Bank Holiday Mondays always feel like Sundays so I am continuing the Sunday Rumble format in which I will, from time to time during the day, ejaculate - look, I do the jokes round here! - sundry thoughts as and when they stumble into my mind. That means they will not be the usual beautifully crafted, highly intelligent, literate posts you expect on a normal day - and I won't tell you lot again!
The car washer test: There seems to be a great deal of fuss being made about Ian Duncan-Smith's so-called welfare 'reforms'. He has admitted publicly that they will not save a penny which, given that most politicians are lying liars by definition, gives me some small hope. However, what Duncan-Smith does claim is that his 'reforms' will manage the money more sensibly. I will offer you all, free of charge 'cos I'm generous like that, a simple test as to the efficacy of these 'reforms'. I make regular use of one of those car valeting services you see everywhere around these days, and yes, it is because I'm a lazy git who doesn't like getting his hands wet! I very much admire the boys and girls who work there, and do so with incredible energy in all weathers. I always make a point of asking where they come from. The answers cover just about every country in Eastern Europe. The only country never, not ever, mentioned is England! And how many Brit 'youfs' and 'youfettes' are in receipt of unemployment benefit, I wonder? When I see Brits working at these places I shall know that the 'reforms' have worked.
I told you, didn't I? A few days ago I provided you all with an audio link to a very shrewd American businessman who, apart from wanting to sell you his services, also spelled out exactly and precisely why the USA is well on its way to the knacker's yard. The Americans will owe around $20 trillion by the time Obama ends his reign and they will be utterly dependent on being able to borrow at the cheap rates they enjoy today because their dollar is still the reserve currency for much of the world's trade. Alas, that is already ending as more and more countries agree to drop the dollar and use their own currencies. I remind you of this because today the excellent Zero Hedge site is reporting that China and Australia have just agreed to ditch the dollar as the currency for their trade. This is all part of a Sino-Russian plan, already well on its way to completion, to form a trade bloc based on energy supplies with the sole aim of excluding the USA and, come to that, any of its usual glove puppets, ie, us! "The times they are a -changin'."
Footie fans: the truly brain dead: From the comfort of my own armchair with a constant supply of hot tea (courtesy of the 'Memsahib' whose hip is coming along nicely, thank you for asking, she no longer has to drag herself along on the floor which slowed up delivery recently) I have just watched Chelsea beat Man United on a freezing cold day. I suppose, just, that there is some justification to leave the comfort and warmth of your home, to travel sometimes hundreds of miles at vast expense and to pay ticket prices that will keep sundry "muddy-mettled rascals" in the millionaire styles to which they have grown accustomed, but surely having arrived there must be better things to do than just stand there chanting imbecilic slogans over and over and over again. Or is it their way of trying to prove to themselves that were they to submit to a brain scan the needle would move - just!
So farewell then, David Miliband, and good riddance! So 'Big' Dave slinks off to America to run a charity for a million quid a year because his sneaky little bro' nicked what he considered to be his political entitlement. Fair enough, I suppose, but today he also resigned as a director of the 'footie' club in his constituency because they have just appointed an Italian lout as manager who once expressed his liking for fascism. Well, David was shocked, I tell you, shocked and instantly made his feelings clear by resigning - whilst probably thanking the Lord he would never have to visit Sunderland again. Of course, had the Italian oaf expressed his support for communism, David would not have turned one of his well-groomed hairs despite the fact that communism has murdered roughly twenty or is it thirty times more millions of people than that dilletante Hitler. Perhaps the fact that his dear old dad had been a lifetime supporter of Stalin, a proper mass-murderer, had something to do with it.
Even The Economist puts global warming in the deep freeze: Thanks to Roger Simon at PJ Media I learn that the mighty Economist mag has dumped global warming:
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat
while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly
100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is
about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as
James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes,
“the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
And someone must have opened the windows at their London offices because now they are quoting some Russian eye-ball swiveller predicting the freezing end of the world:
Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov, of the St Petersburg Pulkovo
Astronomical Observatory, painted the Doomsday scenario saying the recent
inclement weather [in Europe] simply proved we were heading towards a frozen
planet.
Dr Abdussamatov believes Earth was on an “unavoidable advance towards
a deep temperature drop”. The last big freeze, known as the Little Ice Age, was
between 1650 and 1850.
I may be crap at predicting American elections but I did warn all of you to 'go long' on Long Johns!