Morning music
Battles past
From the newspapers
“Thousands of village halls across Britain are facing closure because they do not comply with new anti-terrorism legislation introduced after the Manchester Arena atrocity.
Jobsworths are insisting that venues of all sizes have to implement strict security measures, including training and evacuation plans.“
[Daily Mail].
How depressing, and how typical of what this country has become.
“‘Turns out Meghan Markle was not a great audio talent, or necessarily any kind of talent’: Hollywood talent agency supremo Jeremy Zimmer dismisses Duchess as a talentless broadcaster after Spotify axed its £18m deal with the Sussexes.”
[Daily Mail]
All that The Harry Formerly Known as Prince, and Meghan Mulatta, have to sell is tittle-tattle about the Royal Family, with a few “woke” bits and pieces tacked on. They are pretty much a one-trick pony, and of little interest.
Tweets seen
Essex, again. Just like that other online “grifter” and fake, “Jack Monroe”.
So “Supertanskiii” was at Glastonbury, where tickets cost £340 minimum? Seems that ranting pointlessly on Twitter etc against this admittedly incompetent “Conservative” government, while begging for donations, is fairly lucrative, though she claims that she was “booked to perform” at some kind of fringe event at Glastonbury. As what, another one-trick pony?
So maybe she did not have to buy a ticket. I have no idea.
Of course, many, perhaps most, of the “antifascist”and other ranting fanatics on Twitter are not quite normal mentally.
No-one, I see, has suggested that that Glastonbury “mental health” incident might have been invented, inflated and/or exploited as a “grifting” opportunity (in the manner of “Jack Monroe”). Who knows?
My own visit to the Kremlin, in 1993, was less formal. I paid my (?)20 roubles (in the money of 1993) and bought tourist entry, together with entry to the Kremlin churches (some shown in that tweet), which were very interesting (I was the only visitor to the churches then, probably because it was early in the day, about 0900 hours, and I had been one of the first “tourists” into the Kremlin).
I was the second tourist visitor into the Kremlin that sunny day in the early summer of 1993, and would have been first had a Russian family not got ahead of me as I slept in the sun, sitting on a wall by the not-yet-open ticket kiosk, and having already done an hour of hard swimming at the almost-empty huge open-air swimming pool “Moskva” in Kropotkinskaya (now replaced by a replica of the cathedral that was on the site prior to the 1930s).
Looking today at the website below, I see that the little wooden ticket kiosk (with its typically Soviet inconvenient little ticket-window about 5 feet from ground-level) is now no more, replaced by a large ultra-modern ticketing hall, tickets also being available online (something of course not dreamt-of in 1993).
More tweets seen
The USA, even more than Russia (arguably), is a colossus on legs of straw. Socially, the USA is disintegrating.
More tweets
“Supertanskiii” is sort-of similar to the “Jack Monroe” “grift” but, unlike “Jack Monroe”, she does not even pretend to offer “recipes” looking like mixed-up dog food, or indeed to offer anything at all beyond a continual “f*** the Tories” Twitter rant. Incredibly, though, some mugs are actually willing to chuck donations at her for that.
When you see the sort of utter mugs that send money to “Jack Monroe” or “Supertanskiii”, you start to understand part of why this country is in such a mess, at least in places and in aspects. Too many mugs. This has nothing to do with the blacks, browns, Jews etc. These are all or 99.99% white British people who imagine themselves to be well-meaning or at least “progressive”. Not the same mugs who support “Boris”-idiot, far from it, but on the same sort of unthinking level.
The same sort of “mug-dom” is seen in those who imagine that replacing Indian money-juggler Sunak with Jewish-lobby puppet Starmer is going to change everything for the better. Wake up.
Afternoon music
From 1965. More civilized days, in general.
A “bad” organization, and the DDR (East Germany) was perhaps a “bad” country overall, but life is not usually black and white. When you are my age (66), and have lived and/or worked in much of the world, you understand that.
A neglected blog post
I see that there were a few hits today on the following (linked) blog post from about three years ago. One of my least-read posts, in fact; I think, unfairly…
Late tweets seen
He has woken up, and is trying to awaken others, but the Westminster monkeyhouse is completely corrupt.
Will any hero eventually do what is required?
Late music
“In World War II, the city again suffered significant damage, and Nazi Germany occupied it from 19 September 1941 to 6 November 1943. Axis forces killed or captured more than 600,000 Soviet soldiers in the great encircling Battle of Kyiv in 1941. Most of those captured never returned alive.[95] Shortly after the Wehrmacht occupied the city, a team of NKVD officers who had remained hidden dynamited most of the buildings on the Khreshchatyk, the main street of the city, where German military and civil authorities had occupied most of the buildings; the buildings burned for days and 25,000 people were left homeless.” [Wikipedia]
Further destruction took place during the second Battle of Kiev in 1943.
Ian Robert Millard 
Hello! Regarding your observation about life not being black and white (with which I agree 100%) I would like to quote the famous Mark Twain:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Having said that, I will add: (1) You have to be sensitive, intelligent and broad-minded as Mark Twain was. (2) Most travellers (particularly since the days of mass tourism) are ignorant oafs only concerned with stuffing themselves with exotic food and/or buying silly souvenirs. (3) I met a lot of people who travelled extensively and did not learn anything, proving point 2.
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Claudius:
That of course is correct.
Even living in a foreign city does not necessarily mean that the expat learns much. It does depend on the individual. In fact, when I was living for a year in Almaty, Kazakhstan, I saw many examples of those who lived there but really were entirely in a UK/US/German expat bubble, and were only focussed on their narrow work and who socialized entirely with similar people. Even their food at home in Almaty came from a few expensive shops catering for expats. Americans and Germans especially were unwilling to eat anything much except expensive imported products they knew by name.
As for history, culture etc, most expats knew nothing except whatever cartoon history they had picked up from one-sided schooling etc.
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What you have said is very true and very sad. I believe people who are adventurous and willing to learn about other cultures are a minority. My father was a wonderful human being who always encouraged me to read and learn languages just for the sake of it. That is why he did not make fortune; although he was very successful in his trade (furniture making) he was not obsessed with making money and I inherited that trait.
I have a very good command of the English language and a very basic of French and Italian, however it is more than enough to read and understand 80/90% of the text. To master a language enables you to enter in a different dimension/world where you will meet some very nice people and others not nice at all, but, as a whole your life becomes richer and more exciting.
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