Category Archives: Britain

Monkeying With The Money

Britain, Business, Fascism, Federal Reserve Bank

CNN Business News reports that British bankers and regulators have been caught red-handed, monkeying with interest rates.

And I thought that was the job description of the banking cartel.

Barclays Chief Executive Officer Bob Diamond conducted an “exhaustive internal investigation,” only to find that “other banks were involved [too] in setting and manipulating interest rates.”

In addition to the resignation of Diamond, del Missier and the chairman of the board, Barclays said many traders involved in the Libor manipulation are “no longer with the bank.” But Barclays plans to keep these individuals’ names confidential, since civil and criminal investigations are ongoing.
Meanwhile, Diamond had been consistently vocal about the need for bank to act responsibly. Speaking at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference on June 18, Diamond said: “Being a better citizen is critically important to us in financial services today for all kinds of reasons. In order to be effective we need to regain trust in our industry.”

Buried in the news item is this nugget: “[T]op British banking regulators could be implicated in this wide-ranging investigation.”

USA, USA, We Are Always AAA: Expect the world’s top monopoly money counterfeiter to be right in the middle, stirring the money pot.

Two thoughts:

When the ostensibly private arm of the baking cartel cops to mischief, its bankers take the heat and the hate. The public has been brainwashed into believing that Big Ben (Bernanke) and his counterparts in European and British governments are in the right to debase their countries’ coin. Therefore, the populations on our Ape Planet (where humans are becoming the dumber species) don’t blink over central banker shenanigans. (Except for Ron Paul, who gives Big Ben a hard time.)

THE Cost. Barclays (BCS) spent “nearly £100 million” ($157 million) and three years conducting an ‘exhaustive internal investigation’ into its traders and executives’ role in manipulating … a key global benchmark interest rate.”

The populations affected (mentioned in the point above) disregard the price of central planning and the attendant regulation, even though these costs are passed on to the dumb public.

A free market in money would dispense with the waste.

Heroism Stripped

Aesthetics, Britain, Feminism, Gender, Human Accomplishment, Pop-Culture, Sex

An anonymous sage said that “expectations tend to be self-fulfilling”: Expect nothing and you’ll get nothing. In the West, if kids so much as dial 911 in an emergency, they are decorated for bravery. So, it’s hardly surprising that evincing narcissism, self-adoration and bad taste has been elevated and recast as heroic, honest and gritty.

Going by the MailOnline’s sensibility, the au naturel uglies below are really “brave mothers and daughters [who] bare all – and reveal their hopes and fears about ageing” [sic]. I give you your new heroines. Scroll down for an eyeful.

“Saying ‘I’m a Socialist’ = Saying ‘I’m a Massive idiot'”

Britain, Capitalism, Celebrity, Fascism, Hollywood, Socialism

“About the only people who haven’t figured out that saying ‘I’m a socialist’ is the same as saying ‘I’m a massive idiot’ are Western academics and zillionaire celebrities.”

Nice, pithy blog post at ProfessorBainbridge.com, as to why “aging ex-supermodel Elle MacPherson,” who professes socialism, is known as “the Body” and not “the Brain.”

I disagree that the US and UK continue to enjoy capitalist economies, as Professor Bainbridge cheerily asserts, but his point about the stupidity of a well-rewarded celebrity class is well-taken (and well-made).

What MacPherson desperately needs is for the proto-angel from It’s a Wonderful Life to take her on a tour of what MacPherson’s life would have been like if she had been born in, say, East Germany or the Soviet Union in, say, 1955. Maybe they’d have time for a quick visit to the Gulag Archipelago. Or the angel could show her what her life would have been like if she had lived in Cambodia in the late 1970s.

Besides, we hear a lot about undue corporate influence on politics, but precious little of Hollywood’s access to the Idiocoracy in DC.

UPDATE IV: Bitchslapped in London (Bravo Michael Nutter; Boo Darcus Howe)

Ann Coulter, Britain, Crime, GUNS, Media, Political Correctness, Private Property, Race, Racism, Welfare

Srdja Trifkovic, at Chronicles Magazine, sums up “London’s Postmodern Riots” thus: “The problem with today’s Britain is that donkeys are in charge not only at Bramshill but also at Westminster and at No. 10, Downing Street. If and when ordinary Britons feel compelled to resort to more robust tools than BlackBerryss and Nokias when faced with a looting mob, the lions may have a chance once again.”

[SNIP]

Srdja’s sentiment is a hopeful one. More telling are images such as this one, showing the oppressed disrobing before the oppressor, or wielding a broom to clean-up after the goons.

Described in “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism,” the prototypical western man “is flabby in body and mind. He is fearful and easily cowed. He erupts in tears at a drop of a hat. He is gripped by the culture of apology, and flagellates over sins he has not committed. His eternal state of expiation is driven not by goodness, but by insufferable self-righteousness.”

This archetypal man forgives unspeakable violence against himself and those he is obligated to protect. He would not hurt a fly, much less repel a foe. An astute alien would notice that, in this regard, there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ earthling. …
Not only does this generic Joe refuse to identify his proud, empowered attackers, but he rejects the possibility that they act out of ingrained animus for his kind. The swarms that descended to take what is his—to hurt him and even kill him—he jocularly terms mischief-makers, teens, twitter-operators, technology savvy youth. Yes, this brow-beaten, emasculated, excuse-for-a-man uses diminutives to describe the contempt-filled stalkers who menace him and who would squash him like the bug he is

UPDATE I (June 11): COULTER’S SAFE SCREED. Here is my reply to the posting of Ann Coulter’s “diagnosis” to my Facebook Wall:

Myron, Larry Auster has diagnosed this “leftist spinning,” to which Coulter, generally a PC writer, adheres. Coulter’s shtick, like Mark Steyn’s, relies on maintaining the illusion of American exceptionalism. As if the US doesn’t run as enormous a Managerial State as the EU and UK! Here Auster writes:

“While I don’t have all the facts as to numbers, my impression of the article is that they’re trying to make the non-black involvement seem much more than it is. The truth seems to be that the riots were started by blacks, and then others (whites and Muslims) joined in, especially in the looting. But it remains mainly a black thing, and The Guardian is trying to deny that. Also, it’s not surprising that whites would be involved. As Charles Murray wrote ten years years ago, underclass whites in Britain are in their behavior very much like underclass blacks–products of the welfare state, of fatherlessness, etc., and producers of fatherlessness. And we’ve known for years about the yobs who can be as unruly and dangerous as the black thugs. Britain has this huge low-level white population of which there is no equivalent in America. So it’s no surprise that they would join with the blacks.”

Ann Coulter’s column is generally safe. That’s her secret. As Canadian writer Kevin Michael Grace once mused: “The secret to becoming a successful right-wing columnist is to echo the mob while complimenting yourself on your daring. That’s all there is to Ann Coulter’s craft, the rest is exploitation of the sexual masochism of the American male—he just can’t get enough of the kitten with claws.”

UPDATE II: Some people are able to distinguish right from wrong. One such individual is Mayor Michael Nutter. Via Pat Buchanan:

“You’ve damaged your own race,” said Mayor Michael Nutter to the black youths of Philadelphia whose flash mobs have been beating and robbing shoppers in the fashionable district of downtown.
“Take those God-darn hoodies down,” the mayor went on in his blistering lecture. “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”
And the mayor had some advice for teenagers looking for work.
“You walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back and your shoes untied and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you?
“They don’t hire you ’cause you look like you’re crazy.”
Nutter is African-American and the first leader to speak out about the racial character of the flash mobs attacking people in one American city after another. And where are our other leaders?

Other people can only distinguish one race from the other.

How telling that this gas bag has so many YouTube viewers. What herd mentality would drive anyone to think of Darcus Howe—a West Indian “writer,” who has made himself comfortable in London—as a voice worth heeding? Darcus blames the wanton destruction of private property on the emasculated British bobby. “The worst violence visited [on England] and its capital since Goering’s Luftwaffe executed the ‘Blitz'” is the fault of the lefty, community-oriented police, which would sooner jail a gun owner for defending what’s his than stop a hateful hooligan from destroying what is not his.

These are the defenders of private property, died guarding his community from hooligans. Darcus the drek stands with evil.

Think the film “Harry Brown” with Michael Caine …

The London riots were the work of moral barbarians with no loyalty to the people in whose midst they live and no love for the society to which they give nothing, only take.

UPDATE III (Aug 12): Compassionate Fascist: I think Ann Coulter is attractive; her politics are what’s unattractive.

UPDATE IV: Larry Auster has sent the correct URL for the image of the submissive and the barbarian.