Rebellion On Airstrip One - Just Testing

US troops in top secret WW2 deployment to Cheltenham England - sshhh mum's the word

 Picure from http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-E-Logistics1/index.html

 The British government is allowing foreign governments to spy on the British population and to make the way clear for these activities to descend to even lower depths of perversity... Home Secretary Theresa May is proposing the Communications Data Bill. 

Big Sister is watching us, how very 21st century that concept is...plus...it is what poor batty old Theresa May thinks she is doing, namely Ronald McDonald's right-hand girl and champion of  every woman's right to be a power-crazed lunatic, scuttling the ship of state on behalf of the IMF and Wall Street, the global grand larceny, the pauperisation of our population to feed the bloated bellies of the corporate monster.

Politics in Britain (and for that matter most of the world) are no longer a matter of supporting political parties, they are all carbon copies of each other anyway ... the whole parliamentary system is a form of street-walker's street theatre and a vacuous celebtocracy,  no - the real political struggle in Britain is more like being a member of a global Neighbourhood Watch Scheme. It is the upright and just populations against the unjust corporate criminals, corrupt officials and the outright gangsterism in high office we are witnessing every day both here and abroad.

Theresa May - Big Sister is Watching Us

The sham-government's new Bill widely known in Britain as the Snooper's Charter would allow corrupted public officials and their transatlantic counterparts to listen-in, collect and store every communication we make with anybody for any purpose anywhere in the world and trade this information to the highest bidder. Such personal information in our bit of the empire is collected and sent by GCHQ to the paranoid sociopaths that run the American National Security Agency (NSA) on behalf of  big business and their fully paid for political soap opera currrently staring Barack Obama in the president role.

This is a world that has become recognisably unhinged to the vast majority of rational humanity. What we seem to be dealing with here are a distant race of alienated cyborgs who, having lost touch with any vestiges of conventional reality, now apparently think they are not part of humanity per se... and that is why they have to spy on us human beings 24/7.. because they are scared of us, terrified of consummer power or of democracy and so they are always trying to second guess us, steal a march on us and get ahead of us... in order to predict our behaviour and of course up their profit margins at the same time. Nice work if you can get it you might think?

According to twisted paranoid logic of the NSA the reason they have to know our every thought and action is not only all the usual 'national security' 'war on terror' blah, blah. blah old guff... but also to gain economic advantage for the US multinational corporations that are as everyone knows, the real American government behind all the smoke and mirrors and who are pulling strings in Greater Bilderbergia... or GB as it is also known.

But what about the British government listening post GCHQ in Cheltenham (not to be confused with the US government listening post at Menwith Hill, in Yorkshire -although there is no real difference) ...we know that GCHQ has been bankrolled by the NSA and coaxed... although to be fair bribed might be a better way of putting it... into taking part in domestic spying 'operations' with rather daft names like PRISM and Tempora that could only have been thought up by a resident of Disneyland or some other non-existent fantasy realm.

The US government has contributed at least £100m to the budget of the UK's GCHQ in the last three years in a bid to make sure the intelligence agency "pulls its weight", according to information revealed to the Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

This incidentally is not exactly a new experience for the GCHQ spooks, British intelligence has always been notoriously porous as the Cambridge Five amply demonstrated during the last Cold War before this one. Edward Snowden was preceded a decade earlier by our very own Katherine Gun a modern English heroine and a former translater at GCHQ.

As her Wikipedia entry points out:-

"In 2003, she became publicly known for leaking top-secret information to the press concerning illegal activities by the United States of America in their push for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some of these activities include the U.S. NSA eavesdropping operation on countries tasked with passing a second United Nations resolution on the invasion of Iraq."

....(T)he case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. The reasons for the prosecution dropping the case are unclear. The day before the trial, Gun's defence team had asked the government for any records of advice about the legality of the war that it had received during the run-up to the war. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny as the defence were expected to argue that trying to stop an illegal act (that of an illegal war of aggression) trumped Gun's obligations under the Official Secrets Act 1989."

Katherine Gun- The Archetypal English Heroine

The fact that British national's are today in the pay of a foreign regime to routinely spy upon other British nationals and pass sensitive data about them to a foreign power, not to mention strictly dodgy commercial interests... sort of suggests that whoever the British "government" actually represents it certainly is not us, the population of Great Britain. Indeed if we live in England we don't actually have anyone representing us at all (unlike the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish who have their own parliament or national assemblies at least) -  this makes the sell-out all the more worrisome for the sons and daughters of Albion.

In effect this situation makes England an unconstitutional anarchy and a country (as opposed to a constituent of the United Kingdom or Great Britain) that really should be listed as a state with no government of its own and where no machinery of English national self governance is even in place.

So here we are looking a lot like George Orwell's Airstrip One being spied on by our fellow citizens to feed the gluttonous transatlanticism that impoverishes populations on both side of the Atlantic and all points of the compass as a matter of fact. Orwell called the overarching superstate Oceania, I call it Greater Bilderbergia, but it really doesn't matter what we call it, it goes by many names, acronyms and alliases, for the moment its called Theresa May or Big Sister, an anodyne cult of no-personality.

From an English perspective this is all bad enough, no government, no parliament, no representation, used as an airstrip by Greater Bilderbergia, a listening post by the NSA but neverthe less paying hand over fist to be occupied by aliens.

It's no life is it? We need to rekindle the various cultural archetypes to reassert English cultural heritage, the Herewards, the King Arthurs, the King Alfreds, the Queen Boudiccas and Queen Aethelflaeds of Mercia ...the pantheon of English mythology that gives England its nature and its identity as a place of progress by rebellion.

Boudicca - Anti-Imperialist Avenger and Feminist Role Model

Ripped Off England

It might help concentrate minds if people knew how we as British taxpayer fork out for the priviledge of being snooped on by Big Sister and her American friends at GCHQ.  GCHQ’s individual budget isn’t public knowledge, but according to Chris Milnes running totals on the Gizmodo blog its funding comes from the Single Intelligence Account (SIA), which for 2012-13 is set at £2.1 billion. There’s also a £650 million government slush fund set up to counter cyber security. Given that, it’s easily believable that GCHQ was able to sling £80-odd million into its flagship snooping programme. Thanks to MI5 for the figures.

These numbers don't seem far off what was reported in the British tabloid paper The Daily Mail in 2012 which stated that:-

The Home Office estimates that the programme – under which internet providers will be paid to store hundreds of millions of pieces of data for up to two years – will cost £2billion over its first decade alone.

Beyond this point there will be annual running costs of £200million – or £380 a minute.

Even these figures, which are based on 2009 prices, could be an underestimate given the complexity of the project – and officials’ terrible record for estimating the price of IT schemes.

So, lets just recap here. England is a country with no democratic representation in its own right, it is administered by interests that lie outside the geographical boundaries of England whether they be in Edinburgh, Brussells or in Washington, the political suppression of English sovereignty is universal and all encompassing it seems.

The current unelected and unmandated so-called British government was appointed by HRH the Queen after all versions (i.e. variations) of the current parliamentary political argument were rejected by the majority of English voters in the last UK general election in 2010 . No parliament, no representation, no influence and no democracy in England, but as the most populous region of the United Kingdom we pay dearly for our disenfranchised servitude.
Austerity Britain is an IMF construct born disproportunately by the population of England which forms 84% of the UK.
According to the Office for National Statistics the estimated populations of the four constituent countries of the UK in mid-2012 are 53.5 million people in England, 5.3 million in Scotland, 3.1 million in Wales and 1.8 million in Northern Ireland.

England has ten times the population of Scotland, but unlike its northern neighbour it has no parliament of its own, its laws are made by a fair proportion of people who don't live here, our hard earned taxes are used to line the pockets of US based corporations like Amazon, Google, Starbucks, McDonalds and so on while minute details of our private lives are mauled by avaricious cyborgs all across the globe, whose dirty paws comb through our private papers and whose crassness turns our colective stomachs and for whose paymasters we have nothing but utter contempt and loathing.

I really can't see how it will be possible for the diverse populations of England to continue to be treated like this. All sub-cultures are united by the blanket ambitions of Big Sister and her army of geeks on the public payroll at GCHQ to control and subdue us. In ideological terms the corporate opinion formers are losing the battle for hearts and minds I think.... now dissent is once again the order of the day in England.

Our very souls are under threat from all the intrusive busy-bodies and night-clubbers that couldn't be trusted to look after a house plant let alone all our personal business. Something needs to be done about this ...and soon I think! An English parliament would be a start, so let's sit back and see who declares themselve inelegible to sit in it....so far the Tories , Labour and the Lib Dems have all counted themselves out, sounds promising doesn't it?

Whether Scotland votes for independence or the alternative devolution light this is not going away as an issue in England. Despite recent attempts by the improbabaly named United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) to hijack the campaign for an English parliament (or a UK parliament... or what exactly?) the movement is a broad one with supporters drawn from various strands of political opinion from right across a broad spectrum.

We must work to break the log-jam and liberate England from its state of supine suppression, the monarchy  and the unelected global oligarchy that currently hold the keys to our as yet - rather uncertain futures.

Making Google Plus Into Google Minus

Photo source www.icanhazpodcast.com

Having made a cost benefit analysis of my Google+ account I have concluded the best outcome would be to delete it and I have done so. I've never really seen the point of it, in social networking terms it has never worked for me and actually I think the whole thing is too intrusive. I mean... everyone knows that Google collects intelligence about us all for commercial and government agencies, so its intrusiveness should not come as any surprise to anyone really. Blogger is a Google owned product too of course but it is one that is easier to use, control and to keep track of I think. 

I have been a blogger for a decade or more on various platforms and as in the case of both Yahoo and Multiply...I have been kicked off when the service was no longer of interest to either provider. Bloggers as most people reading this will know from bitter experience were told 'sorry you'll have to go elsewhere we're shutting up shop'... and that was that with both Yahoo and Multiply. So it actually felt quite good to decide to dispense with Google + today which also affects the way Blogger works and that other Google satelite YouTube.

If you intend to say goodbye to Google+ and you have a YouTube account I suggest you change the settings to pre-Google+ which is actually easy peasy even for me. It may be less straightforward if you signed up to YouTube since Google+ appropriated it... but it was quite liberating to say to this global corporate-person... thanks but no thanks, I'll pass on that one!

Since it was in my experience a flawed method of communication anyway and for everyone concerned a bit of a waste of time in my opinion. I don't think it will disrupt communications with my online friends in any significant way now that I've given it up.

It was good to feel the warm glow of moral rectitude in the knowledge that Google is an organisation that is obviously utterly evil to the very core. 

Google's corporate motto Don't Be Evil is an intellectual property claim, not a moral proposition. Google wants the monopoly on all evil of course, just like it does on all internet traffic so it can blab for big bucks to anyone who asks, what could be more evil than that? 
Shameless traders in personal data who sell the contents of your mind to anyone interested enough to obtain it...so they can use dead clever psychology to get you to follow your dreams, buy some useless trinket you once looked at and dismissed and get you nicely into debt.

As a mere physical person as opposed to a corporate person there may not be a lot you can do about it, except lay false trails and stuff like that of course, but you can also inconvenience the domestic espionage a little bit and that is always worthwhile when it is just done by nosey bastards on the make.

Of course in the UK Google is intrinsic to the NSA supervised GCHQ spy caper called not very imaginatively 'Flying Pig' ...oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! 

 

                                 See you soon on Google minus!

Wal-Mart is Asda - Asda is Wal-Mart

 

Fashion Victims 

Ever think of nipping down to Asda for a bargain? What is the real cost of our knickers? How about a little 21st century slavery as part of it? How about sharp suits cheating impoverished women just to get us that sought after bargain.

 

 

How good can you look in H&M when you know the real cost? This is what Wal-Mart does worldwide, Asda is Wal-Mart .....Wal-Mart is Asda same difference, same slavery, same sharp suits.

Wikipedia says:-

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., branded as Walmart, is an American multinational retail corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company is the world's second largest public corporation, according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2013, the biggest private employer in the world with over two million employees, and is the largest retailer in the world. 

It goes on:-

"With close to 2.2 million employees worldwide, Walmart has faced a torrent of lawsuits and issues with regards to its workforce. These issues involve low wages, poor working conditions, inadequate health care, as well as issues involving the company's strong anti-union policies. In November 2013 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced that it had found that in 13 U.S. states Wal-Mart had pressured employees not to engage in strikes on Black Friday, had illegally disciplined workers who had engaged in strikes. Critics point to Walmart's high turnover rate as evidence of an unhappy workforce, although other factors may be involved. Approximately 70% of its employees leave within the first year. Despite the turnover rate the company still is able to affect unemployment rates. This was found in a study by Oklahoma State University which states, "Walmart is found to have substantially lowered the relative unemployment rates of blacks in those counties where it is present, but to have had only a limited impact on relative incomes after the influences of other socio-economic variables were taken into account. Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the United States, employing almost five times as many people as  IBM... the second largest employer in the U.S."

So if Wikipedia says it's true it must be you ask?... well perhaps not always, but that depends upon what we mean by truth of course... which is a whole new blog, if not a PhD thesis. 

So sticking to shopping for the moment, Wal-Mart or just plain old Walmart is a family run business and one of the richest corporations on planet earth. This is how the Walton's who own Wal-Mart got their money in the first place. The indictments go on forever.

So the next time you hear any politician hold forth on the alleged benefits of privatisation ... just think of its greatest achievement - the global reach of Wal-Mart family at its very pinnacle - because that's what its really all about and the story here is the real story. 

So then perhaps we should cast a thought back to these women who have been cheated and abused so blatantly, whose lives have been ruined by the intolerable stress of poverty.... and all on behalf of our cut-price underwear.

A scandal isn't it? .... Does anybody actually think this is worth it?

Virtual Wassail - Your Good Health!

Photo from wassail at Bromyard Herefordshire www.bromyardsessions.co.uk

Welcome to the Wassail which traditionally according to the Gregorian Calendar is around the Twelfth Night of Christmas and a time when wassailing historically took place, except it didn't actually happen on 6 January before 1752 when the Julian Calendar was replaced in Britain and all of its Dominions by the Gregorian one.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition continued to use the Julian system which means it is Christmas for them on 7 January 2014...or to put it another way in just two days from now it'll be next Christmas, hope you've done the shopping and got the plum pudding in.
This means of course that Twelfth Night is not until 19th January when wassailing purists in England today still visit houses and orchards in accordance with ancient traditions on the old twelvy night.
Wassailing is a pre-Christain Anglo Saxon custom of blessings and gift giving in the 'bleak midwinter' when times were hard and when a degree of social welfare was seen as a collective responsibility of the whole community.

Wassailing is the invocation of good health as well as a form of mutual aid and wealth sharing.

Here are 'Ed and Will' from the 2010 BBC One television programme Seceret Britian that features 'A Walk Around Britain' with these nomadic minstrels who 'sing for their supper' as they ramble around various locations across fair Albion and also in the Celtic lands that lie beyond.

Here they are singing the the traditional Wassail Song for some odd reason in a cave.  

Below  Ed, Will and a friend are singing the Broadside Ballad Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy a popular song made known to a wider audience in the latter half of the 20th century by the the Copper Family of Rottindean on the southeast coast of England. The popularity of traditional music in England now is I think an interesting sociological phenomenon.  It speaks I believe of renewed cultural identities in England which had generally fallen behind the other countries of the British archipelago in this particular respect, by allowing our musical heritage to become marginalised by other musical forms as good as they may be. 

The interest in English folk traditions in the early 21st century is in no small part I think a reaction to globalism, transnational capitalism, corporatism and a homogenous atlanticism on the one hand, but also to devolution in Britain and the increasing sense of change and of localism and community. 
The understanding that this localism is a shared and diverse one and is organically related to all other localisms is implicit and which puts the traditional music scene well out of reach of jingoism, racism and chauvenism.
Some tangible expressions of that diversity in the English folk revival is manifested in Imagined Village a multicultural roots folk supergroup... an expression of England today a rainbow nation. Embracing of other folk traditions especially the Celtic one we share with many of our neighbours is part of the identity of the English enclave in the World Music movement uniting populations in songs and dances all across the entire globe.

I personally have been a bit of a folknik since childhood so it is particularly encouraging to me as the years go by that there is so much talent around now... preserving and reinterpreting traditional music and making it so popular even corporate fun merchants like Butlins wants in on the act too.

Here are the lads with a Morris Minor Traveller car of the sort my dad had in 1960 (although ours was pale green) - singing Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy  for us..Enjoy! 

Part Two - Legitimation Crisis Britain - Unwritten Constitutional Slippage

Britain 2013

 Why Is the British Constitution Unwritten?

Answer

According to Ask Jeeves the archetypal English gentleman's gentleman the:-

 "British Constitution is unwritten because it has no single document which states principles and rules of a state. However, it clearly sets out how political power is allocated and where it is legally located. It also defines composition and powers of the main offices and institutions of the state."

http://uk.ask.com/question/why-is-the-british-constitution-unwritten

The Failure of the Neoliberal Political Consensus

In the first part of this blog I suggested that the cultural fabric of the countries that comprise Great Britain have been stretched thin by repeated instances of corruption and malfeasance that has invalidated the social contract upon which represenatative democracy depends. This I would suggest is a significant departure from the consensus politics of the British post-war welfare state period roughly 1945-1973, but it does represent a renewed consensus in British politics and indeed in global politics, which brings with it a whole new comstellation of contradictions.

There is of course nothing unique in Britain's current situation, it is shared to some lesser or greater degree by the wider English speaking world (the Anglosphere) and beyond it ascross many first world post-industrialised countries that are signed up to Global NATO..
On the world stage we see the clash of interest groups and hydrocarbon wars reminiscent Britain's two Opium Wars with China in the mid-19th century. Gangsterism in foreign policy is hardly a recent phenomenon, however widespread information about its machinations within the global community is certainly a 21st century development.

If there is any truth in the marxian notion that capitalism carries within it "the seeds of its own destruction" then I think that the internet holds the seeds of gangster capitalism's deconstruction and exposure as an unsustainable and ultimately doomed project. Having said that, with the exception of the Bolivarian Revolution in Latin America.... in the early 21st century capitalism is a globalised if failed set of socio-economic arrangements that has delivered hardship and insecurity, famine and war to millions of people worldwide while widening the wealth gap between the tiny elite and the global populations at a price that is simply extortionate.


In 2008 the Great Crash that underlined the inherent instability of capitalism changed the world forever.

By and large both the mainstream corporate media and professional economists not only missed the significance of this cataclysmic event... but continue to remain in denial five years on. Things are changing however as the Guardian reported in October this year:-

"Economics undergraduates at the University of Manchester have formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, which they hope will be copied by universities across the country. The organisers criticise university courses for doing little to explain why economists failed to warn about the global financial crisis and for having too heavy a focus on training students for City jobs."   http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/24/students-post-crash-economics

The article goes on to cite Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize winner and professor at Princeton university who has also attacked the complacency of economics education in the US. The Guardian piece makes reference to an article for the New York Times from 2009 in which Krugman wrote:

 "As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth."

That may well have been the folly of the economists but closely related to this is the folly of the politicians who have made a living out of impressive-looking mathematics if rarely it must be said are they mistaken for beauty.
The political malaise that is now confronting Britain goes much deeper than post-crash economics however, it goes to the very heart of the current legitimation crisis that affects the social fabric of this country and progressively dismantles it from within, as well as from without. During the mid 1970s German political theorist Jurgen Habermas published his book Legitimation Crisis in English [1975] (originally Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus 1973)  in which in a nutshell:-

He suggests that people expect governments to intervene successfully in the economy to try and ensure economic prosperity. Failure to succeed can cause the validity of the capitalist system to be questioned, thus undermining its legitimacy. Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/legitimation-crisis#ixzz2oUX9gA2S

Mary Poppins, a Santa Clause convention?.....No its the British judiciary in action

Habermas building upon the post-marxian traditions of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory proposes a form of Systems Theory in which not only solutions are generated, but also contradictions arise from the nature of capitalism and the social relationships it creates. In Britain this is especially associated with the class system, but also has echoes in the 17th century political upheavals out of which emerged a United Kingdom which presently has no king and is increasingly disunited. Nowadays the UK stands for the Untied Kleptocracy as political devolution undermines the foundations of the failing marriage of convenience between England and the Celtic fringe, meanwhile gangsterism runs rife in the ruling establishment of bankers, landowners, media barons and Euro-Royalty. As the latter point makes clear the lands of the British archepelago are not alone in this realignment of global power and influence, but the conditions that pertain here makes the body politic more brittle than some of our continental cousins experience. Sitting at the pinacle of the long defunct British Empire means that the apex of the UK social pyramid has further to fall than in some of our neighbours, those restructuring countries of continental Europe and the former vassal states of the so-called British Commonwealth.
Britain's unwritten constitution which worked well enough throughout the repeated consensuses that have characterised British politics for more than a century, but which now fails to give us any safeguards and its vaunted flexibility has no give left in it as the British government becomes increasingly a parody of itself.

The Mother of Parliaments has become clinically obese and irretrievably demented in her dotage, her institutions are similarly bloated and confused... as we enter 2014 a cold wind of change is inflating the wind sock (or is it the support stocking?) .... on the windswept deck of Airstrip One.

Something has to change before very much longer because the situation as it pertains in England and the other countries of the British Isles is unsustainable...but no worries, it will.... in due course.

Legitimation Crisis Britain - Part One - Seismic Public Spheres

-

 

  

 

 

Foreword by Wikipedia 

 In political science a legitimation crisis occurs when a governing structure still retains the legal authority by which to govern, but is not able to demonstrate that its practical functioning fulfills the end for which it was instituted.

Three characteristics may be linked with a legitimation crisis.

1. Policy incoherence: Government employees are so busy, they don't necessarily know what they are looking at.
2. Institutional will is lost: Employees are not careful about tainting a government institution with decisions which may be seen as mistaken or unpopular.
3. Loss of public confidence. The public begins to lose faith in the government to act efficiently and effectively.

Britain is currently going through a legitimation crisis which has cast most of the institutions of government and the state as dubious, duplicitous and downright untrustworthy. Obviously this crisis hasn't suddenly happened overnight but it is an unfolding process with what Freud might have called an overdetermined combination of  multiple factor causes and drives. It is perhaps paradoxical that the more celebrities are elevated the more they are vilified in the media and this rolling iconaclism engulfs the entire political and social 'establishment'. 

 Case Study 1

The Great and the Good no longer exist since Jimmy Savile finally killed them off, or was that the Queen's portrait artist and performer of that famous bondage anthem Tie Me Kanagaroo Down Sport, Australian superstar and darling of the BBC for more than half a century - Rolf Harris.

Harris sang "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" (with The Beatles singing backing vocals) in the first edition of the From Us to You BBC radio shows, in December 1963. Harris rewrote the song specially for The Beatles. 

On 31 December 1976, Harris performed his hit song "Two Little Boys" on BBC'1's  A Jubilee of Music, celebrating British pop music for the impending Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II. Harris's portrait of The Queen was voted by readers of the Radio Times the third favourite portrait of Her Majesty. The royal portrait was exhibited at Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh, and was exhibited on a tour of public galleries in the UK.

Rolf was always loved by the Royals, a real colonial treasure that was swept up by the BBC and beamed into almost every home in Britain for five decades. 

 

Harris was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1968; he was advanced to Officer (OBE) in 1977, then to Commander (CBE) in 2006.

In 1989 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM), and was advanced to Officer (AO) in the Queen's 2012 Birthday Honours. In 2001 he was awarded the Centenary Medal "for service to entertainment, charity and the community".

Harris has received two honorary doctorates: from the University of East London in 2007; and from Liverpool Hope University in 2010

 In 2008 Harris was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. ( Australian Recording Industry Association).
 In 2012, he was made a Fellow of BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) .

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Harris#cite_note-rolf-77} 

 Everything in Rolf's life was going just fine and dandy until March 2013 when he was arrested as part of Operation Yewtree the rather belated Metropolitan Police investigation into Jimmy Savile's sex life ongoing since 2012 and netting some pretty big names in British popular culture.

According to our old friend Wikipedia again:-

 "Harris appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court on 23 September 2013, charged with nine counts of indecent assault and four counts of making indecent images of children. His lawyer indicated that Harris will be pleading not guilty and he was subsequently bailed. A plea hearing at Southwark Crown Court has been set for 14 January 2014 and the trial will commence on 30 April 2014."

 I have no more to say on this ongoing court case, but as an illustration and indeed a metaphor for the legitimation crisis itself.... usually more evident in the political sphere than in the glitzy world of the monarchy/celebrity British and international glitteratti!  The leakage of this crisis goes deeper into the heart of contemporary Britain as the popular media consumes its own products to attempt to remain profitable in a contracting market.
In the disUnited Queendom if Great Britain the fouth estate is at war with legislators while it has been fatally holed below the waterline by the new fith estate, bloggersand social networkers and is sinking along with all the other estates of the realm. If Britannia till rules the waves it is from below them nowadays not above them any longer.
Jimmy Savile was at the very heart of the British establishment with almost unbelieveable influence and social clout. His fall from grace was faster than the collapse of the twin towers and as everyone knows they collapsed into their own footprint at the speed of gravity, Jimmy Savile and the WTC both demolished as the BBC's credibility went down with Building Seven. Along with the late Savile... the whole British honours system and basis of the British establishment has lurched alarmingly in the ever deepening aftershock. Like Rolf, Jimmy was well in with the Royals

The monarchy are not of course 'the government' as such. England unlike Scotland doesn't actually have a government, nor like Wales and Northern Ireland does it have a national assembly either. There is of course a British institution we call the government but it is the Queen's government, not ours. Politicians do get elected by a diminishing number of people who can bother to go out to vote yes, but they don't represent anything other than their own narrow personal and party interests. 
The current British government wasn't even elected by those in the four countries that comprise the UK whose voters did bother to turn out for the Westminster elections, they were cobbled together by bankers and lobbyists and God knows who?


The alliance between new and old money which takes in these media celebs and the old landowning Norman aristocrats are by and large in favour of globalism of course. Why shouldn't they be?
It is they the globalist elite who avail themselves of offshore tax havens, like the despicable Margaret Thatcher and her family have done for example. Her £12million Central London mansion where Lady Thatcher spent the last years of her life is owned by an anonymous trust registered in the British Virgin Islands – a ­notorious tax haven.

Through this arrangement she seems to have avoided up to £5million in inheritance tax – the 40% that would have been due if it was owned by any UK resident, which of course in reality Margaret Thatcher was.
This actually is just the tip of the corruption iceberg in post-Thatcherite Britain whose eponymous leader was always a cunning old con artist of course, but even those people who actually voted for her now know (some of) the truth about her nefarious non dom tax status, too late of course as ever to put the matter right.

Even private sector multinational public opinion and information harvesters like TNS Global a world leader in the belief in the existence of a Commitment Economy and the secret agents of Mammon in the murky world of shopping can discover this for themselves from their own super penetrative research. 
In May this year TNS gloomily announced that:-

"....(a) recent survey showed that British people feel trapped in an unfair class system and feel politically disempowered as they do not trust politicians, the media, or business leaders. This downbeat picture of low morale in austerity Britain emerges from opinion polling by TNS BMRB which was conducted among 1196 adults."
The survey found only 17% trusted  UK government ministers, but even that was better than the 14% who trusted MPs generally and the mere10% who said they trusted 'popular newspaper journalists'. The BBC did slightly better.. trusted by 28% of population which of course means that the British establishment's primary media mouthpiece was actually distrusted by 72% of the research population.

http://www.tnsglobal.com/other-news/public-opinion-monitor-low-morale-austerity-britain-infographic-1-may-2013

The present government's policies have not only been incoherent as the first indicator of legitimation crisis would predict, but completely irrational like the handing of contracts for catastrophically dangerous nuclear technology to government owned companies in China and France. David Cameron is not only widely perceived as the dishonourable member for Wall Street, but also the loyal messenger from Beijing and the shameless plaything of Paris as well. Globalism is clearly a doctrine based upon doing nothing for your own electors whilst bending over backwards to service various interests from abroad. Cameron behaves like an economic streetwalker touting himself on behalf of his rich pals while doing selfies with Barack Obama and Danish leader, Helle Thorning-Schmidt... at the Mandela photo-op and hypocrisy fest in South Africa this week.

Lightweights Spoiling Mrs Obama's Memorial Mandela Moment

 

This image is the epitome of empty and failing celebtocracy captured perfectly in one single shot.

In the next part - Legitimation Crisis Britain II - we will be considering the potential death of political parties and the end of representative democracy as it has evolved across the various territories comprising the United Kingdom today and since the UK was first created in 1707.

Rejoicing the Folk Valhalla on the North Sea Shore.....The Corporate Roots Experience Relived!

Valhalla (1896) by Max Brückner.

I can't remember the last time I heard a Latin 16th century arrangement of an originally late medieval monophonic hymn at a Butlin's Holiday Centre ...or whatever they are called now they've stopped calling them 'camps'? During last weekend I did something I thought I'd never do again, I went the the Great British Fok Festival at Butlins, Skegness.
Although the weather was relatively kind to us on this occasion, it is still a distinctly chilled place to be for likes of West Mercians such as myself, right over there on the east coast of England... in December. However, it is not the weather that puts me off returning to this venue...it is the relentless charges for everything in places like these that puts me off.
I will not for example pay £1.35 at an ATM to get my own money out of the machine. I'll spend less instead until I can get to the free cashpoint at the local Co-op shop - open from 8 am 7 days per week - a mile or so down the road.
This working class pleasure dome and British institution called Butlins is universally known across the UK.

I have worked at three Butlins camps myself (when they still were called camps before Guantanamo soured the image).

The tales of camp life in my youth would have easily fuelled a few dozen folk songs I'm sure... but sadly none they would play on the BBC, or at Butlins for that matter.

Anyway here is a video of Steeleye Span performing an encore of Gaudete (or rejoice in English) which is about as christmassy as I ever get.

The complete text of "Gaudete"  including the refrain: Latin	English
Gaudete, gaudete! Christus est natus Ex Maria virgine, gaudete!	Rejoice, rejoice! Christ is born (Out) Of the Virgin Mary — rejoice!
Tempus adest gratiæ Hoc quod optabamus, Carmina lætitiæ Devote reddamus.	The time of grace has come— what we have wished for, songs of joy Let us give back faithfully.
Deus homo factus est Natura mirante, Mundus renovatus est A Christo regnante.	God has become man, To the wonderment of Nature, The world has been renewed By the reigning Christ.
Ezechielis porta Clausa pertransitur, Unde lux est orta Salus invenitur.	The closed gate of Ezekiel Is passed through, Whence the light is born, Salvation is found.
Ergo nostra contio Psallat iam in lustro; Benedicat Domino: Salus Regi nostro.	Therefore let our gathering Now sing in brightness Let it give praise to the Lord: Greeting to our King.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the translation of this beautiful old English carol...... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaudete

Meanwhile back in Xanadu aboard Airstrip One.... there is nowhere on these shores where the true meaning of that particular Orwellian epithet could be more clearly demonstrated, than the heavily defended east coast of England. But here we are in the next video montage from the Jellyfish Lounge, Butlins, Skegness in the Danelaw lands with music by Panjenix. Be glad the Solstice approaches! 

Magic Nuclear Futures - Too Safe for Comfort?

It is interesting that at just the very time the British government is accepting contracts for private sector nuclear power stations to be built in England operated by foreign state owned companies from France and China, a new twist to that folly enjoys what Margaret Thatcher once called "the oxygen of publicity".

 Into this Alice Through the Looking Glass situation unleashed by the Atlanticist entrists in the Cameron Clegg coalition steps a new actor into the picture, but one with ancient roots. I refer to the postmodern philosophers stone of modern alchemy  the element called Thorium, known affectionately by its elemental symbol Th and whose atomic number is 90...it was named after the Norse God of Thunder Thor. Excellent, it could save the world!

Actually there is nothing new at all about Thorium which was first discovered in 1828, which was used in gas mantles and has been a contender for 'clean' nuclear fuel for half a century at least.

Thorium is not like the nuclear fuel it is competing with, namely uranium, Th is fertile not fissile and that changes everything.

Wikipedia note - Fertile material is a material that, while not itself fissionable by thermal neutrons, can be converted into a fissile material by neutron absorption and subsequent nuclei conversions.

Proposed applications for fertile material includes a space-based facility for the manufacture of fissile material for spacecraft nuclear propulsion. The facility would notionally transport fertile materials from Earth, safely through the atmosphere, and locate them at a space facility at the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrange point where manufacture of fissile material would occur, eliminating the safety risk of transport of fissile materials from Earth.^[2]

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertile_material}

^{So NASA and other space agencies think Thorium is safe and of course the US military are interested in finding ways to make this peaceful element into a weapon of death and global domination as indicated in the video clip below from the horses mouth, so to speak. The US military have assigned resources to the research, but so far as civil nuclear energy is concerned Thorium is the obvious answer to most of our current problems. It is plentiful and it is safe, too safe for comfort so far as the military industrial banking elite and neoimperialist Atlanticists are concerned, but maybe that is changing?}

<sup>The interest of the NATO hawks is paradoxically quite a good sign for Thorium based energy in general because it was exactly those people who suppressed its development in the United States more than 30 years ago and put us back a generation in the first place.

It is not amenable to nuclear weapons production.

Now the US military industrial complex is suddenly very very interested, because China or Russia might get the technology up and running first... as is happening in Norway and India already of course. 
The unmitigated and still unfolding disaster at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan has finally alerted even the most fanciful, optimistic and/or dullard elements of the energy establishment - that there is something very wrong in the nuclear power gamble as is and it should be abandoned.</sup>

<sup>Thorium has been consistently rejected by governments because it was much too safe!
Th was bypassed in the past only because governments wanted the plutonium from certain conventional reactors to make atomic bombs.

Now Fukushima has confronted Japan and the whole world with completely unstable and unpredictable outcomes the somnambulists in government, the military and the energy industry have awoken with an alarmed start....not so David Cameron and the Con-Dems though, they plan to create another potential catastrophic disaster area initially at Hinkley Point in Somerset, southwest England... without any reference to the insoluable problems caused by this outdated technology all around the world... they still want to throw our money away on the white elephant today despite the unlearned lessons of Windscale [1957], Chernobyl [1986], Three Mile Island [1979] and Fukushima today.

This unhappily is equally true of Ed Milliband's Labour Party and the artificially constructed parliamentary opposition in Britain's hydra-headed one-party state, where there is total concensus on all major issues and in the UK parliament they only squabble over details, nuances and trivia.</sup>

^{British tax payers are going to be fleeced as per usual, this time to pay off EDF shareholders while facing greater risks to the environment by the Hinkley Point deal, the plan is more of the Atlanticist diabolical aim to screw the ordinary people for the sake of the profiteering and criminal elite whose interests they serve... than anything to do with energy security for the people of this country who count for nothing in the Con Dem equation.}

^{For a more honest and intelligent approach than that of squirming politicos like the Con-Dem mouthpiece coalition energy secretary Ed Davey can offer... here is what Dr Paul Dorfman, from the Energy Institute at University College London, said about the proposed deal at Hinkley Point 'C' Nuclear plant ...}

^{... "what it equates to actually is a subsidy and the coalition said they would never subsidise nuclear"}

He added: 

"It is essentially a subsidy of between what we calculate to be £800m to £1bn a year that the UK taxpayer and energy consumer will be putting into the deep pockets of Chinese and French corporations, which are essentially their governments."

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24604218

^{Thorium could solve the world's energy problems in conjunction with locally sourced renewable energy sources. The reason it hasn't already done that, or at least made a major contribution is that psychopaths and charlatans have blocked the progress of a technology that does not further their own nefarious ends.}

^{I don't usually post lengthy videos, but the one below which runs for a little over 28 minutes tells all we need to know about Th and the current crisis in energy planning brought about, largely behind the scenes, by the unprecedented scale of the nuclear accident that happened at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant damaged by the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011. . . Thorium could help save the planet, I think we need to get behind it if we aren't there already?}

 

In Memory of Lou Reed (Born: March 2, 1942 - Died: 27 October, 2013)

 

The first time I heard What Goes On from the Velevet Underground's eponymous album of 1969 I was with a girlfriend in a booth of a record store in Corporation Street, Birmingham around 1970...we were both tripping and had taken refuge from the chaos of the streets in that booth.....We were transformed by this fabulous proto-punk anthem. I had to wait until the1990s before I saw Lou Reed live at a gig promoting his then new album Set The Twilight Reeling (1996) at Birmingham Indoor Arena. This was no stadium rock gig, it was standing/dancing event in which Lou Reed was performing a few feet from where I stood and at more or less the same level, more like a big pub gig than a superstar spectacular.
In the Middle East in the late 70s Lou Reed's album Rock and Rock Heart was my constant companion and his classics like the first Velvet Underground/Andy Warhol ' Banana' album... Transformer, Berlin, White Light White Heat, Live at Max's Kansas City and New York were all albums that I have owned in a variety of formats over the years and still play today. The video below is the best I could find on YouTube, the annoying caption disappears after about a minute, unfortunately it returns at the end, but this original 1965 footage is absolutely priceless I think.

Lou Reed was a master of contemporary music, he was born in New York City and died in New York City  and he sang about the place a lot in between. There will be many tributes to Lou Reed in coming days, but for me there will never be a more exciting sound than the one I heard that day back in the mists of time, dancing with my girlfiend out of our heads in a soundproof  booth in Lewis's Department Store, Brum... with the sound turned up full, it was divine madness.  It was also incidentally - a day to remember for all my life. So thanks for that Lou, you were indeed a fabulous shining star!

English Folk Music Part 1

Just 3 miles (5 kms) or so up the road from where I am typing this post there is a hotel, with a bar and performance area where I have been on several previous occasions to concerts, plays and the like.
 I repeated that habit again yesterday when I went to a well attended performance by those very icons of the second and third English folk revivals, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick.
The influence of both of these men, who have been making music together now for the last 48 years on the traditional music scene in England and across the world is immeasurable... but immense.

They are the masters of the cotemporary English folk genre, which to some significant degree they have crafted and shaped themselves through the various bands and projects they have been involved with over the years.

When I experience them playing while sat perched on a not very comfortable seat in a makeshift concert hall I thought of all the strands of my life that their music weaves together in one way or another, going  back to my adolescence and that is quite a long way back believe me.

I first became aware of Martin Carthy at the age of 14 when I saved money from my paper rounds (I did two) to buy Freewheelin' Bob Dylan's classic second studio album released in 1963.

LPs as they were then called were expensive commodities in my youth and not easily come by. Freewheelin' was only my second album having already acquired With The Beatles as a matter of indispensable necessity. I consumed that Dylan record when I got it like a prized work of art which despite its mass production and global distribution is exactly what it was to me and to millions of others of course. I avidly read the sleeve notes which described the way Bob Dylan immersed himself in the London folk scene, making contact with the Troubadour folk club organizer Anthea Joseph and folksingers Martin Carthy and Bob Davenport. "I ran into some people in England who really knew those [traditional English] songs," Dylan recalled in 1984. "Martin Carthy, another guy named [Bob] Davenport. Martin Carthy's incredible. I learned a lot of stuff from Martin."

Martin Carthy taught Dylan two English songs that would prove important for the Freewheelin' album. Carthy's arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" would be used by Dylan as the basis of his own composition, "Girl from the North Country". A 19th century ballad commemorating the death of Sir John Franklin in 1847, "Lady Franklin's Lament", gave Dylan the melody for his composition "Bob Dylan's Dream". 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freewheelin%27_Bob_Dylan#Footnotes

Shortly after playing host and mentor to both Bob Dylan's and Paul Simon's visits to England in the early 1960s, Martin Carthy started his collaboration with Dave Swarbrick (Swarbs) from1965 when they began recording together. Dave Swarbrick grew up in Birmingham. According to his Wikipedia entry he learned to play the basics of violin from a local fiddler and he attended Birmingham College of Art (now absorbed into the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design) in the late 1950s, with the intention of becoming a printer. When I left school I wanted to be a printer too, but I lacked the academic qualifications to gain entry to the printing trade, so I went off to be a dairy farmer (for 6 months) instead. 

But this post isn't about me, it is about two musicians who have made a massive contribution to English and world music over half a century individually as a duo and collectively in a multitude of projects.

There are intersections throughout my life with this music and its performers from my earliest musical awakenings as a young teenager and actually before that at school doing English country dancing and singing Bobby Shaftoe age 7....that folk music theme runs from then right through to the present day.
Before going on to be a foundation member of Fairport Convention in 1969 Dave Swarbs as he likes to be known, played in the Ian Campbell Folk Group (1960-1966), a Birmingham based institution and a band on my own radar since they got to number 42 in the British singles charts in 1965 with a cover of Dylan's Times They Are A-Changin' . I hunted down this music with very limited resources from around the age of 13.
I followed all leads at every opportunity. I saw Bob Dylan himself play in 1966 which was the high point of my dedicated sojourn, a right of passage the first time I was out all alone in the city all night long queueing for tickets outside the Birmingham Odeon, a venue which is still there on New Street.

Much later on I came to know Ian and Lorna Campbell of the band, at Sunday afternoon music and beer sessions after the pubs had closed during lock-ins at the member-only (dead exclusive) Star Club then in Essex Street (later to move to Digbeth before its decline). Those were great times for me in the 80s mobilised around the anti-Thatcher coalition movement first behind the miners and then on the back of the Poll Tax, we never stopped the struggle and  resisted the monetarist and nationalist propaganda on all fronts 24/7.

This was all going on during the social upheavals of the Miners Strike (1984-85) and for several years after it the party raved on a bit while we licked our wounds and regrouped around CND, the anti apatheid movement, Nicaragua solidarity against the Falkland/Malvinas war and US cruise missile bases in eastern England. .

 The Star Club was owned by the Communist Party of Great Britain and it was a great place to go for political meetings, folk music, it was for a while a foremost punk rock venue ... and a veritable hub for revolutionary activity of one sort or another...as well as one of the best left bookshops in the English Midlands and probably the whole country... if not the English speaking world at that time (why hold back?).

This venue became a regular hangout for me during the turbulent 1980s and into the 90s. Gone now sadly, but the building reverberated with the 'people's music' and it is from that background that Dave Swarbs emerged as a virtuoso of the fiddle and a hero of the second folk revival (and now it seems the third).

What follows shortly is some live footage of the concert, a sharing of a musical event for the pleasure of it... a celebration of a musical culture and a reminder of the universal timelessness of music that for every community has its special place close to its heart.

Musical languages speak to each other and while the voices we hear here are English that 'voice' comprises elements from the languages of the Celts and the Norse, the Saxons and the north African and mid European camp followers of the the fallen Roman Empire, Brythonic natives of these islands and the northern European Belgae to name but a few.
It is perhaps fitting that since the English language has become globalised we remember it is a language made up of many borrowed words from languages that originate all around the world as well as the original Anglo Saxon tongue.

Check the link below for a list of borrowed languages that have helped to create modern English

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_country_or_language_of_origin

This is an important thing to realise about English national identity I think, it is intrinsically all inclusive, multicultural, communalistic and mutually tolerant and is resolutely not what the far right portray it as jingoistic, militaristic, white supremacist, this what the fascists want English nationalism to look like. Neo-nazi groups have more or less hijacked most of the symbolism and icons of English nationalism.
England is a land created by immigrants and one of its greatest virtues has been its comparative capacity to absorb incomers it was built on multiculturalism and diversity and to argue otherwise is profoundly un-English  I think. Therein lies the happy truth that you cannot be a reactionary thug in the name of England because that very condition means that you have not yet attained the the right to be considered English youself and it is the fascist scapegoating bullies that always find themselves isolated and shunned by the overwhelming majority of 'ordinary people'. It happened in the 1930s and it is happening again now.

So while the English fascists howl their alien messages in the wilderness the people's music is in alternative hands, safe hands....hands held out in a gesture of solidarity and not as a clenched fist of racial hatred! 

The people's music belongs to everyone irrespective of their sex, sexuality, ablebodiedness, health status, race or cultural identity... it is all equally ours to share and to compare and to admire our shared musical universal heritage.  Its a sharing of musical traditions

 The revelation back in 2010 that British National Party leader Nick Griffin was actively targeting English folk music as a potential vehicle for his party’s nefarious agenda galvanized the folk world into retaliatory action . Those BNP advances have been roundly rebuffed but we have to remain vigilant for the enemy within traditional English roots music, the very un-English snake in the grass with a British nationalist agenda and a nazi axe to grind.

FAF CONNECT http://www.folkagainstfascism.com/about.html 

Having said all that then here's the video-
 

Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick The Gaol/ Treadmill Song- Live 18 October 2013 

ENJOY!