https://therealslog.com/2020/08/22/covid19-only-deadly-as-an-instrument-of-unregulated-propaganda/ John Ward August 22, 2020 Uncategorized COVID19: only deadly as an instrument of unregulated propaganda In what is being widely seen (by me) as a miracle up there with Red Sea partings and water into wine, The Times today has finally managed to shake off its self-imposed D-Notice and point out how Contrick19 NHS obsession is going to kill far more people than Coronavirus could ever manage: It's behind the Digger's Pusillanimous Paywall, but I can give you the gist of this frontline oncologist's contrarian (and entirely correct) opinion with a few extracts: "Some estimates say a few thousand cancer patient lives could be lost. I think you can easily multiply that by ten. It's far worse than people appreciate. We have almost certainly caused the death of something like 30,000 patients, 30,000 who would have probably been cured if it hadn't been for Covid. I've seen a lot in my half a century in medicine. I've never been more worried about cancer care than I am now. This is an unfolding disaster and so many aren't seeing it. I don't believe [the Covid death toll] is as high as 41,000. I think a lot of those people would have died anyway within a fairly rapid timeframe." So there you have it -- but you read it here first. Now the assumption the Establishment wants us to buy into about the pig's ear of alarmist predictions, distraction from more serious illnesses, one-sided media coverage, incompetent drug trials, double counting, cases treated as deaths and PHE overstatement is that it was all down to human error. But such an assumption would involve a level of quite staggering stupidity around the World. For example, Aukland yesterday was on the verge of total lockdown on the basis of four cases. Not deaths -- cases. And it emerged last night that Spain's blacklisting by the UK as a holiday destination happened because Spain has (since May) been counting in its daily total of 'active cases' people who had the virus weeks ago, but have since recovered. How, for instance, did the Prime Minister of Australia first demand (and then retract) obligatory vaccination when no such vaccine exists... or is indeed likely to? Over the last seven weeks, I have spoken to or corresponded with fourteen virologists, all of whom agree that it will be nigh on impossible to vaccinate against Coronavirus, and all but one of whom were extremely doubtful about such a necessity in the first place. After eighty years or more of looking for such a thing, there is still no vaccine for malaria... .it is handled by HCQ as a management drug that speeds recovery and almost obliterates deaths. Playing in government's favour re this one is the sad reality that around 60% of people still believe the Deadly Killer myth, and a further 30% are too busy, telly-addicted or drunk to give a tinker's cuss either way. But no matter how many Covidiots ignore it, what we have here is yet more proof that Great Britain's laughably dubbed "elite" has become a blame-free zone in which there is no accountability -- or indeed, prosecution of justice -- whatsoever. And as a taxpayer, that gives me a somewhat niggly outlook on the whole thing... ... .a dog-with-a-bone approach to shining light into dark corners. There are two sets of people at the top of my "depraved hobgoblin" hierarchy, bankers and Whitehall senior civil servants. It will therefore come as no surprise to learn that that they are both heavily implicated in this, our current cesspit of base motives. Because for those who want to blame globalist banking failures, stock market graft and blocked Brexit on something that can be easily demonised, Contrick19 is the perfect vehicle. The players in this cacophonous operetta of nonsense are all as I write assumed to be innocent of malign intention. To suspect any of them is deemed "wild conspiracy theory". Had this same rule applied to the Nuremburg Trials of 1946, probably 90% of the Nazi hierarchy would never even have come to trial. Emmanuel Macron has had a profoundly suspicious relationship with the Sanoffi Pharma combine for twelve years. Their PR was instrumental in smearing both HCQ and Professor Didier Raoult at the outset of Covidaphobia... .a campaign Macron fully backed at first. He also lied about the value of masks. Dr Anthony Fauci has enacted the same baseless smears against HCQ in the US. He has lied about the existence of positive trials in five countries around the globe -- all of whom use the 'HCQ cocktail' with great success in managing Covid19. He has ruthlessly lied to the media about C19 death rates based on precisely nothing. The creature he has installed at the CDC has a track record of serious data manipulation in the treatment of AIDS. And he too lied about masks. In Britain, Peter Horby used dubious clinical trials to overdose and omit balance in his administration of HCQ cocktail. As many as 28 patients may have needlessly died in a trial that has been roundly condemned by senior medics in Italy, China and New York. If there is assumed to be no whiff of manslaughter in this case, why? He knew the doses, he knew the cocktail and he knew that his fund donors in Big Pharma want the profits from a new vaccine. A month ago, respected daily title France Soir reached these blunt conclusions about the Horby trials: 'The authors of the recovery clinical trial (Peter Horby and Martin Landray) attempt to cover up a despicable fault in the hydroxychloroquine arm. Several elements are concerning : results that are hiding reality, unforgivable errors in the documents, the author of the appendix of the documents of the Recovery study (British clinical trial) is Dr Hayden known to be historically close to Gilead having taken on several occasions the defence of Remdesivir (drug that has recently been approved by the European Medicines Agency without evidence of therapeutic benefit and very harmful side effects). Hence the Recovery study cannot be considered serious.' Surprise, surprise, Remdesivir "emerged" from the trials as the winner. It has only 35% of the efficacy of HCQ, and costs twelve times as much. Here we have motive, means and opportunity all clearly present. A Whitehall source told me three weeks ago ago that the Horby results were being "queried with a view to re-running the trial". That has not happened. Why? And so to Public Health England -- PHE. Before the chaps at Pumped High Estimates were caught variously doubling up and confusing death with infection, The Slog posted six times to point out the obvious discrepancy between their 'spikes' and the ONS/Funeral Director feedback that showed no spike at all. PHE has now been disbanded -- and will be replaced. That's a pretty draconion outcome unless something very smelly indeed had emerged. Will there be an inquiry? Has any chummy's collar been felt by Mr Plod? Chief Executive at PHE Duncan Selbie has clearly reached his sellby date (fnar-fnar) and said he is "sorry beyond words" for what happened... .but flatly refutes the idea that his brainchild was in any way at fault. Er, so why is he sorry? He was on a salary of GBP190,000 a year. His pension will be unaffected. Once again, the time has come to make the main cultural point at issue here. We are not going to see any of these individuals stretched on a rack somewhere, because they all act with impunity. Pushing ahead with every form of invasive data, obligatory decree and half-baked analysis to dilute our liberties and reveal our most inner needs from Jaffa cakes to turf accountants, all of them act in secret, are grilled in secret, briefed in secret and remain answerable to no objective separate and free body of regulation or law whatsoever. Their increasing invasion of our lives -- while we know less and less about theirs -- is one of the central and most bitter ironies of our age. Covid19 is merely the latest in a long series of intimate examinations that begin, "Now just lie still, this won't hurt a bit". There was Tony Blair in 2004, trying to sell us ID cards with "It's only like a passport". Then Jacquie Smith, the girl who put the secret into Home Secretary by handing a GBP14billion surveillance budget to GCHQ, insisting, "This is only a trial run". David Cameron and his "We did not talk about the Sky takeover with James Murdoch" then Papa Murdoch himself and his brilliant impression of a failed lobotomy as he he looked blank and said, "I never heard anyone talk about phone hacking". And Jeremy Hunt claiming "I have done nothing wrong" after redacting 230 emails that showed he'd done things during the ill-fated Sky deal that were as wrong as something despicably wrong that has spent a lifetime perfecting the scientific art of doing very very wrong things. None of these episodes -- not even Weapons of Mass Destruction -- brought anyone to justice. Rebekah Brooks somehow corrupted the prosecution service to ensure she was charged only with things she hadn't done, and Cameron's ex-Newscorp press secretary went to an upmarket prison for nine weeks... .the trial took eight months to prepare. 146 teenage idiots who looted stores in Croydon during a riot got an average of five years each, and their arrest, trial and incarceration was turned round in just 27 days. But nevertheless, while rejoicing in their immunity, the Establishment took careful note of the annoying inconvenience that even a tepid Rule of Law could be. Which is why, when truculent Brit voters decided to stick it to them on the Brexit issue in 2016, the Shadow State this time stayed firmly in the shadows, as they machinated to undo the biggest democratic decision ever taken in Britain's long and not always illustrious history. They let clowns in silly EU hats, arrogant Internationale Labour MPs, privileged Europhile Tory shires MPs, hapless PM Theresa May and a midget called John Bercow -- the Speaker of the House no less -- bend every constitutional precedent back to Magna Carta. At this point, they decided that mounting a coup d'etat, conspiring with a foreign power and perverting the progress of elected officials was a cinch. And they came within a millimetre of pulling it off. Only the opportunist Boris Johnson stopped them -- albeit (in my view) temporarily. The UK is now ruled by the most secret and unaccountable regime since the Puritanism of Oliver Cromwell. It is headed by the very same Boris Johnson. However, whereas before we have had the Iraq con, the GCHQ con, the Phone-hacking con, the Corbyn con, the EU con, the Skripal con and the Brexit/Brino con, Contrick19 is a global con. As such, it is a First: not even the Warmist con can equal it in sheer volume, audacity, breathtaking coordination, phenomenal behavioural effects and speed of outcome. 2020 has been the year in which Homo Insipiens Globalis emerged to offer solid proof that no electorate in the World is fit for democratic purpose if the Secret State has the measure of how to control The Mob. The summer -- like your freedom of movement, speech, opposition and commitment to facts over propaganda -- is almost over. Enjoy it while you can. https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/opinion-why-intolerant-catechism-always-leads-to-cataclysm/ OPINION: Why intolerant catechism always leads to cataclysm Date: March 6, 2019 Author: John Ward Kneejerk support for discredited socio-economic political theories is bringing Britain to its knees. We need to reject the familiar in favour of the far-sighted. If I ever do get to pen my magnum opus on recent history, without doubt its title shall be, "Escape from Reality -- The British Collapse, 1979-2019". The single most boring and yet intensely unsettling feature of British life during that period has been the consistent need to cleave to one fantastic belief system or another. Bear with me while I meander gently through a (by no means complete) potted history of the last four decades. They were shaped by these ridiculous expectations: That Mrs Thatcher could restore Britain's wealth by destroying its industrial base. That letting utilities take their chances on the markets was no threat to our sovereignty. That wealth created at the top would trickle down. That an 85% dependence on financial services was a matter for pride rather than concern. That those left behind wouldn't become first angry, then desperate, then apathetic. That giving disempowered citizens a charter would be greeted with anything other than cynicism. That New Labour had all the answers, and things could only get better. That immigration on a vast scale was good for Britain. That selling our gold at the bottom was vital as a means of diversifying Britain's investment portfolio. That the now Baroness Thatcher had changed the face of British politics forever. That education hasn't been dumbed down. That we should join the euro, or risk being left behind. That Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of ICBMs ready to fire at Europe immediately. That sky-rocketing credit debt didn't matter. That a personality as dysfunctional as Gordon Brown would be a safe pair of hands in Number Ten. That bailing out the banks was the only possible approach to the 2008-9 financial crisis. That Islam did not present a threat. That we had a Special Relationship with the US. That cultural diversity must be (for no particular reason) a Very Good Thing. That there was actually some substance to either David Cameron or Nick Clegg. That Theresa May knew what she was doing at the Home Office. That the Met police hadn't been corrupted on a grand scale by Murdoch. That phone hacking was all poppycock, and Boris Johnson was "a good egg, just like us". That there was going to be an Arab Spring of democracy. That the euro was in fine shape, and Greece was being 'bailed out'. That ClubMed austerity would help the recession in Southern Europe. That the Brussels regime could be reformed from within. That Ed Miliband had what it takes to run Britain. That LGBT narcissism was more important to the electorate than the economy. That electing an unreformed IS Stalinist dating back to the 1968 Counterculture as leader of the Labour Party was the answer to being unelectable. That the Italian banking crisis and sovereign debt problems were soluble. That banks generally were now sound and needed no further reform. That Antifa was progressive, and Momentum non-violent. That there was such a thing as non-violent extremism, and it should be criminalised. That the elites would honour the 2016 EU referendum result. That Islam is the religion of Peace. That Theresa May could be trusted on Brexit, and UKip standing aside in the 2017 election was a shrewd tactical move. That Nigel Farage is a Man of the People. That David Lammy isn't a racist, but all Leavers are. That Diane Abbott has what it takes to be a Cabinet Minister. That there is ever any point in negotiating with the EU. That Leavers have got it in for Brussels, based on no evidence of malfeasance. That Jeremy Corbyn is a genuine Remainer. That the Windrush scandal was worthy of more media attention than the embezzlement of State pension funds from 3.4 million 1950s born women. That we need a Second Referendum because only the Leave side lied in 2016. That democratic Cabinet government involving politicians is where the power lies on Brexit. That banning Tommy Robinson from all social media sites is anything other than an act of incorrigibly censorious spite worthy of the USSR. That Brexit is unstoppable now, so don't worry. Yes, just when you thought this post might have nothing to do with Brexit, up it pops again. I've boffed on for over a week now about why Sovereign Brexit is -- in the short term -- a lost cause. The broader canvas now is Europe, and how to save it (despite itself) from USSR2. I keep on reading scholarly articles by soi-disant senior parliamentary researchers at Westminster claiming that Brexit is now a done deal and the Remainers have lost; all they do is make me doubt the motives of the authors. This piece from yesterday is utterly unconvincing, and was put out under the auspices of Brexit Central. I wonder -- genuinely -- if anyone else shares my doubts about the side for which that site is batting. But relax: this isn't yet another Brexit post. It's merely yet another post about the continuing ideological attack on reality. Before Private Eye got hislopitised (that's like being hospitalised, but with the added unique sneering pc-sellout feature) the best column they had was a thing called Pseud's Corner. It was a joyous celebration of over-intellectualised bollocks about everything from pop music via social engineering to Saatchi art buying and estate agents. Today, to do the syndrome justice you'd have to have several pages devoted to something called (perhaps) Global Pseudalism: planetary bollocks with the end goal of getting back to the grateful forelock touching of feudalism, aided and abetted by Useful Idiots among the Leftlib cadres. As The Slog's mantra has it -- IABATO: It's All Bollocks And That's Official. But there is another well-worn Slogism that says, "Ideology closes minds and closes ranks". Both of them apply to the point of this post -- that is, the flight from reality... .and the role of catechism in that trend. Catechism as a word I use to encompass both religious and political fanaticism. Since the late 1970's, the western world's electorates have gradually lost the ability to critique, to interrogate, to unmask -- indeed, to even question received truth. That deficit has allowed moronic concepts like settled science, political correctness, cultural appropriation and multiculturalism to not only gain traction, but also become some kind of philosophical given. There is no such thing as a philosophical given. Philosophy is the informed discussion of better ways for men and women to be socialised human beings on Earth -- or indeed, in any other part of the Universe. Bentham was a philosopher, Marx was a structural functionalist ideologue. The triumph of ideology over philosophy is the cancer of our age. Islam, socialism, feminism, globalism, climatism and neoliberalism are all flawed in one basic respect: the crazy idea that a normative proposition does not require rigorous empirical testing in order to engender acceptance. Perhaps I'm being academically pseud myself using those terms -- so let me be blunt: if you read the work of a propagandist from 570, 1760 or 1830 AD (and ignore all the knowledge added since) then you are a complete prick. There will not be 77 Virgins waiting for Muslims in Heaven. Dialectical materialism is a Kindergarten theory entirely dependent on the historical point at which you set the chronometer ticking. Laissez-faire free trade ideas from an age when wooden ships sailed the oceans with dubious navigational aids have no relevance to the age of Apollo missions to the Moon. Bentham believed that material wellbeing and a roof over the head would guarantee what he called "happiness". We know more today -- viz, it doesn't. But Benthamites (and those like me of a compassonate utilitarian bent) move on. The goal of Jeremy Bentham's followers today is the pursuit of the greatest fulfilment of the greatest number of our species without undue damage to the only planet we have. Philosophy takes cognisance of new knowledge. Catechism censors and represses it. There is no discernible difference between the Spanish Inquisition begun six hundred years ago, and the preaching of Islamist clerics or censorious behaviour of the Labour Party, the EU, the BBC, the Murdoch press, Greenpeace, The Guardian, Bloomberg, the New York Times, the FT and the Washington Post today. Be their politics Left, Right or Centre, in 2019 information providers work not on the basis of the general interest, but rather the self-interest of those cynics prepared to bankroll them. And the gullibility of those they seek to manipulate is there for all to see. The awakening of the gullible can only begin via open-minded, depoliticised education. The provision of such is the challenge faced by the new generations emerging today. https://therealslog.com/2020/08/16/the-sunday-essay-the-sum-of-cultural-free-speech-health-economic-damage-done-by-the-covid19-caper/ John Ward August 16, 2020 Uncategorized The Sunday Essay: the sum of cultural, free speech, health & economic damage done by the Covid19 caper Inhuman, unnatural behaviour. Mob obedience. The destruction of Citizen Healthcare. Sovereign fiscal insolvency. Unparalleled job losses. Is anyone still seriously trying to tell me that all this was done with the best intentions to save us from being wiped out by a virus that kills 0.0064% of us? Band together Thinking People: this is nonsense, and we all know it. I have owned one property or another in France for over thirty years. No event has come close to the Coronavirus hype in its quite extraordinary ability to change Gallic culture. There is an overwhelming sense of obedience being the only moral choice for a responsible citizen -- the diametric opposite of the normal French attitude, which is to ridicule every politician, evade as much tax as possible, and break every speed limit as a matter of course. One feels the change very keenly: the almost jingoistic tone of regulatory notices -- 'unifie contre le virus' -- the tut-tutting or stony silence if one says anything contrarian, and of course the fear in those eyes above the mask. The habit of kissing on greeting and stopping for a gossip has disappeared. Even when it's possible to show people with one chart that immunity is growing and deaths are falling sharply, they shrug and say, "I faut rester prudent" -- we must remain on our guard. Three months ago, the obligatory wearing of masks in the street was being hotly debated in the media, and largely opposed in Opeds. Today, large areas of Paris have adopted that ridiculous obligation without a murmur... .despite the now massively quantified data proving that management drugs are highly effective at dealing with the infected, and 85% of the population has only the tiniest chance of dying from Covid19. De Gaulle said, after his long term in office, that France could not be governed in the accepted libertarian sense of the term. In just four months, Emmanuel Macron has shown that the emerging French generations will applaud the idea of collaboration's meaning being shifted from a potential insult into some kind of patriotic duty. There is a life-lesson I have relearned over the last five years: that friends from normal cirumstances are largely useless as comrades when malign forces have made them scared. Brexit and Covid19 did that. One has to seek out new colleagues capable, as Kipling put it, "of keeping your head when others are losing theirs". The ultimate loneliness of Gary Cooper in High Noon is being played out in millions of relationships in the 21st century West. That alone results in disastrous cultural change. It is hard to find a single EU State now -- even a single Anglospheric State -- that isn't socially and politically split down the middle on nationalism, blocism, globalism, race, culture, creed, independence... .and now, even health is emerging as (despite the surface robotic opinion-forming) yet another canyon of divide. At its core, the divide is about telling the truth come what may, restoring the balance of our natural instincts in the context of society, and opposing both the mendacious censorship and puerile propaganda of the State's information apertures. A staggering percentage of Western citizens still quietly believe that, as it were, keeping quiet about injustice can somehow be in the common good. An almost equal percentage see opposition to issues like EU practices and Big Pharma's malign influence on public health as evidence, variously, of igorance, stupidity, racism and the sort of mental derangement that leads "the gullible" to indulge in "silly conspiracy theories". The disbelief in censorship is, for me, the most incomprehensible given its blatant nature. The above block chart illustrates the effect on my readership numbers over the last three weeks. The daily average (it began just out of shot to the left) that had been 8,000-9,000 has slumped to 3,000. That's about the number of signed-up Slog followers I have. Comment levels have stayed roughly the same, but my inbox remains full of complaints that Slog Tweets on Twitter are no longer appearing on their timelines. This a topline analysis from somebody 'out there' of how my site's settings have changed for the worse during the period in question: * Pages indexed by Google are low * W3C Markup validation Issues not fixed * Meta Tags need to be Optimized properly according to targeted pages * Errors in the coding part of your website * Robots.Txt File not present The Slog's tweets are now regularly blanked under the panel heading 'potential sensitive content'. Referrals from Google have halved. The new site at covidisinfectant.com was up just 36 hours before the second page-build disappeared behind '403 Entry Forbidden'. Again, there is obvious massive libertarian damage in such corporate social media censorship; but what one detects now is the emergence yet again of cynical smuggies who smile and say, "Yeh, well -- whaddya expect?" as if that somehow addressed the problem. I strongly believe that cynicism is the new naivety. Yesterday's Slogpost showed how Big Pharma has compromised the ethics of public health's infrastructure as well as the directions taken and conclusions reached by research bodies developing new drugs. Not only have they infected the NHS, for example, they are also steadily destroying this institution by (a) making a fat profit at the expense of taxpayer budgets and (b) evoking in it an obsession with Covid19 so obscenely out of proportion to the real nature of the threat, other vital duties the NHS has are being neglected... ..with appalling consequences for British citizens. I will furnish you with two ongoing examples. My first witness has had enough exploitation from the British 21st century State as it is without being treated like dirt by the Health Service she has supported all her life. For she was -- along with 3.85 million other women -- a victim of the SPA 'reform' whereby three UK administrations in a row used the limp excuse of gender equality to delay State Pension commencement for 1950s born women. Now she has some serious health issues. In her own words: "Polyp in the sigmoid area just before exit... .removed for biopsy. Another interesting 1.5cm polyp hidden by a piece of adhesion on the outside of the bowel... .When they snipped the adhesion on the inside part of the bowel it revealed this polyp. They went all the way round to the exit from the small intestine into the large one and snipped out numerous samples of bowel wall which looked like "micro polyps". All gone for analysis... .The fiasco during the procedure was that I suddenly went hot and sweaty, then my blood pressure dropped to an alarming level of 51/25 and they had to resuscitate me. They have no idea why that happened... .I was then sent home. Feeling very dizzy and unwell which I put down to the effects of Fentanyl. "I rang the surgery next morning. Because of Covid19, this was to be a telephone appointment. An unintelligible man of Asian origin rang at 5.30pm Friday evening completely disinterested and told me to monitor the situation and if no better after the weekend, to ring again. He did not have my notes, had not seen the electronic report from the hospital the day before and did not know my case. "What do I monitor it with then?" He was busy so if I needed help I should ring 111. "Saturday and Sunday I deteriorated. As it happens I do have a BP monitor and pulse reader. My BP was all over the place. I felt very sleepy, nauseous, dizzy when standing up and pains in my chest. So I rang again on Monday 8am having spent much of the weekend in a befuddled daze. By day three, I suspected this was not just the Fentanyl... .a second locum doctor managed to ring me by 4.30pm. Told him the story and how I was feeling. Said I had been monitoring my BP and pulse and that my pulse had not gone above 38 all day. He told me I needed an ECG and to ring 999. "I was put into a 4-Bay Ward on my own, and was told I had to wear a mask, even though I was on my own in bed, held down by multiple wires, sticky tabs and wires up to a machine which talked by Bluetooth to a control centre. I coudn't have a fan "because of Covid". After three days of torture in the heat, unable to wash out my only pair of undies because "damp clothes could spread Covid", I discovered that I had had a heart attack in Bristol, but they had sent me home. I was now due a heart ultrasound, and more bloods were taken and I was to have a Heparin injection and a Cortisol stress test. "I couldn't stand another night of this sweltering torture, so checked with the cardiologists that I could go home instead of waiting until morning with only a breakfast of porridge or white elastic bread and synthetic jam to look forward to. I ordered a taxi and slipped into the wet night, to go home, where I delighted in a warm bath and a cool bed. They said I needed someone with me at all times because I live on my own -- and in the next breath told me to self isolate for 7 days because I've been in two hospitals in one week. "Next day, back in hospital again, this time in the cardiology unit as this bigeminy or trigeminy heart rate caused me to collapse at home last night. Same paramedic who came on Monday night and same strange ECG readings. I must be one of the few unlucky individuals to go in for a tube up my bum and come out with a heart attack and a dodgy ticker." As for the tube up her bum, my witness still has no results from the biopsy, and no idea what all the other symptoms mean. What's clear from this epic saga of cavalier observation without either diagnosis or prognosis, however, is that Covid target obsessions and regulations are massively in the way of curing an older lady with several disturbing pathogens. And that is a disgrace of unspeakable obscenity. And so to my second witness. This is a chap I've known for many years: stoical, upstanding, successful in his own field and now -- like all of us -- beginning to suffer from failing powers. This is his personal testimony: "I fell and broke my right hip in mid-June. Since then I've spent a week in hospital, nearly three in a care home and have been home since July 9th. "My progress getting to walk normally again has been -- to say the least -- a bit of a struggle. "Last November I was operated on for liver cancer .Since that time I complained about a painful right hip which got worse and worse until that evening 15 June when I fell and it broke. The surgeon saw me after the operation for a few minutes and said he thought the hip had failed due to bone cancer and that he was sending bits and his findings to the oncology dept. That was 16th June. "I should mention that until I started phoning my surgery last week, I had heard absolutely nothing from anyone in the "wonderful" NHS... .Zilch. Surgery, hospital, specialists, none have spoken nor written. Yesterday I phoned again, and was called back by yet another doctor (sounds familiar?).There seems to be no doubt that the initial liver cancer has spawned another (or others?) and that radiology is the next thing. How long it will be before the shambles of a health service (cowering behind Covid19) that many pretend is any good, will it be before I am seen again -- goodness knows. "Sleeping is restricted to one side away from the now replaced hip. Moving around without some sort of support is not possible and I am not feeling any progress at all in that department (hence my calls to doctors)." A week later, he adds: "Tomorrow, after weeks of inactivity by our "world class NHS" and quite some pushing by this patient, I will be having complete body C T scan. Very immobile. Feel a wreck. More news when I have any." Now this is a bloke who has lost mobility, been assured that his cancer had gone, complained about hip pain -- and then pestered a ridiculous amount of time before being told he had cancer in his hip as well. I have no news as yet (four days later). Covid19 is, in this case history too, clearly causing both chaos and potentially mortal delays. Meanwhile, Governments around the world -- including the UK -- face a wave of lawsuits from foreign companies who complain that their profits have been hit by the pandemic. Bless. Do they include Sanofi, GSK, Astrazeneka and their fellow travellers, we ask ourselves? If rich globalist companies wish to sue nation States rendered both fiscally and morally bankrupt by the pernicious actions of pharmaceutical giants and their infinite hordes of medical whores, might I make a small suggestion? Would it not be a good idea for those same nation States and hacked off globalists to join forces and sue the collective arses off Megadrug Combines? After all, why sue the pauperised Sovereigns* when the prosperous sociopaths are there for the taking of rich pickings? Don't chase the ambulance to the publicly-funded hospice, guys -- follow the sedan chairs to places like Imperial Private Healthcare. Never heard of IPH? Let me enlighten you: Imperial Private Healthcare is part of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, one of the largest teaching hospital groups in the UK. You know... .the one where Leftwinger Neil Ferguson works. You really could not make this shit up. *I use the term pauperised Sovereigns there without any sense of hyperbole. Here's an extract from a new Ambrose Evans-Pritchard piece -- in my view, AEP is still the most erudite media fiscal economist in Europe: 'The accumulated loss in GDP has been 22% from peak to trough for the UK' He's right. From April and June alone, UK GDP collapsed by 20.4% -- the worst three-month fall ever recorded according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as almost every industry was crushed by the response to the pandemic. There is no way a post-EU economy like ours could ever afford to chuck away a fifth of our net trading volume during what is (if you strip out the bonkers QE element) a global slump likely to exceed that of 1929. That's simple maths of the kind I have been promoting since this farcical Contrick19 hoodwink got under way. If this post doesn't convince you of a destructive, anti-social, illiberal and amoral global game in play, then I'm at a loss to know what will. A massive banking, bourse, currency and corporatocracy reset is imminent. You have been warned. https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2019/07/13/the-saturday-essay-why-more-of-the-same-isnt-a-solution-on-any-cultural-dimension-any-more/ BOTTOM UP IS THE ONLY WAY TO AVOID TITS UP THE SATURDAY ESSAY: why "more of the same" isn't a solution on any cultural dimension any more Date: July 13, 2019 Author: John Ward So-called 'modern' life is riddled with unnecessary demands and infuriating frustration. It is that way because such suits at most 1 in 7 of Western citizens: it is not a viable or even stable recipe for the future. Top down globalist ideological process is reaching the end of its days, and it is up to more mutualist opinion-leaders to start planning from the bottom up for a better balanced world. A world offering maximum personal fulfilment alongside creatively independent thinking. A world freed from potentially totalitarian catechisms. A dating site wastes an hour of my time subjecting me to a cod-scientific personality assessment, and then presents me with an invitation to 'continue' to a page that says 'Error 500 -- Not supported'. So I click on 'Help', which proves about as helpful as an armed Islamist let loose with a Kalashnikov at a Kosher Food convention. My default Plan B these days is to go to the brand's Twitter site and make a public pronouncement on the unhelpful nature of their Help. This I do. 36 hours later, a tweet arrives giving me a link. The link doesn't work. I tell them this. An email arrives telling me I need to download Google Chrome, which I downloaded three years ago. I tell them this. Another automated email arrives asking if my Great Aunt's cat was a Communist. I give up. A letter from the French tax office arrives replete with dire threats because a standing order with my bank has bounced. The letter was posted ordinary mail, and has taken 9 days to travel some 55 kilometres. It warns me that I need to do something by a date that is already three days ago. I ask the bank why it bounced the order, given I wrote to them saying a deposit is on its way to more than cover it. There is a great deal of umming, aahing and unconvincing explaining, none of which helps. I now go online to my personal tax space and try to pay the instalment manually. The Tresor's software is completely baffled by this request. I type 'payer taxe fonciere facture' into the Help panel, and ten results pop up. They explain many things of great and hitherto unknown complexity to me, but not how to pay my land tax bill. However, a flashlight keeps beeping at me saying I haven't paid it. The contrast was, shall we say, poignant bordering on seriously irritating. I ring the Tresor and am offered three levels of (a) to (f) options, eventually pressing (d) for desperation, and a female voice -- a real one -- answers. This bubbly, friendly woman listens carefully to what I'm trying to do, opens her laptop and makes a second request of the bank, which passes immediately. I am left wondering whyTF the original bone-idle fonctionnaire couldn't have done that anyway. Another letter arrives by post, sending my Anglo-French tax agreement form back to me stamped and signed. The French authorities are supposed to send it back directly to my UK Tax district themselves, but this practice has now been stopped "to save money". I have to schlep to the post office ten miles away and post it. The satellite phone I use here as a backup to SFR's fixed-line service rings nonstop all day. The communicants are of a varietal -- nay, cosmopolitan -- nature, in that they are ringing from Estonia, India, Ethiopia, Macedonia and many countries not necessarily ending in ia. They're trying to sell me garden sheds, penis extensions and other construction projects, none of which I either want or need. Further, as none of the organisations involved are peddling a drug to help me write the definitive 21st century novel, I have pigeon-holed them all as Nuisance Callers. I ring the ISP, and they recommend I change the number. For which there will be a charge. I ask how about you just stop the nuisance calls, and the bloke at the other end asks what do you suggest and I say oh, right, I'm the phone company now. We have a long and fruitless discussion, at the end of which I think we have agreed that they will monitor the nuisance calls and get back to me. The same afternoon, a text message arrives "confirming" that I wish to cancel my subscription to the phone service. Now all of the above may sound like the random groans of an ageing Grumpy, but in fact there is a connected, macro pattern here that reflects the unfortunate reality of Western life today. The overarching observation is this: we pay our tax monies purely on the basis that this will protect us from nasty tax demands, deliver us a level of service (given that allegedly they work for us) and protect us from invasive annoyance, scam artists and unaccountable institutions. But on investigation, it is very obvious that the basis of our tax obedience is without foundation. Taking each of the case histories outlined above: * The State has no interest in regulating or controlling the diabolical service and serial lies offered by internet marketers trying to sell you something; its sole concern is to stop free speech on the Web trying to tell you something. * Increasingly, the taxation organs of the State automatically (a) put the citizen in the wrong (b) question citizen motives rather than banking incompetence (c) save money as a means of exerting pressure on the taxpayer and (d) launch software to cover arses rather than meet customer needs. * Government charges us more and more for doing less and less. This is because it is there to serve globalist banks and bourse profits, defend currency valuations, maximise its own pension arrangements and help Big Business deliver the maximum profit to its shareholders. It is most emphatically not there to help realise the potential of its greatest asset, the citizenry. * The private sector is heading helter-skelter towards a world in which cheap Artificial Intelligence (AI) acts as the means by which service-receivers can tear their hair out in frustration, while the Gigarich get richer still at the expense of an honest living for the less fortunate. Time after time after time, human emotional intelligence can solve within seconds the kind of problem that leads to sleepless nights for the innocent, the ill, the deprived, the betrayed and the old. This is a policy which has, in terms of stable social anthropology, absolutely no saving grace whatsoever. * The selfish and stupid idea that everyone educated to O-level, GCSE and/or over the age of 75 is ready to start doing tax declarations online and paying for everything with zero-contact plastic only goes to show how completely off with the fairies bureaucrats and bankers are. More pernicious, however, are the apps and tones adopted by contemporary banking and tax demands that seek to address the bamboozled as if they are common criminals. The totality of this madness is at times hard to express, but on this occasion I will take a shot at it. Here we are -- regardless of Western nationality -- and this is our situation: we are being ordered (not asked) to pay more and more of our meagre incomes -- and take less and less interest on our capital -- in order to underwrite in one way or another the reputations of deluded political ideologues, the privileged pensions of bureaucrats, the obscene wealth of the financialised 3%, the death toll among our armed forces, the share prices of globalist tax evaders, the influence of a tiny number of on and offline media moguls, the depravity of the energy industries, the goals of religious zealots, and subterfuges of assorted security service paranoiacs. Something approaching all of us want nothing more than happy families, cohesive communities and the privacy of liberty. Something approaching all of them don't have any of that on their radar; they desire only more and more -- power, money, weapons and surveillence technology on the fantasy road to global hegemony. Yet we, the 97%, are keeping them, the 3%, in limos, conferences, red carpets, wars, illusions, grandeur, fame and control. Why in God's name are we doing this? The reasons are myriad, and I've covered them endlessly elsewhere: tiredness, laziness, low IQ, a desire to conform, a need to write off empiricism as conspiracy theory, an internet full of loopy conspiranoids, distraction, disinterest, cynicism, boredom, kids, media manipulation, chores, and the endless struggle to make ends meet. Beyond the 3% and its 12% task-force of lackeys, some at least of these motives and causes impinge on all of us. But hardly any of us stop to think, for example, why none of our ends meet any more... .why there are chores, distractions, long hours, stress, tiredness, money problems, credit debt mountains, cynicism and conformity. The reasons are those outined in my earlier account of the last 36 hours: arrogant bureaucrats, self-seeking politicians, business without ethics, selling without service, banks without accountability, mainstream media without investigation, police with too few investigators or too many pc careerists, and citizens with no time. But above all for me, two reasons stand out... .and they are totally interrelated. First, ideologues who flatly refuse to depart from the script, and thus evoke the inevitable response -- viz, to metaphorically change channels. And second, a citzenry whose education and media consumption has led them to believe that life will be just fine if they just keep on changing channels and watching crap. Their goal is no longer to get the most out of life, their goal now is to get through it with an acceptable level of sanity. When it comes to the Ideological Script (and the brass-necked mendacity that goes with it) there is no difference at all between Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Jeremy Corbyn, Vince Cable and Nigel Farage. They will parrot Special Relationship, NATO, City contribution, trickle down wealth, more jobs than ever before, for the Many not the Few, neoliberal globalism, collectivist Socialism, privatisation, bourse economics, nationalisation, austerity, Keynesian expansionism, Modern Monetary Theory, Marxism, Mercantile Free Trade, Human Rights, more regulation, less regulation, European Union is everything good, European Union is rich man's club, Brexit means disaster, Brexit means freedom, feminism is right, racism is rife, Tommy Robinson is a hero, Tommy Robinson is Hitler and all the rest of the simplistic drivel that passes for analysis in 2019. As for the electorate that lacks either time or interest, let's look at time first. "I haven't the time for that nonsense" they often tell me; but they do have time to read magazines about mediocre celebs, follow soaps, and rave on about what's going to happen next on Game of Thrones or whether Liverpool can beat Man City to the Premiership title next year. As for the interest, the puerile target-set nature of education has ensured for nearly thirty years now that socio-political conformity scores A*, and debate about received truth gets a Fail. The truly dangerous thing about the 21st century West is that vast swathes of the population have little or no understanding of political consequences and constitutional watersheds, but both the police and the media are highly politicised. Some examples might be helpful here. Britain is currently engaged in a Mediterranean face-off with Iran. I doubt if more than 7% of the electorate either knows why, or what they think about it either way. The depraved role of Jeffrey Epstein has suddenly surfaced again in the US. I'd be surprised if awareness there of Epstein's likely past role as an intelligence agent (or his ability to flout the law at every turn) is the hot topic of conversation in any family -- not least because Anglo-Saxon families don't eat together any more. The EU is about to pass laws making air travel more expensive. Ostensibly the reasons for this are ecological, although in my view they don't stack up. How many voters in Germany have a working knowledge of what the Gilets Jaunes are about, and why they exist? In France, the private monies promised for the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris stand at EUR800 million. The amount received is EUR38 million. Although an Inquiry was "launched" on April 16th, it has yet to make its maiden voyage. A badly stubbed-out cigarette or an electrical fault could have started the devastating fire that ripped through Notre-Dame cathedral in April, Paris prosecutors said three weeks ago. Vague on the detail there... .but surprisingly clear on the conclusion: 'any criminal intent has been ruled out'. Where is the public outcry or press analysis of that surreal interplay of cluelessness and certainty? Plato famously remarked that an uninformed electorate would always lead to dictatorship. 2,450 years later, the percentage of the western democratic populations aware of who said this, why, and how such a certainty might be supported has, without question, shrunk over the last half century. Ask them, however, what causes global warming, and a chorus of the Mob will shout "CO^2!!" as if they were extras in a scene from Life of Brian. Think of it like this: a media, political, banking, bureaucratic, globalist, intelligence or military opinion-leader can assert anything today, and stand an excellent chance of being believed. An ordinary citizen can quite legally put up an argument disputing that assertion, and wind up in jail. Or better still, think of it this way: nobody is thinking about stuff any more. Nobody at the 'ordinary' level is thinking about how both monetarist financialised capitalism and collectivism have failed almost everyone almost everywhere. But in "democratic" societies, these are the only realistic options on offer... .and 60% will go into the voting booths apparently happy with that. The 40% who aren't happy with it (or indifferent) are cut out of the discussion, because they don't vote. What can we do about this? Most Sloggers already know my views on devolved mutuality as a far better alternative to the above sclerotic chaos. Those who don't are welcome to read what I've previously written here. The answer isn't yet another political Party with more of the same Top-Down ideas. The answer is something that starts as community 'bridging' and then grows to assert pressure on the need for radical constitutional reform. The immediate need is to dump ideology, replace it with pragmatic testing, oppose any futher AI and robotics development, and get the real emotional intelligence of people back to work. This is not a Luddite blast from the past, but simply a better future direction based on fairness, fulfilment and niche exports that go beyond services and finance. More of the same is not the answer. Community bridging could do worse than start with education, and applying pressure locally to get rigid educationalist attitudes both revised and more attuned to questioning rather than placid acceptance. If necessary, this may require the creation of a new educational sector -- away from either private or State -- that is funded on the basis of mutuality and affinity selection. The aim would be the greatest fulfilment of every child, in the context of a strong civic element stressing the need to respect others. Such would be an expansion of ground-level PDC (Personal Destiny Control) as discussed elsewhere on this site. At some stage, however, I would also avocate the application of pressure on Westminster to introduce obligatory social service (discipline but no arms or uniforms) between the ages of 13-15. In the meantime, ignoring Westminster, Whitehall and political dogma, and demonstrating superior alternatives from the bottom up, is the only way left for Western citizens who want to make the rest of this century considerably better for considerably more people than the first 20% has been. Thank you for persevering with this essay. https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2019/07/18/brexit-the-minnow-masquerading-as-a-shark/ FISHY "FACTS" IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY BREXIT: THE MINNOW MASQUERADING AS A SHARK Date: July 18, 2019 Author: John Ward You may have missed this during the blizzard of balderdash that has emanated from the British Establishment and its Useful Idiot campfollowers during the last eighteen months, but there is one opinion that hasn't changed since the Referendum, and it's probably the only honest opinion on Brexit there is: "I don't know". It stood at 12% then, and on 3rd July two weeks ago it still stood firm at 12%. This (and all previous posts here on this eternally and infernally dumbed-down subject) are aimed at the 12% who don't know, and admit they don't. I couldn't really give a tinker's curse for the other 88%, but I do know this: if people like me -- that is, folks who do study the data, do know the eurozone inside-out and do support the ethico-moral and democratic arguments for leaving Brussels to flail about in its own soup -- can persuade just half of those 12% that the scaremongers are serial liars, then there may just be a chance for some form of clean, no-cost Brexit to emerge... .even if a Second Referendum is required. We shall still, of course, be a nation split down the middle, but that has broader and deeper causes than Brexit... .which remains a symptom, nothing more. And as I develop later in this column, the events careening down the road with nobody at the wheel will, within the next two years, put Brexit into a proper context. And now, back to Project Fear. This morning, there is another all out blast from the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) declaring that purely as a result of No Deal Brexit the UK will pass officially into recession during 2020. We would all do well to ask what the effect will be on the EU we leave behind, because they will lose EUR60 billion in trade surplus, not to mention the roughly EUR110 billion we chip into fees, subs and projects every year. But let's set that aside and look at the provenance of this "forecast". First up, most of the OBR data have been borrowed from the IMF, using assumptions -- the responsibility for which lay with the new head of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde. The IMF under Lagarde made 23 forecasts on the Greek economy between 2014 and 2018, 22 of which were wrong. It made 13 over the same period to do with the eurozone performance, and every one was wrong. Additionally (and I do recognise that it is shameful of me to point this out) IMF Christine Lagarde had something of a conflict of interest in delivering this Gotterdammerung scenario to the OBR just before she set off to become ECB Christine Lagarde, scion of the Brexiteers and other similar infidels. But perhaps I am not guilty of shame at all; for let's face it, Lagarde has considerable form when it comes to anti-Brexit bias. Asked in October 2017 what she thought the impact would be of Britain falling back on World Trade Organisation rules, Lagarde said: "I just cannot imagine that that will happen, because for the people themselves, what does it mean? The Europeans who are based in the UK and the British who are residing in the EU, WTO does not provide for such eventualities... .When I think of the airline industries, the landing rights in various European countries ... There is so much that has been brought together between the continent and the UK that it requires a very specific approach which will reduce the uncertainty that is damaging potential." This gem is claptrap from start to finish. Where people reside in or outside the EU has absolutely no bearing on WTO rules, nor does that organisation have any jurisdiction on such matters. Two years on, we now know the aircraft landing rights issue was a figment of some spinning Mr Hyde somewhere. Today, Brussels itself asserts that is is "fully prepared for a No Deal Brexit". It isn't of course, any more than we are: but this is down to an unholy brew of incompetence, propaganda and deliberate sabotage: Whitehall, for example, has now stopped all administration relating to No Deal... .while both the Tory leadership contenders say they will go that way if the EU sticks to its The Shall Not Pass drivel. Right. We'll do that, then. Two months later, Frufru was at it again. She told the Independent that "all our experts are now being proved right... the effect of Brexit on UK gdp is if anything even worse than we thought". Well, she got that wrong too. But then, our Chrissie's place in the firmament is In The Wrong: in 2007, Lagarde was the first woman to become Finance Minister of a G8 economy -- that of France. In October of that year, she had this to say to the IMF's financial committee: "The central banks reacted swiftly to this summer's turbulence on financial markets, thereby averting a liquidity crisis. It is still too early for a full assessment of the impact of the crisis, but in 2008 growth should gradually regain its full potential and world trade should pick up." Three years later, when asked about stress tests on French banks, Lagarde said, "Well, there will be tests, and then you will see everything is perfectly alright". They weren't; but by then, the waters had closed over Dominic Strauss-Kahn at the IMF, and Chrissie walked on those waters and into a job for which she was completely unqualified. We have never been given a satisfactory explanation as to why US Fed Reserve nabobs were selling her candidacy to South American leaders before DSK's sorry encounter with the CIA and bar of soap in New York. I doubt we ever will. Last December, the OBR itself was forced to issue a grovelling apology for its earlier forecasts predicting a disastrous deterioration in the public finances following the EU referendum. Not only did this not materialise, the public purse was fatter at the end of the forecast period than it had been at the start. Indeed, it is in the nature of the truly disgusting Phillip Hammond that he backed the OBR report to the hilt in 2016, but then claimed credit for the unexpected bounce that followed. "There is a special place in Hell" etc etc. Hilariously, the OBR (in its mea culpa memorandum) wrote that 'the lessons learnt from the exercise were to expect shocks not necessarily to hit the economy as quickly as it previously thought'. Ah yes, mistakes were made, but lessons have been learned. Except that they clearly haven't, and this latest badly sewn Frankenstein of a forecast proves it. It's important to point out these minor fallacies and weaknesses in the forecasting space, because people have very short memories, and both political spin merchants and paid security service agents capitalise on this species-wide Alzmeimer tendency at every opportunity. Suffice to say that, if you were looking for a post-Brexit forecast with even a semblance of credibility, the very last people you'd talk to are the OBR, Christine Lagarde and Phillip Hammond. The reality, however, is that -- come Deal or No Deal, Brexit or No Brexit -- we are debating the exact size of a minnow here. We've all been persuaded over and over again that Brexit is a Great White shark... .and if we just kill it, then it will be safe to get back in the water. Cue the theme from Jaws. There is indeed a shark on the loose, but it isn't the relatively harmless Great White. This is the lesser known and more deadly Squalus Globalis occultacost datafakus... .in more plain English, the Globalist hidden-cost fake data Spinshark. The Leftlib Establishment has in recent years established the myth of Fake News -- aka Anything the Right Says -- but as I have posted several times before, the real Alt State use of massaged, assumptive or just downright mendacious stats produces several forms of Squalus Globalis... .any one of which could make a mockery of every forecast being so diligently but unthinkingly developed right now. Fake Data -- and the false optimism it generates -- is the most deadly predator the globalist neoliberal economic and banking system has. If you go to the Home Page here and type 'fake data' into the Search engine, you can find everything I've written on the subject. Two definitive sources for the explanation of fake data are Shadowstats and Dr Tim Morgan's blog. Suffice to say that fakery comes in several forms: 1. Banking assumptions that mutual risks -- for example, in the derivatives sector -- have been almost entirely "squared off" to the point where they cancel each other out. This is spurious nonsense, and the inevitable collapse of Deutsche Bank will be the final proof of that. 2. Government and media assumptions that the banks have been "reformed" and thus 2008 could not recur. It simply isn't true: almost all the US legislation proposed in 2010 has been abandoned or watered down, and the gearings of major banks are as high (and the debts higher) versus the situation of Lehman Brothers in 2008. (In 2007 -- in my previous existence as NotBornYesterday, I predicted the demise of Lehman, and repeated the assertion in an article for Market Leader magazine. Oh how they laughed). The liquidity crisis in the eurozone today is worse than it was then. 3. The widely peddled belief that AI in the form of algorithms can ensure the end of investment market panics forever. On the contrary, algorithms can only adapt to circumstances of which they are already aware: when something hitherto unknown happens, they will simply carry on as if nothing was wrong. This wouldn't be a good look. 4. The assumption used by statisticians (currying favour with politicians) that when unemployment benefit periods come to an end, the recipient has found a job. This is akin to assuming that a centagenarian in 1990 hasn't claimed his pension since then because he won the Lottery. 5. The downward manipulation of inflation figures by careful and cunning choice of items to go in the 'inflation basket'. 6. The addition of QE to the calculations of gdp when arriving at the "conclusion" that there is "growth" in the economy. It takes a uniquely blinkered mind to see tax monies used to buy highly toxic debt up from banks (which then gets put into a write-off column called 'future potential assets') as economic activity. It is political theft and financial chicanery, but it certainly is not economic endeavour. 7. The flooding of every consumer, investment and trade market with cheap debt being recorded as growth-related consumption. It is not anything of the kind: it is borrowing on an industrial scale because incomes are not high enough to pay on the nail. Debt at all levels is rising stratospherically; were even a fraction of this debt called in, everyone on the planet outside the 3% and the retired would be bankrupt. Buying on credit is not contemporary consumption... ..it is bringing forward a purchase into this fiscal year, and counting that as evidence of growth. 8. The quite deliberately depressed expression of real energy costs as we run out of accessible fossil fuels. As Tim Morgan rightly points out, the CO^2 Mob talking tripe about global warming causes is not the reason to look for greener, more sustainable energy sources: the economic reasons are the ones that count. Going forward, every one Dollar in gdp costs around $3.50 to generate the production energy required. This is not the stuff of accountancy exam distinctions. In the face of fully quantified and cogently argued critiques from eminent professionals with no axe to grind (as opposed to conspiranoids, ideology-riddled MPs, spin doctors, EU pensioners, stock market Feelgooders and self-appointed "experts") it is hard to avoid a couple of broad conclusions: * While it is true that if we fail to cut the EU umbilical cord there will be dire consequences not for the real UK economy but most certainly for the National Debt, we really are worrying about Britain being nibbled by a sprat, when it is clear that the entire world is about to be slapped unconscious by an oily mackerel. * Fractional Reserve Banking, accountancy, investment firm hype, economic forecasters, legislatures, neocon diplomats and academic theorists have two great advantages: they explain why the past happened, and they keep up confidence by insisting that the present oddities are nothing to worry about. But all these opinion groups have always been (with hugely honourable exceptions) bloody useless when it comes to having a common sense of realism about the future. Alan Greenspan should have brought in strict credit controls in 2003. QE has dragged stock market valuations out of the body of economic activity in the manner of a Caesarian birth. Zirp has reduced the genuine spending power of Baby Boomers -- the biggest single consumer group in the Western World. Texan oil interests have hidden the reality of what their illegally protected product does. And the US Fed is at last learning the hard (and pitifully slow) truth that, once you have created an abnormal Universe, it's the Devil's own job to normalise it. You have to blow it up and start again. Lie back and enjoy whatever does or doesn't come from Brexit. It is merely the overture. Think on the more important probability that, seven years from now, your house may be worth 20% of its current price. This is what happens when we let sociopathic number-jugglers create asset bubbles. Apologies for the pescatarian nature of parallels and metaphors today. But on the whole, "fishy" is as good a description of the smell involved as you'd need.