P of the G

keeping an open eye and ear to find something new.
onwards and upwards there is always a way to get things done

[Christian @InTheTrenchesUK]

THE LONELINESS OF OWEN JONES

You want to know what keeps him awake? Not being called privileged. He's heard that for a decade. Not being called a hypocrite. He wears that armor.

What keeps Owen Jones awake is knowing his own side despises him.

September 2024. Labour banned him from Conference. Cancelled his pass. The reason they gave: "safeguarding issues." The real reason: he was harassing MPs by asking questions on camera. Especially female MPs. His own party called him a risk to women.

2019. After years denying antisemitism in Labour, he admitted it was real in his book. Only after Corbyn lost. Only when it was safe. Jewish supporters who trusted him watched him lie, then watched him flip when the wind changed.

March 2024. He quit Labour. Called it "hostile environment." Senior Labour figures called him "pathetic." A "strategic blunder." His own side thinks he's irrelevant.

The Corbynites. The left he claims to represent. They call him a "shill." Say he gave Corbyn "mealy-mouthed support" while doing "nothing to defend him from antisemitism smears." They don't want him either.

The kill shot:

Owen Jones has no allies. The right never wanted him. The centre finds him embarrassing. The left has rejected him. He is banned from the party he quit. He is mocked by the movement he claims to lead. He is a columnist writing for an audience that has outgrown him, about a working class that never knew him, from a position that no longer exists.

He is forty years old and completely alone. And every column he writes proves it.

Your move, Owen.

[Eric Alper 🎧 @ThatEricAlper]

From the barstools of 'Cheers' to the apartments of 'Friends,' James Burrows directed some of television's most beloved moments. The Emmy-winning comedy giant has died at age 85. https://t.co/Th2LT8FGFz

[Ridge & Frost @RidgeandFrost]

"You've taken the words right out of my bin"

Leader of the Count Binface Party, Count Binface, comments on Andy Burnham's win in Makerfield last night

https://t.co/8boTJsXBWE

📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

Another journalist asked for my thoughts on the impending Labour leadership explosion. So I said this. #Makerfield

[Karl Turner MP @KarlTurnerMP]

Pathetic.

[P of the G @roader71]

Hahahahaha

[Handre @Handre]

Everyone remembers the crash of 1929. Almost nobody asks where the boom came from.

The Federal Reserve created it. Between 1921 and 1929, the Fed expanded the money supply by roughly 61 percent, an increase of about $28 billion in total bank deposits, currency, and other instruments. The expansion was subtler than the printing press running wild in some Weimar sense, which made it more dangerous. Benjamin Strong, the head of the New York Fed, kept interest rates artificially low through open market purchases of government securities and bankers' acceptances. He did much of it as a personal favor to Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, who wanted to prop up the overvalued pound after Britain's blunder of returning to gold at the prewar parity in 1925. American savers got to subsidize British monetary vanity. Nice.

Cheap credit does not spread evenly. It floods into the interest-sensitive sectors first: capital goods, construction, the stock market. So you got the Florida land mania, you got skyscrapers rising in Manhattan, you got brokers' loans ballooning from $1.5 billion in 1921 to over $8.5 billion by 1929 as everyone and his shoeshine boy bought stocks on 10 percent margin. The structure of production stretched far beyond what real savings could support. Entrepreneurs read the low rates as a signal that capital was abundant. It wasn't. The Fed had simply forged the signal.

This is what the mainstream missed, and still misses: Prices were roughly stable through the decade. Consumer prices barely moved. To Irving Fisher and the early monetarists, stable prices meant no inflation and therefore no problem. Productivity was surging in the 1920s, and prices should have fallen. They would have fallen under honest money. The Fed pumped in just enough new credit to keep prices flat, masking the inflation entirely. The thermometer read normal while the patient ran a fever.

So when people tell you the 1929 crash proves capitalism is unstable, ask them who set the interest rate. Ask them who doubled brokers' loans. The boom was the disease. A central bank manufactured a decade of malinvestment, then acted shocked when the bill arrived.

[P of the G @roader71]

@BearJFK Still using my one , have supercharged it with a sd drive and 512 memory and long life battery

[Noirchick In Old Hollywood @Noirchick1]

Julie Newmar, on the CBS Danny Thomas Show delivers the weather report in an unforgettable 1963 way, don't you agree??

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

“We have taken the steps to ban your children from watching YouTube but if you would like to sign up for them to be chemically castrated, go right ahead.”

[J Stewart @triffic_stuff_]

😱 DELUSIONAL LABOUR MP TOLD TO HIS FACE: “YOUR’E IN DENIAL!” 😂

Labour’s Steve Reed is out this morning still spinning fairy tales that Keir Starmer is rock solid and going nowhere.

Sophy Ridge cuts straight through the nonsense: she points out the Makerfield by-election was blatantly about handing Andy Burnham a platform to challenge Starmer.

Reed tries the classic robot script: “It’s all hypothetical… there’s no leadership contest… we’re just getting on with delivering change for this country…”

Mid-sentence, Ridge hits him with it:

“Can I be honest? It feels a little bit like you’re in denial about what’s just happened.”

The sheer front to go on TV and pretend everything’s rosy while the knives are being sharpened is actually impressive.
Starmer’s circling the drain and they’re still doing victory laps.

You can’t write this stuff. Absolute car crash television.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

Swiss police mugshot of Benito Mussolini, 19 Jun 1903

[The News Agents @TheNewsAgents]

“He can’t slag off the south anymore. He can’t be King of the north. He can’t be Mr. Outsider to Westminster.”

To get into No.10, does Brand Burnham have to change?

@maitlis | @jonsopel | @lewis_goodall

[Small Faces @roomforravers]

19 June 1966 - Radio London Trophy Meeting at Brands Hatch attended by various bands. Small Faces, Episode Six, the McCoys, The Crawdaddies, David Bowie & the Buzz perform.
#6TYAT #OTD #smallfaces

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Just to remind these same folk:
You’ve not lifted 1/2m kids out of poverty. You’ve just moved them over a bureaucratic line on a Whitehall spreadsheet.
Your ‘workers rights’ are destroying entry-level jobs, hitting young people disproportionately, where unemployment is now over 16%.
You have not transformed the NHS. It’s still the same old wheezing leviathan, just with a lot more dosh and still dismal productivity.
And you’ve nationalised steel and rail before. It was not the prelude to an economic or industrial miracle. Plus you will now have to include their demands for capital/subsidies among all the other priorities already crowding in on the public purse.
Other than that your reminder was useful. Thank you.

[FootballRetroPlus @robertmdaws]

Grzegorz Lato 🇵🇱 Poland

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 PICTURED: The high-speed East Midlands Railway train that has collided with a commuter train near Bedford

[Winston Marshall @MrWinMarshall]

Only 100 years ago we ruled 1/4 of the world

[P of the G @roader71]

24 years ago today
Off to shepherds bush for a sonic assault by the Mani and Shields powered Primals.

[Nick Matthews @_NickMatthews_]

@Steven_Swinford