jaywalker

In my recipe, I forgot the spinach. I guess one nice thing about curry is that it is forgiving of such senescence.

I took on board from my stepfather the significance of fruit in curry. Everything fresh: so onions softened, spices balanced and cooked out (turmeric, dried chilli, curry powder), meat then fried off: then the fun starts; fresh tomatoes, bananas, fresh mango, to go with fresh chilli, whole green chilli, pepper, salt, water. Then coriander stirred in at last moment. Some texture accompaniment: poppadum, bhaji etc. Takeaway curry rarely tastes fresh, often tastes one-dimensional with glutinous, terrible sauce.

Huge thanks to the House of Lords for showing some resistance this evening.

the first geranium (Roxanne, not 'geraniums' as in pelargoniums) flowered today. and then the hellebores ...

To be clear, I probably do subscribe to Friedman's general view. The reason living-wage increases are inflationary is that the BofE is expanding the money supply faster than a cheetah on speed. I have nothing against the idea of a living-wage. Where a government has an unsustainable deficit (no danger whatsoever of that in the UK of course :-) ) then inflation is the only course open to it. Hence the desperate moves to cancel RPI adjusted state-pensions, and try to get us to forget that housing costs have anything at all to do with inflation (the ludicrous CPI).

I have a strong sense we are sleep-walking into more trouble than we realise. Today I had notification that my parents' care costs will rise 5% next month. The reason given is the rise in the minimum wage (with more to follow in subsequent years). Do you think their pensions rise by that much? But this is before the effect on wages/supply-of-care-labour: as EU workers leave to more rational climes (or are simply excluded by this contemptible government) we will realise that we have seen nothing yet.

The press consensus is that Trump is being normalised rather rapidly. Of course this has nothing to do with the rather large increase in funding announced today for the military-industrial complex.

It was the nearest (so far ...) that I have faced imprisonment. The judge, you see. Ignorant and biased. I very nearly stood up and said so. I clutched Bourdieu's Language and Symbolic Power for solace (strangely you can take books into court even though not allowed to read them). It all ended well: even the literalist Daily Mail readers on the Jury could tell something had gone wrong with the prosecution.

murderer

For me, exactly right JoeLeg. The ruling metaphor of the new certainty: contain it and we will be better off. Hoard, secrete, make precious, defend. Weird, like everyone read the canon of Mercantilism but never had time for Keynes. Hey you inward looking people: switch the metaphor!

Weird that one tactic I use against scammers is now a scam :-)

I have this when I have to attend church (e.g. a funeral) and refuse to pray. Perhaps it would be more polite to get on my knees. But then I might start believing.

The BBC tonight says memos have been issued and funding will be sought from Congress to provide enforcement. What Trump will find is that following a rule of this kind (the memos only apply to those who have broken the law) will be his undoing (assuming he does not go totalitarian). And he will not be able to understand why.

I guess ???? you have found a way to cut-off any discussion and to secure your own certainties. It is difficult to see what one might say that is not 'Virtue Signalling' in your book. The vacuity of the phrase allows you to deploy it as you please.

So now he is circumventing legal obstacles by 'tightening up existing regulations'. Street arrests, cultivating general fear in the targeted population, raids etc. A country with which we are somehow proud to have a 'special relationship'.

dive

keano77 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > A post Brexit Britain will need to create > conditions that will unleash entrepreneurial > talent for Britain to realise it's potential. Ah, that would be the abolition of corporation tax and a more flexible labour market (all those pernickety constraints to labour security and equality engineered in the EU) - and lower taxes require further cuts in social security spending (since we are already spending way beyond our tax revenue and the economic cycle is about to downturn reducing those revenues, and raising the debt, even faster). Now where will that lead I wonder? Surely not inflation (which will hammer those with little capital with which to protect themselves). That combined with ad hoc stupid promises to individual foreign companies to beg them not to "rationalise" our industries (i.e. eviscerate them). Will May meet the owners of Kraft I wonder: they have a policy of reducing all their manager's budgets to zero and asking them then to justify every expenditure. They operate on way reduced costs than Unilever: one of the reasons is that Unilever has much more of a social-environmental agenda. Will we pay Kraft off? Or just seek reassurances over job cuts :-). And there are many further companies in the target of the USA (Buffet etc) now that the pound is so cheap. My outrage at Corbyn and the labour party is that the EU was the primary defence against this sort of nonsense. I have begun to wonder if they actually want economic chaos, as a chance for the revolution. May, by the way, will not survive this. She is a reactionary interventionist, not a laissez-faire free-marketeer. But she will be completely riven: trying to find trading partners in an era of protectionism (having torn up the agreement that protects two thirds of our trade from just that) she will have to allow USA capital to do what it wants: so we will be scorched, face a collapse in tax revenues and she will have to abandon even the semblance of her socialist side (which I have no doubt is deeply felt).

berry

Where would one find the proletariat to be in the vanguard for in 2017? Churchill was of aristocratic lineage - hence his tendency to risk-taking and dissolution, but also to artistic expression, political non-conformity, absolute faith in national destiny and so on. These were by no means typical of his schooling (indeed, his schools labelled him very dull). Contrast with, say, Lenin: "Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk on the Volga River on 22 April 1870 into a well-educated family. He excelled at school and went on to study law. At university ..." (bbc). Certainly Lenin had the intellectual capacity (unlike Churchill) to be in the vanguard of new thinking (a great pity the way it turned out of course).

RoLo, I am not at all an expert, but have been through this process with a neighbour in Kennington who dug out a level below their basement (....) Have they formally notified you? Do you have a party wall agreement (given it is a wall not a fence and seems to be impacting on your property)? In my case, I did not grant them permission, so they had to appoint a party-wall surveyor who inspected my property carefully: at the end of the works I received compensation for some (limited) damage. Generally, I think, if in any doubt at all you should go through this route: the party-wall surveyor is a legally binding-role and their costs are for your neighbour, not you. Is there also planning permission and, separately, building regulation approval? Has work started with all this in place, or is this just a proposal? If they are talking about under-pinning your house, do you have guarantees and money on deposit from them should their builder go bust or the work prove actionable? This was not part of my experience, but from the newspapers I believe it is increasingly frequent (and also increasingly subject to legal dispute). And have you notified your own building insurers? They must be told.

breaks

Jenny, you are falling for the trap (as I had done) that the article I cited indicated: do find time to read it. With apologies to Baudrillard, Trump is not the President, he was never the President, and he will not have been the President, as the appalling language has it, "going forward". He will simply become some forgotten. You can tell this tonight as his media voice is getting ever more hysterical. This, after all, is the apotheosis of Twitter. He knows the next cut (of the thousand still to come) will be Bannon. Only those who have adopted the post-modern 'there is no truth' (ironically, the stupid ones suffering destinies in the most cruelly lonesome parts of the USA who have the ressentiment fuelled self-certainty to think they can know truth-as-such) still think he should be in office.

This is the most incisive article I've found on Trump this week: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n04/david-bromwich/act-one-scene-one

Well, someone is doing the leaking and it's not Snowden. The deep-state exists and it is terrifying. Way beyond the 'military-industrial complex' now. It may end up being far more of concern than Trump (who, we may come to think, is just a smoke-screen: for when he is impeached or resigns an illusion of 'sanity' will prevail, the perfect mask of power). Obama has some responsibility here.