Let us not salute the curate’s egg of globalism
“Briefly salute the rice” said the recipe. Standing to attention, I gave the sort of ship-shape wiggle-wiggle-wiggle hand against the forehead of which any British NCO would’ve been proud, without being entirely sure why I was doing it. Risotto rice is not a medium with which I’m terribly familiar, and so it took a minute or two before I realised the spelling mistake involving an additional ‘l’. I could’ve been there all night looking like an Alexander Technique freak, but as it was the sauté process started to produce a thicker mixture, as accurately promised by Danilo Alfaro.
Cooking the food of one nation for a citizen of another when one is a citizen of neither is a tad tricky: you can very easily wind up being too clever by half, and pleasing nobody. But I think I got away with this one on the grounds of English eccentricity. Or Clubmed politesse – one of the two. Either way, at least the literal error in the Alfaro recipe was unintentional: if only the same thing could be said for what passes as ‘fact’ these days.
When I read headlines like “Trade figures dent recovery optimism”, I think ‘What optimism?’ One man’s optimism is another man’s bollocks, but it does irritate the crap out of me when complete fantasy is given the undeserved title of ‘optimism’…..as if there were any grounds for it in the first place. The Telegraph piece I’m referring to added, ‘UK exports fell by a sharp 9.1pc largely due to a decline in demand in countries outside the European Union where British companies have been focusing their efforts’. No, really? Decline in demand, eh? You’re kidding me. The column was of course written by Phil Baldrick, idiot manservant to the Lackbladder Twins of Sark, so we would be mad to expect anything better.
Antonis Samaras, however, is in a class on his own when it comes to fantasy playing the role of reality. The Greek Prime Minister seems determined to cast a giant Minotaur of legend in the role of Minute Fact, so it has all the credibility of a Christmas pantomime in which even the kids can see the Minotaur sh*t cascading from the arse of the actor, and the giant forked tongue protruding from his stretch-nylon costume. “Greece is turning the page on six years of recession and the economy is becoming competitive,” said AntSam today: 2014, he declared, was going to be the year Grexit became Grecovery. As there has been no Grexit, I think we can therefore safely assume there will be no Grecovery – but there are other reasons why I think the assumption is safe. They revolve largely around the complete absence of any data to form the basis of a Greek recovery. The Greek recovery in 2014 is for me on roughly the same level of likelihood as cast-iron proof of reincarnation emerging during that year.
Exactly the same observation can be applied to the EU economy, the Australian economy, the US economy, the Russian economy – and most of all the Chinese economy. Here too the reasoning is very simple: we live in a globalised world of business where the West buys Chinese crap on price, the West is clueless about how or what to sell back to the Chinese, and Australia sells China some of the raw materials to enable this surplus/debt nonsense to keep going. So when the West catches a cold, China sneezes, and Australia gets pneumonia. And contraction produces a drop in energy demand, and so Russia gets double-pneumonia. At this point, it emerges that India and the South American brics have currencies based on there being no such thing as the common cold….so they have no immunity, and die. You may think this pessimistic, but to me it’s common sense. And even if it is gloom for the sake of it, compared to UK and Greek prestidigitation involving tiny hats and giant rabbits, it represents absolute truth of undeniably clinical accuracy.
I began this post with the salute/sauté gag because I thought how amusing it would be if one of these unscrupulous clowns – Bernanke, for instance – said on Monday, “If you want to make an omelette, you must first of all fake some eggs”. Instantly, media and Bourse analysts would be trying to interpret the more profound meaning in the phrase. The hysterically funny part would come from the certainty that (1) Bernanke had merely got his teeth and tongue in a tangle and (b) thus wound up unwittingly telling the truth.
The Slog 