Category: General

Today in Kentucky a man was displeased with his breakfast and went on a shooting rampage which was responsible for the death of 5 people. His eggs, according to the story, were not to his satisfaction.
Here is the link to the full story.

This, as extreme as it is, is not unheard of in the USA. Some parts of the country, especially along the border with Mexico are essentially the fiefdoms of Latin American drug cartels. Across the San Francisco Bay from me lies Oakland — one of the centres of gang activity. The heartland for that, however, is Los Angeles where several times a month people die because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Actually, that happened here in San Francisco last month — a German teacher on holiday was shot and killed when she was caught in the crossfire. But life in the USA is great, just peachy. It is wonderful since American society is so much stronger than that in the old world, obviously. That is why violent crime rates are several times higher in the USA than there.

“When I warned [the French] that Britain would fight on alone, whatever they did, their Generals told their Prime Minister and his divided cabinet: ‘In three weeks, England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.

“Some chicken….Some neck!
Winston Churchill

Goodnight everyone, sleep well.

On September 10, 1683, the papal legate sang a great outdoor mass on the Kahlenberg, west of Vienna, for King Jan III Sobieski and his 16,000 troops.  The king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been named commander of the field army of some 85,000 troops, including not only the Polish–Lithuanian contingent, but also troops of the  Habsburg Monarchy,  Bavaria,  Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the Zaporozhian* Cossacks — collectively: the Holy League. (Note that only Louis XIV of France had refused the Pope’s rally call and was using the opportunity to seize Hapsburg territories in the Elsass and other parts of southern Germany. The Elsass (Alsace) would eventually become part of France, and we all know where that lead. Continue reading “The other 9/11”

After a Russian and an American singing singing our patriotic anthems, a Czech conductor! He did a good job.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
Winston Churchill

Goodnight everyone, sleep well.

my daughter’s two

During a discussion on the radio this morning between Ian Fletcher, author of ‘Free Trade Doesn’t Work- What should replace it and why’, and Philippe Legrain, author of ‘Aftershock’, the latter stated that a tariff is a tax on the consumer. While strictly true, the remark typified the kind of thinking in boxes that has led us into the present mess. It overlooks the simple truth that consumers are largely employees under another heading. By setting capital footloose in the world we have cheapened the goods we consume, but at the cost of employment. As employment continues to decline, so must consumption of non-essentials, cheap or not. This is a race to the bottom. I have not read Fletcher’s book, though I have just ordered it, but I suspect that much of his argument reflects concerns that some of us have held for years.

At a time when the ‘experts’ in the CIPD were advising companies that they must ‘empower’ their employees, I argued that empowerment was dead in the water as a concept. “Deregulation and technological development have stripped away forever the protective walls behind which western employees were able to organise in order to wring concessions from employers and government alike on terms and conditions. Capital is now free to seek out the cheapest sources of labour anywhere in the world and to move to where poverty and authoritarian government combine to ensure a compliant labour force.” (‘Human Resource Development-a contingency function?’ by Tom Kilcourse. Journal of European Industrial Training. Vol 20. No. 9. 1996)

I predicted in the nineties that “Their employer, if they have one, will probably be a labour only contractor offering them a short-term of employment. It is possible that they will not have a contract of any kind. We could see the white collar equivalent of the old tally system used on the docks whereby workers reported for duty in the morning with no guarantee of work that day.” (‘Empowerment and other myths’ by Tom Kilcourse. The Leadership and Organization Development Journal. Vol 17. No 5. 1996). We are not there yet, but the increasing number of agency workers indicates that we are heading in that direction. Increasingly workers, including the highly skilled, are not employees of the firm they work in, but of outfits like ‘Manpower’.

Broken Britain? You aint seen nothin’ yet, and in America too. The politicians and their big business backers have sold the people out.