Morning music
On this day a year ago
Incidentally, reading about Cecil Parkinson in that blog post from a year ago, I looked up on Google Earth the street and house where he was born (and probably brought up): 4 Edward Street, Carnforth, Lancashire. I have rarely seen such a poor-looking street in the UK. To go from there to the Cabinet, as a Conservative MP at that, took some talent, whatever one may think of him otherwise. He was truly at least a spruce, if not an oak, of his own generation.
Margaret Thatcher was told of Parkinson’s sex scandal (his former secretary pregnant by him) by Parkinson himself. Despite that, she wanted him to become Foreign Secretary but he demurred and accepted a lesser post, though still in the Cabinet (but he felt impelled to resign when the scandal became public knowledge): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Parkinson.
It is not impossible to imagine that, had he accepted the FCO post, then not resigned in 1983, Parkinson might well have become Prime Minister eventually.
Times have certainly changed, when one looks at the tangled mess of sexual scandal, incompetence, and corruption around “Boris”-idiot’s tenure in office.
Parkinson was a relatively competent minister, whose achievements included, when Secretary of State for Transport from 1989, the initiation of the Crossrail project.
Apart from that, it strikes me how necessary it is for a politician, in the words of the Spice Girls, to “really really want” to become Prime Minister, if ambitious. A vague wish or preference is not enough.
David Davis had at least two chances to seize the Conservative Party leadership in the past decade, but was just not hungry enough in the end.
Likewise, after Chamberlain resigned in 1940 (after Dunkirk), Lord Halifax was the obvious successor, but at the meeting chaired by Chamberlain and attended by Churchill (and Brendan Bracken), Chamberlain spoke against Churchill as PM but Halifax then expressed what he claimed was his own unfitness to become PM (he was Foreign Secretary at the time).
Churchill at first kept silent (a tactic previously advised by Bracken) and then more or less crowned himself.
What a difference that made!
Had Halifax become Prime Minister, an armistice with the German Reich would have been agreed by Autumn 1940 if not before. Britain would therefore have become neutral, in effect, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union the following year. There would have been no London Blitz, no bombing of England, no later and terrible carpet bombing of Germany, no Atlantic War at sea, no Normandy landings, no years of rationing in the UK. Very likely, Germany would have destroyed the Soviet regime and toppled Stalin in or after 1941.
These things matter. Even when (as in the UK today) there is really one System “political class” split into two main and rather similar parties, it still matters which party is in power, and it also matters who exactly is Prime Minister.
More cultural vandalism
“The director of the Wellcome Collection, Melanie Keen, was appointed in 2019. A year later she pledged to be courageous in dealing with the most contentious items on display there.
The announcement was welcomed by some Twitter followers but attacked by several others. “An act of cultural vandalism to close without even having any idea of what will take its place,” wrote one.
“Is there no one who can get rid of these cultural vandals instead or does the rot go all the way to the top? Is this the prelude to whole museums closing because their collections aren’t woke enough?” another asked.“
[reported in the Guardian]
Yes, let’s indeed “get rid” of those vandals.
Incidentally, this is the “Melanie Keen” who has closed down the museum:
Wouldn’t you know?
“Melanie Keen (born 1967) is an arts professional and the director of the Wellcome Collection.[1] She has worked extensively in promoting the Black Arts Movement in the UK.[2]“
[Wikipedia].
In other words, an enemy of our culture, and of our history.
Tweets seen
Hard to know whether this is the start of another great upheaval in China or whether the protests will just be repressed, as they were in 1989.
In any event, seems that at least the more aware Chinese are against more “panicdemic” “lockdown” nonsense.
I myself opposed the UK equivalent in 2021-2022, openly opposing the facemask nonsense (rarely wearing a facemask, and doing so as carelessly as possible when forced to), not getting “vaccinated”, not taking “social distancing” at all seriously, and mocking the whole nonsense as much as possible, both in person and online. As for the ludicrous “Rule of Six”, invented by “Boris”-idiot, that never applied to me; by reason of my generally anti-social preferences, I was never in a situation with more than six people present during 2020-2022.
Tweets seen
Not all better, but many things were better. Above all, Britain was British.
Hard to know whether, or to what extent, this whole problem has been created by sheer incompetence, or whether it is deliberate, conditioning the masses to accept rationing. The plan may be to blame Putin; alternatively, to make the sort of claims acceptable to Greta Nut and the affluent eco-terrorists, i.e. that British people going without electrical power (etc) is somehow “saving the planet” (or whatever).
Migration-invasion— the situation in Ireland
Little Matt Hancock
Late afternoon music
Peeved
The dumbing-down of BBC Radio continues. Radio 3 this morning misdescribing Wagner’s Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin as, simply, the “Prelude“.
A small matter, yes, but a slip like that would not have happened 30 or even 20 years ago (though I concede that Jack de Manio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_de_Manio did nearly get the sack from the BBC Home Service (forerunner of Radio 4) in 1956 for mispronouncing the region of the River Niger [pron. “nee-zheer”] as “nigger“).
Late tweets
Meanwhile, the ultra-wealthy few are buying up land, eg in the UK. Particularly land in the prime agricultural counties. James Dyson is only one example. He has bought vast tracts of Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and other counties. Mostly in one loosely-connected group.
Just as the WEF says “you will own nothing, and be happy“, which is strange, or not so strange, when you see that the richest are multiplying their riches. Bezos, Musk, many others. That is why it is comforting when one realizes that those billionaires, some of whom own hundreds of billions of UK pounds or US dollars, are still subject to the Primal Karma of mankind that Buddha noted— old age, sickness, and death. Death is the Great Equalizer, and I found it oddly comforting when I read that the rather unpleasant Steve Jobs had snuffed it.
The conspiracy behind those billionaires (and of which they may well be unaware, in fact) does want the peoples of the Earth to be “happy“, in a sense. Not right now, before the worldwide government has been totally clamped down, but later. The reason is simple: “happy” (complacent, brainwashed) people do not revolt, do not even question. They will be given a hi-tech version of the “bread and circuses” that kept the plebs of Rome quiescent most of the time. Circuses? I mean such as I’m A Celebrity, Love Island, “reality” (unreality) shows of all sorts, increasingly vulgar, increasingly divorced from any actual reality. That, and also globalized televised sports spectaculars, such as the World Cup.
I await the next brave warrior who will take action.
I have been loving the scalded reaction to Musk’s new Twitter regime; not least, the reaction on Twitter itself. From the Jew-Zionists in particular. They call themselves, between themselves, “J-Twitter”. Now they fear that, not only will they be unable to repress the free speech of others but also that they themselves may be “cancelled”. Ha ha! “J-cancellation”!
Me…
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 