Scrapbook for April 2018

27.04.2018 – King Louis

At last, a sensible royal name!

YouTube [opens in a new tab].

King Louie's song from Disney's Jungle Book (1967), music by George Bruns (1914-1983), lyrics by the Sherman brothers Robert (1925-2012) and Richard (1928-).

25.04.2018 – Pallywood

The videos and photos purporting to be of a chemical attack at Douma in Syria were so obviously fake – 'Pallywood' is the correct term – that we didn't bother discussing them here.

That this obvious fakery was used as a pretext to spend an amount in excess of four billion dollars for the USA alone blasting some Syrian buildings to smithereens was just one more of the many incomprehensibles in circulation at the moment. It's quite puzzling that when you reduce a 'chemical weapons laboratory' to rubble, none of the deadly chemicals escapes.

For those who still don't believe in the Pallywood nature of the videos, Steve McIntyre on his blog Climate Audithas gone to has published a piece that goes to immense lengths to analyse these. Executive summary: the videos are Pallywood – extremely pure, weapons-grade Pallywood.

It appears that Russia is planning to bring a number of robustly healthy Syrians to the OPCW in the Hague. There they can identify themselves and their roles as the dead and dying in the videos and photos – you know, the corpses with shaving foam bubbling out of every orifice, for example.

25.04.2018 – The art of wellbeing tour…

…cancelled due to illness.

Readers may remember that it was the Manchester Art Gallery that took down John William Waterhouse’s painting Hylas and the Nymphs at the end of January this year 'to prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks in Manchester's public collection'. After outraged protests at such lunacy the painting was reinstated about a week later.

Manchester Art Gallery is clearly a right-on institution free of any sense of irony. Its current offering is full of events targeted at people with psychiatric problems. No sense of irony at all. Every misfortune that befalls it, no matter how small, is therefore welcome.

25.04.2018 – Sun Queen nuts

Is it some virus in the French that causes otherwise sensible people who come in contact with them to start behaving like eighteenth century European despots – who themselves were only copying some degenerate Bourbon?

What would the Founding Fathers think of such cloying, obsequious, conspicuous consumption triggered by the presence of a dainty Frenchman and his odd wife?

21.04.2018 – Germany: Toddlers mixing paint

Writing in PI-News, Peter Bartels, a former Editor-in-Chief of Bild newspaper, reinforces our motto that in German politics nothing ever changes.

Opinion poll results in Brandenburg give the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) 22 percent of the vote. Compare this with the results of the two 'ruling' national parties: CDU (23 percent) and SPD (22 percent).

But, despite such success, the AfD will never achieve anything because all the other parties will always gang up against it. The results are to be seen in the ever odder coalitions being formed – last year's bizarre 'Jamaica' proposal was just one of them. There is always some combination of red (SPD), redder (GRÜNEN) and reddest (LINKE) that can be patched together to keep things on track with a majority that just about gets them over the line. Risking the boredom of our readers we repeat: In German politics nothing ever changes.

Bartels concludes:

Yes, in Germany something is building up … But so long as the AfD does not have 51 percent there will be no change of direction. Because the guardians of the stewpot will for eternity empower themselves to gorge from it. It doesn't matter what the colours of the plates, the table or the chairs are. As soon as the skies threaten to become Bavarian or German blue, every means of darkening them will be seized upon. Unless, that is, the German Michel finally takes off his sunglasses and looks the coming end of Germany in the face…

The 'German Michel' is the traditional personification of the German national character, recognisable by the nightcap he wears.

07.04.2018 – Patience