16 months later, I believe that the article is even more relevant, now that Coronavirus/Covid-19 has concentrated minds (and leaving aside the fact that the Chinese virus is overblown and also being used by the System to bluff people into becoming members of police states across Europe and beyond).
I was just reading again about “Doggerland”, which is not a gonzo-literature novel about some of the leisure activities of a sub-set of the English pleb-dom, but a large territory that once existed between the area now designated as “UK”, and those of present-day “Denmark”, “Germany”, “Netherlands” etc.
[By Francis Lima – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49850020] It can be seen that, at its greatest extent, what is now called “Doggerland” (a term invented only in the 1990s), together with similar areas in the Atlantic off (mainly) the present-day coasts of the UK and Ireland (the ancient land of Lyonesse, of Arthurian legend), was larger in extent than the present-day UK.
Consideration of these matters gives perspective.
Videos about the above matters:
and while looking at those Doggerland videos, I also saw this one (below)
Fascinating, though possibly not a good idea even if do-able.. How about starting with something smaller, such as the Irish Sea? (only, sort-of, joking…).
In fact, large-scale projects are not always a poor idea. One which has interested many is that of creating a canal from the Mediterranean to the Qattara Depression in the Western Desert of Egypt, then using gravity to move seawater the 40 miles to the Depression.
The Qattara Depression is on average 200 ft (60m) below sea level, though the lowest part is 440 ft (134m) below sea level. No-one lives there, though the very isolated oasis of Qara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qara_Oasis lies near the Western edge of the Depression, some 47 miles (75km) North-East of the nearest larger oasis, Siwa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siwa_Oasis
I myself stayed in Siwa for a month, in early 1998, out of three months spent in Egypt (on that trip).
Siwa is 189 miles (305km) from the Mediterranean Sea coast. British or American people tend to think of an oasis as being a small lake with a fringe of palm trees, but Siwa is, at greatest extent, 50 miles long and 12 miles wide, and has a total population of some 30,000 (though when you are there —admittedly I was there over 20 years ago— the place does not seem in any way heavily populated, rather the reverse). It has about 350 freshwater springs (the water of which is exported to Alexandria and Cairo in plastic bottles), 300,000 date palms, 70,000 olive trees (and some fruit trees, too).
Reverting to Qattara, the Depression is 190 miles (300km) long by 84 miles (135km) wide. Area: 7,570 square miles, about the same as mainland Wales.
A project to flood the Depression would be hugely beneficial. Fish would flood in with the water, it would change the regional climate for the better, and it would enable hydropower as well.
It may be that, by using hydropower and solar power, new eco-cities or towns, even horticultural areas, could be created and maintained, supplied with fresh water via desalination.
In Iran, not long before the Islamic Revolution unseated the Shah , there was a government programme to replace sand dunes and semi-desert with forest. Of course, the backward mullahs did not continue with it. I read about the project in the National Geographic. Brilliant.
First, the sand dunes were coated with a very thin layer of crude oil, sprayed from tanked vehicles. Secondly, seeds of the tamarisk tree (salt-resistant and heat-resistant) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarix were spread over the oil layer.
The thin oil layer prevented the seeds from being blown away by wind, and anchored the tiny shoots when germinated. The climate had enough moisture for their survival. The tiny growing shoots and trees (within a few years about 4 feet high) were protected from goats and their owners, if any, by fences and a ranger force.
Once the trees were mature (some of the 60 types of tamarisk grow as high as 60ft/18m), the idea was that the climate and ecology would be markedly improved.
Under the Shah, there was to have been a roll-out across Iran. It never happened. Sad.
There have been and still are many large-scale projects of great value, both engineering projects and more obviously “environmental” ones. Most founder on the rocks of politics and/or finance.
Israel is a country with many interesting aspects in terms of water supply, agriculture and horticulture, urban planning, afforestation etc.
I should certainly find it interesting to visit Israel, because I find artificially-contrived societies interesting in general (Singapore and North Korea being two others which do not seem natural), but I doubt that it would be long before I became the victim of a traffic accident, a scuba accident, or whatever. You get the idea…
16 months later, I believe that the article is even more relevant, now that Coronavirus/Covid-19 has concentrated minds (and leaving aside the fact that the Chinese virus is overblown and also being used by the System to bluff people into becoming members of police states across Europe and beyond).
I was just reading again about “Doggerland”, which is not a gonzo-literature novel about some of the leisure activities of a sub-set of the English pleb-dom, but a large territory that once existed between the area now designated as “UK”, and those of present-day “Denmark”, “Germany”, “Netherlands” etc.
[By Francis Lima – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49850020] It can be seen that, at its greatest extent, what is now called “Doggerland” (a term invented only in the 1990s), together with similar areas in the Atlantic off (mainly) the present-day coasts of the UK and Ireland (the ancient land of Lyonesse, of Arthurian legend), was larger in extent than the present-day UK.
Consideration of these matters gives perspective.
Videos about the above matters:
and while looking at those Doggerland videos, I also saw this one (below)
Fascinating, though possibly not a good idea even if do-able.. How about starting with something smaller, such as the Irish Sea? (only, sort-of, joking…).
In fact, large-scale projects are not always a poor idea. One which has interested many is that of creating a canal from the Mediterranean to the Qattara Depression in the Western Desert of Egypt, then using gravity to move seawater the 40 miles to the Depression.
The Qattara Depression is on average 200 ft (60m) below sea level, though the lowest part is 440 ft (134m) below sea level. No-one lives there, though the very isolated oasis of Qara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qara_Oasis lies near the Western edge of the Depression, some 47 miles (75km) North-East of the nearest larger oasis, Siwa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siwa_Oasis
I myself stayed in Siwa for a month, in early 1998, out of three months spent in Egypt (on that trip).
Siwa is 189 miles (305km) from the Mediterranean Sea coast. British or American people tend to think of an oasis as being a small lake with a fringe of palm trees, but Siwa is, at greatest extent, 50 miles long and 12 miles wide, and has a total population of some 30,000 (though when you are there —admittedly I was there over 20 years ago— the place does not seem in any way heavily populated, rather the reverse). It has about 350 freshwater springs (the water of which is exported to Alexandria and Cairo in plastic bottles), 300,000 date palms, 70,000 olive trees (and some fruit trees, too).
Reverting to Qattara, the Depression is 190 miles (300km) long by 84 miles (135km) wide. Area: 7,570 square miles, about the same as mainland Wales.
A project to flood the Depression would be hugely beneficial. Fish would flood in with the water, it would change the regional climate for the better, and it would enable hydropower as well.
It may be that, by using hydropower and solar power, new eco-cities or towns, even horticultural areas, could be created and maintained, supplied with fresh water via desalination.
In Iran, not long before the Islamic Revolution unseated the Shah , there was a government programme to replace sand dunes and semi-desert with forest. Of course, the backward mullahs did not continue with it. I read about the project in the National Geographic. Brilliant.
First, the sand dunes were coated with a very thin layer of crude oil, sprayed from tanked vehicles. Secondly, seeds of the tamarisk tree (salt-resistant and heat-resistant) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarix were spread over the oil layer.
The thin oil layer prevented the seeds from being blown away by wind, and anchored the tiny shoots when germinated. The climate had enough moisture for their survival. The tiny growing shoots and trees (within a few years about 4 feet high) were protected from goats and their owners, if any, by fences and a ranger force.
Once the trees were mature (some of the 60 types of tamarisk grow as high as 60ft/18m), the idea was that the climate and ecology would be markedly improved.
Under the Shah, there was to have been a roll-out across Iran. It never happened. Sad.
There have been and still are many large-scale projects of great value, both engineering projects and more obviously “environmental” ones. Most founder on the rocks of politics and/or finance.
I suppose that what passes for a strategy in Labour is to wait until Boris-idiot messes things up even more than he has already done, then hope that, in Britain’s absurd and unfair (and basically binary) First Past The Post political-electoral system, the voters will simply cool towards the Conservative Party and thus elect Labour by default. Not much of a strategy, really…
Tweets seen
Well, alas, Mr Madman, this is rather what the govt did with care homes, incompetently failing to protect the most vulnerable in the country, while pretending that everyone was in equal danger and engaging in a wild, flailing policy of house arrest and economic strangulation. https://t.co/LxeNbkqzut
I don't doubt that it *can* regulate everything @craigglasgow2. I have visited the PRC, the GDR and the DPRK and lived in the USSR . The question is whether it *should* do so. https://t.co/nY7E61PqQL
Not myself a ‘libertarian’ but I am aware of the great range of responses and can find no congruence between any policy and any outcome. The virus arrives, follows its bell-curve and tails off. Errors such as failure to isolate care homes are significant. But shutdowns etc? Nope https://t.co/utpSkX1q87
Little children forced to go without ANY human contact even if in distress. Is this callous idiocy: cruel incompetence, or deliberate psyops intended to make people surrender to ID vaccination & #Covid1984 tyranny? Either way these bastards should be ….https://t.co/8yyAO3wwJE
Guardian turns blind eye to inconvenient truth: 20% of hospital (and carehome) patients have Covid_19. Normal deaths 12,000/week = 1,700/day. 20% = 340 deaths/day WITH coronavirus = not one extra death = #COVID1984 power grab hoax.#lockdownrebellionhttps://t.co/oEoJhBQtJN
It's all starting to unravel now. Sunday Telegraph today has 2 stunning articles exposing the #ICL programme that led to #lockdown as total junk.
Every academic, politician & journalist involved in this worst policy 'error' in history should be sacked and jailed. #COVIDIOTSpic.twitter.com/uJ53EKIHvT
Exactly. I suppose that a tiny minority (including me) are already in the frame as dangerously independent thinkers, dissidents, “extremists” (in the view of the NWO, ZOG, “Zionists”, the UK/EU System etc). Others are as yet unidentified by the powers of Evil. The Coronavirus, and the staged panic, and instant laws instituting a toytown police state, are just the beginning.
The System can now use filters such as “who is tweeting or writing against facemasks/”social distancing”/”lockdown” (etc)?” to identify who belongs to the group that is less compliant, less brainwashed. The others, the multikulti “sheep”, “rabbits” etc are malleable and/or unthinking.
The most brainwashed, compliant, easy to order are, of course, those who obediently troop outside their houses once per week to clap or make other noise (at first it was “for the NHS”, now “for our carers”). Social conditioning, as seen also in hospitals, supermarkets etc, where the managements “facilitate” (or should that read “mandate”?) the, in effect, enforced (by social pressure) “clapathon”.
In fact, many do not want to think. Thinking is harder than not thinking, at least at first. You see tweets (often from those presenting themselves as intelligent and/or “caring” and/or “socialist”) actually demanding that “lockdown” be made stricter, that the Government go further, that heavy fines or prison be introduced for “breaches” of “the rules” (regardless of whether the so-called “rules” are law or indeed even lawful). Most of these people are those who believe that they favour “human rights”. They fall at the first fence, unaware of the irony, unable to see it.
A few more tweets seen from Nick Griffin
Seriously though, homeschool. Protect your family from the mental paedophilia of 21st century liberalism. pic.twitter.com/6UbNj4JvOb
Fine piece of Industrial Revolution architecture on Thomas Telford's Llangollen canal. Great habitat restoration project on neighbouring Whixhall Moss nature reserve. pic.twitter.com/5Fr23BuEb7
Remember how lockdown was to flatten the curve & stop #NHS being overwhelmed until #Immunity spread. Hospitals are now underwhelmed, so healthy people should be encouraged out to help build Immunity. Unexplained goalpost moves. Incompetent or sinister?https://t.co/v2Y2VRb7pV
As I predicted years ago, in 2015 and later, the EU, as part of the NWO consensus/conspiracy, would try to secure (if a Brexit referendum became inevitable in the UK) a Remain victory. Failing that, the first fallback would either be a second “confirmatory” referendum (a re-run, to get the “right” result) or a “deal” on everything, which would really be a “BRINO” (Brexit In Name Only).
Some people are still foolish enough to think that “Europe” (by which they mean the EU) stands in opposition to the USA. That may be true in the —relatively— small things such as agricultural standards and so on, if you like, the “tactical” things; but on the strategic plane, the EU and the USA are really working together as part of the “Western” NWO plan:
The only niggle I would have with the cartoon above is that Zionism, in the usual sense, is only one part of the conspiracy, the other being a kind of uber-freemasonry. In fact, if you look at those playing important public roles (albeit as puppets) in the UK area of the international conspiracy, they are usually part Jew and part connected by present family or by heredity with the sometimes non-Jew but highly Masonic-linked power structures of the West: David Cameron-Levita, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, to name a few.
The migration-invasion continues
What was once dystopian fiction has become everyday fact: when Jean Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints, it was regarded as implausible fiction, yet now we see enormous numbers of blacks and browns invading Europe by sea, more or less as per the book mentioned.
As far as the UK is concerned, joke Home Secretary Priti Patel (thick as two short planks, an Israeli tool, and in effect an invader herself) talks about stopping at least illegal immigration, but hundreds, every day, are landing on the beaches of Southern England, or are “intercepted” at sea and then brought here for free shelter, food and cash! Several hundred a day.
By the way, the book used to be available secondhand for little money, but has now soared in cost. £100+. Fortunately, a pdf version is available for free:
Once here, the invaders are encouraged to breed with European (i.e. white) women, to create the mixed-race population of the future as envisaged a century ago by the evil “genius” of the System, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi
In the UK (and elsewhere), the propaganda for a mixed-race population, to be achieved mainly by the impregnation of white women by blacks and browns, has become truly relentless; in TV ads, TV “soaps” and other dramas or melodramas and in every other way:
I have never met Nick Griffin. Before a pack of Jews procured my expulsion from Twitter, I retweeted a few of his tweets; he retweeted one or two of mine. Perhaps, having reposted a number of tweets from Griffin, I should briefly explain my view of him. It is, firstly, that he did very well to get the BNP to the point where two MEPs were elected (Griffin himself and Andrew Brons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Brons).
I disagreed with some aspects of BNP policy and presentation, but also agreed with much. The same with Griffin’s views as seen now on, eg, Twitter. I agree more than I disagree.
Griffin’s Question Time debacle in 2009 was a bad mistake on his part. I think that he and his colleagues may have considered that the BNP had finally made it into the “mainstream”. He was ambushed. System mouthpieces like American black woman Bonnie Greer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_Greer] relentlessly interrogated Griffin about the “holocaust” and Third Reich etc. Greer was seated on the panel next to Griffin, inches away.
The whole programme was akin to a Chinese Cultural Revolution denunciation-fest organized by Red Guards. Griffin himself called it a “lynch mob”. The normal format of the show was put aside so that Griffin and the BNP could be seen to be (seen by over 8 million viewers) humiliated.
I suppose that one could call Griffin’s decision to attend, “brave but stupid”; more charitably, a gamble that did not come off (because the race was fixed).
“The programme was watched by an estimated 8.2 million viewers, more than three times the average figure for Question Time, and on a comparable level with prime time entertainment shows. Griffin’s appearance dominated the following day’s media; a follow-up report in the New York Times said that “the early reading by many of Britain’s major newspapers was that Mr. Griffin lost heavily on points.
In a press conference held on 23 October, Griffin stated that he would make a formal complaint about the format of the programme, which he said was “… not a genuine Question Time; that was a lynch mob“.[93] He suggested that he should appear again, but that “… [we] should do it properly, and talk about the issues of the day”,[94] and added: “That audience was taken from a city that is no longer British … That was not my country any more. Why not come down and do it in Thurrock, do it in Stoke, do it in Burnley? Do it somewhere where there are still significant numbers of English and British people, and they haven’t been ethnically cleansed from their own country.” [Wikipedia]
I also feel that Griffin has had to fight the System, and has been arrested, charged, prosecuted by it, though acquitted in the end, thanks to British juries (those results would be less likely today, because there would be more blacks and browns on the juries). Having been myself questioned (though never prosecuted, charged or even arrested), I feel for him!
In fact, I recall that, after the final 2006 acquittal of Griffin and Mark Collett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Collett , Counsel magazine (sent free to all practising barristers) carried an ad for Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] recruitment, which ad had obviously been drafted (and artwork done) in the expectation of Griffin and Collett being convicted. System stitch-up, but it went wrong for (((them))) that time.
Homeschool. Turn off the TV. Get a trade and family, not a lifetime millstone of student loan debt.
Having children, rearing them right, & arranging one's life to avoid paying tax tribute to a System that hates you. These are the highest virtues in the last years of liberalism. pic.twitter.com/7xZJhM3fvw
Good points. The “push button for degree” and “push second button for ‘master’s degree’ and ‘doctorate’” “university” “degree” system now in place is anachronistic, pointless and, from the purely “career” point of view” of the students, becoming almost worthless for the majority of graduates.
As to the idea of “learning to think”…
The point is made.
It is interesting to note that some of the most financially successful people in the UK never attended university:
Not that I am commending any of them them as people, but they have certainly managed to create things by thinking outside the box and the usual confines of the educational system.
It is, also, noteworthy how many of those who favour multikulti Britain, mass immigration, Remain(ing) in the EU, a strict Coronavirus “lockdown” etc are those who went straight from school to “university” (of some sort), maybe (for those whose families are more affluent) after a “gap year” (ie an extended holiday in places like Thailand, Goa or wherever). The sort of people who, though often thinking themselves both educated and intelligent, are unused to truly thinking “out of the box”, in other words.
Some more Nick Griffin tweets
Sun & air kill corona. So it's confirmed that putting us all under house arrest for 6 weeks was the worst thing this lying, criminal scum regime & their cowardly, #covidbully police farce could have done.
Why do I call him Dear Leader Kim Jong Son? It could be because he finds the shutdown of liberty amusing : ' "I've learnt that it's much easier to take people's freedoms away than give them back," the prime minister joked, to laughter from his team.'Ha.Ha. https://t.co/e9YpcUh2rfpic.twitter.com/7S2Ilo0Bs6
Hail to our Glorious Dear Leader Kim Jong Son, and his dreaded Health Commissar Mat Hang Kok, who have managed to snuff out centuries of liberty, and replace Parliament with a plastic dummy, with barely a peep of protest. pic.twitter.com/StJEi5NtsZ
‘“I’ve learned that it’s much easier to take people’s freedoms away than give them back,” the Prime Minister joked to laughter from his team.’ And there, in one truly awful sentence in today’s Sunday Times, we have it @ClarkeMicah
Do we, @notacunningplan? I disagree with much of what Piers Corbyn says, as it happens. Even so I am grieved to see a man arrested for exercising the former freedoms of speech and assembly, now abolished to the indifference of most. https://t.co/7qpJ4vapfI
Lord Sumption in the Sunday Times, deploys his customary logic and clarity: Set us free from lockdown, ministers, and stop covering your backshttps://t.co/vXGuKnYrRE
It is only 'required' @MJstrowbridge, because the government deliberately shut down the economy, as a result of wild panic. In other words, it is not 'required' but is an avoidable consequence of a stupid action, which should be reversed immediately. https://t.co/o6vrHkJ5t7
I am far from being fiscally conservative. I disparage penny-pinching and the “pennywise” Scrooge-ism of the Cameron/Osborne/Duncan Smith years (2010-2017, and the 2-3 similar years up to now). I favour Basic Income too, though it has to be basic, not too generous in its early phases. However, the Rishi Sunak measures seem to be driven not by social equity, not by Keynesian expansionism, but by a muddled public relations agenda.
It is quite pathetic how Rishi Sunak is now touted as a future Prime Minister. For one thing, he is Indian! The System wants a non-European to be PM, because it wants the population to become non-European, so naturally it wants a non-European as PM, in 10-20 years.
Apart from that, the giveaways from Rishi Sunak, which might have been justifiable for a few weeks, a month or so, are now set to continue, in full measure, until October! Now, as I said above, I favour Basic Income, but for the furloughed employees and now self-employed, to get up to £2,500 a month until October, while sitting at home, economically inactive, is absurd. There is little or no incentive for many to hurry back to (in many cases) boring work while most if not all of their needs are being met.
Yes, some were making far more than £2,500 a month, but many were not. When you add to the fact that the “furlough” payments will now continue through the Summer and into the Autumn the fear which still exists, created largely by the Government itself, it can be seen that, for many, the idea of having a kind of holiday, in many cases a family holiday is enticing.
The State schools would have broken up in July anyway (am I recalling aright when I “remember” that my old (non-State) school used to break up in mid-June and return only in mid-September? Long time ago now…early 1970s). Endless Summer…
So anyway, many furloughed employees are in no hurry to return to their commuting on crowded trains, or Underground, or buses, or congested roads, and to their jobs, when they can have an extended holiday until October, especially now that the shops, maybe soon even cafes and hotels, will be open for business. People can drive out to national parks, beaches, woods, while knowing that they are being paid by the State until the Autumn.
I wonder a little whether, somewhere in their hearts, those employees and others actually intuit that they might not have jobs or work for long, or are unsure, so are determined to have one last elegiac summer with their families. Just a thought.
Already we see large companies cutting or preparing to cut jobs by the hundreds, by the thousands, once the furlough payments stop. Already companies, large companies, are planning job cuts on a vast scale. As for small companies, many have no real chance of survival.
More tweets
M.Gove on Marr: 'We cannot have a situation where we keep our economy and our schools and our public services continually closed down, because the health consequences of doing so would be malign as well'. Why didn't you say so before? https://t.co/b1bihyxh2L
I don't think you've watched https://t.co/P5OalsV9H6@JeremyWarnerUK. What you disgustingly call a 'lockdown' *compels*. Sumption says *we* can decide whether to take the risk or not. 'People who feel vulnerable can self-isolate and the rest of us can get on with our lives' https://t.co/dYo8trEVXE
1/2 If by positive you mean 'government toady', I hope not @richardhrbenyon. I have a low opinion of governments after covering their actions at home and abroad for more than 40 years, and meeting politicians at close quarters. https://t.co/FVdHvCImEi
2/2 @richardhrbenyon If this government had not taken a lump hammer to the economy for no good reason, it would never have needed to institute its wildly extravagant payday loan scheme at all. People would have carried on working, and been paid for it. https://t.co/FVdHvCImEi
Lord Sumption speaks for Britain: Govt has 'frightened the daylights' out of the people by greatly overstating the danger of the virus. We are grown-ups. You cannot imprison everybody in case a few people behave badly. Shouldn't need saying. https://t.co/P5OalsV9H6
I’m just gonna leave this here, as we watch people being assaulted, shamed, and called murderers for not wearing a face mask. pic.twitter.com/WbDFrEYS1V
The Chief Medical Officer has publicly stated that the R figure is low enough to justify relaxations in the restrictions. The NHS has not been overwhelmed. The surge did not happen. The Nightingale has been stood down. Our economy is on free-fall. What are we waiting on? pic.twitter.com/GDSfunIkjG
Sorry I will not wear a mask. You can give me dirty looks. You can tell me I cannot come into your stores or use your transportation. But I won’t be wearing one
This is mass hysteria and I will not participate in it
I’m clearly missing something. I’m sure I’ve watched numerous ministers, including Boris, calling for people to avoid public transport and to take the car if they have access to one. Now they’ve slapped a huge increase on the London car charge. What is the logic? https://t.co/F52mXdbDlO
What she is “missing” is that it is the Mayor of London, via Transport for London [TfL] who decides about the London Congestion Charge…but when did lack of basic knowledge ever stop any (well-known or obscure) person from tweeting?
The “Lubaba” one apparently lives in Croydon, and is a Student Union officer, so was probably brought up (and born) in the UK, but hates us –meaning hates British, meaning “white”, people– (under cover of hating the British Empire).
She thinks that she and her family would be much better off had her ancestors been left in the primaeval squalor of Central or West Africa…
“Against stupidity, the Gods themselves struggle in vain” [Schiller].
I notice that “Lubaba” has flags from Barbados, Trinidad and Palestine on her Twitter masthead, as well as what is presumably the Labour Party rose. No Union Jack. No St. George’s flag. Many of the blacks and browns often seem to just hate us. They really should not be in Europe at all. And they are steadily outbreeding us…
Here are some more untermenschen supposedly “equal” to us…
Perhaps the most emotive [accusation] concerns slavery. During the 18th century, the peak of the huge and lucrative Atlantic slave trade, British merchants bought slaves from African rulers — on average, 120 people every day by the 1780s — and sold them primarily to French, Portuguese-Brazilian and British planters. Was this the source of Britain’s wealth, and the fuel of the Industrial Revolution? Profit from the slave trade made individuals rich, but accounted for about one per cent of national income. The Industrial Revolution’s key element was coal, of which Britain had a lot.
Where the British Empire’s relationship with slavery was unique was in combatting it. Britain abolished its own slave trade in 1807. In 1834 it abolished slavery throughout the Empire. British subjects were forbidden to own slaves anywhere in the world.”
I have to admit that I was unaware that the slave trade accounted for only 1% of national income (unclear as to whether that 1% was only the actual trade, or including profits made using slaves, eg West Indies cotton and sugar).
Yes @MarkyV18, of course governments claim that their mad destructive actions saved lives. They would, wouldn't they? (as Mandy Rice Davies would have said). Their futures depend on it. The amazing thing is that a credulous public *believes* it without question. https://t.co/4bvKLesCB1
Here (above) is a link to that article. It is very true about Wikipedia. I like and use Wikipedia a great deal, but it is very blinkered on certain topics, among which is the so-called “holocaust” fable. Many of Wikipedia’s editors (mostly unpaid volunteers) are Jews (especially American Jews).
Another topic upon which Wikipedia is very biased is anything to do with what the Jews, “antifa” idiots and msm usually term “far Right” politics. You will be misinformed if you rely on Wikipedia for information about that.
Finally, Wikipedia will allow newspaper articles to be cited, but not if the newspaper is the Daily Mail! The Sun? OK. The Daily Mirror? OK. Morning Star? OK. In fact, as far as I know, any newspaper, and certainly any mainstream newspaper, is OK, but never the Daily Mail. On any topic. I am hardly likely to be pro-Daily Mail, as such, having been featured generally unfavourably by that newspaper in the past (2016) but it is no worse than the rest of the msm; and often more informative.
An old Palestinian couple in front of their stolen house now inhabited by jewish settlers from Brooklyn, NY, USA. Most of Palestine is stolen. pic.twitter.com/4uXKeuxkxq
— Fares Shehabi فارس الشهابي (@ShehabiFares) May 15, 2020
Look at the sheer number of Police Officers present to arrest Jeremy Corbyn's brother Piers at Hyde Park corner for taking part in the Lockdown protest.
No masks to protect themselves or the public & the officer handling the loudspeaker Piers Corbyn had isn't wearing gloves. 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/9KKe5iw5YN
This is what happens now when we try and excercise the right to free speech and protest. Piers Corbyn is a brave man and should not have been arrested. Shameful https://t.co/HzypAfj0s4
Time was when you could speak freely at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park. In fact I myself spoke there to fickle crowds a few times (in 1978, if memory serves). Not now. (((They))) have killed free speech. At Speakers’ Corner. In print. Online. Toytown police state.
Coronavirus, “lockdown”, and the toytown police state (that might become a real police state)
I have so far only skim-read this https://t.co/WYQ0aQMuM1 and so cannot possibly endorse it, and do not do so.. But it does contain a very disturbing summary of events.
It is alarming. For example, Devon and Cornwall Police: “On 1 April, Devon and Cornwall Police released a statement saying that, regardless of the guidance from both the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing, it would not be changing its position on people travelling by car to a place for exercise. ‘Our interpretation is that it is not reasonable, for the majority, to drive miles to a specific place such as a beauty spot. It is also not within the spirit of what we are trying to achieve if you drive from Devon to the coast of Cornwall for surfing, regardless of whether that is “lawful” or not.’”
In other words, the Devon and Cornwall Police, among others, are going to try to “interpret” the will of the Government, and apply that, regardless of whether that has the force of law or not…
The above is a good example of the Common Purpose attitude (“Leading beyond authority“) which has infected the police and public services generally over the past 30 years: the police actually purporting to decide what is the law, and even saying, straight out and brazenly, that they are going to allow or disallow X, Y, or Z whether X, Y or Z are lawful or not!
Then there is the police “nark on a neighbour” idea, which at one time was attracting nearly 6,000 quasi-Stalinist denunciations daily!
Other tweets
I'm starting to feel sorry for Prof Neil Ferguson, now apparently being measured for his costume as the national scapegoat for the biggest mistake in 60 years. https://t.co/Shx1abGtKL. He was just one expert of many. They didn't *have* to choose his advice. The govt's fault.
Yes, this map could have *something* to do with NZ's ( and St Helena's, and Antarctica's and Pitcairn's amazing 'success' in not having many Covid cases. https://t.co/FxT2SS5ypk
John Buchan once wrote a book, one of his least famous, called The Island of Sheep. It was an adventure thriller set on an island full of (real) sheep. The sheep I am talking about here, though, are metaphorical sheep (aka some British people) and “the island of sheep” is Britain.
Look at the tweets below, from a woman who thinks of herself, looking at her Twitter profile and “pinned tweet”, as an independent thinker…
I'm enjoying being politically independent. My views and opinions haven't really changed much, they just don't seem to have a natural home anymore. So I will keep speaking out, protesting and debating. And I'll lend my vote to whoever makes sense at the time.
Dismayed by events at #HydePark, those people should now be quarantined for 14 days, but of course they won't. Police should seal the Park, not let them out, they have deliberately given themselves a high chance of infection. They're walking biological hazards.
— Louise Ellis Davies ☮💕 (@louanndavies) May 16, 2020
She displays no real thought at all. The latest estimate was that 24 people a day in London, a city of about 9 million inhabitants, are being infected with the Chinese virus. That is 3 people out of every millionliving in London.
Another example?
What we need is government to give clear instructions, and journalists to inform us about it. What we've got is so vague, journos are making suggestions. Chaos. https://t.co/687DvuCPQM
— Louise Ellis Davies ☮💕 (@louanndavies) May 10, 2020
Very “Soviet”. Government decides, journalists then obediently transmit and explain the decision to the broad masses…
In fact, that is more or less what has happened up to now, but this shambolic government of fools, led by a part-Jew public entertainer who seems to live an unmeritedly charmed life (so far), is floundering, driven more by public relations than by “the science”, let alone common sense.
She shows herself, like so many on Twitter, and particularly the pseudo-socialist ones (this lady herself is in fact a supporter of Corbyn-style Labour), as almost begging to be told where to go and not go, what to do and not do. She is brainwashed by the “virus” scare to the nth degree. “Independent”? About as much as any marionette or automaton…
Actually, I should not spend too much time on this lady, though she is typical of so many on Twitter, but she is rather “the gift that keeps on giving”:
Finding the tweets on Lucozade really interesting. I remember it as a sports drink, but it seems older people remember it only when they were ill. It seems to be just another soft drink now. It was deliberately high in sugar, maybe that's why we have an obesity crisis.
— Louise Ellis Davies ☮💕 (@louanndavies) May 15, 2020
As a child in the early to mid-1960s, I was only ever given Lucozade (the original one, in a large glass bottle with yellow cellophane wrapping) when unwell. It was thought to aid recovery and maybe it did, because it was indeed high in glucose. Where the tweeter above goes wrong is in saying that Lucozade caused obesity. Hardly. Most children only had about 2 bottles a year, if that!
I see people like that on Twitter daily, the ones who think of themselves as thinking people, often (as in her case) socialist or rather pseudo-socialist (well-meaning perhaps, so be it…). They make about 9 silly points for every 1 good point.
“Fewer than 24 people are catching coronavirus each day in London, new modelling suggests, with forecasts predicting the virus could be wiped out in the capital within a fortnight.
If cases continue to decrease at the current rate, the virus will be virtually eliminated in the capital by the end of the month, raising questions about whether the strict lockdown measures would need to continue.” [Daily Telegraph]
After leaving their traps, they no doubt go home to stand outside their homes, virtue-signalling by clapping like drunken seals “for the NHS”.
Government subsidy for the self-employed
“A government scheme to support self-employed workers signed up 440,000 people on its first day at a cost of £1.3bn, according to the Treasury.
The self-employment income support scheme (SEISS) provides workers whose finances have been hit by the coronavirus pandemic with a cash grant of 80% of their average monthly trading profits up to a cap of £2,500, backdated to cover the last three months.
Launched this week, more than two weeks ahead of schedule, the scheme is expected to support up to 3.5 million of the UK’s 5.2 million self-employed people.” [Guardian]
What strikes me first is how “autres temps autres mœurs“…
In the past decade particularly, we have seen the way in which the Conservative Party governments (aided in 2010-2015 by their LibDem enablers) stigmatized the poor, and particularly the poor who are also unemployed and/or disabled, and living on mostly very modest State benefit monies.
Many people who are now gratefully in receipt of the “furlough” payments for furloughed employees, and those who are applying for what amounts to the new State benefit for the (supposedly) “self-employed”, will have voted “Conservative” in the past 10 years. Amazing how attitudes change with circumstances…
While the new “benefits” are modest (the maximum claimable is £2,500 per month), they are still more than almost all unemployed and disabled can claim (even if Housing Benefit etc is included in the latter categories’ monies).
It reminds me of the attitudes of the farmers, who like to pretend that they are self-standing independent people running agricultural businesses, yet who “accept” farm subsidies and grants at (under the system as it now is, which may change) around £150 an acre merely for owning or renting land, fundamentally. A farmer with 200 acres (the overall average), will get 200 x £150, so about £30,000 a year. Not huge, but still pretty good for doing effectively nothing (a simplification, but one cannot get into more here)! That sum will be payable whether the farm makes £100,000 profit, £10,000 profit, nothing, or a loss.
The farmers do not see themselves as being “on benefits”, of course! You only have to listen to BBC Radio 4 Farming Today to hear the convoluted arguments and language they and the NFU farmers’ lobby employ to justify their subsidies (“providing a service“, “doing environmental work“, “growing the food the nation/world needs“, “ensuring Britain’s food security” etc…). Anything but “we want the State to pay us for owning land“, though occasionally you do hear “without the farm payments, half the farmers in England will go out of business“. And your point is?… The coal mines, steel works etc used to say the same.
Is it April the First?
There are now so many red flag warnings that Western society has gone mad that it is hard to select from the hundreds, thousands, of examples. What about this?!
One of the few good things about the Coronavirus situation is that, up until now, it has pushed Greta Nut off the news agenda. Now, those behind her have managed to inveigle her back on, despite her lack of any knowledge or qualification.
Economic ruination?
“Almost half of UK businesses are within six months of running out of cash, despite the lifeline provided by the government’s furlough scheme, according to the latest official snapshot of how firms are faring.
In its fortnightly survey on the economic impact of Covid-19, the Office for National Statistics found 44% of firms that responded said their reserves would last for less than six months.”
“About 27% said they had cash that would last beyond six months.” [The Guardian]
So only a quarter of UK enterprises have cash reserves sufficient to last them beyond November of this year? Sobering.
“When the government put the economy into lockdown in March a third (33%) of those surveyed said they thought it would take six months or more for the country to bounce back to its pre-crisis state, but that figure has risen to 46%.” [The Guardian]
The “furlough” and other recent Government schemes are expensive in themselves (at least £8 billion per month, and now more, with the “self-employed” subsidy), but a debt of that sort (meaning eventually perhaps £100 billion) is at a level that can be handled, given that the UK can at present borrow at long-term rock-bottom interest rates
The economist Jonathan Portes was making that point only this morning on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. If I heard correctly, he thought that it worked out at £30 per person per year (interest or interest + capital repayment? I have seen £100 per year as a combined figure). In any event, not catastrophic. A long-term national debt burden.
What would be catastrophic would be a general economic collapse. Were that to happen, the pound sterling would fall like a stone (despite the similar problems in other countries, particularly EU countries). That in turn would make imports prohibitively expensive. Britain imports (including raw materials) about 80% of its food.
In addition, a general economic collapse would cause enormous unemployment, in that genuine employment would be hit, and so would the basically fake (short-term, “gig economy”, part-time, zero-hours) employment and (equally fake, really) “self-employment” of millions.
Still, as Lenin put it, “worse will mean better…” meaning that, for us now, and in 2021-22, there might be, for the first time in my present lifetime, a realistic chance for social nationalism in the UK.
White genocide
The tweeter below sees, in the Daily Mail‘s cropping of a photo, “white racism” but I see something else— the cover-up around “the Great Replacement” of whites by non-whites in Europe.
Compare the #DailyMail front cover photo and the stock photo they used – and notice anything about the people they cropped out? pic.twitter.com/8dG38mU0vD
When I was a child, in the early and mid 1960s (I was in Australia 1967-69), Britain was an almost-entirely white country (despite the lies put out to the masses by shows such as Grantchester, Endeavour, various other popular TV shows). Certainly you never saw many, if any, blacks or browns etc in most of the country or even in Central London (there were enclaves in ports such as Liverpool and Cardiff). In fact, the only black person I believe I ever saw in England was the consultant (ear, nose, throat) from somewhere in the Caribbean, whom I saw when aged about 6, maybe 7, at the Royal Berkshire Hospital.
Now, the BBC and the msm generally have stolen British (and other European) history, right back to the Middle Ages, and even to Roman Britain and earlier!
The Conservatives have slipped back to 51% popularity. What, I wonder, would David Cameron-Levita or Theresa May not have given for such a level of support? However, it is merely popularity by default, given that Labour support continues to bump along the bottom, a function of irrelevance.
You wanted me to wear a face mask? Here it is, even though the WHO says 'If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.'https://t.co/xC6QBEr5Cmpic.twitter.com/tDaByf9Dh4
Indeed @mrpjdonovan. People who got married in the 1970s are so embarrassed by how they looked that they often do not display their wedding photos. Yet at the time they thought it all quite reasonable. https://t.co/Zx42iySX6d
Hard to argue against the above Hitchens comment, looking at the present government of fools.
“There is no correlation between fatalities and lockdown stringency. The most stringent lockdowns – as in China, Italy, Spain, New Zealand and Britain – have yielded both high and low deaths per million. Hi-tech has apparently “worked” in South Korea, but so has no-tech in Sweden. Sweden’s 319 deaths per million is far ahead of locked-down Norway’s 40 and Denmark’s 91, but it’s well behind locked-down UK’s 465 and Spain’s 569.” [The Guardian]
“Britain’s last experience of protracted national disruption, Jim Callaghan’s Labour government continued to lead the Conservatives in some polls. But as the crisis dragged on, and seemed increasingly beyond Callaghan’s control, the government’s ratings collapsed and never fully recovered.
If that happens to Johnson, the disconnect between his popularity and his political abilities will stop being a mystery that columns like this try to solve. His long hold over voters and the media, ever since he won the mayoralty in usually Labour-supporting London 12 years ago, will be seen as a bit of a con – like an enticing but dodgy company that eventually went bust.”
All well and good, but if the public get fed up (enough) with Boris-idiot and his government of fools, to where do they turn? Britain, or at least England, has a basically binary system. When the “other party” is flat on its back, defeated, irrelevant, as Labour now is, will the electorate turn to it? Doubtful, especially with someone like Keir Starmer as leader and MPs such as Rachel Reeves around him. You never know, and the System loves the pointless ping-pong on Con-Lab politics, but Labour has no real base any more, in any sense; unless you say that Labour’s base is now the affluent but virtue-signalling London multikulti types, and the Twitterati, together with the ethnic minorities (except Jews) and public service people. The old Labour of the steel mills, the coal mines, the transport unions, the (now near-irrelevant) TUC, has disappeared.
Again, this should be, in theory, the time when social nationalism rises up to destroy the evil ones, but there is no such party, no such movement. Yet.
astonished that the PM said there would be no checks and now it’s clear there will be checks https://t.co/XYQqvNfKv4
— Friend of Deep State 🐋 (@PickardJE) May 13, 2020
Why would you be surprised that a psychopathic liar and part-Jew public entertainer (merely posing as “Prime Minister”) would…lie? It’s what he does.
Well, who would have thought it, #BorisJohnson has #Lied about something else. Now border checks on goods moving over the Irish sea. Add that to a long, long list……. probably longer that can be comfortably fitted on the side of a bus. OR…… What is Dom trying to deflect?
Customs in the Irish Sea will lead rapidly to a united Ireland. Which might well lead to Scotland separating from the UK. Johnston’s lies might have significant historic impact. https://t.co/jeMRMgeVNj
— David Miller T.O. (@iamdavidmiller) May 14, 2020
…particularly when, only yesterday, the UK Supreme Court quashed the convictions of Gerry Adams. Do we see where this is going? I think that we do.
Indeed, it now seems that Boris-idiot secretly agreed to the “border in the Irish Sea” as long ago as October 2019!
The “Communist” campaign of subversion that started as an adjunct to Soviet Intelligence and was noted by such as Golitsyn (albeit over-valued by him, and to some extent distorted), became so-called “Cultural Marxism”, infecting society from the 1960s. It was particularly powerful in infecting students across Europe, North America, Australasia (and, to a lesser extent, South Africa).
Those students became prime ministers, Cabinet ministers, judges, heads of TV stations, radio current affairs programmes, as well as journalists and talking heads etc. A few names from the UK? Tony Blair, Cherie Blair, Alistair Darling, Jack Dromey, Jack Straw, and many many others. Few if any were “Soviet agents” (as far as I know, not even ghastly Jack Dromey, later a Blairite “Labour” MP, who attended the 1970s mercenaries’ “trial” in Angola as a kind of “socialist” vulture, sub nom “observer”).
Few of those then-young people were even pro-Soviet, not least because “Cultural Marxism” broke free from its conspiratorial Soviet origins as the Soviet Union started to slowly decay and eventually collapse.
It could be said that what is called, inter alia, “Cultural Marxism”, is now just another NWO cultural current. It has little or nothing to do with any form of “socialism”, that’s for sure.
Where Golitsyn went wrong was in assuming that the “headwaters” of “Cultural Marxism” lay in Sovietism, when in fact they lay on higher ground, in the groups that developed (and named) the “New World Order” or NWO. Those same groups were those who fostered the Soviet Union under Lenin in the first place.
In other words, the former secret operatives who helped to collapse Soviet and Eastern European socialism (in the Soviet Union, Romania, Poland etc) were not communists disguising themselves as something else, but a metamorphosis of communists or socialists turning into something else, while still coming under the overall and yet covert control of the NWO powers on the grand scale.
Russia is not in control of the play as it is acted out; neither is the USA, as such. The NWO is pulling the strings, often through “Zionist Occupation Governments” [“ZOG”].
The aim is to form a one-world regime, composed mainly of raceless, cultureless serfs, ruled over by ZOG and, beyond ZOG, the NWO powers. Below the ruling levels, a mass of untermenschen is promoted by the “governments” and the contaminated msm, drowning out the true voices of Europe’s future.
Tweets seen
Seems that some Americans have never heard of “tax” and, in particular, “income tax”. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet is very dry in its humour…
If only there were some public fund billionaires could pay into along with everyone else that helps fund our infrastructure, hospitals, and public systems all at once.
It could even be a modest % of what they earn every year. We could have an agency collect it and everything https://t.co/g0vI45xnYG
Unfortunately, while in principle it is far more efficient for tax monies to go into one fund, or what in the UK are usually termed “central funds”, in practice this has flaws and drawbacks. It tends to mean that governments decide to use some of the tax monies gathered for all sorts of misconceived projects and grandiose ideas, while the foundations of society are ill-funded. It also means that those who pay tax (one way or another, and to some extent, everyone) lose any feeling of connection between what they pay in tax and what they see being funded and/or underfunded.
It might well be worth the loss of a certain amount of notional fiscal efficiency to both tie and be seen to tie tax monies raised to specific expenditures. For example, “Road Tax”, or “Vehicle Tax” is raised from motorists and others on the misleading basis (apart from it being compulsory) that the monies raised will pay for roads. Well, some may go to that, but probably less than is raised. The rest? To “central funds”.
“National Insurance” is another and similar example.
I am sure that people would more readily accept taxation if they knew that X% was going to go to the NHS directly, perhaps by taking X% off income tax and having a new “NHS Tax” at X% (or whatever).
The above proposal would also make more rational the election-time arguments about money, taxes, and services.
There is a limit to how far funding of NHS, roads etc can or should be localized, however. There is always the danger that poorer areas will be hugely impoverished if dependent only on a local tax base. However, a degree of localism is, in my view, good. It enables people to relate easier to what needs funding and to the sources of funding.
Why get rid of the one channel that’s dedicated to culture, art, history etc? Quality educational programming is so important and should be funded just as much (if not more) then entertainment. What a shame..
…and to “balance” all the sensible opinions (with which I agree), let’s have the obligatory dim SNP tweet of the day:
I don’t watch BBC, ITV, SKY……..all foreign media to us in Scotland!
— KizzieWiz@KizzieWiz..ALBA Party (@KizzieWiz) May 14, 2020
Ah, yes, UK/English TV is “foreign” to a dim SNP partisan. Funny how these Scottish “nationalists” have (certainly Sturgeon’s SNP leadership have) no objection to the Jewish/Zionist lobby, no objection to mass immigration of non-Europeans into the UK (or even Scotland itself), no objection to Scotland being ruled or partly-ruled by the EU, NATO, the USA/NWO, “international” banks and financial institutions etc…Fake “nationalism”.
Lord Reith laid down his famous dictum for the BBC: “Inform, educate, and entertain“, presumably in that order. That dictum has been watered down to the extent that the BBC usually now fails to inform, or deliberately misinforms; it scarcely “educates” at all, even on BBC2, though it does —to some extent— on apparently-doomed BBC Four. As for “entertain”, it still tries to do that, mostly unsuccessfully, as far as I am concerned. Lowest common denominator.
The fact that opinionated football idiot Gary Lineker is (as I read) paid nearly £2 million a year makes the BBC worse than a mere absurdity.
The BBC pays millions to unpleasant “comedians” who trash everything worthwhile: Jo Brand, Jimmy Carr, David Baddiel; and many others.
The BBC is a negative force in national life now, in every respect. This latest insult to those of its viewers (and “licence”-payers) who have a mentality above gutter-level proves that it should now be shut down. It is not true “public service broadcasting” now, is an expensive anachronism and also a nest of anti-British propaganda.
Tweets by Peter Hitchens re. “the current situation”
Am I, @mwqa_limited? Have to read the Coronavirus Act? Did you note that it was passed without a vote? Do you not see that opposition to the government has been marginalised? How do you think freedom dies in a formerly free country? https://t.co/HV8DBOvURx
Excellent from @Sherelle_E_J Sherelle Jacobs @Telegraph: https://t.co/tMXOC7WcfT 'BBC has …pumped out No10's basic pro-lockdown propaganda message without question,genuinely convinced that they're holding the Government to account by spinning news items about a "No10 shambles".
I also very much doubt it it sweetie. That’s why I use my freedom to mock the powerful while I still can. @mwqa_limited I sense free speech hasn’t long to go. https://t.co/7god0jUEXu
Seems very likely that Covid-19 was present in Western Europe at least as early as December 2019 (one such case has been identified with certainty in France) and has since been quietly following the normal bell curve of such things, regardless of state panics. https://t.co/6RTupUvoCi
“A team of international researchers say mouthwash could destroy the outermost layer or ‘envelope’ of the virus, preventing its replication in the mouth and throat.” [Daily Mail]
“Spending time in the fresh air and sunshine can reduce someone’s risk of catching the coronavirus, a scientific adviser to the Government has said…Professor Alan Penn, a member of SAGE, the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, reassured that those who flock to the parks that the risk of catching the virus outside is lower…He said: ‘The science suggests that being outside in sunlight, with good ventilation, are both highly protective against transmission of the virus.’ Other scientists say they ‘totally agree’ with Professor Penn and advocate spending more time outdoors, where the virus is less likely to survive.”
So much for the “Stay at home, Protect the NHS, Save lives” nonsense-propaganda that has been pumped out by idiots to idiots for months now…
I wonder how many virtue-signalling serfs will be out “clapping for the NHS” this evening? Where I live, not many; I have only ever seen one or two clapping. We now know that in fact NHS staff face little if any more risk from Coronavirus than do the general population. The risky jobs seem to be those done by care staff, taxi drivers and, oddest of all, security guards.
Evening foray
Needed a few things from Waitrose. Far more traffic on the roads than seen for maybe 6-8 weeks. In Waitrose itself, still the ludicrous “social distancing”, which seems to have been ingrained in many; a couple of people jumped clear as I, carrier of the Plague (as it might be) approached. One vacant-looking woman was wearing a —clearly home-made– facemask.
In fact, there were few shoppers and no obvious shortage of any goods. One “interesting” event occurred. I was there just before closing, and got stuck behind a woman buying a mountain of shopping while also having an extended conversation about trivia with the cashier. While standing waiting for my turn to be dealt with, an announcement over the PA system: “Waitrose closes at 8 pm, at which time all staff will stop what they are doing and clap for our carers”! In other words, what started as a genuine and spontaneous gesture in a few places has become a socially-mandated, Government-promoted and corporately-enforced and compelled act.
As a matter of fact, I left the Waitrose building a minute before 2000 hrs, and was still in the car park when the designated clap-time arrived. I noticed that only the black-clad Waitrose marshals, two of them (I call them Handmaid’s Tale militia) actually stood outside the main doors and clapped for 10 seconds or so. I also heard a police or ambulance siren, which was probably not co-incidental.
En route back to Schloss Millard a minute or two later, I saw one family of 5 standing outside a house, having presumably clapped. I later heard that some idiot let off some fireworks somewhere in the area.
Das ist’s. Time to dispense with the “clapathon”, I think.
Any fatality from cancer, coronavirus or any illness is tragic, but we've become so obsessed with the fight against Coronavirus we've neglected these other patients.
This simply has to change or it will cost countless more lives.
— Professor Karol Sikora (@ProfKarolSikora) May 14, 2020
Lionel Shriver excellent here. Yet the Spectator still teeters on the edge of full-scale resistance. Where are you @douglaskmurray? If this isn't the madness of crowds, what is? . https://t.co/5CW12fxPU3 via @spectator
Something else worth noting is that below, about “social distancing” being “here to stay” (or so says thick Ugandan Asian Priti Patel, the inept would-be spy for Israel who is now, laughably, a Cabinet minister for the second time)…
Entirely believable, alas @sallycopper. As I have said, unless the government can be made to admit its policy was wrong, we are stuck with this forever. https://t.co/VXEUAOT0aD
But our teenage government are qualified to act? If you dismiss my qualification to comment, why do you accept this talentless, scared Cabinet’s qualifications to ruin the country? They are expert in nothing. https://t.co/nG1FvU1Tyg
Again, this by Hitchens hits the nail on the head. Why oh why do people simply accept without question what deadheads like Boris-idiot and little Matt Hancock say? I put it down to centuries-ingrained English or British deference, a class-based behaviour, though in fact “Boris” is a part-Jew, part-Turk, of very peculiar origins, and basically acting a part, the “upper-class” “Englishman”, neither of which he is. The training in privilege received at Eton, then at Oxford, helped. As for the rest of the present Cabinet, they are mostly Jews or part-Jews, Indians etc, and the few English ones of a “beggar on horseback” type, such as Hancock.
Sadly, a certain confident manner and a Standard English accent (perceived as “posh” by the plebs) gets many mediocre types rather far, not least many MPs. People really should look at the real levels of intelligence, education and other qualities of “our” MPs. Very poor, for the most part.
I am not ‘obsessed’ with it, the people who want to impose these futile muzzles on others are the obsessives. I simply point out that there is no good evidence for their use outside a few very narrow circs, and that the muzzles are a further humiliation of a cowed population. https://t.co/XIVzy5SMpU
I have to say that, though I am far from agreeing on everything with Peter Hitchens, he must have the patience of a saint, the endurance of a Trojan, and the hide of a rhinoceros to put up with the Twitter mob as he does. I admit that I myself would simply not have the patience. I can only assume that Hitchens perceives what he does on Twitter as a duty of some kind laid upon him.
Summed up in 60 seconds. We will not escape from these Maoist panic rules until the government (and much of the media) admit that throttling the economy and mass house arrest were a wild, disproportionate error. https://t.co/dNzjtt9lkS
And these muzzles are also no use . The WHO itself says https://t.co/xC6QBEr5Cm 'If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.' https://t.co/B2eMJGi5ss
ONS figures, up to 1st May 2020 = 3911 deaths for people up to age 64. Approximately 57 deaths per million for working-age people. Are we really locking down a country with those statistics? The elderly and vulnerable can choose to isolate themselves. https://t.co/Ey6102epggpic.twitter.com/7uDnW6SPU8
One aspect that made me laugh from the start of the Coronavirus “pandemic” (which is now, in the UK, not even an epidemic) is that all or almost all the pseudo-socialist mob on Twitter have been in favour of ever-more restriction of liberty, ever-more rules and ever-stricter “lockdown”. It is one of their psychological flaws. The need or perceived need to be told what to do.
One saw it in the Brexit situation, that idea that the UK’s civil liberties etc (free speech being the greatest), fought and struggled for over hundreds of years by British people could now only be maintained by a pack of tired Eurotrash politicians and bureaucrats in places like Brussels and Berlin and Strasbourg. In fact, the wish not to be free was palpable in the Remain camp.
Indeed, would anyone think himself “free” in an EU where to question any of the often absurd details of the “holocaust” fable is actually a criminal offence?!
We have seen, all through this “crisis” or scare, that the Labour Party official Opposition has been pathetic, just supporting the Government! Really really pathetic. I think I understand why Keir Starmer is doing it. He really, at heart, would like to see Labour as part of a fake “National Government”, thus giving Labour some reflected credibility as part of that Government. “Boris”, though, thanks to his unmerited and unexpected 80-seat Commons majority, does not need Labour. The result is that Labour is a total irrelevance.
Likewise the TUC. I remember from my teenage years the TUC as a vast, monolithic, almost Soviet bloc of unions, powerful and of national importance whether one supported or opposed their actions. Today on, I think, Sky News, up pops Frances O’Grady, its General Secretary, and all she can do, really, is bleat a little. A waste of space. The TUC still has 5.6 million members (Wikipedia; another source says only 3.69M), but that is only about 1 in 5 employees; if you include the self-employed, probably 1 in 6. Like Labour, near-irrelevant.
The Jew Shapps
The “Cabinet minister”, Jew Grant Shapps, on TV news this morning, posing in front of a small bookcase prominently featuring two Union Jacks. Surely, in view of his Zionist ideology and one-time position as head of the youth wing of Bnai Brith UK, Israeli flags would have been more fitting?
BREAKING: UK’s highest court @UKSupremeCourt rules that Gerry Adams was imprisoned illegally by British government when was interned without trial in early 1970s. The Supreme Court has quashed his two convictions for trying to escape from the Maze Prison @rtenews @RTENewsNow
Already on its knees because of unreformed libel law & rapacious lawyers, the press will be terrified now to print the truth about Adams and many of his IRA chums. Yet Gerry Adams was among those directing an organisation dedicated to mass murder. https://t.co/P5RAN5Syg5
I should be used to it by now but it still astonishes me that Gerry Adams has the gall to complain about violations of due process, given the IRA's record of torture, murder and disappearance. What due process did Jean McConville get? Robert Nairac? Tim Parry? https://t.co/482TXgyZib
— Niall Gooch 👍🇻🇦🏴🚅🏏✒ (@niall_gooch) May 13, 2020
In 1984 I was present when Gerry Adams and two other senior members of The PIRA arrived from Belfast for an Army Council meeting in Monaghan Town…I was there…I seen and I listened…Why dont you get John the piss artist to issue legal proceedings over that…Comfort Letter! https://t.co/O3zASsIsYY
— The Irish Observer (@theirishobserve) May 13, 2020
We live in a society where the likes of Gerry Adams have their supposed “rights” fastidiously upheld by a “Supreme Court”, but also a society in which Jez Turner was convicted and actually sent to prison merely for saying that Jews should be deported from the UK (as has happened several times in history), and a society in which Alison Chabloz was prosecuted and sentenced merely for singing satirical songs about proven “holocaust” fakes!
[above: the satirical singer-songwriter, Alison Chabloz, at the piano]
Corbyn
I’ve joined 145 UK MPs and peers in demanding action over the Israeli government’s illegal plan to annexe large areas of occupied Palestinian territory.
Annexation would be an act of aggression – and the UK government should make clear now that would lead to sanctions. https://t.co/A5I9mZ7wvk
Not that Corbyn is “wrong” in this, but he has just spent 5 years supporting the mainstay of the Israeli/Zionist state, i.e. the “holocaust” narrative! Also, decrying anything supposedly “anti-Semitic”. In other words, he is against Zionism in the Middle East, but —in effect— supportive of it in Europe, North America and Australasia!
Ah, well, Corbyn is back in his comfort zone, bleating about matters far away, which he has no power to influence or change…
For more than six weeks I have been abused and smeared as someone who cares more about money than life, because I have warned that the smashing of the economy by the government was a major threat to the NHS. Now the govt admits it. Apologies welcome: https://t.co/i0LZCAU5Qh
'We have both an eye-watering number of avoidable deaths and a staggering amount of avoidable economic damage. The purported trade-off between lives and jobs – always a false choice – has instead spared neither. It is the worst of both.'https://t.co/LGS6BRnqkx
Actually, the “facemask” nonsense is the ideal excuse for anyone asked in court, “and why were you walking around covering your face?” The criminal defence barrister has a new tool to put in his box, along with “it was someone who looked like the defendant”, “his fingerprints were there because he had been there previously, and legitimately…” and (after conviction) “the defendant has had an unhappy life to date…”
I acknowledge it. @vidur_kapur I am glad Prof Ferguson has defenders, but I am not one of them . My own opinion of Imperial was greatly influenced by the Foot and Mouth outbreak. I saw the results of their advice. Farmers weeping as their healthy beasts were killed and burned. https://t.co/KklzCg11e1
I am sure that laughter is the best weapon against this comic-opera despotism of Dear Leader Kim Jong Son and his dreaded Health Commissar Mat Hang Kok. https://t.co/WldDjseWlq
@l1ttkeherbert . I love your use of ‘virtually’ to mean ‘not’ . As in , not Japan, not Taiwan, not Sweden. So not all. There is *no* congruence between shutdowns and reduced deaths. Absorb this, and you can start thinking, which I recommend. https://t.co/ThkKVyB3y3
NZ did not ‘nail’ anything. It had very few cases because it is so remote. No connection has been shown between its shutdown and the continued low instance of Covid-19 there. Why are people so *gullible*? Taiwan and Japan have no shutdown and few deaths. https://t.co/7XTHSAWKWG
Neither I nor anyone else has presented me as an expert @bedlingtonjamie. I am a journalist, disseminating the work of actual experts, largely denied a platform by flaccid or one-sided media. Why do you never attack the lack of expertise in the * government*? https://t.co/B0sbRiZKnX
Well, Boris Johnson’s shambolic amateur-night Churchill impression of yesterday has not exactly gone down a storm. I think that the infamous casting director who first rejected Richard Whiteley’s application had the right injunction: “Himoff!”
Even that peculiar little “Misbegot”, Philip Schofield, is doing a Peter Finch “Network” reprise!
Oh shit man, we're through the looking glass now. It's defcon one. Even Schofield's gone renegade. https://t.co/Wkj8l1jyUv
In fact, the usually supine msm talking heads such as Schofield seem to be getting back a heady whiff of journalistic (or whatever) independence. Look at Piers Morgan, here tearing a strip off one of the barrow-boy “Conservative” MPs, former market gardener Andrew Bridgen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Bridgen#Early_life_and_career]:
This is really powerful from Piers Morgan. A grasp of the facts, and the bravery to articulate them, that most political editors and politics correspondents wholly lack. pic.twitter.com/gqFJyJfSUG
Reading some of the readers’ comments in, eg the Daily Mail, the public mood is now becoming unforgiving toward Boris-idiot and his Cabinet of fools. And that is before the furlough money tap is shut off…
Even the msm journalists are scathing toward “Boris” now. The only one I saw who is not critical was the ancient reactionary joke scribbler, Janet Daley, in the Telegraph.
I forecast after the 2019 election that, with Labour an irrelevance, any opposition to the “Boris” government of fools would come from within the Conservative Party itself. So it is proving to be.
The public too are now, too late, awakening to the horror of the full uselessness of “Boris” Johnson. Yet he can only be (lawfully) removed by his own MPs, and they are very unlikely to do that at this stage.
Tweets seen, etc
10% safe capacity. How long do you think the queues will be? Has Johnson EVER seen Oxford Circus Tube at 5pm on a weekday? When operating at 100%?. When they have to close it for safety? https://t.co/hiIulSMu1D
In one part of his mind, “Boris”-idiot knows that the Underground is the best incubator that the Chinese virus could ever find. Another part of “Boris”, however, imagines that all those workers that have to resume (or continue to) work in London can just hail a taxi! Or perhaps bicycle, or stroll, to their work, as do Oxford students en route to lectures and tutorials.
“Boris” should be told that London workers of all kinds do not all live in the purlieus of the Palace of Westminster, or bicycle from Mayfair or Belgravia. Some come in from as far away as Didcot, Diss, Margate and the Isle of Wight! Not to mention North Finchley, Epping, Morden and Ealing
And the commute from, Surrey, Kent, middlesex, Essex, Sussex, and beyond? That's a bloody long way to cycle or walk? Absolute dotards, the lot of them.
It seems as if the reputation of Imperial College (whose advice triggered the Kim Jong Son Panic Policy, is not rising among other epidemiologists. https://t.co/q9UEgw616I
The tweet below caught my attention mainly because it is typical of the times: semi-literate, yet the tweeter is apparently a writer who has written or broadcast for BBC, Sky News, Guardian,New York Times etc…
You can pay a nany to come to your house daily, but your sister can’t watch your kd while you’re at work.Really saying the quiet part loud in terms of class.
— The Poisonous Euros Atmosphere Fan (@DawnHFoster) May 11, 2020
For some reason, proponents of the Panic Policy *really* don't like this story (barely covered in the UK) which shows large numbers of people getting Covid-19 after obediently staying at home: https://t.co/lBf0wM3xLr
I suspect the pressure for obligatory futile muzzles in public places and on pubic transport will come from the unions. Once again, reason and fact will be bulldozed by emotion and panic. https://t.co/30gMtr5a7J
As I have blogged before, forcing the public to wear absurd facemasks or scarves round the mouth or face will not only not do much (if anything) to stop the Chinese virus, but will be the biggest boon the shoplifters and other criminals have had for years. Eyewitness and cctv evidence will become almost useless, and people will look rather alike in many cases, so facilitating petty (and perhaps also serious) crime.
Yes, it is interesting that the government has so far paid no attention to this crucial work by Prof Carl Heneghan and colleagues at Oxford, still preferring the work of Imperial College. https://t.co/2pM3dJiZwS
Poor you. I grew up in a country where Oppositions *opposed* – Gaitskell & Bevan at Suez, most notably. This isn't a war. There's no threat of invasion. It's a plain dereliction of duty for opposition to coalesce with the government. Such coalitions are coalitions against liberty https://t.co/OvTZRQzPaw
Good for you @jazznbits ( though the scientific justification for the seven foot rule in the open air is thin to say the least). But I frequently encounter people (often wearing futile cloth muzzles) who are unsmiling and plainly scared. https://t.co/JSLR86JfYm
You miss my point @oneukba. The BBC, in almost all its coverage, accepts that the policy of throttling the economy and mass house arrest is right and justified. Like the Labour (non) 'Opposition', It criticises the government only for its operation and delivery of this policy. https://t.co/J5rvQwFZZw
So to Waitrose. The police, even in this quiet corner (with apologies to Gogol’s Dead Souls) seem to have become much more active. A police jeep saw me and, though ahead of me just before I turned from one road to another, circled around by another route so that the police were behind me after a minute or two. Being rather intuitive, I had guessed from the start that that is what he or they would do, but (having a clear licence and the car insured and MOT-compliant), I could not be bothered to outwit them. In the end, the police followed me all the way to Waitrose in the nearby town, but did not bother to stop me after I turned into the store car park. Still, a sign of the times…
As to Waitrose itself, no obvious shortage of anything and, as on my previous visit, few shoppers, though this time none wearing those pathetic masks or wound-round scarves.
Recent tweets seen
Why are otherwise sensible people in the chattering classes defending the absurd Dear Leader Kim Jon Song? I'm not 'pretending to be baffled'. I'm furious and contemptuous at this simultaneously pathetic and nasty announcement of the continuation of a failed, wrong policy. https://t.co/A2QnBXE94X
Lord Sumption excoriates Dear Leader Kim Jong Son's absurd continued assault on our liberty 'The worst interference in our personal liberty in our history' .From 38 minutes in this BBC Sounds recording of the PM programme 11/5/2020. https://t.co/lC6zoldCSW
"Attempts to prove correlation between lockdown and a reduction in deaths continue to be thwarted by data showing no such correlation." pic.twitter.com/0NgkPbPRYz
I noticed that in someone, in either January or February (I forget which) for several days, and I believe that I myself may have caught this virus in early February but shown no symptoms at the time (despite being 63). I suppose that I shall never know.
No, I haven't heard, and it is a good point. Lord Sumption pointed out that police obeying instructions of Ministers, rather than enforcing law, was the essence of a police state. Whole use of Public Health Act 1984 is highly questionable anyway. https://t.co/yNYx4Z2kBK
Most striking bit of Dear Leader Kim Jong Son's document 'Our Plan to Rebuild the Country After We Completely Messed it Up' is (Section 7, Annex B): 'You are very unlikely to be infected if you walk past another person in the street.' Now they tell us. https://t.co/Pwtbfy6Ff2
Why? It is not necessary once the absurd “lockdown” is lifted. The scheme costs £8 billion per month, almost as much as the entire NHS with its 2 million employees, which costs £11 billion a month.
It is suggested that the scheme might continue until September instead of end of June. Another £24 billion, almost as much as the wrongheaded HS2 project (in its entirety)! In fact, I would support the furlough extension if that meant that HS2 would be scrapped, but I doubt that ministers will do that. It would be too elegantly simple.
As for the idea floated around Westminster that employees might return part-time, and that the furlough payments be reduced accordingly, that idea would seem to have no logic at all behind it.
Kay Burley
I rarely bother with TV news these days. A kind of Soviet-style government mouthpiece, whatever the channel designation. However, I did see a few minutes of Sky News this [Tuesday] morning. Kay Burley interviewing Angela Rayner.
I do not have much time for Angela Rayner, but Kay Burley’s behaviour was extraordinary to those of us brought up to think that news presenters should be or at least seem “impartial”. To my mind, Kay Burley showed herself completely pro-Conservative Party, pro-Government. I am not talking about giving Angela Rayner a hard time as interviewee but Kay Burley simply shouting out her own opinions and refusing to leave open the possibility that the Government might have acted incompetently. In other words, she did not so much ask questions as demand that her view be accepted.
I have often seen Kay Burley cross the line into partisan territory. She was very hostile to Corbyn from 2015 to 2019, and totally in the pocket of the Jewish lobby; at least that was my strong impression. However, I always discounted the claims of Corbyn supporters that Kay Burley was biased in favour of the Conservative Party as such. No longer a question. She is.
Angela Rayner did try to remonstrate, mildly, with Kay Burley, about the latter’s behaviour in the interview, but to little effect. Indeed, Kay Burley hit back! This is what happens when fairly mediocre, not highly educated people, get jobs as news anchors, get paid a million a year or whatever, and then forget that they are only reporters or news facilitators, not active players. John Humphrys was another example.
Sanity breaks out here and there…
“Coronavirus is not at epidemic levels in Britain, experts at Oxford University have said, with new figures showing that only a tiny proportion of the population is currently infected.
The latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that just 0.24 per cent of adults – approximately 136,000 people – have the virus. Separate surveillance by the Royal College of GPs indicates it may be even less.
Figures released last week showed just 0.037 per cent of people have the virus…” [Daily Telegraph]
Ghastly old Jewess Edwina Currie has apparently been on daytime TV, supporting the Government’s “policy” on “lockdown” etc. Poor Government!
Dear English friends you have my deepest sympathy Edwina Currie on #GMB said to Piers you can have a member of your family from a different household in your house as long as they are cleaning. The weird and bizarre messages from the Tories is getting weirder by the day
— THE BLACK SALTIRE#FBSI (@80_mcswan) May 12, 2020
Did Edwina Currie honestly just tell @piersmorgan he can see his son if he hires him as a cleaner basically? This Government and their representatives are absolute jokes 😂😂🤦♀️
Edwina Currie, like many Jews, especially women, “smiles”, or goes through the motions of what human beings do when they smile, when there is no actual reason to smile. I have never discovered why “they” do that. Like a nervous tic rather than any expression of humour or warmth.
As to Edwina Currie specifically, I remember well her overnight destruction of the UK egg market in 1988. My memory is not at all taxed. I remember that incident because I heard about it in specific circumstances that make it easy to recall. It was late at night and in December 1988, and I was at the Hotel Grand (now the Mercure Grand Warszawa) in Warsaw.
I had just that evening arrived by train from Bielsko-Biala in the south of Poland. Outside, the snow lay heavy on the ground.
I turned on my radio and found the BBC World Service (which at the time was still worth listening to). The news from the UK had two main items: there had been a terrible train crash at Clapham, South London, with much loss of life; also, Edwina Currie, the government junior minister responsible for, inter alia, the egg industry, had said (wrongly) that most eggs in the UK were contaminated by salmonella. As a direct result of Edwina Currie’s mistake, 4 million hens were slaughtered.
University expansion and general dilution of educational standards. ‘Academic’ ’ really doesn’t mean all that much by itself any more. Like ‘A-level’ and ‘degree’ and ‘Master’s’ . https://t.co/ik0aUOif48
“Ain’t that the truth?!” [above]. Now, every Tom, Dick and Sharon has a “degree” from some place or other, quite many have a “Master’s”, involving a 1-year course, which no-one ever fails; in fact at Oxford and Cambridge you get a “Master’s” degree merely on payment of a small sum, with no course requirement, work, or dissertation required!
I am not making that up. In fact, I recall that my then girlfriend, in the 1980s, was sent a letter from Cambridge University warning her that if she wanted to be able to put “M.A.” after her name, she would have to pay (I think) £35, because the time limit was approaching (as I seem to recall). She had graduated around 1971. The limit must have been 10 or 15 years, if there was a limit. Maybe the University just wanted the money.
As for “academics”, “academia” in the wider sense is now full of fakes and simplistic ideologues such as the woman lecturer (I think from Southampton University), whose tweets I saw on Twitter recently, to the effect that books written by “Nazis” should be burned. These are among the gravediggers of European civilization. They must be stopped.
There are numerous “doctors” of this or that (esp. on Twitter) who actually use the title, despite not being medical doctors, academics in any formerly-accepted sense, or persons in either holy orders or scientific institutes. Infra dig, but that is what Britain today is like: just a bad joke.
We could get our sense of proportion back @petergreig6, and stop scaring ourselves needlessly into poverty, serfdom and ill health. https://t.co/sQgeMZ9pUy
Despite official figures (quite possibly inflated) showing that 30,000 or so people have died “of” (with) Coronavirus, i.e. about one person out of every 2,000 in the UK, and that only about 4 people (if that) out of every 10,000 are presently infected, the public panic has scarcely abated. Fear has been spread (by the Government, the Opposition, the NHS lobby, the msm etc), and it is now proving hard to rein back on that.
Oh , it is *so* simple, isn’t it @mriggorz. But in NY survey, 66% of new Covid-19 hospital cases had *stayed at home* . And there is now evidence that virus was present in W.Europe in December 2019, so was already widespread long before shutdown. No evidence that shutdown works. https://t.co/eOkW1opziy
1/4 Lord Sumption: https://t.co/CfxRH6J706 'According to the Office of National Statistics 91% of the [Covid-19] deaths have been of people with serious underlying conditions. 88% have been of people over 65…'
2/4 Lord Sumption https://t.co/CfxRH6J706 '…The number of deaths of people under 50 is so tiny that the ONS isn't even able to show it on their colourful charts. It is people who are fit and under 65 who are being asked to sacrifice not just their liberty…
3/4 Lord Sumption https://t.co/CfxRH6J706 '…but their jobs, their businesses and all the ordinary collective activities that make life worth living for something that hardly affects them at all….Its obvious that the NHS capacity has caught up…
4/4 Lord Sumption : https://t.co/CfxRH6J706 'The threat was always grossly overstated …that's why we heard nothing last night from the PM about "saving the NHS" and the phrase has been dropped from their slogan'. 'The worst interference with personal liberty in our history'
For not above the 5 millionth time @avrammeitner, there is not a 🕷️speck🕷️ of evidence for the government's claim to have stopped the spread of the virus by throttling the economy and introducing mass house arrest. Why do you 💥presume💥 this propaganda is true? https://t.co/D8zESLw05P
This is key, but it is actually alarming that so many people, including those with “degrees” and recognized professional qualifications cannot see it. I had smoked salmon for breakfast this morning, and the weather became less cloudy. I do not imagine that the weather became less cloudy because I had smoked salmon for breakfast. It would have happened whether I had smoked salmon, devilled kidneys or raspberry pop-up tarts. cf. “lockdown” and Coronavirus.
How would it affect it @scepticalape? The govt can act ( or can fail to act) to protect care homes, quite independently of ceasing to deprive people of the freedom to live and work normally. The Utopian gesture is the enemy of the practical and effective. https://t.co/EsqfpMwfwo
Tripe @asbrexit I have merely pointed out that the shutdown of the economy and the stifling of personal liberty are deeply damaging and absurdly disproportionate responses to an overstated danger, and that there is no evidence they have done any good. https://t.co/hMUlsc0Rlx
Sunak has extended the “furlough” scheme until October. A remarkable decision, and I think the wrong one. The right decision would have been to open up the economy completely or almost completely from this week or certainly by the end of the month.
What has now been done is to say to at least 7 million employees and self-employeds, “stay on holiday until the Autumn” on what amounts —for many of them— on full pay, once the costs of simply being employed are taken away (eg transport to and from work).
Yes, others are “working from home”, either actually or notionally, while yet others are, whether as “key workers” or not, still working normally. However, a quarter of the total workforce are now as good as economically inactive until October or even November. The economic fallout will be massive, as will be the upfront costs of “furloughing” all those people: £8 BN x 7 months = £56 billion.
As Lord King, the former Governor of the Bank of England said today, the economy will not be damaged as much by the furlough programme costs (if only because the cost of State borrowings is very low at present and can be spread over long future periods) as it will be by the fact that a quarter of the workforce is not doing anything productive, and because companies on the edge before the “virus” struck are now insolvent but kept in suspended animation by “furlough” monies to employees, loans to companies from the State, and rent holidays (and/or suspension of rent default proceedings in the courts).
The furlough payments will keep up demand to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent, in that payments are capped at £2,500 per month.
The effect on the currency is as yet unknown. Other European (and yet other) countries have similar schemes, so there may well be relativity, but eventually the pound sterling must fall vis a vis most other currencies, thus fuelling inflation in the UK.
I have seen inflation of that type. It has political effects. I am not talking about the utterly mad hyperinflation of Germany in 1923 but a lesser, yet still fast, inflation. When I first went to Poland in 1988, the taxi drivers had a little sticker by the meter. You paid a multiple of what the meter said. When I was there in Summer 1988 (for a couple of months), the stickers read “x2” and then “x4”. When I returned, a few months later, the stickers read “x8”, then “x12”. The following year, the year when the whole Soviet and Eastern European socialist system started to collapse visibly, the stickers read “x40” and then, I think, “x200″…
For a foreigner (what some Germans of the post-WW2 occupation of Berlin called, in a mix of English and Russian, a “valuta vulture” , “valuta” being the Russian for “foreign currency”), the collapse of the Polish zloty in the late 1980s had selfish positive effects: I for example could take a taxi to whatever passed for a good hotel (when I was first in Poland, I was not staying in hotels), have a breakfast, get a taxi onward, and pay (including tips) about £1 or £2 for breakfast and taxis combined. That was not much even in 1988.
Anything produced in Poland could be bought for pennies in English or American currency. For example, I bought a few Polish vinyl records of symphonic music for about 10p or 20p each.
The drawback was that very little was for sale anyway. The usual local shops were not well-stocked. Anything imported had to be bought at hard-currency-only “PEWEX” (pron. “Pevex”) shops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pewex
Where did people get their dollars to spend at PEWEX? Mostly from the Polish diaspora, particularly the long-established Polish communities in the USA. Remittances to famly members.
One of Lenin’s probably apocryphal statements was “to destroy a country, first destroy its currency“. The fact is true, even if the attribution is not. Currency is a major factor of any state. States that do not have their own currency are joke states (eg Zimbabwe 2009-2019). States where the currency is very weak tend to be weak states (Weimar Germany in the early 1920s, Poland in the 1980s).
In Poland, the collapse of the zloty was not the cause of the collapse of the socialist system, but accompanied it, as did other trends, and the currency collapse was at least one cause of the collapse of “Polish” socialism.
The pound in 2020 or 2022 may not quite go the whole way of the Polish zloty of the 1980s, but “never say never”…
1/2 'In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." https://t.co/hfzHdSV958
2/3 Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four…. https://t.co/hfzHdSV958
3/3 'And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!' https://t.co/hfzHdSV958
What the government of fools has done, in effect, is declare a national holiday on full pay for millions of people. For a further 4 months. At the same time, the most egregious restrictions of the “lockdown” nonsense are to be relaxed (before the mob ignore them anyway…), so allowing all those people “furloughed” some freedom to enjoy their unexpected weeks and months of leisure.
Yesterday evening, went out to Waitrose. First outing for 4 days. Roads fairly quiet but not empty. It was after 1900 hrs, though.
At Waitrose, the car park almost empty, though a source told me that a Tesco supermarket, in another and more populated area 21 miles away, had been packed earlier in the day. Different factors though: that other area is quite suburbanized, is on a major “A” road, the time of day was earlier, and of course Tesco is more popular than Waitrose anyway, being slightly cheaper.
At Waitrose, the Handmaid’s Tale militia (Waitrose “marshals”) were few, in fact I saw only three loitering outside or cleaning shopping trolleys. There have been as many as half a dozen in recent weeks. There was no line to get into the store; in fact there were almost no customers at all.
Inside, disappointed to see no last-minute offers at 10% or 5% of the usual price (I can be rather a scavenger), but for once no shortages. All the usual suspects were available: bread, dry pasta, rice, pasta sauce, even bleach. I think that the shopping public has decided that the “panic buy” emergency is at an end and so there is no need to join the throng. In any case, in my area, many people must be sitting on mountains of loo paper, kitchen roll, pasta and rice.
Still, there is still a background panicked atmosphere around. I saw one silly woman wearing a thick scarf very loosely wound round her mouth and neck. Very unlikely to make any difference whatsoever to getting or not getting the Chinese virus. Even more ludicrously, I saw another and even more silly woman driving out of the car park, alone in her car and wearing a face mask! So…she is afraid that she might transmit “the virus” to…herself? Or is she afraid that, somehow, the air that comes into the car might harbour “the virus”? Which is impossible.
Tweets seen
Some recent tweets by Peter Hitchens, who is worth reading because he is one of the few who has stood up against the Government-sponsored “virus” panic (etc) which has recently swept “the nation” (which latter does not exist any more, but let’s leave that aside).
The disturbing fact is that the police in many formerly free countries now actively side with a political viewpoint, and failure to hold that viewpoint can swiftly bring you into conflict with a body established to uphold *law* not the govt of the day. This is a huge loss., https://t.co/Mqgl3ouPOT
My view is that so-called 'lockdown' (in fact a US prison term which should not be applied to free countries) has so far had no discernible effect on the pattern of the disease, if you examine all the affected countries. https://t.co/4KqCKwunXN
The unmistakable sound of one mind shutting @hyperglobalist. What a dreary life you must lead cut off from the ideas you fear. Tombs is a good writer, though in my view his ‘That Sweet Enemy’ written with his French wife Isabelle, is better. https://t.co/wg63pXP2tj
On April 5 at govt briefing Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, confirmed that many deaths with Covid are not necessarily from Covid. She said: ‘These are Covid-associated deaths, they are all sad events, they would not all be a death as a result of Covid.’ https://t.co/UAGhuyLWfk
I know the difference between hard science, objective testable, falsifiable, experimental and predictive, and pseudo-science, which is none of these things but pretends to have the same status. Which is why it describes its guesswork as 'stochastic'. Big words baffle. https://t.co/HqNFNleQil
Heresy! An affront to our Dear Leader Kim Jong Al our All-Wise Helmsman ! But this article: https://t.co/pyWshJGJuY is also a calm, well-reasoned and researched corrective to much that has bene said about the Covid outbreak. Please read, but only if you are intelligent.
“Covid-19 is no more than a nasty, but basically normal, viral respiratory infection, though you’ll be regarded rather as a mullah regards a blasphemer if you say so. Why is this?
After all: it is precisely because its symptoms seemed so similar to viral pneumonia that the initial outbreak in Wuhan was missed until the numbers built, and it is now clear that we have been missing Covid-19 cases diagnosed as pneumonia in Europe at least as far back as December, probably earlier. In the vernacular: it looks as though it was bubbling away for ages before we noticed.”
and
“There are really only two particularly unusual things about the Covid-19 epidemic: the timing of its arrival and the lockdown some countries declared. And if we ask “Covid, where is thy sting?”, it is lockdown that will sting: in the UK, the death-toll of people not turning up to hospital with cardiac issues (admissions are down 50% across the country) is now unmissable in the weekly non-Covid excess death figures published by the ONS, now running over 3,000 per week just for England and Wales. The downstream toll from missed cancer diagnoses (referrals are down 67%, as stressed by Professor Sikora) is heartbreak yet to come.
This is to say nothing of the toll on education, liberty and the economy. We’ve given up everything we should hold dear for a virus that just turned up three months later than similar viruses normally do.”
Some of the comments appended to that blog post are also of interest:
“It’s also a consequence of the media being increasingly dominated by young people, who thus have no sense of historical perspective. We see it in the climate change debate – weather events that are bog standard in any sort of medium to long term time span are immediately termed ‘unprecedented!’ by the media, whose attention span (and personal experience) hardly goes back more than a decade or so. Thus the idea that something that happened in the 1990s could be relevant to what is happening today would be laughed at.” [from above blog post comments section]
“Life today driven by demands of the minority of vocal pathetic snowflakes’ demands for “no-risk”. Just look at the headline today about the Unions not wanting to go back to work until they ‘feel safe’. This is the language of infants.” [from above blog post comments section]
“Three points. Lockdown started AFTER peak infection and peak hospital admissions. Continuing infections/deaths occuring despite weeks of lockdown because hot spots of infection unaffected by general population, they are in hospitals and care homes. Sweden, Japan, S Korea, Taiwan had no lockdown, considerably less deaths than UK. Lockdown has had minimal effect on the normal bell curve of infection/deaths.” [[from above blog post comments section]
A “free country”?
Just as plans harden for a court challenge to Kim Jong Al's shutdown (see https://t.co/OCFvptAai1 A former govt law adviser says Human Rights laws should be suspended to prevent such challenge: https://t.co/F0PFubdewR Free country or what?
Meanwhile, away from the toytown police state imposed on the British people, and in the real world:
“Five boats carrying 82 migrants were intercepted in the English Channel on Saturday as people smuggling gangs stepped up their operations during the good weather conditions.”
“It means a total of 227 people have been brought from Calais to the south coast of England in 13 small boats within just two days.”
It is clear that some countries which have had little or no “lockdown” have done much better than the UK in dealing with the Chinese virus, and have at least tried to save their economies from ruination; others, on far more strict “lockdown”, such as Italy and Spain, have done worse than the UK (per capita) and now face economic meltdown.
I blogged from the start that (as the UK Government said before crazed advisers caused it to go mad) the only known way to safeguard yourself from getting this virus is to keep thoroughly washing hands with soap and water (or gel, if in transit). The other “measures taken” have been driven by public relations rather than any scientific facts. I mean the “2-metre social distancing”, the facemasks, the “stay home” mantra. As to those three aspects, it may be that a tiny number of people have been protected by such measures, but at what cost?!
Meanwhile, the London Underground has stayed open, though (you couldn’t make it up!) with reduced numbers of carriages, thus making the conditions even more friendly to “the virus” (and other viruses and bacteria). And let’s not forget the influxes into the UK: air passengers allowed in freely, and migrant-invaders “caught” in the Channel or on beaches, then directed to free shelter, food and cash, and allowed to mingle freely with the unwilling host population.
As for “Protect the NHS”, well the sacred cow has been protected, but at the cost of thousands of lives: those often elderly people bundled up and shunted off back home (to often-inadequate home care), sent back to residential care homes where they and other residents have been dying in droves, while the “clap for NHS” rabbits have been virtue-signalling on cue every week (though not as many ever did it as the propaganda would suggest, and the display has almost died out now; where I live, it was always only a tiny minority doing it).
Then there are the uncounted thousands who have died and will die because “lockdown” has delayed or cancelled consultations, treatment, surgical operations etc.
One may laugh at Boris-idiot and his “government of fools”, but these opportunists are killing people, by their half-measures but also by their over-reaction and by their sheer ineptitude and negligence.
I do not think that “lockdown” is very useful, and in any case I think that the Chinese virus is far more widespread than at first thought. It probably started to infect people in the UK in January or even last December. Neither do I think that the “social distancing” measures are hugely useful. What I do think useful are closures of crowded nightclubs, pubs, busy cafes, sports venues, pop concerts and (which was never done) closure of public transport in crowded cities like London. Places where people are jammed together and may breathe over each other.
My bottom line? Whatever the truth of any of the above, either way, the fact is that “lockdown” (especially) has huge economic effects, despite and even to some extent because of the ameliorating measures put in place by Rishi Sunak.
The Government has scared people silly, unnecessarily. Now, the public is only gradually getting used to the idea of not being under a kind of house arrest, only gradually getting used to the idea of going back to their —in many cases, boring— jobs. The 80%-of-pay furlough payments (capped at £2,500 per month) add up to 100% of pay for those making under £36,000 a year and who pay for transport to and from their usual work.
Apart from the niggling restrictions, the civil rights aspects and the sheer boredom, the “lockdown” has, thanks to furlough payments, not been too bad for many. However, the Government simply cannot indefinitely bribe much of the public not to work, not at that level.
For me, that is the bottom line, beyond all of the medical, scientific and other arguments around “lockdown”: it simply cannot be maintained endlessly, because it cannot be paid for.
Many have accepted “lockdown”, as a temporary measure, because they are not suffering financially. Indeed, that is what the furlough payments (etc) were designed to do. Furlough alone is costing £8 billion per month. By way of comparison, the NHS, with 2 million employees, costs £11 billion per month to run.
I doubt that the Government will authorize furlough payments after the end of June. Maybe until the end of July. Not later. Then those furloughed will either return to work or, in many cases, go onto the”Universal Credit” dole.
We do not know yet the full economic cost of the Government’s imposition of a toytown police state. Everything has been frozen: redundancies, sackings, domestic property evictions, commercial property legal actions for recovery of rent; and so on. We do know that the “ruthless entrepreneurs” and “hardnosed private enterprise” chancers, like Branson, have all been demanding, or begging for, money from Government. Many will beg without satisfaction.
Airlines (and so airports) may be uneconomic for months, for years. Ground support companies as well. Retailers may soon be failing by the hundred, by the thousand, not only from “lockdown” itself but because people will have less money to spend and may prefer to spend what they do have safely, via the Internet. Fancy a holiday in Spain or Italy? I doubt it. Not for a year or so, anyway. Ferry companies will also struggle. The list continues.
Quelle surprise…
“Nine in 10 people do not want the lockdown to ease immediately – with 50 per cent happy to stay off work if they are getting paid or receiving government subsidies.
As Boris Johnson prepares to unveil his ‘exit strategy’, a poll found just 4 per cent believe the draconian restrictions should start to be lifted now, and another 7 per cent were not sure.” [Daily Mail]
So half the workforce are “happy” to stay off work so long as they are still getting paid? Well, there’s a shock (not).
The Daily Mail graphic is interesting, if accurate:
So hardly any of the public (4%) want an end to the “lockdown” nonsense immediately (well, it’s not the first time I have stood as part of a small but worthy minority), more than a quarter think that the end of this month would be best, but a fifth think that the end of June would be best (!), while nearly a quarter prefer the end of July or even later!
I doubt whether many presently content to sit at home indefinitely, or at least for another month, so long as they still get paid, are aware of the probably lasting damage that this is doing to the UK economically. They will only notice it when it hits home in terms of no job, no home, no future for their children etc. By then, the virus may be in the past, but the negative effects of “lockdown” will be very much around.
Boris-idiot’s speech
Sitting in my car earlier, I heard a Radio 4 broadcast of a 10-minute speech by the person currently posing as Prime Minister. I should say that it was somewhere between mediocre and poor. A half-hearted attempt to reprise Churchill in 1940 fell very flat. Johnson called Coronavirus “the most vicious threat to the UK I have seen in my lifetime”. So it seems that the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and the Cold War passed “Boris” by?
Johnson seemed overwhelmed. This was not the easy prime minister stuff he wanted to do. He gave the impression of being not quite big enough for the role. His speech was pedestrian, forced, unconvincing. An overgrown schoolboy pretending and posing and whistling into a cold wind.
As for Johnson’s movement on “lockdown”, too little by far. He also went through a list of matters which only served to underline his incompetence and that of his Cabinet.
What Johnson does not seem to understand is that people are not waiting for his permission to do things such as drive places, walk through parks or national parks, or on beaches. Or maybe he does understand that he, the Government and the toytown police are losing control. His remedy? To make “lockdown” easier before people just ignore it.
Oh well, at least that stupid “Stay at home; Protect the NHS; Save lives” slogan is now dumped. Dump the weekly “clapathon” too!
Van der Valk
Another episode of the new Van der Valk. Slick compared to the mid-1970s original, a more developed storyline (in 2 hours compared to the original one hour), but somehow slightly missing the heavy Dutch atmosphere of the original 1970s stories.
I did not know that the series continued after the 1970s. As to that Dutch atmosphere, both productions were/are British, though filmed on location. I myself was first in Amsterdam in 1975, and made subsequent visits in the 1980s.
One aspect that seemed to be unnecessary in the new production was the introduction of a young black detective in a semi-comic role. Out of place.
Overall, I should award the new production 4 out of 5 stars. It is well done for the most part, though it suffers from the same problem as the first Van der Valk, namely the characterization of the title character. Somehow insubstantial or vacant. What makes him tick? Compare Van der Valk to Inspector Morse, Lewis, Endeavour, Wallander etc. Point made, I think.
Tweets seen
Seems that I am not the only one appalled by how out of his depth Boris Johnson seemed today:
So in a nutshell. Step one: Make the impression of easing lockdown Step two: Give impossibly vague guidance on who can go to work Step three: Increase fines Step four: Use the vague guidance loopholes to rake it in Step five: oh and yes, every death a tragedy etc #BorisHasFailed
and to date there are 117,000 more tweets in the same vein.
So what? Now include Belgium and Ireland, the Netherlands, and Japan and Taiwan. Any serious analysis does not focus narrowly on a few countries. And it finds there is *no* pattern which links the severity of the shutdown and the number of deaths. https://t.co/u1rxNGlDsE
Define 'hysteria' @jlflanner. I'm not ordering people to stay in their homes,like Wee Willie Winkie, or sending out the police to arrest sunbathers, or spending £2.4 billion a day I haven't got, paying people to do nothing,on the basis of guesswork. I'm the one saying it's silly. https://t.co/0JHeYyEphe
Let me say it one more time. Many countries which have not shut down have had low numbers of deaths. There is no pattern which suggests that oppressive measures save lives. https://t.co/YnVqDgQaVx
I think the Churchillian pretence has never looked so thin. The Kim Jong Son statement was simultaneously boring and outrageous, then made ridiculous by clunky Blue Peter graphics. Like watching John Major declare war on Monaco. https://t.co/44cMGgvAoF
1/2 Watching Dear Leader Kim Jong Son's address to the people of the Democratic People's Republic of England, I noted this was the first time any head of government in this country had ever concerned himself with when and how I go to work, how I travel, who I meet.
2/2 All this absurd Maoist interference with private and personal matters was founded on a claim, unsupported by evidence, that he was somehow able to protect me from a virus. This is a classic distillation of fear into power….
3/2 As I watched this Maoist performance, it was amusing to think that only a few weeks ago this man and his party machine (now also flooding the country with fairy gold) were trying to persuade me that Jeremy Corbyn was a Marxist threat to freedom and the economy. Well, I never
Oh dear @kundesteria, how determinedly you miss the point. You actually *want* to believe that Big Brother can protect you from a virus, don't you? What all the evidence shows is that He can't. At some point you have to grow up and be an adult in a world of risk. https://t.co/W3E25SGO8U
And you *believed* that @hollinssquare? You gave power and freedom to the state and expected to get it back? What *do* they teach them in these schools? https://t.co/wKcdf3YYAz
“Hospitals may have broken the law by sending patients with Covid-19 back to care homes without telling their managers they had the virus.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has been told that several hospitals returned people despite suspecting – or even knowing – they were infected.” [Daily Mail]
Sad to hear that Roy Horn, of the stage act Siegfried and Roy, died. I recall seeing Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on TV feature them, when I lived in the USA about 30 years ago. They had a fabulous villa in the desert near Las Vegas and lived there with their huge and beautiful white tigers. In general, I don’t like stage acts involving animals, but Siegfried and Roy really loved their big cats (white tigers, lions, leopards). Pity that the full episode featuring them at home is not up on YouTube at present.
Britain 2020, where free speech is being killed
This ghastly little bastard, Evan Smith [see below] has written a book attempting to weasel about preventing people from giving lectures or speeches thought unsuitable by the “anti-fascist” thug element. What this is, is an attempt to intellectually legitimize censorship and socio-political repression.
It will be noted that one Aurelien Mondon of the University of Bath, and one Gavan Titley of Maynooth University (the place in Ireland from where most of their censorious Roman Catholic priests used to be churned out), have both endorsed this new book, for what such endorsement is worth.
My view has always been that there should be absolute freedom of speech on socio-political, historical and religious topics. If others want to restrict such freedom, and make it all about who has the biggest club or the most weapons, then that is their decision, their choice and their self-judgment.
Labour continues to bump along the bottom vis a vis the misnamed “Conservatives”. Keir Starmer, dull as ditchwater, and Lisa Nandy, humourless and not particularly intelligent political-correctness banner-carrier. No chance. I suppose that both they and the Labour rank and file think that, in the UK’s unfair binary system of ping-pong politics, if people tire of Boris-idiot and his entourage, the electorate will have nowhere to go but Labour. Don’t be so sure. Look at what happened in and after 2015 in Scotland.
While Labour has rarely had so many committed members and supporters, they number only about 600,000. That may seem many, and actually does make Labour the largest political party in Europe, but is still only about 1%-2% of the electorate.
Details of Simon Dolan's legal challenge to the government's probably unlawful closedown of the country (and details of how to help it) are here : https://t.co/OCFvptAai1
Yes, a point I first made in 2004 in my book 'The Abolition of Liberty'. The weaker we are on actual crime, the more we must treat the whole population as suspects. https://t.co/e0oWWKThvipic.twitter.com/txnZmPP4Yh
'Creepy" does not really cover it, does it @maherronan ? My home town is plastered with expensively produced little placards, tied to traffic lights and gateways, with the same message. Who knew the government had such an efficient and well-funded propaganda department? https://t.co/00eYpOySeF
George Orwell tried to imagine how a less free UK might be taken over. What he did not quite foretell was that old-established liberties and norms (eg the right to leave your house, to walk in the park with a friend, to stroll on a beach with the same, the right for shopkeepers to open shops, or the right to drive in the country for a change of scenery) might be extinguished, not by Stalinist despots and grim-faced soldiers, but by incompetent Old Etonians and Oxford graduates, by a part-Jew public entertainer posing as Prime Minister, and by a kind of toytown police patrolling roads to see whether someone is “allowed” to drive to the country, or the same uniformed clowns patrolling city parks and popular beaches to lecture old couples and solitary sunbathers.
It’s that that is so bizarre: the mixture of the repressive and the clownish; the mixture of emergent police state rigour, the remnants of “policing by consent”. Those elements and, of course, the utter illogic of it all, “sanctified” by the ludicrous and pathetic officially-mandated and promoted weekly community clapping sessions…
Two Israeli nationals, suspected of defrauding several French companies with a false promise of a #coronavirus vaccine, will be extradited to France… I’m shocked I tell you shocked 🙄 https://t.co/QIe1ax9I37
I am the last person likely to be accused of being “pro-black” and/or “socially-liberal”, but this clip, below, showing a black man shot (with a taser) by Manchester Police, is truly shocking:
What disturbs me more than anything is that the black was shot in front of his small child. Something like that could have lifelong negative psychological effects, with bad results for society too.
I do not have the facts behind what is shown, so do not want to be too swift to judge, but surely there must be an inquiry into this.
I have just now seen this, which seems to relate to the filmed incident:
— Resjudicatamyfoot (@Resjudicatamyft) May 8, 2020
“The times they are a’changing…”
One of the creepiest and most dystopian things I've seen since the pandemic began: a terrifying camera-equipped remote-controlled robot patrols Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park in Singapore to — for now — warn about social distancing. Look at the fear. Story: https://t.co/12QfT1mcyZpic.twitter.com/hBGUhmC7N7
The combination of social disruption and economic disruption, combined with floundering by the System parties, provides the best chance for social nationalism since the 1930s, but that opportunity can only be grounded if there exists a social-national party or movement to act as lightning rod and vanguard.
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/
[By Francis Lima – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49850020] It can be seen that, at its greatest extent, what is now called “Doggerland” (a term invented only in the 1990s), together with similar areas in the Atlantic off (mainly) the present-day coasts of the UK and Ireland (the ancient land of Lyonesse, of Arthurian legend), was larger in extent than the present-day UK.
By AlwaysUnite – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17865159]
[above: tamarisk tree in the Negev Desert, Israel. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=293521]
A few more tweets seen from Nick Griffin
[above: the satirical singer-songwriter, Alison Chabloz, at the piano]
Ian Robert Millard 