Morning music

On this day a year ago
From the newspapers
“Cost of living catastrophe“, but that was written (and tweeted) by Sky News in December 2021, about 3 months before the Russian incursion into Ukraine that (we are now told) is the cause of all our woes…
Mainstream media lies.
Tweets seen
Meaning because of “them”…
Very true. Worth reading.
Roger Scruton
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton]
…and in the middle of the alien crowd, I see the philosopher Roger Scruton, now deceased. “And then there were none“.
A couple of friends of mine in South London were friendly with Scruton, back in the mid/late 1970s. He would arrive by bicycle, in the manner of Cambridge University.
Then a fairly obscure university college lecturer at Birkbeck College (part of the University of London), though already becoming known and communing with the famous and well-connected (including Margaret Thatcher), Scruton later dropped the couple I knew for fear of being associated with them after the popular Press ran a story about how Scruton of the Salisbury Review etc was associating with “fascists” and “neo-Nazis” etc.
In other words, Scruton put career before friendship.
Having said that, Scruton was a considerable figure, sometimes honoured more in the recently ex-socialist states such as the Czech Republic —where I myself once saw a whole bookshop window of Scruton’s works in Czech— than in the UK.
That display was seen by me in Central Prague in 1999; it could not have happened when I had previously been in that city (1988); very few Western visitors were there then, and the works of Scruton (and many others) were banned.
Scruton was born into modest circumstances and, when later both famous and wealthy (as some might say, “box office“, with his high-selling books in multiple translation, and with several income-streams), he took on some of the traditional habits of the English “upper classes”, such as foxhunting, and living in country houses. He also started to take money from tobacco-lobby interests.

Scruton (whom I myself never met) strikes me as having been, like many, perhaps most people, a blend of the highminded and tawdry, of the original and the very derivative, of the highly ethical and the morally-suspect.
A hugely-talented man, in any event. One could say, without it being too much of a cliché, “a Renaissance man“.
Perhaps better remembered in his works than in himself.
“Blame and praise alike befall, when a dauntless man’s spirit is black and white mixed, like the magpie’s plumage…”
[Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival]
More tweets seen
Perhaps the (at time of writing) 643 utter “mugs”, each presently donating between £3.50 and £44, and every month, might start to wake up if they saw the total income (from that source alone) of “Jack Monroe”, the so-called “Bootstrap Cook”. Somewhere between a few thousand pounds and tens of thousands, monthly.
“Criminal?” My idea of “criminal” is pleading poverty or (when, e.g., Tiffany earrings are noticed by alert readers) near-poverty, in order to induce people to donate thousands of pounds monthly to a private bank account, while never or rarely providing the goods and services offered, and (it is said by many) never having intended to perform; or crowdfunding in order to fund a defamation case, with no real intent to launch such a case, and later (it is alleged by many, at any rate) keeping the donated monies for private purposes.
This will only be clarified if, or when, police and/or trading standards officers and/or various regulators properly investigate the activities of “Jack Monroe”, the “Bootstrap Cook”.
No decent meal can be made for either 30p or 11p. This is reaching Monty Python levels of nonsense.
Without the Russian connection (there since Kievan Rus in the 9thC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27], there would be really nothing of note in Ukraine, and that is exactly what its present Jew-Zionist dictatorship wants; in other words, for there to be nothing in Ukraine that existed before 1991, when this shambolic, corrupt and Jew-Zionist-ruled and exploited republic emerged from the collapse of Sovietism.
Afternoon music
Christmas University Challenge
A semi-final alumni teams match: Balliol, Oxford v. Exeter, Oxford.
At last, two teams which at least scored about the same as me, not far below as over the past two weeks. Balliol seemed rather better than on their previous appearance (admittedly not hard). Some incredible howlers all the same.
Late tweets

It cannot be denied that this conflict started in 2014, not in 2022.
The Zelensky regime in Kiev wants NATO to weigh in on the Kiev-regime side. If that were to happen even more blatantly than is presently the case, a nuclear exchange between NATO (NWO/ZOG) and Russia will be only a matter of time.
I cannot say whether the above is a genuine cause or not; probably it is. In any case, the true cost of war is the suffering of both human beings and their companion animals.
It is bad that Ukraine, whatever the reasons, is a theatre of war. Let us make sure that the rest of Europe is not dragged into a worse, and greater, war.

Hello Ian: Thank you for posting that excellent comment about that hypocritical POS known as John Cleese. I wrote and posted something very similar a couple of years ago in an American forum. The despicable sod NEVER said a word about the growing destruction of the British culture and the replacement of White Britons by aliens (something that started way back in the early 1960s)
Then, suddenly, he woke up to the fact the “London is no longer an English city” (his words. Even then the coward would not say a word about the cultural and ethnic destruction of his country by calling things by their names. Did he join or invite people to join a patriotic movement to fight back? NO! He ran away to an island in the Caribean to join other cowardly White millionaires like himself who cannot stand the hell they helped to build.
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Claudius:
When monitored, humour becomes lame, as with the Soviet magazine “Krokodil”. Satire in the UK has gradually become dangerous (as the case of Alison Chabloz shows). The centres of financial and political power can therefore only be half-laughed-at. Any mention of the Jews, and vultures such as the “CAA” and “CST” are making reports to online fora, MPs, police etc.
The John Cleese/Monty Python humour was (as noted in those critiques) only possible when the British Establishment was as it was decades ago. It is largely without point now. Look at how even Fawlty Towers has had to have bits taken out for broadcast.
The result is dead “humour” of the Paul Merton, Jo Brand type.
My wife and I watched half of the first of a new series of “Travel Man”, with a supposed “comedian” called Joe Lycett:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Lycett
Completely unfunny, and with a constant stream of unfunny gay double-entendres. My wife said “if we’re going to have a camp gay comedian as presenter, they might at least have a goodlooking one, like Julian Clary”.
I might add that Clary is or was at least witty. If he travelled at 100 mph, this Lycett character travels at 20 mph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Clary
BTW, for the Travel Man show (about Rio), Lycett was joined by some other “comedian”, equally unfunny.
It is not about race, though, but talent, and about society. We used to quite enjoy the Travel Man series with Richard Ayoade (half-Norwegian, half-Nigerian), though it was uneven.
“British” television is a very rotten borough now, largely unwatchable.
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I agree with your sentiments (and your wife’s). I remember watching some fragments of the Julian Clary show from the 1990s and I liked it. My wife, who cannot bear homosexuals, liked him too. In Clary there is a blend of sarcasm and wit that is very agreeable and funny.
Another thing that I found repulsive and unbearable in most British (and also Argentinian) comedians of today is the unnecessary and obscene amount of swear words they use. Our society is rotten to the core.
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Very nice to see those adorable kittens rescued and safe. I have a very soft spot for cats. Another adorable animal who I discover are very popular as pets in Japan are otters. Look at these adorable creatures!
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Claudius:
Otters were almost wiped out in the UK by habitat loss and hunting (there were traditional otter hunts until the early 1970s), but now the little creatures are thriving in many places.
I am sure that you know that Henry Williamson, a National Socialist in all but name, wrote Tarka the Otter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarka_the_Otter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Williamson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_otter
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I despise Roger Scruton. He may have been very intelligent, cultured and eloquent but morally he was coward. Period. He chose the easy path of being a dissident within the system, a kind of “conservative/traditionalist” who would criticize the system but without rocking the boat (God forbid!)
He enjoyed a privileged upper-middle class English life-style which included (and this is enough for me to hate him) fox-hunting. If you think I am too harsh on him I will give you an example. In 1989, the 60-year-old revisionist Robert Faurisson was attacked by three Jewish thugs who beat the hell out of him sending him to the hospital. Did Faurisson shut up? Did he stop denouncing the Jewish tyranny and the vile Holohoax? NO
Did Roger Scruton spoke openly against the cultural and ethnic destruction of the British people? NO! Did he risk his career in doing so? NO! Did he condemn the appalling crime wave created by blacks and browns? NO! Did he denounce the Jews as the mortal enemies of the White race? NO! Compared with Faurisson and many other he was a f… coward, because HE KNEW who the enemy was, but he pretended not to.
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Claudius:
Sadly, I have to agree with you about Scruton. A hugely talented man, but one who sometimes failed to exercise moral courage in, especially, the UK, and especially in respect of the (((main menace))).
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Sorry, I forgot this: https://codoh.com/library/document/revisionist-historian-suffers-savage-beating/en/
Lest We Forget!
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Claudius:
France is (if anything) even more (((infested))) than the UK, and the Jew-Zionsts there are even more evil.
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