A Gentleman's Domain

A Debatable Result

I suppose a lot of you watched the debate last night.  I did, though I’m surprised I managed to sit through all of it  and after it was over I was left with a sense of anti-climax.   I had been hoping for some verbal jousting, a bit of cut and thrust that would have left blood up the walls.  Instead what we got was largely recitation, and it was in many places an exchange of speeches rather than a debate.  One of the definitions of a debate is an argument.  I wanted a lot of arguing!

So, who won?  I’d say Obama, but not by very much (though if I lived in a red state and had watched the debate in my undershirt on my second-hand recliner in my trailer, with a beer in one hand and a Lucky in the other, I probably would have said that McCain won).  He started out sounding very stilted, as though he was unsure of his footing, moving very cautiously.  McCain came over quite well at first but morphed into a tired, testy old man.  McCain wasn’t afraid to lie, and Obama failed to call him on his lies on several occasions.  When McCain complained of the half a trillion dollars that the USA owes to China, Obama failed to point out that that money was borrowed to pay for the war in Iraq, though he did make some limp comment about borrowing to fund government programs. 

The debate was supposed to be devoted to foreign policy, but it took a while to get there, because, not surprisingly, by force majeure the economic meltdown took first place.  When they did get onto it, McCain was at pains to remind us constantly that he has, it seems, been everywhere and met everyone in every trouble spot in the world.  Maybe he has, but do the voters care? They have twice elected a president who thought that a brief trip to Mexico was enough foreign experience to occupy the Oval Office.  Obama came over as the smoother operator of the two while McCain seemed to offer a policy of stubbornness.

I don’t know about you, but I got the feeling that both men realize that the situation in Iraq is hopeless, but of course neither of them could say so.  Obama talked about a phased withdrawal over a sixteen month period, while McCain talked about victory.  His definition of victory, however, was more a description of an honourable departure with, by implication, a puppet regime installed in Baghdad.  I don’t think even McCain thinks there can be a victory there (the US army there is after all an army of occupation) but he had to pretend he does.  I expect that his priority above all will be to avoid a repetition of the undignified defeat in and retreat from Vietnam.  The Iraq war is a poisoned chalice that Bush will hand over to his successor, and I think both men know that the next president will have to make the best of a very bad job, but they both tried to treat the matter with a measure of optimism that I am sure they don’t really feel.

It wasn’t till almost the very end that McCain casually dropped his having been a prisoner of war into the conversation.  Ironic cheers from our living room. We had been wondering how long it would take him. Earlier, he had introduced some sentimental mush about a widow giving him a bracelet.  You could almost hear people saying “Awwww!” all over the red states.  Then Obama trumped him beautifully with “I’m wearing a bracelet too.”  Was that planned, or simply fortuitous?  Either way, it was a masterstroke.

I very much doubt that anyone who has already decided which way to vote actually changed his mind after watching the debate.  The undecideds probably still haven’t decided yet.  There are more debates to come, so there is no hurry.  Next week the vice-presidential candidates will go head to head.  That should be interesting.  I wonder what the 2008 equivalent of “Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” will be.   I’m rather looking forward to it.
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Deja Vu

...the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True, they have tried. But their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

This is from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Inauguration Address in 1933.  Does it make you think of anything?

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Trainwreck: Katie Couric Interviews Sarah Palin

I’ve posted elsewhere again. Have a look at this. Even if you don’t want to read the entire thing, do watch the brief interview.  Katie Couric treats it almost as a celebrity interview, pre-approved by the subject’s PR people, but even so, Sarah Palin comes across as clueless, talking away and saying nothing.  If only we could see her interviewed by someone who knows how to deal with politicians – Jeremy Paxman or Kirsty Wark for example.   

What makes us feel so uneasy about this, or at least it should, is the knowledge that this dunderhead could end up as president.  It just takes two events – a Republican win in November and McCain leaving office due to death or infirmity.  Neither is impossible.  Can you really imagine Palin at, say, a G8 Summit, dealing with people like Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi?  Seasoned politicians with years and years of experience in national government and foreign policy?  People who actually know what they are talking about?  Bleating “I used to live next door to Russia!” at them won’t get her very far.  She’ll be in completely over her head, especially when she discovers that having small town values, whatever they are, will be meaningless outside a small town. 

In reality, of course, she will become just a cipher, a front woman for the people in the background to make more money and ignore 90% of society.  What can we do? Well, it probably won’t do much good but we can all write to Katie Couric c/o CBS, asking her of Palin has brought them to her yet.  See what she says.
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Greed & Incompetence: How Bad Can It Get?

I have posted again at another place, and if you'd like to see it please step this way.  I also urge you to have a look at this posting at the political site that my wife co-hosts. After you have, ask yourself if that Palin person really cares about women.
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Where Is Spain?

I have posted something at another site.  If you'd like to have a read, please click this way.....

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Thursday Thirteen #65

A lot of the biggest and the best in the world can be found in the USA.  There is a lot to be proud of.  However, there is one “biggest” that has the potential to bring considerable hardship and even misery – the USA owes the world’s biggest national debt. At present it stands at nine trillion dollars (that’s a nine followed by twelve zeroes).  Figures that high tend to lose all meaning, so to get an idea of what it means consider this: that figure translates at thirty thousand dollars for every man, woman and child in the USA today. 

About three quarters of that figure represents what the US Government owes its own citizens, corporations and institutions, in loans very largely consisting of US Treasury Bonds. The largest holder of US debt is the federal government itself, with massive funds built up for Medicare, Social Security etc (and we hope they last!). 

The other quarter is what the US Government has been lent by the governments of other countries, which comes to about two and a quarter trillion dollars.  This need not necessarily be a problem, as long as the debt is held in US dollars.  If the value of the dollar falls too much, and the countries involved insist on repayment in other currencies (euros, pounds, yen etc.), that would cause massive difficulties. 

The other joker in the pack is the temptation that some countries, needing to raise money themselves, might be tempted to sell  on the debts for, say, ninety-five cents on the dollar, to third parties (hypothetical example: Russia sells twenty billion dollars worth of US Treasury Bonds to Cuba for nineteen billion dollars in cash.  Cuba then becomes a US creditor).  This is unlikely but not impossible.  One temptation is to say “To hell with them! We won’t pay them back!”  but then of course the US would become a bad debtor, and people would be disinclined to lend money ever again.  The other temptation, namely to create money from nothing by printing enough currency to cover the debts (money with nothing to back it up) would lead to hyperinflation.   I’m not here to offer a solution – just to pass these facts on.  And to show you...

THE THIRTEEN FOREIGN COUNTRIES TO WHICH THE U.S.A. OWES THE MOST MONEY  (in billions of dollars)…..

                   Japan                                             592.2
                   China                                             502.0
                   United Kingdom                          251.4
                   Oil Exporters                                 153.9    (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait etc)
                   Brazil                                              149.5   
                   Caribbean banking centres        115.4   
                   Luxembourg                                    84.8
                   Hong Kong                                     63.1
                   Russia                                              60.2
                   Norway                                            45.3
                   Germany                                          44.0
                   Taiwan                                             42.6
                   Switzerland                                      42.5

A few surprising names there.  Further down the list  there are names you would expect (Mexico  38.0  and Canada 24.0)  and some you might not (Egypt 12.7).   But wherever it is owed to, sooner or later it will have to be paid back. It is sobering to remember that the entire federal tax levy for one year is somewhat less than two trillion dollars.  I suspect there will be a perpetual cycle of borrowing money to pay back what is already owed.  I shudder to think what the debt will be when our grandchildren reach retirement age!

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Tiers of Sadness

These days, or at least since the 1970s, we have been told that it is okay for people to cry – including men.  I think that was the start of all that New Man business.  Let it all out: don’t bottle up your feelings, all the people who are supposed to know what they are talking about have been telling us.  I wish that had never happened.  I happen to think that crying is one of the more grotesque human bodily functions – contorted faces making foul noises and leaking fluids from eyes, nostrils and mouth – in adults: in small children it is understandable, no matter how annoying.  And before you jump down my throat, yes, even in adults it is permissible.  Grief, for example, and genuine excesses of joy, and even when you laugh so much you segue into tears.  That is probably what crying is for.

But not for most of the myriad reasons that people have been disposed to cry for in public, and there does seem to be an awful lot of that about these days.  In reality shows they seem very prone to it.   You can’t switch on a reality show of any kind without watching some nonentity blubbering away.  Okay, yes, I understand that if you have undergone a huge struggle and won a million dollars, then the emotion might make you cry.  But I won’t accept it if you lose.  Two examples stick in my mind, both of them from Bravo shows.  A couple of weeks ago a contestant was eliminated from Project Runway.  Okay, like everyone else in the competition except the eventual winner, he will just pick up his normal life where he left off.  There is no penalty for not coming first.  Bravo TV executives don’t slaughter the firstborn of losing contestants, or take way their houses or make them bankrupt.  But one wimpy twit, in his bit to camera after being eliminated, was sobbing away like an overindulged child.  He wasn’t good enough to win, so they chucked him out, and he snivelled and sobbed, and carried on as though the world had ended – I recall that he was particularly devastated because some of the judges had made a few sharply critical remarks about his designs.  What a moron!   

I can also remember a contestant in one of the past seasons of Top Chef who was eliminated about three quarters of the way through the competition.  A few apposite comments would have been appropriate, and maybe a word of congratulation for those who were left in the contest.  But nooooooooo…..   This puffed up thirty-something turned on the waterworks and blubbed his way through a self-centred bit of drivel where he told us how devastated he was, how he couldn’t bear being eliminated, and how basically his life was ruined, until he dissolved, it seemed, into a blob of tears and mucus.  I wanted to hit him.  It’s just a TV show, you arse!

Let’s put this into a little perspective.  A week or so ago I was watching a documentary about the Holocaust.  A woman, remarkably self-contained considering what she was telling us, described how she had endured two years in Auschwitz, experiencing suffering that is beyond the ability of most of us even to understand, and had survived the war, even though all the other members of her family and most of her friends had been killed.  As she told us this, her eyes watered, and she swept away a tear or two with her handkerchief.  That is crying that is totally understandable, and one wouldn’t have batted an eyelid of she had cried even more for she was feeling grief that is almost insupportable. As one watched one understood, one sympathised, one wished her nothing but good.  There are levels of  sadness, and hers was the deepest.  That is the sort of thing that the safety-valve of crying is intended for – not for spoiled, selfish, grotesque idiots who throw aside all control and make disgusting, self-indulgent spectacles of themselves.  On a sadness scale of one to ten, being kicked off a reality show comes in at about minus eight.

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From Rubber Room to Polling Booth

I’ll let you all into a little secret – the US Presidential Election will take place in a couple of months.  Some of you may have already guessed, but for the rest of you, let me tell you that it will be, as it always is, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November (this strange establishment of when it should be was devised to ensure that there was never an election on November 1st, which as you all know is All Saints’ Day).  I’m not sure how many names will be on the ballot, but there will probably be about a dozen or more.  There always are, but of course there are only two that actually matter – the candidate who represents the party that prefers people to money, and the other candidate, from the party that worships money and despises people who aren’t  rich.

This will be the last Presidential election in which I shall not have a vote, but even so, as a resident and taxpayer I take a very keen interest in what happens, and I can’t stay disinterested.  I am rather hoping that that nice man who speaks of change will be elected.  Probably, by the time the election day rolls round I will have become sick and tired of all the advertising, speech making, name calling etc with which the electorate is bombarded and will be glad to have it over with.  I have lived through a great many election campaigns in Britain, and a couple in Canada, but I have never known any elections that bring the hate merchants and out and out loonies crawling out of their slime pits like American elections. 

Here is an example.  The gentleman concerned is The Honorable James Donald Manning and he is a pastor of some sort.  Now, I think that except for an hour or so on Sunday mornings, pastors of all kinds should just shut the fuck up.  Nevertheless, many of them seem to feel that they have the right to come out of their churches and into the real world to tell us how to act and how to think.  This one appears to have bought into the foul blanket of lies and hate mongering that his party is constantly attempting to throw over Sen. Obama.   I leave it to you to decide if this man is evil, deluded, or just plain off his head. Whatever he is, the sad thing is that out there, there are some people who take him and his drivel seriously.
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Thursday Thirteen #64

Maybe some of you have heard of Cockney rhyming slang.  It is a seemingly rather convoluted, yet really very simple, way of saying certain words by using other words.  Its origins have not been definitely established, though the balance of opinion seems to be that it was a code invented by the criminal classes in Victorian London, in order to be able to talk about certain nefarious activities they had planned without having to worry about being overheard.  I don’t know if that’s true but I hope it is.  Basically, what it involves is taking an established pair of words (or three words), the last of which rhymes with what it is you want to say, and you say that instead.  Sometimes you will only say the first word of the group.  Two often quoted examples (which, incidentally, you will never hear in real life) are Trouble and strife, meaning wife, and Apples and pears, meaning stairs, so for example you can say you have to go up he apples, meaning upstairs.   Rhyming slang fell into disuse in the second half of the twentieth century until it enjoyed a revival thanks to its frequent use in such immensely popular TV programmes such as   Minder and The Bill and Only Fools And Horses.    These days it is still widely used and understood by far more people, at all levels of society, than it ever was in the Victorian era.   Here, now, are thirteen (plus two) examples of rhyming slang that are in current use………..


Barnet Fair   This reference to the annual fair held in Barnet means hair. Another place name signifying part of your body is…

Hampstead Heath  which mean teeth.

Mutt and Jeff  Deaf

Tom and Dick  Sick.  And if you are too Tom and Dick you might end up….

Brown bread  which means dead.  RIP.

Dog and bone  means telephone. Probably not a Victorian expression but a later invention. “What’s your dog number?”

Raspberry tart  means – have you guessed? – fart.  As in, blowing a raspberry.

Tit for tat  means hat.  But in general, you don’t refer to your tit (I wonder why not!) but your titfer.

Bees and honey  means money. If you don’t have any, then you are…

Boracic lint  meaning skint.  Skint?  Yes – a British slang term (not rhyming) meaning absolutely broke.

Adam and Eve means believe.  Almost always used in full, as in “Would you Adam and Eve it!”

Boat race  means face. 

Pork pies means lies, as in the kind people tell. Very often abbreviated to “porkies”  as in “Are you telling me porkies?”

In at least one instance, the rhyme has moved on to another level.  Aris means arse (translation: ass, or if you’re too delicate, rear end).   Actually it’s a very straightforward progression.  Bottle and glass means arse, and bottle rhymes with Aristotle, which is shortened to Aris, therefore Aris = arse.  Simple, really!

PS:  Memo to Sarah Palin, recently named as Vice Presidential candidate for the Republicans.  If your daughter Bristol ever goes to England, she should be prepared for smirks and giggles. No, I don’t mean because she is preggo – I mean because Bristol is rhyming slang for breast, after a football team called Bristol City.  Geddit?

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