Friday 23 October 2015

Can A Bearded Man Ever Pleasure a Woman?


I'm not criticising my neighbour but when I hugged him on impulse the other day as a thank you for finding a lost key to my bike lock, I was suddenly made aware that he had grown a beard. Ouch!


One sees it everywhere. Imitation Beckhams? Or are they imitation Imams? The worst is probably the total baldie with a great bush on the chin. "Mummy", do I hear a little girl cry? "Why are the men wearing their heads upside down?"

Equally with smokers and baldies, I avoid the bearded. One of my Paris lovers grew one and I made it clear I couldn't have a sexcessful evening with him unless he came clean shaven for our date. Bless him, he shaved.  On the spot!

It's not only the kiss that suffers. Full love making involves lingual caresses of other body areas. Does one really enjoy the sensation of a brillo pad between one's thighs? Or do we deny oral sex its place in the love making experience?

My feeling on returning recently to the UK and seeing these dreadful facial growths was that men were retreating from sex. Or was it that they felt so dominated by the confident females one sees striding around that they had to fight back and say, "It's ok to be male" and even more that, "A man has to convince you that he has the hormones to grow a bushy beard.

I've noticed the older male usually grows a beard. Grey, of course. Perhaps it's a statement that his sex life is finally over? But now the younger ones are wearing these feeble little fungi. Is this also a statement? Men must be Men! Awch! If they have no other way of proving their maleness: must they grow these often badly tufted outgrowths?

When Mark Antony accepted Cleopatra's invitation to dine aboard her barge on the river Cydnus, we are told (by Plutarch) that he shaved himself almost to the bone to impress her--and indeed to start his historic love affair with her. Are we to believe that Roman men who did not have the facilities available to present day men would have managed such a feat, using a very sharp knife?

My impression is that stubbled jaws and beards are a sign of disregard of and disrespect to women's sensibilities. Females have more sensitivity to touch and the notion of being scraped by a stubbled male face wherever it puts itself in her anatomy, is an insult to that notion of the love of women which should be at the heart of male approaches to sex. Or are women so desperate these days for a caveman experience after a belly full of beer and pizza (and I'm afraid that's what it amounts to for many) that they will accept anything? Face down, presumably?

Beards like the present ones were prevalent during Victorian times when women were corseted and closeted and had few political rights. Can it be that men by becoming bearded are striking back into the heart of female liberation by saying, beards show who's boss?

And then there's the 'Health and Safety' question, "When did you last shampoo your beard dear?"








Monday 3 August 2015

The Vandals are at the Gate. What next?

Periodically I leave this sceptered isle for lands less prosaic. East Africa, America, France: I lived in them for years, left them, then came back to what I supposed to be home. Last time I returned it was not quite as desperate a venture as that of clinging to the underside of a lorry for the entire crossing. I financed my, nevertheless, refugee like return from Paris to the uk with a job for my Paris Production Services film facility: it contributed the bulk of what I nicknamed "The Colditz Tunnel Escape Fund."

That was because returning from France was more complicated than my escapes from Africa and America. Those latter flights to my London homes of those days were accompanied merely by personal baggage. When I moved to Paris however, I left no home in the uk and embarked for what I thought might be forever taking all my furniture, files and treasures. Most of those now rest in a friend's chateau in Burgundy but I had some pieces in Paris that I wanted to bring with me and all of this requires organisation, packing, shipping, and funding. After several months hard work I found shippers and a haven to which my stuff, including a 1912 Bechstein I inherited from my mother, could be carted.

I was a sort of refugee fleeing from the jelly bellied Francois Hollande and coming hard times in France after his election. The problem began when my landlady's husband died and she decided to sell my apartment where I had lived for 13 years. I had paid a total of some €150,000 to her in that time but I had no rights under the law to either buy the place as a sitting tenant or keep on renting it with a new owner. Moving had become a difficult option. I had been living in a privileged location, poised above the Place des Pyramides on the corner of the Louvre and Tuileries Gardens. The only blight to my southerly view was the wretched Tour Montparnasse. The other blights were related to my discomfort under the legal regime that favoured the landlady's over my own rights and which, due to demand, made it by now virtually impossible to find a substitute central Paris apartment. I did not think I could stand being a foreigner any longer.

I left a great love behind me, but it was a great relief to reach Angleterre. Alas, I found it greatly changed but still very civilized with sensible common laws for property rentals. Now I am watching with some horror, those others, less blessed than myself and without a British birthright, trying with intense desperation to come to the uk.

Recently, a photograph appeared in the Telegraph of a 22 year old Sudanese whose words "Britain is good" touched my heart. He was pictured sitting at the Toddington Service Station on the M1. I could not but chuckle. Never had such a banal place seemed so much like Paradise, it seemed. He had crossed to the UK clinging to the underside of a lorry. Now he hoped to study for a degree. I was moved. I cannot bear to think of him, after his brave enterprise, languishing in a prison cell.

I can also be moved by the plight of thousands who, whether political or economic refugees and with only the clothes they are wearing, are trying to enter the country by force, even with their children? Desperation to reach a country where welfare will help them and indeed where there are many lower level jobs: surely our compassion cannot refuse them? But, we can't let them blackmail us, can we? Legal immigration procedures must be enforced. We must have the immigrants we choose, not those forced upon us.

This is a terrible harvest reaped by the great success of the English language and by the equally great success of the British economy which can provide the jobs that are unavailable in the Social Chapter strapped EU.  And the freedom of movement allowed within the EU is also our great handicap. Italy, Hungary, France, just wave them through.

We are besieged and must man the battlements.





Wednesday 15 July 2015

A Criminal Geo-Political Plot

Few recall that an American bank helped Greece to enter the single currency.

The idea of monetary union existed in the EU since its inception. The late 1990's saw preparations for all EU countries other than the UK and Denmark to adopt the currency. In 1999 the currency existed in virtual form. The Euro coins and notes actually entered circulation on January 1st 2002. Greece had joined the virtual currency on January 1st 2001 after several years of preparation with what are now known to be fudged statistics, to which evidently the EU's Eurostat turned a blind eye.

During the height of the Grexit crisis of July 2015, President Obama urged Angela Merkel to 'ease up' on her demands for a renewed Greek austerity programme. Was it his business? Most certainly. The US and its always fumbling geo-political strategy has been at the heart of the Euro's creation (as a competitive currency) and deeply, in the sense of 'deep politics' (political actions hidden from public scrutiny) a part of the European Union's attempt to become the United States of Europe.

What am I saying? The United States of America and the dictators of Brussels are at one in their goal to rule the world. Only, of course, in the endgame's outcome the US comes out on top.

The Euro had its inception in the Maastricht Treaty of 1991--1993. But that treaty also ruled no country could join the single currency without qualifying by having a budget deficit no more than 3% of GDP, nor could its government debt exceed 60% of GDP. Almost every EU country, France and Germany included were cheating on this percentage. But Greece, having worked the magic of statistical manipulations also received help from a US investment bank who's deal was the fount of 2015's disturbing debt drama, and before that, of Greece's fall into the pit of long term debt accumulation.

I quote from a Spiegel Online article of Feb 8th 2010.

"Greek Debt Crisis: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt
By Beat Balzli

"Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit.

"The Greeks have never managed to stick to the 60 percent debt limit, and they only adhered to the three percent deficit ceiling with the help of blatant balance sheet cosmetics. One time, gigantic military expenditures were left out, and another time billions in hospital debt. After recalculating the figures, the experts at Eurostat consistently came up with the same results: In truth, the deficit each year has been far greater than the three percent limit. In 2009, it exploded to over 12 percent.

"Now, though, it looks like the Greek figure jugglers have been even more brazen than was previously thought. "Around 2002 in particular, various investment banks offered complex financial products with which governments could push part of their liabilities into the future," one insider recalled, adding that Mediterranean countries had snapped up such products.

"Greece's debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period -- to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.

"Such transactions are part of normal government refinancing. Europe's governments obtain funds from investors around the world by issuing bonds in yen, dollar or Swiss francs. But they need euros to pay their daily bills. Years later the bonds are repaid in the original foreign denominations.
But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.

"This credit disguised as a swap didn't show up in the Greek debt statistics. Eurostat's reporting rules don't comprehensively record transactions involving financial derivatives. 'The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps,' says a German derivatives dealer."

How does this fit the Criminal Geo Political Plot scenario as orchestrated from Washington DC?

1. Washington wants to control global politics.

2. Washington believes its real enemy is the China/Russia bloc.

3. Europe is a useful device or decoy for manipulation and control of the frontiers that are inaccessible to the US and to the resources that lie behind them. That is the Middle East, Central Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe bordering the Russian Federation.

4. Current and continuing destabilisation in these regions, notably the Ukraine, Afghanistan, and now Greece, suggests interference by a global manipulator. Greece, of course falls under the control of the EU. And the EU is governed from Brussels aka from Berlin.

For the US plot to succeed, Greece has to remain in the Euro. After all, Greece geographically commands the Eastern Mediterranean. But it has signed over some usage of the port of Piraeus to China and the US can hardly have wanted the left wing Syrzia to start doing deals with Putin's Russia--even more danger if the Russians gained a warm water port within a EU and NATO territory.

The US has long been pushing for Turkey to become a EU member state. Why? Oil pipelines from the Caspian reach the Med via Turkish ports.

Now, the plot seems to falter. If Greece leaves the Euro might it not also leave the EU? Might historic tensions between Greece (still a NATO member) and neighbouring Turkey break out once more? Worse, could Russia find ways of buying itself into that Mediterranean port? Via gas swap deals for instance?

Solution, Greece must stay in the Euro and of course the EU. Thus diplomatic pressure from Washington plus public words from Obama, encouraged the Brussels/Berlin/Paris axis to try harder avoid the Grexit. When the project seemed lost and Grexit looked only hours away, even with a paper from the German Finance Minister--who in all logic has the right idea, to kick Greece out of the Euro but with a nice diplomatic compromise of re-entry in five years--brilliant but not what Washington wants, Obama tells Merkel to ease up the pressure for increased austerity. France, never likely to bow to US diplomacy has another reason for wanting to keep Greece alongside: socialist solidarity and the kudos that comes to Francois Hollande for being Merkel's poodle in keeping the Eurozone together. And also for keeping the wolves away from France's own currency credibility when the Front National looms as a powerful voice for the return to the Franc forte, and France's own economy and debt mountain threaten her economic stability.

Quite a stitch up don't you think?

And where does it lead us?

To the conclusion that independence from the Eurozone and the EU is a far, far better thing than being a victim (and a paying one too) of these alarming geo-political power games.

Britain, now is the time to GET OUT!