Morning music

Saturday quiz

Well, this week I scored 6/10, thus again trumping political journalist John Rentoul, who scored 5/10. I did not know the answers to questions 3, 5, 7, and 9 (though I should have got no. 9, had I thought about it).

Tweets seen

“Whoever supplies weapons wants war,” AfD leader in Thuringia against arming Kyiv.

Three-quarters of the residents of East German Thuringia oppose arms supplies to Ukraine; the right-wing Alternative for Germany may win the land elections in this land for the first time. The head of the regional branch of the AfD, Bjorn Höcke, demanded that Germany stop supplying weapons to Kyiv and organize negotiations.

“My grandparents told me what war is, so I say that this war must be ended as quickly as possible and at any cost,” Höcke said on Die Welt. He accused his opponent’s party, the CDU, of inciting the conflict. “The war rhetoric of the CDU will not lead to real progress,” “we need Germany as a peacekeeping power.”

He pointed out that Russia did not shy away from negotiations, results were achieved in Istanbul in 2022, but the West and Germany did not want them, and chose military supplies rather than diplomacy. “Whoever supplies the weapons does not want peace, he wants war,” Höcke concluded.”

“As many as 82 percent of Germans do not believe that Ukraine can defeat Russia with the support of the West.

IN AUGUST 2023, 70 PERCENT DOUBTED THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF THE CONFLICT FOR KYIV.

ONLY eight percent of Germans believe that Ukraine can win a confrontation with Russia thanks to Western weapons. This was shown by a survey commissioned by the German television station ZDF. Also: that 82 percent of respondents are skeptical about the possibility of Ukraine winning the conflict with the Russian Federation. ZDF indicated that in August of last year, the share of skeptics in Germany was 70 percent, and those who believed in a positive outcome for Kyiv were 21 percent.

The same survey showed that 42% of Germans surveyed believe that the West should provide more [humanitarian] aid to Ukraine.“

Good grief. Reminiscent of the 1960s spy-spoof TV series, Get Smart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Smart.

“Kiev and the West are tired of war and of each other.

What a small group of objective, but long-maligned observers in the West warned about for a long time, is now happening: Ukraine and the West are losing the war against Russia.

The strategy of using Ukraine to either isolate and slowly suffocate Russia or to defeat and degrade it in a proxy war is approaching its predictable disastrous end.”

As I have been saying on the blog (for the past 18 months) would happen.

That Milei character is quite obviously mentally disordered, and “they” are taking advantage of his mental state.

Good news for Russia (and Iran), inter alia; bad news for the major economies of the West, and perhaps for China.

Liz Truss and Woollyhead Trussbanger (Kwasi Kwarteng) as Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom. What does that say about where this poor country now is? (the replacement of Liz Truss by Sunak, the little Indian money-juggler, makes only a cosmetic difference). I know what I think.

“A Home Office Islamic Network aims to recruit Muslim staff and “influence policymakers” to support “Muslim needs”, a GB News investigation reveals. Leaked documents show the group of over 700 civil servants say they aim to “promote the recruitment, retention and progression of Muslim staff in the Home Office” and “influence policymakers so that policy is more inclusive of Muslim needs”. THE WHOLE CIVIL SERVICE ARE THE ENEMY WITHIN.”

To adapt and substitute the supposed words of Boris Savinkov re. non-Russians in the “Russian” Revolution, “Muslims, Jews…where are the English?!“

Look at most of the “alt-right” msm and/or social media “controlled opposition” types, the so-called “populists”, including those who make money, or try to make money, out of being pseudo-national and/or anti-Islam or anti-Islamist: the academic, Matt Goodwin, is a rising star of that tendency; others include the notorious Douglas Murray, Katie Hopkins, “Tommy Robinson”, Paul Golding and most of the “Britain First” crowd, and Anne Marie Waters of the now-defunct “For Britain” group. Then you have Farage, Tice, and their UKIP/Brexit Party/Reform UK parties.

They vary. Some are national figures with considerable public support, and are welcomed on msm platforms (e.g. Farage, and Matt Goodwin); others are marginal (e.g. Paul Golding of “Britain First”, Laurence Fox and his tiny Reclaim Party, and others). All, however, speak in favour of Israel, in favour of the UK Jewish lobby, and against any enemies (especially Islamist enemies) of Israel.

Most are also vehemently hostile to what they are pleased to call the “far right” (anyone social-national).

Look at the similar types overseas, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geert_Wilders#Views_on_Israel_and_Palestine.

As for me, I stand for the British people, for European humanity, and for European culture and civilization. I oppose any enemies of European culture and civilization.

One can see, though, which tendency or interest-group is constantly trying to get European Christendom to fight the Islamic world (and not just Islamism).

I have just seen this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Phillips_(TV_presenter).

“Alexandra Lesley Phillips (born 26 December 1983) is a British journalist and former politician. She served as a Brexit Party member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the South East England constituency from 2019 to 2020. She was the second candidate on the party’s list for the constituency after party leader Nigel Farage.^[1] Phillips was previously head of media at the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which she left in September 2016. She was a GB News presenter between June 2021 and September 2022. In February 2023, Phillips joined Reform UK.

Alexandra Lesley Phillips was born on 26 December 1983 in Gloucester.^[2] She has an older brother. She is Jewish.

On 2 August 2019, Phillips was selected as the Brexit Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) for Southampton Itchen.^[15] However, on 11 November 2019, the Brexit Party announced that it would not stand in incumbent Conservative seats.^[16] The following day, Phillips announced that she would not be voting in the general election as she had been “disenfranchised” by her party.^[17] Her term as MEP ended in January 2020 when the UK withdrew from the EU.^[18] In February 2023, she joined Reform UK (successor to the Brexit Party) as a policy adviser to party leader Richard Tice.^[19]

Prior to joining UKIP, Phillips had worked as a local journalist for ITV, and later BBC Wales.^[5]

Phillips presented a twice-weekly show on talkRADIO and is a contributor to The Daily Telegraph.^[20] She co-hosted an afternoon programme on GB News with Simon McCoy between June and August 2021.^[21][22] After McCoy moved to the breakfast show, she was given her own show, The Afternoon Agenda, in August 2021.^[23] She left GB News in September 2022 after her show was cancelled.^[24] In July 2023 Alex began presenting a Saturday afternoon programme on TalkTV. She now co hosts a show with Kevin O’Sullivan on talk tv daily.”

[Wikipedia]

Look at that one profile: UKIP, Brexit Party, Reform UK, ITV, BBC Wales, TalkRadio, GB News, Talk TV, and the Daily Telegraph.

Counting the rounds, I made that a total of 11, not 8.

Thus proving, once again, that at least a substantial minority of UK voters, and about half of Conservative Party voters, are absolutely brainless.

The only reason a slight majority think that life is better now than in the 1960s and 1970s is because a constant drip-feed of propaganda tells them so. Most of the respondents would have been born after 1980 or 1975, of course.

The 1970s in the UK were a lot better than most people today will believe, despite some (actually quite limited) industrial unrest etc.

As for the 1960s, I remember them well, having been born in 1956. Fairly OK in most respects (I should add that I spent the last three years of that decade in Australia (Mosman/Cremorne, in Sydney), and that was another world then, though the devil is always in the detail: those were —and are— among the better suburbs of the city.

By my use of Electoral Calculus [https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html], that comes out as leaving the Conservative Party with about 35 MPs (Lab 527, LibDem 48).

Looking at the above tracker graph, the Labour intended vote has been fairly stable (within parameters) for about a year or so, whereas the Conservative Party intended vote has steadily declined for what seems to have been most of the past year. They’re toast…

Were the Con percentage to decline even one point, to 18%, even without an increase in any of the other numbers, the number of Con MPs would reduce to only 28.

When you see that, and factor in the political intentions of those under 40, and under 30, and the fact that the Con core vote consists largely of the retired, indeed of those over 70, over 80, you can see that this really could spell the end of the Conservative Party.

In fact, even were the Conservative Party to retain 100, even 150, MPs, it would be all but irrelevant in a Commons with 450+ Labour MPs, and a Labour majority of maybe 300 or more. That would hit Con Party funding and ability to come back from the debacle.

I was just musing on such ideas as I carefully drove a few miles this morning on a rural A-road, its surfacing poor and dotted with troughs and potholes which one had to navigate around, as in some areas of Russia and Ukraine (or, in pre-EU-membership days, in Bulgaria, as I recall from 2001). The decline of Britain is seen even in mundane areas such as road maintenance.

Late tweets seen

How strange. The little Indian money-juggler did not see fit to “condemn” the slaughter, by the Israeli forces, of tens of thousands of women an d children in Gaza, nor the unprovoked attack by Israel on the diplomatic and consular offices of Iran in Syria, an attack on two sovereign states.

Like 90% of “British” politicians, if you want to call him that, Sunak is bought and paid for…

Late music