johnny9fingers | Entries tagged with us

www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/31/brexit-mess-with-good-friday-and-well-block-uk-trade-deal-us-politicians-warn

Now it's going to be very difficult for Boris to blame the EU for this mess, because he will have to also blame the US Congress. In fact, it's everyone's fault but ours, hey Boris? Or just maybe it could be, when you read the fine print (which is something Boris never does) we find that Brexit is fundamentally incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement. Despite this, whether or not an acceptable fudge to avoid the incompatibility can be made is now looking much less likely.

Boris is just beginning to realise the pile of codswallop he has sold the public. Now we can force him to eat it, bit by bit. Day by day. In public.

I fear very soon I'm going to be feeling quite sorry for Boris on so many levels. But that's where we are.

Crossposts: https://johnny9fingers.livejournal.com/311291.html

This:

johnny9fingers.dreamwidth.org/293058.html#comments

About this:

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/08/trump-removes-secret-service-director-homeland-security

And I said:

"Now I guess he will have to purge all the Intelligence/Security Services under his jurisdiction. Then he can ensure there are no challenges to his narrative of events... ...And when Trump has purged the security services and put his own folk in place I guess he will be the one dictating how the history of these events is told from here on in."

Today I find this in my newspaper:

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/28/dan-coats-trump-director-national-intelligence

The other interesting thing is Trump appears to have like-minded folk in power in three of the five eyes network; and I can't see Canada rocking the boat. I hope our Intelligence agencies know what sort of predicament they could be in. And I hope Jacinda Arden remains bulwark of reason and sense.

Crossposts: https://johnny9fingers.livejournal.com/310712.html

New leaks...

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48978484

Wherein we find that yet more of Sir Kim's private opinions are being paraded across the press. The fact that those opinions have been held by many folk worldwide is not the point.

But it does seem that the leaker has been identified:

www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jul/14/suspected-leaker-of-kim-darroch-emails-identified-report

And the various heads of the Civil Service are beginning to speak out:

www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/13/senior-civil-servants-warn-of-campaign-to-undermine-officials

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, one of Darroch’s predecessors as the UK ambassador in Washington, said the leak of emails could have a wider impact on the advice officials are willing to give. “Kim Darroch may have been the immediate target of the leak, but I suspect whoever was behind it has in mind a wider target of our system of public service and wanted to influence the way the next government handled the civil service, and was perhaps trying to influence the succession of Kim Darroch. This undermining of the public service has been going on for years and is clearly going to be a fundamental problem in the period ahead.”

So it seems that we have uncovered the person who leaked this stuff. I suppose an example has to be made pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire mentioned.

Crossposts: https://johnny9fingers.livejournal.com/307247.html

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/08/donald-trump-we-will-no-longer-deal-with-the-british-ambassador

Someone leaked the British ambassador's private summary of the Trump administration. Now Kim Darroch is toast. Whoever leaked this needs a horsewhipping on the steps of a Pall Mall club. Folk in the clubs in St James' would know better. Or ought to, anyway.

If I were an ambassador for the UK to any nation I would consider this very seriously. Kim Darroch has been compromised; maybe I could be compromised too.

As for me, in my nasty fashion, I think the punishment to the leaker ought to fit the crime, and the likely motivation thereof.

So I think, when we find him, we can sequestrate the assets of the person who leaked this to pay for the bill for the ex-Ambassador's pension and other costs. We can leave aside the costs to British business, industry, and the rags and shreds of its former prestige.

Let's make this society properly capitalist, shall we? The leaker has cost the nation, and therefore should pay for it. Debtor's prisons will be such wonderful places in our new, Dickensian society.

Mind you, it is a bit rich for anyone from the UK to regard any other nation's politics as "inept and dysfunctional". Something about Matthew 7: i-v. springs to mind.

Crossposts: https://johnny9fingers.livejournal.com/306965.html

Over the past couple of days I've noticed that folk on the right in America have used the left's rhetorical of hatred of GWB as somehow equivalent to the right's rhetorical of hatred for Obama.

However I think this to be a false equivalency.

"I hate George Bush" seems to me to be a personal emotional response.
'Second Amendment Solutions" is a call to arms.
Selling guns with "You Lie" (the words Republican Congressman Joe Wilson shouted out loud at President Obama during a congressional speech in 2009) is rather different from calling Bush a "lying scumbag" in print.

The difference is quite specific: the weaponisation of the debate. If folk don't see that, then I don't suppose it's up to me to point it out.

Oh and for my America chums I have this from Benjamin Franklin.

Eagle

Property

CHAPTER 16|Document 12
Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris
25 Dec. 1783

Writings 9:138 The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.
All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

The Founders' Constitution
Volume 1, Chapter 16, Document 12
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12.html
The University of Chicago Press