johnny9fingers | Recent Entries

And I’ve been demoing various musical ideas. Very rough demos it has to be admitted.

As an aside I hate engineering. I spent years in recording studios, playing, arranging, and producing; but I gave up engineering in the early ‘90’s. I still know things like mic placement etc but I’m not a drum-programmer; and when it comes to mixing I’m ok, but the specialists are better and fast. I am as slow as the growth of mountains; and can’t be bothered. Nevertheless I still try to get ideas down. Some ideas aren’t really ever going anywhere and are a throwaway one-off joke full of overplaying and fun - even if very rough.
Here’s one recent one. It’s not really going anywhere; but it’s quite fun in its childish exuberance and flashy spite.

Johnny Ninefingers · Theme for an Imaginary Political Talk Show

Some time ago my LiveJournal account was compromised and the password was taken.

johnny9fingers.dreamwidth.org/356813.html

I was then informed that the person(s) who had broken into my LJ account now had all my passwords etc. But as it happened, most of my internet accounts have a two-tier security which requires confirmation from my phone. So my accounts haven't been hacked. Now my chums appear to have received spam from a bot impersonating me with rubbish issued by close to my email address, just with an acajapan.org attached to the Johnny Ninefingers name.

You have been warned.

I've been thinking about culture, as you do, from an extrinsic perspective; inasmuch as it is possible to imagine yourself into an alien viewpoint.

And I think we have been evaluating things pretty poorly.

Homer and Shakespeare and Cervantes and Goethe are very species-specific. Xeno-ethno-anthropologists will spend careers understanding the nuance of the human condition; using literary criticism, no doubt.

But Bach, Bach is not species-specific; appreciating it is sense dependent - a different order of thing; one that crosses species and culture.

So the idea is... excerpts from an alien narrative form akin to a serial; medium as yet undecided. The title being "Bad Headmaster" and set in the St Thomas School under Bach's Cantorship. The narrative explores the bad-tempered Bach and his well-tempered clavier. Then alien humour reveals itself as susceptible to absurdist juxtaposition and overnight the most important human cultural exports to the universe are Bach, Beethoven et al; and Spike Milligan and the Monty Python team.

The rest of it just writes itself. Which is why I can't be bothered.

For all of lockdown my cleaning lady has been absent, understandably. As an aside I share a cleaning lady with my mother. The last four or five have been Eritrean lasses displaced by various political upheavals and civil wars in their own country. The last lass before this one showed The Mother^TM how to strip, clean, and reassemble a Kalashnikov, much to her amusement.

The Mother^TM happens to come from an Irish Republican family. I have a suspicion that they all know how to strip, clean, and reassemble an AK47.

But yesterday, Alga, for that is my cleaning lady's forename, descended upon my kitchen, bathroom, et al like Byron's Assyrian - she came down like a wolf on the fold and left the place spotless. I wanted to send her away with a bonus bottle of champagne or something alongside her wage. Alas, she didn't accept.

When you get to almost 60, the comfort of staff is perhaps the single greatest luxury available to human beings. Me, I heap mine with whatever gold I can muster; they are more valuable to me than rubies; and I acknowledge that. I refuse to limit my cleaning lady's payments to the statutory minimum wage - to me she is worth more than double that. And it assuages my conscience for not cleaning my own mess.

I came to the conclusion that in the three or four hours she works for me she saves me six to eight hours of time; which I can then waste in leisure or be productive, as I wish.

I actually feel I should be paying her what I earn per hour, but at the moment I'm not earning, so that's a no-no.

At the talking heads on the telly.

The levels of egregiousness are just too much for me to restrain myself. I know the talking heads can't hear me; but venting provides a valve on the internal pressure cooker.

I hate most politicians. But I can at least respect and support some of those opposed to the extreme right wing lurches in the Anglo-Saxon polities.

When Trump goes on about "AntiFa" he's talking about me; my father who fought in WWII; my uncle who lost an eye in that conflict; and all those who died rather than let the fascists take over. I'm a liberal capitalist with kids in private school. I'm AntiFa.

Anyone trying to trash my father's memory, or any of his generation, gets short shrift from me.

If you are anti-AntiFa it means you are pro-fascism; it is just that fucking simple. So...

Trump is a fascist, as are all of his followers who object to AntiFa.

And as for me, I hate fascism.

Something I’ve been saying for a while now:

theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/

It’s true in the US and it’s true over here too.

I've been writing music. Some of it is getting close to finishing the ideas and I'm demo-ing tracks at home using GarageBand. The Helix has been pretty important in this process, enabling me to get good sounds down. It's such a shame I suck at engineering and mixing.

I thought I'd link to some of the stuff via SoundCloud. It seems ok as I don't post much and no-one really reads what I write. I'll think about it a bit more.

www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/16/dark-hair-was-common-among-vikings-genetic-study-confirms

So being a Viking was more of a job description than an ethnic grouping. What appears interesting here is how over a thousand years or so, the descendants of the Vikings seem to have lost a lot of their melanin.

I wonder if we were all getting blonder over the generations.

Not me, obvs. I am descended from Normans who were Norsemen. But good old English miscegenation means that I have Irish, Indian, Portuguese, Welsh, and German ancestry; as well as the Scandawegian reaver genes allied with Anglo-Saxon stock - which makes me a fairly commonplace mixture in London but probably quite exotic to the mono-cultural purists elsewhere.

I suppose it’s the gas chamber for me if the new fascists ever consolidate power. I’m the living definition of cosmopolitanism excepting for lack of Jewishness. I suppose I could convert to make a point, but I’m not the kind to convert to a religion. Find me an organised religion and I will find a way of becoming apostate with elan, if not actual brio. And if there’s going to be a religion I don’t believe in it’s going to be C’tholicism.

I really think, post Lovecraft, that the Catholic Church should lose that “a”. C’tholic seems to suit the institution so much better; æsthetically speaking.

Holding the UK's criminal government to the Good Friday Agreement in full.

Dominic Raab looked pretty shaken. How will this go down in Tufton Street and Number 10? All of the chickens will come home to roost if only the US elects Biden. It is the only real hope for the UK to hold this criminal administration to account in the very-near future. Otherwise it may take a decade or two.

Please Americans, even if you're a Republican, elect Biden and save the UK; because we fucking well need saving from this crew.

Watch on YouTube

... Be it rage or be it shit, that I'm unsafe on the internet.

I am considerably less than civilised at the moment excepting with children - even mine. I can maintain good humour even with H and M; which is surprising given H's tendency to wilful naughtiness.

We have a few proper conduits of journalism left in my country: the Byline Times, Private Eye, and The Guardian (most of the time). The remainder are comics of a kind. The levels of corruption, malfeasance, incompetence and ineptitude shown by this government have not been matched for over two centuries.

A true historical benchmark.
Maybe more folk should be as angry as me.

...are picking up on the Russian interference story:

www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/uk-russia-report-takeaways.html

This is what happens when one of your major national brands, James Bond - sold to the world as representational or at least symbolic - is an intel agent, and your government ignores the intel much to the amusement of the rest of the world.

The Conservative and Unionist party have betrayed the nation. More than any communists have ever. More than Philby, Burgess, and Maclean. More than Mosely and his fascist collaborators.

And the rest of the world, and about half the population of the UK can see it.

Cummings and BoJo better have a good escape route planned. Because the minute they lose power the forensic investigations of every aspect of their lives will begin. This is going to be amusing. Especially when BoJo and Gollum fight and Gollum falls into the Crack of Doom holding the ring.

Only Twitter and Snopes are talking about Portland? None of the media in the UK have made much of what is going on. And it's all a bit bizarre.

twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1284092149248778240

twitter.com/DrPhilGoff/status/1284360561069826050

twitter.com/DemWrite/status/1284376473504108544

twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/1284360767224061952

www.snopes.com/ap/2020/07/17/mayor-of-portland-to-trump-get-your-troops-out-of-the-city/

So it seems the folk supporting the government destroying the constitution are the ones so vocally in favour of it... selectively, obvs.

...And the loss of the Chair of the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee, the government leaks the fact that Labour may have benefitted from Russian-leaked information before... any other revelations are pointed to by the Russia Report. It won't do more than that; but that is more than enough and all the dots will be joined. The Intel community already knows all the details. And I'm not sure they can be bribed further given those details.

So it's damage limitation time. I expect all sorts of smokescreens to be run out. Given the lay-offs from the Fourth Estate after the Covid crisis maybe they are hoping that there won't be any investigative journalists left. They have the Beeb by the balls so I'm sure any negative stories can be spiked there. But the Grauniad, The Byline Times, Private Eye, and all the foreign press... all of it... forensically examining every aspect. And all the foreign security and intelligence services too.

Nothing in recent history has this political and intelligence scandal potential. Nothing. And Five, Six, and GCHQ now have to cover their backs given the Five Eye Network and NATO already know all the details.

Really, how long does Cummings think he can hold on? Even with some small minority of folk in the security services onside? Gatekeepers can be bypassed. Even BoJo and Cummings can be bypassed. But if it comes to that it won't be nice and I will probably have preceded Cummings to the scaffold simply by dint of sounding posher than should be allowed to live.

There have been a few small wins:

Julian Lewis knocked out Chris Grayling in the contest for the chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee. So we have a person steeped in defence matters at its head, and not a party apparatchik; ergo the Russian Report will be published forthwith.

And then, to top it all off, Boris withdrew the Tory whip from Lewis; thereby exposing himself to an independent conservative of conviction and integrity. It's just like the days when Dominic Grieve was in the chair. Instead of taking Lewis for a couple of slap-ups at le Gavaroche, and maybe an invitation to White's, and being exceptionally agreeable and wonderful company, they withdrew the whip and put him straight into the opposite camp. More genius from Dominic Cummings, but then again Cummings never had much time for diplomacy... thank the gods.

Then Chris Grayling was described as "A man so incompetent he can't even win a job contest the actual Prime Minister has rigged" and I know that even in the midst of the attempted take-over, unless they actually find someone competent, they are going to come across as the Keystone Cops rather than the SS.

Maybe the sleeping giant of England will notice how it is being played. If it does, and rounds on these scoundrels, I'd suggest they flee; they are the ones who have contributed to the removal of decency in society, and that lack of decency may well return to haunt them.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap. And those chaps really, really don't want to reap what they have sown.

I can't recall at present the name of the last person to be hanged, drawn, and quartered was in England, but the constant pushing for a return to more primitive values does make me wonder just how far back we will go for our punishment examples when we awake from being gaslighted.

You can't just turn a nation into savages without expecting them to behave as savages. And they will turn on you eventually, because, having lost that social requirement of a rational, measured, sensible approach to any problem, they deal with it emotionally. And if it's not their own hair they are rending, it will have to be something else like your or our limbs.

Cummings really has no idea about what he's been playing with; but it's all a sandbox to him. Classic Dom as Marat or Danton; or maybe even Robespierre. Because the UK is a constitutional monarchy Cummings only has to subvert Parliament rather than overthrow the Queen. And he's managed that pretty well up to now because the Tory party have colluded with him, and they have an 80 seat majority. He tried to clear the Tory ranks of decent folk like Dominic Grieve; but a few have remained to help hold him and Boris's government to account before its members run off abroad with all the loot they and their chums have pocketed in the meantime.

The other thing is the dodgy money is "island hopping" among the Anglo-Saxon polities. The folk who control the dodgy money have been trying to put more into New Zealand, obviously. Australia appears to have a fair few rich folk of their own helping out; but I'd guess Canada and South Africa will get a bunch of these folk coming in and putting money into political parties that appeal to them. Wherever Arron Banks' money goes, that's where they will be trying it on. He does appear to be a canary in the mine, so to speak.

It's like corporate takeover on a huge scale. They come in, install their puppet government, then milk the state for whatever they can get, then move on to the next polity having asset-stripped and sold off all that they can manage, and shorted the currency, and left the nation mired in debt before they are found out by the electorate; and then they can argue it was just ~~business~~ politics and not outright thievery and corruption.

I could admire it, structurally and technically speaking. It is elegant and clever and taxes the stupid, the ignorant, and the morally decent folk for not being amoral fucking cunts.

Go to hell, go straight to hell,
do not pass Purgatory,
and do not collect absolution if you pass go.

This really is world-beating.
And BoJo and Cummings need to own it.

Jo Maugham QC

You can read here the exchange of correspondence between @GoodLawProject and lawyers acting for @MattHancock in relation to Pestfix and Clandeboye. Some startling revelations... THREAD

The PPE Fiasco - Good Law ProjectMore details of PPE fiasco that left hundreds of doctors and nurses dead are starting to emerge. Whilst our EU partners were putting together emergency procurement arrangements in late January, it w…https://goodlawproject.org/news/the-ppe-fiasco/

First, the Government has now spent £5.5bn on PPE.

Second, despite receiving offers from 16,000 suppliers, the Government chose a confectionary wholesaler, a supplier of pest control services and a family investment fund owned in a tax haven to receive some of the biggest contracts.

Third: the Government misreported the value of the Pestfix contract as £108m; in fact it was £32.4m although a number of other contracts have also been concluded with Pestfix. (They are not yet published; what's the betting they'll sum to £108m?)

Fourth, despite Government using the exceptional urgency procedure to bypass normal tendering rules, the isolation suits supplied are being held in a warehouse and have not even been tested!

Fifth, as I understand this paragraph, Pestfix, a company with last reported net assets of £18,000 was paid 75% of £32.4m in respect of isolation suits even before they were delivered!

What is abundantly clear from this paragraph - which is a very unusual form - is that @MattHancock is super-keen for us to go away.

(Don't worry, we won't).

We also do not understand why Government is further occluding transparency by ignoring its own guidance (assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…) that contracts should be published within 20 days.

Obviously I have cherry picked the bits that I find most interesting - but please do read all the correspondence (that's why we've published it).

Our present intention is to pursue judicial review proceedings in respect of the Pestfix, Clandeboye and Akanda contracts.

If you'd like to support the case you can do so here:

Why was £108m of public money paid to Crisp Websites Limited?EveryDoctor works for a future where every patient and every doctor is safe. Good Law Project is a not for profit that uses strategic litigation for a better world.https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/108million/

Please sign our petition to ask @MattHancock why he is breaking the usual rule about publishing contracts here:

PPE supplied by a sweet wholesaler? - Good Law ProjectThe Government has awarded an £108 million contract for the supply of PPE to a wholesaler of sweets. The enormous contract was awarded to the confectionery business seemingly without any advertising …https://goodlawproject.org/news/ppe-supplied-by-a-sweet-wholesaler/

But it now seems other folk are waking up to the problem:

www.un.org/sc/ctc/news/2020/07/06/cted-publishes-updated-trends-alert-response-extreme-right-wing-terrorist-groups-covid-19/

No doubt some will regard it as fake news.

The PPE contracts "...scandal appears to be getting dangerously close to the cabinet. All these contracts, worth close to half a billion pounds in total, ...were apparently awarded to a single bidder in each instance, without the normal competitive tendering process."

Quote Tweet

Byline Times

@BylineTimes

· Jul 5

“These contracts would never have come to public attention without the existence of the EU’s TED  portal, which publishes details of contracts awarded by public authorities. After Brexit there may be no legal requirement for such continued transparency.” https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/supplying-ppe-the-new-klondike/

the-truth-about-the-billion-pound-ppe-procurement-fiasco

We need to read the Byline Times, Yorkshire Bylines, Private Eye, or at a pinch, the Grauniad to find this stuff out. The rest of the fourth estate are spineless and corrupt collaborators with the corrupt government, or actively courting such corruption in the hope of profit.

It seems more of the dodgy business practices of the Government are becoming, um, er, transparent. I copy paste from Twitter. This is all copyright Jolyon Maugham QC, obvs. But at the end he asks if there are any more folk can think of.
I can see his point and so am acting as an amplifier in a small way. And also just to emphasise my disgust at the corruption in our present set-up.
( Read more... )

Jo Maugham QC

@JolyonMaugham

Jul 4

We are already pursuing a Government over the £108m PPE contracts it said it entered into with a chocolatier and a supplier of pigeon netting.  I know there's only so much of this weirdness you can take but here are two more.  First Aventis Solutions Limited.

You may think it is not the most obvious place from which to purchase £18.5m worth of facemasks (for which contract it was apparently the only bidder). This Government disagrees. ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NO…

Government does give you the chance to click through and read the contract but (as with every single on I have tried) the link is broken (ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NO…).

So what do we know about Ayanda Capital Limited?

Its net assets (in its unaudited accounts) look healthy but are swamped by its intangible assets, which could be anything.

Well, it is owned by the Horlick family through an entity based in Mauritius, one of the worst tax havens in the world.

Its website says that it is a "family office" focusing on currency trading, etc. Not an obvious place to buy PPE.

(A family office is a rather ugly creature of late capitalism. If you have SOO much money you need a business specially to look after it then...)

This rather interesting man doesn't appear anywhere on Ayanda's website...

But his LinkedIn entry describes him as a Senior Board Adviser. Oh, and an Adviser to Liz Truss' Board of Trade (which does contain an Andrew Mills).

And he has a twitter profile which is rather on-brand for the modern Conservative Party.

A fair bit of White Lives Matter type stuff with the characteristic sprinkling of support for transphobes. But mostly it is RTing support for @trussliz.

Anyway, as Ayanda Capital's contract is by far the biggest I've seen; and its business lines don't include supplying PPE; and it is owned through an especially grim tax haven; and has links to the Tories, this might be one for journalists to take a look at.

We have litigation in train in respect of the chocolatier and the pest control company. We can probably take on one more - if you'd like to support it.

Yep, there was a Tou International Limited (now dissolved) with an Andrew Mills. beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/117991…

Thank you everyone.

So, in addition to the chocolatier and the pest controller contracts, shall we go after the:

Playing a starring role in this ☝️thread ☝️ is Board of Trade adviser and @trusslizfan Andrew Mills (who has just changed his twitter handle).

Nothing at all to see here.

Then this lovely tweet makes it all so damn obvious:

twitter.com/jackfmitch/status/127969446211822387

Jack

@jackfmitch

I am starting to understand why it took so long for the UK to obtain PPE.  It takes time for conservative MP advisors to become directors of shell companies; to win unchallenged tenders, offshore the profit and complicate basic supplychains whilst the country dies.

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Oh damn, still in this dream.

Recent Entries

So I’ve been doing this and that.

Update.

Some thoughts on an alien perspective...

The Problems of the Bourgeoisie.

I've got to stop shouting...

Er...

So during lockdown...

Rather liked this...

Good old American Democrats...

Maybe Gil got it wrong. But it's still brilliant.

I am so full of it...

Well, now it does seem other nation's presses...

Why is it...

With the last few days manoeuvring...

So...

Just to give some sort of perspective...

More from Jolyon Maugham QC

Not that I haven't been saying it for over a decade...

Tweets about the PPE scandal...

And then there's this...