global regulation to water it down, while his political masters intend exactly that. He points, ironically, to the City's "long history" of openness while failing to acknowledge that this was predicated on EU membership, and the protection that afforded London as a home for European financial markets, while only days later Amsterdam's share trading volumes exceeded London's. He whines about lack of equivalence findings from the EU, yet merely promises that "The UK’s financial markets and its financial system are therefore open for trade to all who will abide by our laws and act consistent with our public policy objectives." He then complains about the UK being a 'rule-taker'!

The very simple rejoinder to all this is that Britain is right to acknowledge that it must work with others to change the international rules before it can change its own. But it only has itself to blame for making that task harder by leaving the EU and losing influence over the shape of EU trade rules. 

 

Sunday 14 February 2021

Britain's Gaslit Future: So Bright You Gotta Wear Shades

The gaslighting is now so strong in Britain that you can't watch a government press conference without sunglasses. The last six weeks in plague-ridden lockdown have been particularly surreal. There's a horrible grinding sound as if whoever's really driving Britain is struggling to find reverse, while the CovidBrexidiot at the wheel claims that trade in goods is flowing as smoothly as public funds into his Tory cronies' pockets. Buried within the government's sycophantic media are tell-tale signs that ministers and officials never understood the trade barriers that EU membership suspended between Britain and its closest neighbours, let alone their own new rules; and none has read the withdrawal agreement, EU-UK trade deal or the mystical 'Northern Ireland Protocol'. We were even treated to the Parliamentary pantomime of Brexidiot Villiers urging Brexidiot Gove to 'renegotiate' a new protocol to replace the existing one. Fresh from misselling the benefits of the Japan trade deal, Brexidiot Truss has notified Britain's Pacific neighbours of the intention to join their trade pact rather than the world's largest only 21 miles away. Meanwhile, the Right Honourable Wackjob Reclining-Smug has regaled Parliament with claims that local fish are "happy to be British" and his favourite breakfast is "nanny's home made marmalade on toast".

But none of this is really new. A strong sense of denial and unjustified entitlement has powered British politics for well over a century. While most major countries embraced their relative positions in the world, Britain's political cult leaders and their followers drank constantly from a deep well of nostalgia-laced Kool Aid. Scorning the fact that phyrric victories in successive global conflicts had left their country dependent on both American money and a steadily growing European marketplace, they branded this twin dependence as Britain's 'Special Relationship' with the US and begrudging leadership of a grateful post-war Europe. 

Never mind the fact that Britain begged to join the EEC over French objections, then tried to cement its place by transforming the trade bloc into a steadily expanding European Union. Ignore 'big bang' when American financial institutions were encouraged to make London their route for raising and deploying foreign capital. 

The British political establishment consoled itself over such bitter compromises with reality by welcoming the embezzled funds of sundry despots and dictators, transforming a string of colonial-era island dependencies into tax havens and London itself into the money laundering capital of the world. Mayfair grew to entertain both US hedge fund managers and Putin's diaspora, united in their need for disruption and the investment opportunities that brings...

There is no better symbol of this constant struggle with reality than the rise of the mendacious Boris Johnson. It may have taken Trump's flash-in-the-pan for British populism to find its voice among the Tories' rabid Eurosceptics, but it took Johnson's peculiarly fraudulent outlook to spot the opportunity to lead them into the centre of government with perhaps the greatest confidence trick in British history.

Whether it's possible for politicians to continue defying the reality of Britain's decline is unclear. Certainly there is little by way of Parliamentary opposition, as their leader seems incapable of unifying his own party let alone pointing out the fundamental flaws in his country's trade plans.

But that gaslighting will definitely need to go up a notch... 


Wednesday 3 February 2021

Brexidiot British Gove-ment Begs To Renegotiate Brexit After 33 Days

Well that didn't take long. Amidst the widely predicted damage that Brexit is inflicting on the British economy, Brexidiot Gove has written to his EU counterpart under the misleading title "Next Steps on the Northern Ireland Protocol" to list the many ways in which the British government would now like to renegotiate the terms of Brexit and future trade with the EU generally. Fearful of again running out of time, Gove has also requested a delay of "at least" two years in the erection of the barriers that he knew would arise with the end of Brexit transition, despite rejecting the option of a two year extension last June.

Never mind the fact that Brexit was touted by Brexidiots Johnson and Gove as a way to "Take Back Control" or Johnson's electoral commitment to "Get Brexit Done" with an "oven ready deal".

If those responsible for this fraudulent misadventure are not prosecuted for Misconduct in Public Office there seems little point in having the offence on the statute books.

Meanwhile, however, the visionless Labour 'leader' seems intent on placating the flag-waving nationalists who helped Britain into this mess

He and the Tories ignore the rest of us at their peril...



Friday 15 January 2021

New Year's Resolution: Find The Opportunities In Idiocracy

Earth's future
Returning to these pages from 2020, I feel like a bewildered time traveler. Earth is gripped by climate change and a deadly pandemic. As the hospitals and morgues overflow, the outgoing US President attempts a coup and Britain destroys its own import/export markets, reducing free meals for children to bits of carrot... 
 
It's like the set up for a movie. I'm thinking Idiocracy 2: Birth. A kind of prequel to the first film, which leapt 500 years straight into the future without really explaining how we got there. How society really began to unravel to the point where people can barely speak anymore and don't even need to leave their armchairs to take a dump during Ow! My Balls on the Violence Channel
 
You may think I'm being negative here, but already I've come up with a movie idea, see?! 
 
Indeed, this chimes perfectly with my New Year's resolution: to only see the opportunities amidst all this carnage. Chill out. Enjoy the ride. Whatever happens. Take it easy.

Just do not read my Twitter account.
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