Category Archives: Reminiscences and Musings

Alt-Right, Boris Johnson, Brexit, daily blog, diary blog, Jewish lobby in UK, Paul Watson, Prison Planet, Reminiscences and Musings, society, The Great Replacement

Diary Blog, 30-31 May 2020

55 Comments

In the name of God, go!

No, I am not talking about the egregious Dominic Cummings. I have already, some time ago, blogged my views about him:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2020/01/03/dominic-cummings-a-government-of-dystopia-and-lunacy-posing-as-genius/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/les-eminences-grises-of-dystopia/

What I am talking about is this ridiculous Government-created panic, and its accompanying “lockdown”, shutdown, curfew and social nonsense. The “2 metre social distancing”, the shutdown of barbers, dentists, vets and other useful services; also, the pathetic facemask-wearers, the rabbits clapping like idiots every week (though not so much where I myself live); also, the toytown police (and their change from being protectors and crimefighters to being zookeepers, or guards in a dystopian, fake-communitarian open-air prison camp).

I am thoroughly sick of this whole and largely unnecessary nonsense, foisted upon a supine and useless public by an even less useful idiot posing as Prime Minister, a part-Jew public entertainer who is very obviously out of his depth in his present office.

I have just been trying to watch an episode of Inspector Morse, only to find it interrupted by the sort of advertisements common today, meaning a split-screen ad showing about 20 children, mostly non-European, howling some pop song and basically supporting both the lockdown/shutdown and the multikulti society from which the children have sprung.

As I have blogged previously, the unnecessary panic about the Coronavirus outbreak (more people in the UK were killed by “Hong Kong Flu” in 1968, without such measures taken, though I myself was at school in Australia at the time) has tested to destruction many long-held assumptions about UK society.

Tested and found wanting have been MPs, Parliament, the Government, the almost non-existent official Opposition, the police, the legal system, the Press and msm (especially the BBC).

Opinion polls seem to indicate that a sizeable proportion of the public, perhaps a majority, want the “lockdown” to continue, at least as far as not “allowing” (sending) people back to work in what used to be the normal way.

Why do so many people want to not “return to normal”? There are several aspects to this. We are told that the sole reason is because people are afraid that the “virus” will get them or their children. Really?

A child under 5 has about 1 chance in 20 million of dying from “Coronavirus” aka “Covid-19”; in fact, children and young people of any school or university age have virtually no chance of dying from “the virus”.

The msm has tried to brainwash the public into saying (as also happened in the AIDS panic of the 1980s) that “everyone is at risk” and/or “everyone has a equal chance of getting infected”. Well, it was certainly not true of HIV/AIDS (even heterosexual transmission was largely confined to non-Europeans, especially blacks), and it is not true of Coronavirus.

If the infected person shows no symptoms, it scarcely matters to that individual infected. The only issue is transmission to those at risk, which mainly means those over 70.

So far, even on the inflated figures produced by the NHS and Government, there have been (to put it harshly) “only” 38,000 deaths in the UK from or with “the virus”, and many in fact died from one of up to 4 other conditions. Even taking the statistics as they stand, it is only, roughly, 1 in about every 1,900-2,000 people resident in the UK.

For me, leaving aside the trashing of civil liberties etc, the bottom line is that a shutdown of the entire economy, or at least 80%-90% of the economy, cannot be sustained indefinitely. It cannot be sustained even for the time already spent, in fact.

Returning to why much of the public wants a continuation of “lockdown”, or a very gradual relaxation, I am afraid that I take a possibly cynical view, which however I think correct.

About 8.4 million employees are on “furlough” at time of writing, and are getting 80% of their pre-lockdown pay provided by the State. Some are also getting the remaining 20% topped-up by their employers.

When you take into account the costs of having a job (transport, clothing, lunches etc) this means that the furloughed employees are actually better-off than they are when working. They are getting the same income or more, but are spending far less, most shops, pubs etc being closed.

Admittedly, that would not apply to all employees, because of the cap imposed of £2,500 per month, but it would cover the vast majority.

Apart from the above, there is the point that, for many, this is like a holiday, albeit rather restricted. The roads have been empty, and are still relatively uncrowded; Nature has come back, and there are more birds visible and audible. There is a marked absence of drunken loutishness in some places, because the pubs and “clubs” (I mean those noisy crowded places many seem to like, not the Carlton or the Travellers) are closed.

People have few responsibilities at present if they are on furlough or other vacation. There is no need (or ability) to go to doctors, dentists, MOT garages, shops (except food shops) etc. No need (or ability) to make duty visits to relatives or others.

Barristers (as I once was) have no need to go to court (with some exceptions); vicars need not take church services or tend to their flock directly; shop staff etc need not and cannot sell; waitresses cannot and need not wait; doctors are doing far less; even the police have less to do (allowing them to cruise about like the militia in The Handmaid’s Tale), now that the drinking-holes are shut, householders sit at home (making burglary almost impossible) and everywhere else, almost, is closed, making bank or other robberies impossible.

If you add in the “self-employed” (real or nominal), who are also being covered up to a point, then the true figure on paid leave is probably somewhere around 9-10 million, about a third of the workforce as it was before this all happened.

Then you have to add in those many millions now “working from home”, many of whom have only a fraction of the work to do that they would have had before. They are on at least semi-holiday.

I do not know how many people are working more or less as before “Coronavirus”, but probably only about a third of the pre-virus workforce.

As others have noted, it is obviously the case that people working (a bit) from home, getting full pay and possibly high pay, who have large houses, pleasant gardens, maybe even swimming pools and tennis courts, are having a rather pleasant time, so long as their Waitrose or Ocado delivery of food and Chardonnay is made when required.

Those living in, say, small rented hovels, or rented council flats in large crowded cities, perhaps with small children, and so effectively imprisoned by this Government (supported by the useless and now Jewish-Zionist-controlled “Labour” Opposition), are in less pleasant circumstances.

However, many at least do not have to work in low-paid and boring jobs, because “furloughed”; even those who are unemployed are better-off than pre-Coronavirus, because the DWP is overwhelmed by new applications for unemployment and other benefits, has fewer staff available and has suspended almost all of its now-customary bullying and harrying activities.

In the circumstances, it is hardly a surprise that many want the “lockdown” to continue. That is even more so now that the more officious aspects of “lockdown” (eg the toytown police lecturing people doing nothing wrong, moving them on etc) are being relaxed as the public increasingly ignore the restrictions anyway. Soon, some more shops and beer gardens etc will re-open. There is little appetite for Britain’s typically crowded, unpleasant, expensive commute to a job that, for many, pays not too well anyway.

The bill, however, will be presented in due course…

Tweets seen

I would not usually repost anything by “Prison Planet” Watson, who is politically a complete waste of space, as well as a craven doormat for the Jewish lobby, but this (below) is worth seeing:

https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1265754061737021441?s=20

People are so funny, but so irritatingly thick! Look (below) at tweeter @mccarthylarry, who feels no (economic) pain. No, not yet. “Furlough” monies are being doled out, businesses propped up. Wait until companies start making millions redundant, wait until every day brings the fall of a hundred (including “iconic”) companies…

I said the same as Lord Sumption, before he did. People paid little attention to me. True, I was never on the Supreme Court. Having said that, Lord Sumption was on the Supreme Court bench, and until now he too has been ignored, and almost as much as me, Peter Hitchens and others who saw through the “virus” scare-panic.

Meanwhile, the economy is sliding fast

“Britain’s manufacturers are poised to make tens of thousands of workers redundant after a worse-than-expected slump in orders, prompted by the pandemic that has left many firms struggling to survive.

A survey by the manufacturers’ lobby group, Make UK, found that 25% of companies are already drawing up plans to cut jobs in the next six months. A further 45% say they are considering redundancies.

Only 30% said they expect to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic with all their staff on the payroll.” [The Guardian]

The Machine Stops

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52821993

More tweets seen

I wonder whether the msm talking head Sunday TV shows (Marr, Peston etc, if Peston has not yet been sacked) will talk much about the plainly sliding UK economy, or will it all be “lockdown”, Cummings, “second wave” (which may never come) and schools? The British talk about schools and education so much that you would think that schools and education were really rather good in the UK. Sadly, not so.

I have to agree.

“Protests” in USA

What is possible? Is anything possible?

I was watching the TV news showing the launch of the Elon Musk rocket. Musk is an interesting (though not necessarily “nice”) character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

What I saw on the TV led to musings about what is or is not possible in this world. Peter Hitchens was tweeting a day or two ago about an obscure story by E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52821993

That story was written in 1908 (repub. 1928) and seems to prefigure the Internet, email, Skype, and the atomic bomb, not to mention “pandemic”, “lockdown” and “social distancing”!

The story has been dramatized a few times, as here (below) for radio:

It is a truism that fiction often foretells fact in the sense of inventions, events etc. There are many examples. Jules Verne is often mentioned in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne

My own theory is that anything that the human mind can imagine can become physical or material reality. That is not to say that the later reality exactly matches the earlier thought, essay, drawing, or story.

Leonardo da Vinci suggested that there could be mechanical flying machines. He even made some detailed drawings. In reality, his machines could not have flown. What is important is not Leonardo’s drawings as “blueprints” but the fact that he had such ideas at all. His “planes”, “helicopters” and “parachutes” were “defective” in terms of 20thC or 21stC engineering viability, but what matters is that he had such ideas in the first place! And that is why Leonardo was a genius…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci#Engineering_and_inventions

The human mind is probably only at the very start of its evolution, in big-picture terms. If I think now, for example, that in the future human beings will be able to fly without machines, or kill by a look, or make plants grow by the power of thought, that is mere fancy or speculation today, but may be everyday reality at some point in the future. Why? Because I have thought it.

Of course, had he not the money to make real his ideas, Elon Musk would probably be written off as a crank, as were others in their day, such as Galileo, who thought the Earth spherical when almost the entire educational, “scientific” and political establishment (under the Church) and all of the population, pretty much, believed the opposite, the the Earth was flat.

Christopher Cockerell was such a “crank”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovercraft

The Wright brothers, too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers

and many others.

Germany 1945

A very interesting film (no audio) in colour, about Germany in 1945, after the defeat and fall of the Reich.

For me, the most interesting thing to see is the devastated state of some (most) of the German cities after the Allied bombing and Soviet bombardments. What a contrast to today! In fact, even by 1960, Germany was already rebuilding fast, most obviously in the Bundesrepublik (West Germany), but also in the DDR (East Germany).

Throughout history, civilizations have been destroyed, rebuilt, renewed, and in some cases vanished forever, even without leaving external ruins (one example is that of Sparta).

Thoughts such as these impelled me to blog on such themes last year:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/the-tide-is-coming-in-reflections-on-the-possible-end-of-our-present-civilization-and-what-might-follow/

The toytown police state gets tough

“As the government has started to ease restrictions – and the rules made so broad as to be effectively unenforceable – the police’s enforcement powers have been ramped up,” said the letter, seen exclusively by The Independent...The combination of increasingly vague police powers and heightened fines…” [The Independent]

Trafalgar Square

Several hundred blacks, half-castes and a few white “cucks” (to use the Americanism) are at time of writing in Trafalgar Square, in support of the black rioters and looters in the USA.

This pathetic demonstration (about 1 in every 20,000 of the London population, or 1 in about 100,000+ of the UK population is so ridiculous that one can only shake one’s head. On Twitter, it’s big…

Looking at tweets, there could be as many as 1,000 in Trafalgar Square, so make that 1 out of every 10,000 in the London area…

Once again, the disconnect between reality and Twitter, especially now that the screeching Jewish lobby has had most of the more thoughtful and interesting tweeters expelled. Well, what goes around comes around, as the Americans say…

Tweets seen

Below, a couple of tweets about Naomi Campbell and the latest in the “Prince” Andrew and Jews scandal. So the Jews bribed a black woman to ensnare white girls? Wait a minute! That’s just like “Nazi” propaganda! Surely that cannot be true? Oh no, wait…

My thoughts about the above opinion poll tweets: people are not judging on policy, because you could hardly put a razorblade between the “two main parties”, both of which (now that Corbyn has gone and the Jew-Zionist lobby is back in control) are under the same (((control))).

The voters are judging this Government of idiots on character grounds, really.

You cannot imagine a careerist like Keir Starmer getting numerous stray women pregnant, bunging some of them public money as well, in the manner of Boris-idiot. Likewise, I doubt that Starmer would drive hundreds of miles in contravention of his own semi-dictatorial “rules”, or drive through an area of the country replete with accident black-spots “in order to test his eyesight”! Neither would he tolerate an “adviser” who did that.

Not that I take the Cummings matter or petty scandal very seriously, because the “rules” are nonsensical anyway…but the public seem to take his breach and perceived hypocrisy very seriously indeed.

The point is, though, that without Cummings and his crew, Boris-idiot would have no policies at all, really. His own “ideas” are those of a boy of 15 (at best)— bridges across the Irish Sea, artificial islands with enormous airports on them, magic economic development plans that exist only in the clouds…

I cannot see Keir Starmer and “Labour” enthusing anyone, but Boris-idiot’s honeymoon period is already well and truly over. After the end of “lockdown”, and more seriously, “furlough” payments and business loans, we shall see where the economy is. In a pretty bad state, I am guessing. In a hole, quite possibly.

In such a situation, the people might be ready for a new direction…maybe some form of social national ideology will be able to capture the hearts and minds…

Peter Hitchens’ tweets today

All worth reading.

Music to soothe the savage breast…

Tweets seen

For once, Trump seems to be doing a few things right: attacking the nasty “antifa” idiots, and threatening Twitter, Facebook etc with accountability re. people denied access to their platforms.

Image

“Chancellor Rishi Sunak on Friday promised a “new collective national effort” to revive Britain’s economy, as ministers drew up plans for a big job creation scheme to address the spectre of mass unemployment.” [Financial Times]

https://www.ft.com/content/425f4baa-ab57-44a5-93ee-8a90a856789e

So having ruined the economy, the idea is to blame “the virus” (not the “lockdown” and shutdown) and then to launch a massive “make-work” project, probably at minimum wage.

Night music

Late entry…

https://twitter.com/Armen1anGroyper/status/1267238335438708736?s=20

Black rioters and looters —called “protesters” in the (((msm)))— attack and rob white people wherever they can find them. Americans call this a “chimp-out”…

https://www.rt.com/usa/490346-santa-monica-la-looting/

https://twitter.com/defnoodles/status/1267241301843427328?s=20

I used to own a copy of Gorky’s book (selected essays etc), The City of the Yellow Devil, about his visit to New York and other places in the USA. He was not entirely wrong. Here we see a society, a culture, which has fallen into gross materialism and which has all but forgotten its mainly white Northern European roots. Those at the bottom are excluded from most of the material benefits of the society and economy and, given a chance, they (mainly the or some of the blacks) seize what they can, unless stopped.

Below, a tweeter attacks the looters. Understandable, but this situation shows multiple flaws in the society as a whole, as well as the criminality of the looters.

Image
[above: America, the land of freedom…]

Hitler was right. Only some version of National Socialism, adapted for time and place, can save America now.

[above: America, land of freedom…]

America may be faced before very long with a choice between a kind of dictatorship and a kind of diffuse civil war and chaos. If so, let us hope that the values of white Northern European culture prevail in the end.

Read this. Read. This.

If you only click on one link in this blog post, make it this one:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/15/we-could-open-up-again-and-forget-the-whole-thing/

That report and interview should be required reading for all UK MPs, all Scottish MSPs, all Welsh AMs, all Northern Irish politicians. All msm journalists, TV presenters etc too.

Alison Chabloz, Alt-Right, Conservative Friends of Israel, daily blog, diary blog, free speech, historical, historical revisionism, Jewish lobby in UK, Nick Griffin, Reminiscences and Musings, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 29 May 2020, including Thoughts About Unity Mitford

5 Comments

Unity Mitford

Unity Mitford by William Acton.jpg

Thinking about Unity Mitford, who died 72 years ago yesterday, some aspects of her life struck me especially.

This, below, struck me: both re Adolf Hitler’s very open daily schedule…and the fact that Unity sat near him for 10 months before being invited to join him!

“She was obsessed with meeting Hitler, so she really set out to stalk him.

She set her mind on getting Hitler, and she discovered that Hitler’s movements could be ascertained. It’s one of the extraordinary things about Hitler’s daily life that he was so available to the public. You knew which café he’d be in, you knew which restaurant he’d be in, which hotel, and he would just go and meet people over sticky buns and cakes, and it was possible to meet him like that. And he was in the habit of eating in the Osteria Bavaria in Munich and she started sitting in the Osteria Bavaria every day. So he would have to come into the front part of the restaurant where there was this English girl.[4][5]

“After ten months, Hitler finally invited her to his table, where they talked for over 30 minutes, with Hitler picking up her bill.” [from Channel 4 documentary, Hitler’s British Girl, published in Wikipedia]

We often see “documentaries” (incredibly biased and basically Jewish-Zionist propaganda), or lying “history” in the “Lugenpresse/Judenpresse“, to the effect that Hitler was always afraid of assassination, took huge security measures etc, but here, even in such a film (on Channel 4, no less), the producers are so keen to traduce Unity Mitford that they forget to lie about Hitler himself, for once!

True, and after a number of failed assassination attempts, Hitler’s security was improved from the mid-1930s, and more so during the Second World War itself, but he himself was a fatalist, who believed both in Fate (Schicksal) and in his own personal fate and destiny.

Unlike Stalin, Hitler was not afraid of the people that he ruled or, rather, in Hitler’s case, led.

That snippet about how Unity Mitford met Hitler does show her extreme persistence: to sit in a cafe-restaurant every or almost every day for nearly a year in order to be in close proximity to Hitler shows a devotion which is very telling.

The fact that Hitler was able to let his whereabouts be known in advance to the public (and the regularity of his attendances in favoured places) shows that not only was Hitler unafraid of the people who put him into office, but that there were few who wanted to attack him. Here was an assassin’s dream target, someone who lets his whereabouts be known in advance, and who often goes to the same places day after day, yet sits safely amid the German people.

The few assassination attempts of later years were perpetrated by Jews and/or Communists and/or persons of disordered mind, until the British Intelligence organizations tried their hand in 1939 and during the War itself. They failed, though (typically).

What also struck me is the synchronistic nature of it all: Unity Valkyrie were her names given at birth, a birth which took place in the small Canadian town of Swastika!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika,_Ontario

One must remember that that birth occurred in August 1914, long before the world knew of Hitler, the NSDAP, or the Third Reich. Hitler himself volunteered, in that same month, to enlist in the List Regiment of the Bavarian Army, the First World War having started about 5 weeks before.

The Swastika, in 1914, was an esoteric symbol in more ways than one. Most people in Europe would have been ignorant of its existence. As for the town of that name, its naming is lost in the mists of history.

[above: Swastika, Ontario, as it is today and, below, as it was in 1918]

Incredibly, the settlement of Swastika, Ontario, was not named by Unity’s father, who had an interest in one of the gold mines situated there (though not the nearby one which made Harry Oakes, much later murdered in the Bahamas, one of the richest men on Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Oakes

Unity’s father was David Freeman-Mitford; his father had been a Wagnerian, and personally acquainted with both Richard Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Stewart_Chamberlain

Unity Mitford descended through the spheres to incarnate at Swastika and to be named Unity Valkyrie. In fact, her other name, Unity, also seems to me to be significant, symbolizing the union or alliance which might have been, but sadly never was, between two great empires, the British Empire and the new German Reich.

Every human being has personal attributes, personal flaws, characteristics arising or becoming manifest through their worldly ancestry, and the society and culture into which they incarnate. We must look beyond this to see the bigger picture.

Tweets seen today

This one made me laugh!

Reminds me of the “shopping riots” in England a decade ago. The trigger there was the “unfortunate” death of a black gangster in a “taxi” (gangster transport) at the hands of the London police. Soon thousands of (mainly) blacks and half-castes were roaming all over London stealing anything not nailed down, and burning down buildings at random.

The msm were careful to say “bands of white and black youths” because a few deracinated and useless white (ish) chavscums were there, amid the black mobs. As for “youths”, some were 40 or 50 years old (the Windrush generation? Just after that time?).

It is true that some of the American police are very forceful, and some are also trigger-happy (perhaps unsurprising now that many are trained by and in the manner of the Israel occupation forces “police”), but at the same time, the USA is very very different from the UK, something even those who holiday there fail to see (I myself am still nominally an attorney of the NY Bar, and in the past I lived in the USA on and off as well as travelling there on legal business —NJ, NY, SC and FLA). Some of its criminals are very vicious.

I like the photograph and the sentiment. As for the exact words, well “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, per Oscar Wilde, and Griffin did have the decency to use quotation marks…

[above: Britain’s toytown police deal with a serious sunbathing incident on the South Coast]
[cf. Britain’s new poundland KGB, as seen in the arrests of Alison Chabloz, the satirical singer-songwriter, most recently arrested and mishandled only a week ago; a dozen goons invaded her bedroom; she was held for 8 hours before being released on “police bail”, her telephones etc taken from her for technical snoop purposes]

I should say that, not only is Hitchens right, but that it is almost inevitable. The “British” population (in fact I would call only about 2/3 “British” anyway) have shown themselves to be serfs at heart. Also, a decade ago they accepted without question the perceived “need” (which we now see was no “need” at all) for the poor, disabled, and unemployed to be brutalized, upset, put into destitution and, in some cases, starved to death, and all because they were somehow responsible for the world banking crash…and how did the “British” people know that? Because a part-Jap Friends of Israel MP called Iain Dunce Duncan Smith, a fraudster, embezzler and freeloader, said so, backed up by two Friends of Israel part-Jews, David Cameron-Levita and George Osborne, who had both lied their way into the centre of government.

Hitchens right again. The faith that “the plebs” have in the Government is in a way touching, though also pathetic. The manufactured fear of “the virus” (that in fact kills only about 1 in 2,000 of the population…) has translated itself into that pathetic reliance on what “the authorities” say, whether the person in “authority” is Boris-idiot (posing, ludicrously, as Prime Minister), little Matt Hancock (former tea boy at the Bank of England, now posing as Health Secretary), or the local toytown police, cruising around telling people not to sunbathe, use parks, or even drive cars or ride motorcycles to enjoy a drive somewhere on the empty (emptied) roads .

Woke tweet…

Those so blind that they will not see! The city is burning for three days, yet CNN calls these ghastly black riots “protests in Minneapolis”!

The Protocols of Zion and the British aristocracy

The Protocols are often described (by Jew-Zionists or those working for them) as “a forgery”. It would be more accurate to describe them as “literary fantasy” based on a matrix of fact. For example:

“The aristocracy, who by right shared the labour of the working classes, were interested in the same being well-fed, healthy, and strong. We are interested in the opposite, i.e., in the degeneration of the Gentiles. Our strength lies in keeping the working man in perpetual want and impotence; because, by so doing, we retain him subject to our will and, in his own surroundings, he will never find either power or energy to stand up against us. Hunger will confer upon Capital more powerful rights over the labourer than ever the lawful power of the sovereign could confer upon the aristocracy.”
— Protocols; protocol 3.; Shanks’ translation

“Under our auspices the populace exterminated the aristocracy which had supported and guarded the people for its own benefit, which benefit is inseparable from the welfare of the populace. Nowadays, having destroyed the privileges of the aristocracy, the people fall under the yoke of cunning profiteers and upstarts.”
— Protocols; protocol 3.; Shanks’ translation

“It gave us the possibility among other things of playing the ace of trumps—namely, the abolition of privileges; in other words, the existence of the Gentile aristocracy, which was the only protection nations and countries had against ourselves. On the ruins of natural and hereditary aristocracy we built an aristocracy of our own on a plutocratic basis.”
— Protocols; protocol 1.; Shanks’ translation

Doesn’t that sound familiar? If it be said “but Britain (eg) still has an aristocracy“, my answer is “does it?“. What is called an aristocracy in the UK is in fact something fake, or 90% fake. Look at the “British aristocracy” and you find that most titles only go back to the first quarter of the 20th Century. Not to Richard the Lionheart. Not even Elizabeth I. Not even, the vast bulk of them, George III, nor even Victoria!

It is well-known that the majority of British hereditary titles date only from the 20th Century. Many were conferred as a result of bribery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maundy_Gregory#Selling_honours

Indeed, quite a few “aristocrats” in the UK today not only have a considerable admixture from the Americas, but even outright Jewish elements. One example is the family that own Highclere Castle, the place used in Downton Abbey. In fact, the old Lord Carnarvon, the 6th Earl, was rather proud of his part-Jew background (a quarter, but possibly half) and referred to it more than once in his amusing and sensationalist memoirs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Herbert,_6th_Earl_of_Carnarvon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert,_5th_Earl_of_Carnarvon#Family

Even leaving that aside, we see that the title goes back only to 1793 (though the family had lesser or other titles since the 17th Century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_of_Carnarvon#Earls_of_Carnarvon,_first_creation_(1628) ); and that family is older than most…

Take another example, the Duke of Westminster. The present Duke, one of the richest men in Britain, is the 7th Duke. The dukedom only goes back to 1874! The family did have titles before that date, but the first was only granted in 1622 and was merely a (bought for cash) baronetcy.

There is a Jewish element there too:

“The [6th] Duke of Westminster married Natalia Ayesha Phillips, the daughter of Lt-Col. Harold Pedro Joseph Phillips and his wife Georgina Wernher, in 1978.” [Wikipedia]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Westminster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Wernher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Wernher#Marriage_and_children

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgina_Kennard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Grosvenor,_6th_Duke_of_Westminster

Ironically, the 2nd Duke was obsessed with the Jewish infiltration into the aristocracy, a fact noted by his estranged Duchess in her autobiography:

“During the run-up to World War II, he supported various right-wing and anti-Semitic causes, including the Right Club. “His anti-Semitic rants were notorious,” according to a biographer of Coco Chanel.[15] In her book The Light of the Common Day, Lady Diana Cooper reminisces back to 1 September 1939. She and her husband, the prominent Conservative Duff Cooper, were lunching at London’s Savoy Grill with the Duke of Westminster. She recalls:[16] “when he [the Duke of Westminster] added that Hitler knew after all that we were his best friends, he set off the powder-magazine. “I hope,” Duff spat, “that by tomorrow he will know that we are his most implacable and remorseless enemies”. Next day “Bendor”, telephoning to a friend, said that if there was a war it would be entirely due to the Jews and Duff Cooper.”

“The Duke, known for his pro-German sympathies, was reportedly instrumental in influencing his former mistress, Coco Chanel, to use her association with Winston Churchill to broker a bilateral peace agreement between the British and the Nazis.[17] It was in late 1943 or early 1944 that Chanel and her current lover, Nazi espionage agent Baron Hans Gunther von Dinklage, undertook such an assignment. Code named “Operation Modellhut”, it was an attempt through the British Embassy in Madrid, via Chanel, to influence Churchill, and thereby persuade the British to negotiate a separate peace with Germany. This mission as planned ultimately met with failure, as Churchill had no interest.” [Wikipedia]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Grosvenor,_2nd_Duke_of_Westminster#Political_ideology

Tweets seen

It has died a death where I live, but then it never really got off the ground here anyway. What a stupid ritual…

Hitchens tweeting in support of the legal challenge to the probably unlawful “lockdown” toytown dictatorship. Glad to see that that fund has almost reached its goal (it’s about 80% attained), but the real challenge to the “lockdown” is already slowly happening, inasmuch as the English people (and Scottish and Welsh? the Scots seem a poor lot these days) are (as I predicted about 2 months ago) slowly simply ignoring the restrictions.

There is no mass march against the “lockdown” but public pressure, via gradual ignoring of the Boris-idiot “rules”, has now pressured the Government of idiots into giving way, though wanting to make it seem that Boris-idiot, his Cabinet of clowns and the toytown police are “really” still in charge.

That public pressure has come from more and more people waking up to the nonsense of “lockdown”, though the majority have still not thought through this: “hey, if only 1 person in every 2,000 dies from the virus, then I’m probably going to be OK even if I get infected“.

That of course is all the more true for anyone under 60. Small children have a —something like— 15 million to 1 chance of dying from it. Even people in their thirties have a tiny chance of dying from it. All the more so now that the virus has peaked (and may have peaked in early April!).

As a result of all this, people are not protesting, or marching, or even writing angry emails to “their” MPs. What they are doing is going out whenever they feel like it to wherever they want. The only problem is that hardly anything is open. If shops and cafes were open, millions would be flocking to them (until the money runs out, which for many may not be far away).

The Government (of idiots) is not in charge of anything. The whole thing is a gigantic con-trick.

“Britain’s policy on coronavirus has clearly been disastrous. The press might trumpet America’s 100,000 deaths. But America is a big country and, on the most sensible generalised measure of “excess deaths per million”, Britain’s rate is not just three times America’s but possibly the worst in the world, at 890 against American’s roughly 250. Even its deaths per million are higher than America’s. 

“Johnson and Hancock remain in denial over the apparent reasons for this, that thousands of Britons appear to have died after being ejected or turned away from NHS hospitals, either dumped into care homes or having vital operations postponed. Thousands more may have died at home, through being terrified by Johnson into not seeking hospital care at all.”

“This saga is approaching its end and there must be a reckoning. Perhaps some lives have been saved by lockdown. If so, it is strange that countries that rejected it, from Sweden to Taiwan, have seen a lower death rate than Britain. Meanwhile the longer lockdown lasts, the faster its cost rises towards the staggering total of £200bn. How many lives might that have saved? “

“With budget deficit now predicted to reach 17% of GDP, Britain now faces a double humiliation: the world’s highest coronavirus death rate and the worst resulting economic collapse. Johnson likes blood-curdling “worst-case scenarios”. Mine is that this will prove to be Britain’s most catastrophic and costly policy failure in modern times.“

I agree with all of that. Boris-idiot and “financial genius and future PM” Rishi Sunak will now march the plebs —for whom they have nothing but contempt— into the valley of the shadow, “ably” assisted by little Matt Hancock (if he survives in Cabinet).

And the idiots, some of them, will probably still be standing outside their homes, clapping…

Still, this ludicrous misgovernment might just lead to a social-national upsurge by 2022 and, by Grace of God, victory in the end.

Brexit, daily blog, Deadhead MPs, diary blog, environment, MPs, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 19 May 2020

15 Comments

Queen of the Desert

Saw a film on TV starring Nicole Kidman, Queen of the Desert [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_the_Desert_(film) ], about the English explorer and pioneering traveller, Gertrude Bell [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Bell]. She helped to draw, with others whom she got to know, such as Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence), the map of the Middle East as it was from the 1920s through to the present day, or at least until very recently.

The film was a quality production, but slow. It is more like, in the American phrase, an “art-house movie”, than anything likely to achieve box-office popularity. It was a major financial flop in 2015, I have now read.

I found the film quite compelling though, if you stick with it. At the end, rather moving.

Huw Merriman MP

In one of the ad breaks of the above-named film, I saw a few minutes of Sky News. A scruffy-looking MP hitherto unknown to me, Huw Merriman [Con, Bexhill and Battle], was speaking. I did not hear the whole of his interview, but what I did hear sounded rather dull. I looked him up on Wikipedia etc out of mere curiosity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huw_Merriman

I see that he attended a Secondary Modern school (I did not know that some were still operating under that title as late as the 1980s), and then Durham University. Called to the Bar sometime around 1995, he seems to have practised briefly in criminal law before leaving the practising Bar to become an employed lawyer somewhere. He worked as a salaried in-house lawyer for 17 years until elected to the very safe seat of Bexhill and Battle in 2015.

Here is what he says about himself:

https://www.huwmerriman.org.uk/about-huw-merriman

He appears, unsurprisingly, to have left out some far less creditable information about himself:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5885029/Married-Tory-MP-married-three-children-love-child-aide.html

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lawyer-sues-married-tory-who-bullied-her-over-affair-s3vghrqdfrb

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/12148274/Lawyer-accused-of-looking-for-cash-following-one-night-stand-with-Tory-MP.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/patronia-campbell-lawyer-who-claims-her-tory-mp-boss-husband-victimised-her-forced-to-deny-she-was-a6863491.html

https://www.eastbourneherald.co.uk/news/lawyer-drops-her-employment-tribunal-case-against-pevensey-and-herstmonceux-mp-1269343

He also seems to have been “economical with the truth” about his in-house lawyer role. He gives the impression that he was somehow appointed to “sort out” the mess at Lehman Brothers, after its collapse. Elsewhere though, I have read that he was working for Lehman Brothers itself, in earlier years. Maybe he was appointed to the latter role because of the former one. At any rate, and whatever the facts about that, his latter-day “consultancy” with the liquidators apparently pulled in (does it still?) £160,000 a year, according to the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-32891604

(also, disappointing that the BBC website thinks that “led” —past tense— is spelled “lead”. Still, that is where we are in these times of collapsing standards across the board).

On the face of it, Merriman does not seem to be a particularly nice person, and I see that his Parliamentary career has stalled. He started to climb the Government ladder in the 2010-2015 Parliament by being appointed PPS, latterly to the then Chancellor, Philip Hammond. However, he now holds no Government appointment:

“He supported the UK remaining within the European Union (EU) in the 2016 UK EU membership referendum. Merriman voted for then Prime Minister Theresa May‘s Brexit withdrawal agreement in early 2019. In the indicative votes held on 27 March, he voted for a referendum on the Brexit withdrawal agreement.[13][14]

On 12th April 2019, he voted for a People’s Vote, and also for a no deal Brexit.[15] He was the only MP to have voted for both options.” [Wikipedia]

Well, time to leave Merriman MP and return to more important matters.

Coronavirus

It is clear that the former epidemic/pandemic has tailed off now in the UK. We shall never know for sure, but it seems most likely that Coronavirus swept through unnoticed in the first month or two of 2020 (possibly even December 2019), but that most people had no symptoms, or mild symptoms. Others were probably misdiagnosed (“all clap now…”) before the new virus was publicized. The “lockdown” was unnecessary, apart from nasty “clubs”, pubs, mass entertainment and sporting events, and the Underground and buses (which never were stopped, though dim Sadiq Khan reduced the number of trains, and coaches on trains, so making infection far more likely!).

Now, the government of fools is busy slamming shut stable doors after the horses have bolted.

Prince Charles

The Prince of Wales always seems to go out of his way to make a fool of himself. I do not totally blame him. He thinks that he is somehow helping. He is not. Most people will just laugh (despite the seriousness of both the message and the situation behind it).

Naturally, the public see someone who is hugely privileged, vastly wealthy, and whose milieu is one of similarly-privileged parasites, to use a harsh word, and see no reason why they should pick for free, or for minimum wage, fruit and veg for farmers, many of whom are fairly affluent if not rather rich, and who receive large UK and EU subsidy payments as well.

Many may hurl insults such as “send Harry!” or even “get the Royal Mulatta to pick that cotton!”…or indeed might suggest that schools such as Eton College organize “Patriotic Picking” sessions…

This harvest crisis is typical of what happens when you have a government of fools incapable of organizing anything, and headed by a part-Jew public entertainer who is plainly out of his depth.

Tweets seen

“There is no evidence of a risk of societal breakdown, even if one takes Professor Ferguson’s disease modelling at face value. Spanish flu is estimated to have had an infection mortality rate two to three times higher than Covid-19 and to have killed around 200,000 people between 1918 and 1921, in a UK population two thirds its current size. Although it mainly attacked fit, economically active young people in their twenties and thirties, it came nowhere near to imperilling supply chains or provoking societal breakdown. Covid-19 attacks people with severe pre-existing vulnerabilities. Nearly nine tenths of the dead were aged 65 or over and likely to have been retired. The number of work days lost through non-mortal illness are fewer by far than days lost through the lockdown. At present, the real risk of societal breakdown comes from the lockdown, not the virus.” [Lord Sumption in The Spectator]

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/jonathan-sumption-a-response-to-my-critics-on-lockdown

But will the hysterics and aggressives of the msm, and the Twitter mob, listen to sense? I doubt it. They never have…

Nick Griffin

I do not agree with all that he writes, but I agree more than I disagree.

Image

5G and Coronavirus

I have no fixed view, and on the face of it there seems little to link a Chinese virus with Chinese mobile telephone technology, but look at this:

http://www.michaelwarden.net/It-Merits-a-closer-look.pdf?mc_cid=dc15af18fa&mc_eid=defb9b2c71

and this:

https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2020/05/18/guest-post-coronacontroversies/

Rishi Sunak

Ah. So now that “financial genius” Rishi Sunak says that things are about to get very tough indeed:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/19/chancellor-plays-down-hopes-of-quick-economic-recovery

What he fails to add is that most of the pain will have been because he, Boris-idiot and the rest of the crew shut down the UK economy unnecessarily, and have decided to continue much of that shutdown into the Autumn despite the fact that the Coronavirus has basically swept through and gone now.

“The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has warned that Britain is facing a “severe recession, the likes of which we haven’t seen” and lasting economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic.” [The Guardian, which apparently now employs people unaware that “Chancellor” is right, “chancellor” is not].

“Sunak had suggested as recently as last month that Britain could “bounce back” quickly thanks to the government’s support measures and the nation’s “fundamentally sound” economy prior to the crisis.” [The Guardian]

Can these people not see that companies, often long-established, are now falling dead to the ground all over the place. Today alone, I saw that Antler, the luggage company, founded in 1914, is gone, its remaining 200 workers (who were on furlough) being made redundant.

The very same day, a large energy company made 2,500 workers redundant.

These companies may have been struggling before, but have now been killed off, or in some cases mortally wounded, though they may survive until the “furlough” payments end. What is killing these companies, incidentally, is not “Coronavirus”, nor the “Covid-19 situation”, but the actions of this government in shutting down the economy and society for months, completely unnecessarily.

environment, historical, Reminiscences and Musings, Uncategorized, wildlife

Lost Doggerland, Some Historical Changes and Some Large-Scale Projects

4 Comments

In January of 2019, I wrote the following speculative piece:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/the-tide-is-coming-in-reflections-on-the-possible-end-of-our-present-civilization-and-what-might-follow/

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.

At the end of the last ice age, Britain formed the northwest corner of an icy continent. Warming climate exposed a vast continental shelf for humans to inhabit. Further warming and rising seas gradually flooded low-lying lands. Some 8,200 years ago, a catastrophic release of water from a North American glacial lake and a tsunami from a submarine landslide off Norway inundated whatever remained of Doggerland.https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

and see the very interesting series of maps below

[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).

SiwaPanorama

 

275682-Siwa_Oasis_Egypt

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.

By AlwaysUnite – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17865159]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project

Fact follows fiction (again): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Sea

Anwar Sadat was said to have been seriously interested in the Qattara idea, but when he was assassinated, the project was again mothballed.

Other projects I have seen or read about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundrop_Farms

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-05-15/port-augusta-sundrop-farms-sold-to-investment-fund-morrison-co/11108046

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.

Tamarix aphylla.jpg[above: tamarisk tree in the Negev Desert, Israel. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=293521]

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.

[Note: the above first appeared in my daily blog]

Update, 1 December 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/01/evidence-life-on-doggerland-after-devastating-tsunamis-study

Boris Johnson, daily blog, diary blog, elections, Party Politics, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 18 May 2020

17 Comments

A thought out of season

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…

Strange. He looked quite healthy quite recently…

More musing

In January of 2019, I wrote the following speculative piece:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/the-tide-is-coming-in-reflections-on-the-possible-end-of-our-present-civilization-and-what-might-follow/

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.

At the end of the last ice age, Britain formed the northwest corner of an icy continent. Warming climate exposed a vast continental shelf for humans to inhabit. Further warming and rising seas gradually flooded low-lying lands. Some 8,200 years ago, a catastrophic release of water from a North American glacial lake and a tsunami from a submarine landslide off Norway inundated whatever remained of Doggerland.https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

and see the very interesting series of maps below

[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).

SiwaPanorama

 

275682-Siwa_Oasis_Egypt

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.

By AlwaysUnite – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17865159]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project

Fact follows fiction (again): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Sea

Anwar Sadat was said to have been seriously interested in the Qattara idea, but when he was assassinated, the project was again mothballed.

Other projects I have seen or read about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundrop_Farms

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-05-15/port-augusta-sundrop-farms-sold-to-investment-fund-morrison-co/11108046

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.

Tamarix aphylla.jpg[above: tamarisk tree in the Negev Desert, Israel. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=293521]

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.

UK politics

The latest opinion poll:

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

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/02/stupid-arguments-for-drug-legalisation-examined-and-refuted.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8327641/Coronavirus-modelling-Professor-Neil-Ferguson-branded-mess-experts.html

and I like this…

Image

Night music

Boris Johnson, Conservative Friends of Israel, daily blog, diary blog, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, Party Politics, Reminiscences and Musings, society, The Great Replacement, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 11-12 May 2020

21 Comments

Boris-idiot and the Chinese virus

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!

Yes?

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]:

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

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

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…

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.

Evening foray

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

Interesting tweet below, too!

and this (below):

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.

“Furlough” scheme

The furlough payments scheme “should be extended”, it is said:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/12/extend-furlough-scheme-or-face-spiralling-job-losses-rishi-sunak-told

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]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/11/coronavirus-no-longer-epidemic-uk-oxford-study-finds-cases-falling/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr

Edwina Currie

Ghastly old Jewess Edwina Currie has apparently been on daytime TV, supporting the Government’s “policy” on “lockdown” etc. Poor Government!

https://twitter.com/lozhockers/status/1260106322701410304?s=20

https://twitter.com/BizPaul/status/1260106981609820161?s=20

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.

Ilustracja

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.

Tweets seen

“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.

https://www.cambridgestudents.cam.ac.uk/your-course/graduation-and-what-next/cambridge-ma

What a farce…

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.

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.

The “Great Replacement” continues…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8309529/Joy-52-migrants-saved-languishing-Greek-camps-flown-UK-start-afresh.html

More Hitchens tweets

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.

Rishi Sunak and furlough

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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52634759

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”…

Image

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.

 

daily blog, diary blog, free speech, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 25 April 2020

Leave a comment

Coronavirus

It now seems to be accepted that, as I myself suspected some time ago, Coronavirus may have swept through the UK and particularly the London area as long ago as January:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8250371/How-people-REALLY-caught-coronavirus.html

There is now a plausible argument that as many as 5 million people in the London area are, or have been, infected. So far, about 5,000 have died of or with the virus. 1 in every 1,000 of the infected population.

The above facts make a nonsense of “lockdown”, as suspected. The entire economy and society has been closed down because of a likely one in a thousand chance of being killed (which probably would happen anyway, “lockdown” or no “lockdown”).

That is a thousand times greater than the chance of being struck by lightning, and is quite a high probability for mathematicians, but for those of us in the real world is a rather small chance, though admittedly far from de minimis.

No-one seriously suggests that Coronavirus is not a serious public health emergency, but it has been hugely overblown, and regarded like the Black Death or something similar.

http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jan/14/mortality-statistics-causes-death-england-wales-2009

The Government and its staff insist that it is only because of the “lockdown” that Britain has “wrestled the infection figures down” to the point where the reproduction number (RO) is below one, meaning that the virus will now decline inexorably to near zero. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8255677/Chris-Whitty-reveals-UKs-reproduction-number-dropped-1.html

Nonsense. “Lockdown” is all but irrelevant. A leading expert, an Israeli, has just recently said that any measures taken in various countries are close to irrelevant to the ultimate outcome. That seems to accord with what has happened in countries around the world.

The latest “plan” from little Matt Hancock is for people to be “allowed” to meet up to 10 specified others outside their own households! Only a cretin of the Hancock sort could come up with a “plan” so impossible to make work! Who will enforce this “plan”? The whole thing is ridiculous.

Someone like G.K. Chesterton would have fun with this “plan”, and probably write an amusing short story about it.

Meanwhile, in the real world, people are (judging by what I saw on my local roads yesterday) all but ignoring the “lockdown”. Plenty of traffic compared to a couple of weeks ago.

I hope that this episode has taught the increasingly arrogant Common Purpose-infected police a lesson, to wit that they police by consent in this country. People (misinformed, brainwashed, so be it) consented at first to the “lockdown”, but more and more are waking up to the fact that Coronavirus is almost yesterday’s news.

Most people now understand that, especially if they are under 70, they are not going to get Coronavirus or die from it, and that, if they are under 40, there is every chance that, even if they are infected, they will be totally unaware of the fact.

Those at high(er) risk are known: non-Europeans; inhabitants of “hotspots” such as London, West Midlands etc; older persons (esp. over 70); persons with other serious health problems.

The chance of getting it and being hospitalized and then dying is probably not even one in a thousand overall. For white people under 40 it is close to zero.

Tweets

(because Douglas Murray has not worked out, or been told, what the Jewish/NWO lobby wants him to say…)

Below, a Peter Hitchens tweet which echoes some of what I have been saying about Boris-idiot for years:

Alarming, that “Shannon” cannot see that this absurd and petty-tyrannical “lockdown” breaches “our rights“! A non-European, it seems; with where is she comparing the UK in human rights terms? Some place in Asia? North Korea? Also, “aspiring journalist”. Well, looking at the standards of journalism now, plummeting even in the national msm, I am hardly shocked. Looking at her other tweets, she seems well-meaning but, frankly put, not the brightest. Talks about “uni” and her “dissertation” (leading to a “doctorate”, presumably) yet mixes up “their” and “there” in some tweets. A couple of yet other tweets from this person, below:

https://twitter.com/shannonbammj/status/1242235128249794562?s=20

In other words, unless a political chancer like Boris-idiot gives you permission to leave your houses, stay effectively under house arrest, because “you are probably supposed to stay inside.” She obviously has no real idea what longstanding British civil rights are…and there are millions like her in the UK now, millions…

A sign of the times…

More tweets

Speaking personally, I keep to the “Government lockdown advice” not because it has any legitimacy (or legality, arguably), nor because I am afraid of being fined (the police would never be able to catch me for anything anyway), but simply because the libraries, bookshops, charity shops, cafes etc are all shut. Even the barber. In short, apart from the nearest supermarket (about a mile away), the nearest M&S (ditto) and the nearest village shop (a mile or so in the other direction), I have nowhere to go unless you count a monthly visit to a Boots and a weekly call-in to get a few gallons of fuel.

As for exercise, I have not done any serious exercise for nearly 20 years, and it is even longer since I swam 90 lengths (nearly 2 miles) without a pause, or trekked up the mountains of the Tien Shan in summer heat and winter snow. So I do not go out to exercise.

I am, in a word, the perfect “lockdown” citizen, without even wishing so to be!

More evidence that the “lockdown” in the UK is a pointless exercise that is trashing the economy (without which there will be no NHS, by the way). Still, “keep clapping” (nein danke!). As a matter of fact, it seems to me that this whole “clapathon” nonsense is basically the public services applauding themselves, and in some cases unmeritoriously.

https://twitter.com/hale_kari/status/1253998909921394688?s=20

https://twitter.com/hector_drummond/status/1253818097976389637?s=20

https://twitter.com/CherylBoruszko/status/1253965489467949057?s=20

Linguistic “hate”

I wish that people brainwashed by American msm culture would at least stick to tried and true English English. In particular, I see many tweets today on the subject of pasta, talking about people “hating on penne”. THERE IS NO “on“! “Hating penne”— good. “Not hating penne”— also good, BUT NO “on“, either way!

What makes it worse is that I would be prepared to bet that 90% of these miscreants have never visited, let alone lived in, the USA. They have no excuse! If I, once married to an American, once nearly married to another, who lived on and off in New Jersey for 3+ years, who repeatedly visited and/or worked in Florida and South Carolina, and who is still nominally a member of the New York Bar, do not say “hating on…“, then someone who has never left Essex, Brighton, or London (mostly London, judging from Twitter) has no excuse!

While I am on the same (perhaps minor) sort of subject, those places where you can embark on a train are railway or at least rail stations, not “train stations”! I first heard “train station” in London in or about 1990, from a West Indian woman. Since then, it has invaded and conquered the BBC, Sky, the print msm…Even persons pretending to education use it, sometimes. No…

“Hating railway stations” = OK (though puzzling), “hating on train stations“= not OK.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles – Transporting the Führer | Mark Felton

Back to the present “lockdown” nonsense

That, Mr. Hitchens, does not wash. It is for those who laid down the “rules” and the stupid Coronavirus Act 2020 to prove, via successful prosecutions, that one or both are lawful. The 17thC-19thC freedoms which Hitchens supports would never have emerged had the people of those times always waited for the State to be challenged in the courts.

I have not read all of the law recently passed, but I doubt that “incitement” to break it is itself an offence anyway.

The real reason not to “incite” breaking the new petty tyranny law is, simply, that few would attend a demonstration. Demonstrations and marches are almost always a waste of time and effort. “What would happen if you held a demo, and no-one came?” There is your problem, the spinelessness of the present UK population.

Oh dear (see below): I disagree with Hitchens again. “House prices are the true measure of inflation“? That’s nonsense.

From 1983 until 2000, people buying houses on mortgages got a completely unjustified tax break: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_interest_relief_at_source

That was a government giveaway; the same has been true of other more recent incentives to buy houses, eg relief for buy-to-let parasites. The result? Absurd house price inflation. If I lived in a house in London valued in 1980 at £100,000, which is now (or was in 2019) valued at £4 million, that is not a genuine measure of inflation but an artificially-fanned conflagration of inflation. House price increase— 40x in 40 years, in a society where pay has, on average, increased by, at most, 10x, and for most people maybe 5x.

The price of, say, retailed food, has also increased by maybe 5x in the same period. Wine that was £2 a bottle in 1980 is about £8 or £10 now.

Hitchens is very up the creek here, I fear.

After agreeing with many of Hitchens’ recent tweets, I am now in disagreement over some things…

“Rich” is indefinite, of course, but I do not think that anyone who has an overinflated house “worth” a couple of million can be described as anything but at least somewhat rich…(a thought dictated by my seeing on Rightmove a house for sale in the little crescent off Reigate Hill, Surrey, where my parents lived in the early 1980s. £1.25M! Ridiculous).

Yes, if the owner sells his one million pound house, he needs to buy another. Or does he? Someone with a million pounds has options, such as buying a house in a cheaper part of the UK (a million-pound house in Surrey or London can be replaced for as little as £300,000 in many quite decent parts of England or Wales. Or the possessor of a million pounds can buy a luxury yacht for, say, £250,000, live aboard and still have £750,000 to fund the fun in the Med, Caribbean etc.

Again, see below, it seems to me that Hitchens is, to some extent, up the creek here:

Most people with money (beyond some low level) in the UK inherited their money, they did not, primarily, earn it. Much of that is real property, or proceeds of sale thereof, that gets passed down. There are exceptions, and from 1945-1989 (to pick an end-date) quite a few, but these days, few really make much money actually working, even if that work is (or so the public think) lucrative, say at the Bar. Hitchens, as often noted, is here in his beloved 1950s rather than in the Britain of 2020.

I do, however, agree with Hitchens here (below):

More tweets

Here, below, the authentic voice of the inner London (Islington) “radical”, begging for “authority” to “step in” etc, while thinking herself almost revolutionary…

https://twitter.com/agirlcalledlina/status/1254004649109176320?s=20

Note the language: Allison Pearson, the columnist, as “a danger”. A “danger” to what? A constipated and completely pseudo-socialist view of society?

“Lina” is right about another of her targets, Priti Patel, though. What a thick plank she is! Home Secretary, no less, in the Government of Fools.

Here’s another “socialist” poseur, who thinks that he is terribly clever (it seems), one John Crace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crace_(writer)

Time was when the Guardian would have had something to say about the complete trashing of the rights of the British public, about their having been corralled at home because the advisers of a government of total incompetents thought that the Black Death was about to arrive. But no; these days, the Guardian’s unimpressive scribblers prefer to tweet that people who have woken up to the absurdity of State-imposed “lockdown” have “a single brain cell” for not complying (any longer) with the continuation of the patently ridiculous mass house arrest imposed. Time was…

Thus we see, in part, why “Guardian” views are just ignored these days, and we also see why, in part, the Labour Party is all but finished.

One of the few pleasant aspects of the manufactured “crisis” is that little Greta Nut is no more to be seen in the newspapers. She or those behind her made a brave attempt to piggyback on the virus news agenda, by claiming that Greta “showed symptoms” of Coronavirus. Sure she did…A Scandinavian, aged 17. What were the symptoms? A-tishoo? Twice?

Actually, I have to amend the above paragraph, because I saw this in the Guardian as I wrote: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/22/earth-day-greta-thunberg-calls-for-new-path-after-pandemic

“If one single virus can destroy economies in a couple of weeks, it shows we are not thinking long-term and taking risks into account.” [Greta Thunberg, or her “advisers”]. Has she never heard of the Black Death, the Plague etc?

I think that her 15 mins of fame must be nearly at an end.

Here is another brave attempt to retain relevance:

Claire Fox, one time Revolutionary Communist, now turned “libertarian”, briefly Brexit Party MEP (April 2019-January 2020). An odd woman from an odd (and rather suspicious) political or ideological background.

animal welfare, Defence, environment, historical, historical revisionism, Jewish lobby in UK, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Uncategorized, wildlife

If Only “The War” Had Never Happened

1 Comment

I happened to see the second tweet below, the one showcasing an opinion poll from November 1947:

You see, here we are 73 years later, and the Jewish lobby with the compliant msm are constantly putting forward the idea that the 1930s were backward, poor, basically terrible, but that “the war” changed all that. In reality, the latter part of the 1930s was a time of general economic and social advance.

Looking mainly at the UK, the second part of the 1930s was a time when, at least in the South and Midlands, there were job opportunities, new towns and roads being constructed, air routes being laid out, both across Europe and, via Imperial Airways etc, worldwide, using safe and comfortable flying boats.

Across the South of England, people were moving into the detached and semi-detached suburban housing still considered desirable property today, 80-90 years later.

More than that. Advanced thinkers were already laying the intellectual foundations for the Welfare State: decent public housing, a National Health Service etc.

Then came the war. It has been said that, under strict WW2 rationing, perhaps as much as a quarter of the UK population was actually better-fed than it had been in the 1930s, an indication of the social inequality rampant before the war. However, in general, the war impoverished the whole nation (how could it not?). Britain suffered under rationing of various types until the mid-1950s! There is no doubt that poverty and indeed inequality would overall have been ameliorated quicker had the war not “frozen” the social situation.

Before 1939, Britain was taking steps to grant independence to the colonies. The White colonies had already achieved Dominion status. The colonies of black Africa and elsewhere might have been given independence later but on a more secure basis, after sufficient Africans (etc) had achieved the stature capable of running advanced societies and economies. Sadly, that never happened.

“The War”, as UK people still call WW2, was disastrous for most of the peoples, animals, birds etc of the world. Environmental degradation today continues apace, a result, ultimately, of the corruption and inefficiency of the “independent” states formed after WW2.

The peoples of the former colonies have suffered wars, civil wars, banditry, rapacious officialdom, you name it. All because of premature decolonization. Not only in the former British Empire, which attained its greatest territorial extent after the First World War, in 1918. About a third of the world was under British control at that time. Also, there were the colonies of the other European states in Africa and elsewhere, those of France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and the former German colonies (South West Africa, Tanganyika).

How much better a world would we now have were those formerly colonized lands still under European rule, or ruled in collaboration with a large enough and cultured enough African elite built up by the colonial powers over time …Look at Rhodesia up to 1979, and then its decrepit successor-state, Zimbabwe…

This is not just a question for the UK. It is a problem, historical and contemporary, for the world.

In Europe, the UK (and France) might have not given the Poles the worthless “guarantees” of 1939, which led the Poles to imagine that Britain and France would actually fight for Poland. Never happened.

Likewise, after the Fall of France in 1940, Britain might have secured an honourable armistice with the German Reich, so saving the peoples of Western and Central Europe from the massive destruction caused, mainly, by the Allied and Soviet forces during, again mainly, 1941-45. It would also have meant no Soviet takeover of the East and most of the Centre of Europe by Stalin’s Soviet Union in the mid-1940s.

We hear much (much too much) of the Jews, who were, prior to WW2, being allowed to emigrate from Germany and its allied or vassal states. Indeed, the Germans were glad to be rid of them. Well, had there been an armistice in 1940, that emigration would have continued: to the USA, Australia, Palestine etc.

Terrorism after WW2 was a product of the terrorists or “guerrillas” during that war, both those trained and funded by the shambolic British organization, SOE, and by the Soviet Union (the “partisans”). Most postwar “terrorism” from 1945 through to recent times can be traced back readily enough to British, American and Soviet sources.

Had “the War” (in the West) never happened, or been stopped in its tracks in 1940, the Soviet Union would probably have collapsed by 1942, there would have been no massive destruction by Soviet forces (or by the UK/USA air fleets) in the Europe of 1941-45, no Cold War, no Berlin Wall, no East-West proxy wars. The Israeli state and the arrogant Arab and Iranian oil states would have all either been strangled at birth, or kept on a tight rein.

In Britain itself, the neglected historian Correlli Barnett [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlli_Barnett] has made the point that, because of Britain’s having been bled dry by the War, it could not do more than one, or at most two, of its three main policy aims after 1945:

  • keep the Empire;
  • regenerate UK industry and commerce;
  • introduce a Welfare state.

In the end, Britain tried to do all three, but could not fully succeed in any, eventually almost abandoning the Empire and its remnants.

If only there had been no “War”, or a war lasting only a year…

If only.

Alison Chabloz, Alison Chabloz, Campaign Against AntiSemitism, daily blog, diary blog, free speech, historical, historical revisionism, Ian Millard, Jewish lobby in UK, Reminiscences and Musings, Russia and Russian relations, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 8 April 2020

9 Comments

An interesting video, worth watching:

This video is not merely about vaccination (nb. I myself am not an “anti-vaxxer”, by any means), but about large-scale transnational changes taking place around us.

A few basic thoughts I have had over the years about a possible “33-year cycle”

1923: seeds of WW2, as in Italy…the March on Rome (late Oct. 1922) and Mussolini asked to become Prime Minister (October/November 1922); the invasion of Corfu (1923) ; Russian Empire becomes the Soviet Union on 30 December 1922; in Germany, the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923; hyperinflation across Germany (1923, though inflation in Germany had been increasing from 1921).

1956: Suez Crisis, when Israel joined with UK and France against Nasser; this was the start of the Arab/West conflict in the modern era; Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denouncing Stalinism (in which he was himself one of the worst offenders), leading to the Thaw, and eventually (not in a straight line) the total collapse of Sovietism; also, the first big rebellion of the satellites, the 1956 Hungarian Uprising; final end of WW2 rationing in the UK and start of consumerist UK in 1955-56; [and my own birth];

1989: the fall of all kinds of socialism and even social democracy worldwide, inc. effective fall of the Soviet Union (officially 1991), fall of Berlin Wall, Chinese transition to full capitalism behind “Communist” facade; Cuba becomes effectively private enterprise after 1989; also, the NWO/Israeli attack on the powerful states of the Arab world starts in Iraq; in the UK, the end of Thatcher’s rule leads to Labour Party abandonment of “socialism” even in its party constitution;
Also, George Bush snr. proclaims the NWO openly in early 1990;

2022: [personal note: I shall be 66 on 2 September 2022]

It will be noted that these years also link themes: 20thC socialism, the Arab/Muslim v. “West” situation etc.

Our companion animals

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/apr/08/sanity-stability-stress-relief-why-pets-important

A few of today’s tweets

Let’s start with a typical Twitter conformist, tweeting typically —and typically meaninglessly (the police who ride around in jeeps and cruise up and down empty motorways, or fly drones over national parks, are of course not “putting their lives on the line”):

I just noticed that this odd-looking creature has no less than 551,000 Twitter followers. She must be one of the ever-growing mob of “celebrities” and the temporarily famous.

Ah, God bless Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Spraggan  Seems that she is a lesbian singer who nearly won the TV talent contest, X Factor, in 2012. I myself had never heard of her, but that is not her fault; pop singers and talent shows are not my milieu.

So what other tweets are being sent out today?

Sweden has not had a “lockdown” so far, and it looks as if it will not have one. It has also, as far as I know, not had a Swedish equivalent of Britain’s “clap for the NHS” either. Not that most nurses and doctors (etc) in the NHS do not “deserve” a clap (and a decent pay rise) for their valuable work, but for the virtue-signallers of Twitter what seems to matter is the almost enforced “me-too-ism” (cf. Poppy Day and its surrounds).

https://www.thelocal.se/20200228/coronavirus-the-everyday-precautions-to-take-if-youre-in-sweden

Hitchens is of course right here. The economy of the UK, of the EU, of much of the world, cannot in fact be shut down indefinitely without almost everyone in this country starving to death eventually. A “lockdown” must of necessity be temporary. The first question is “how temporary?”

https://twitter.com/RafiBSingh/status/1247644182803558402?s=20

https://twitter.com/PaulThomason1/status/1247452640688181250?s=20

The problem with comparing the Coronavirus situation in the UK to that obtaining in USA, Sweden, Italy, China etc is that

  • every country has different demographics, lifestyles, transport, health services etc;
  • every country is collecting statistics differently (e.g. as to what is a “Coronavirus” death in the first place): to take a reductio ad absurdum example, if someone has flu and Coronavirus, is his/her death from Coronavirus or simply with Coronavirus? What about if someone has Coronavirus, feels unwell and, perhaps even as a result, crashes his/her car and dies?;
  • every country has a different level of testing in place. Some test only those in hospital, some test medical staff, some (e.g. the UK until now at least) test hardly anyone.

The result is that, in looking at “the statistics”, we are comparing apples and oranges.

https://twitter.com/Catholic76/status/1247575479638507520?s=20

Is the UK a “free country” any more?

Silly question (of course it isn’t).

First of all we had all the “race relations”, “community relations” etc laws, then came the crackdown on other freedoms, including Internet freedoms, mostly at the behest of the Jewish lobby. Now the System is experimenting to see how far can it go in restricting quite ordinary daily activity, such as a motorcyclist going for a spin, or a family walking across the Derbyshire moors. The Coronavirus is being used as a fine cover story for a dry run for total System tyranny (though the Coronavirus situation iself is bad enough, of course). The mass media have ceased even to try to question government policy (as was also seen throughout the 2010-2019 “austerity” repression. Same now:

https://twitter.com/meemstd/status/1247799322676056066?s=20

The Underground travellers (who probably have little choice) being blamed, impliedly, for crowding the trains, when, as we have seen, the trains are crowded because people like NHS staff still need to travel, and because that hopeless little Pakistani, Sadiq Khan, reduced the number of trains being run.

Dictatorships and tyrannies have had sycophant newspapers for a couple of hundred years, radio since about 1920, TV stations since (for this purpose) the 1950s. A new element is the online mob, particularly on Twitter; happy to be slaves of the System if they can hate the targeted dissenters.

Idiot Corner…

https://www.thejc.com/news/world/direct-links-between-rise-in-antisemitism-in-germany-and-spread-of-coronavirus-says-commissioner-1.498931

In view of the fact that North West London is a major “hotspot” for Coronavirus, as are parts of Paris and certain urban parts of Israel, it might be more accurate to say that the spread of this virus comes not from “antisemitism” but from a quite different direction…

“Always look on the bright side of Life”…

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/08/jewish-chronicle-and-jewish-news-to-be-liquidated-and-staff-laid-off

It seems that quite a few non-Jews (and even some non-tribal Jews) are not too sad to see the end of at least one Jewish (Zionist) lobby outlet!

https://twitter.com/simonmaginn/status/1247884431622148101?s=20

https://twitter.com/SOCdem55/status/1247887914710601729?s=20

Oh, this is great! Faux-“revolutionary” scribbler (and part-Jew) Owen Jones is crying about the Jewish Chronicle closing down!

I know! Let’s all “clap for the Chronicle”! When the clocks chime 25, tonight…

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/01/04/a-brief-word-about-owen-jones/

Ha ha!

Imagine if I hit the Euromillions and put in to the administrators or eventual liquidators the only bid for whatever is left of the Jewish Chronicle! Ha ha! I wonder what I could put on the front page once I become the new proprietor? Something historical?

JewQuarterVienna1913

I could even have a section devoted to historical revision. Alison Chabloz writes nicely…

Maybe Pollard would agree to stay on as Editor (under suitable supervision and control, of course…), if I were to make him an offer he would be unable to refuse…

I just thought of another good aspect to the Jewish Chronicle closing down: Stephen Applebaum, Twitter troll (who secretly, using pseudonyms, trolled quite a few anti-Zionists, mostly women, with equally horrible Stephen Silverman and other “Campaign Against Antisemitism” bastards), will now find it even harder to pose as a soi-disant “film critic”. As far as I know, the Jewish Chronicle has been the only newspaper to print his occasional reviews for years.

(“@grubstreetsteve” is his present personal Twitter account, along with “@rattus2384”).

Ha ha!

ds3

It even looks like Pollard! But if the cap fits, Applebaum too…

Quite a few Jew scribblers —including several connected with the Jewish Chronicle—enjoyed my being disbarred in 2016 (no doubt in ignorance of the fact that I had in any case ceased active Bar practice in 2007-2008). Not all will now lose their jobs, livelihoods, maybe even houses and flats, but some will. As for the rest, their time will come.

Example:

“A sad day“…not for me! Bye!…

Ha ha! Just what I needed on a day like this (a boring day, and me living under a “Conservative” pseudo-communitarian ZOG semi-dictatorship)! A boost like no other! I begin to see, in minor key, why people always said that Saddam Hussein was never so happy as when his enemies were being killed off! Well, some of mine are not being killed off, just losing jobs etc, but in times like these, one must take one’s pleasures where one can.

I still like the idea of winning the Euromillions jackpot and then buying the rump of the Jewish Chronicle! I could staff it with anti-Zionist Jews, the ones the Zionist Jews hate: Gilad Atzmon could do the show business stuff, while the commentator-at-large might be…hm, let’s see…Mira bar Hillel!

Coronavirus view from Israel

“Israeli virologist urges world leaders to calm public, slams ‘unnecessary panic’

‘People think this virus is going to attack them all, and then they’re all going to die,’ says Prof. Jihad Bishara. ‘Not at all. In fact, most of those infected won’t even know it’”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-virologist-urges-world-leaders-to-calm-public-slams-unnecessary-panic/

Well, he sounds as though he knows all about it…

“A leading Israeli virologist on Sunday urged world leaders to calm their citizens about the coronavirus pandemic, saying people were being whipped into unnecessary panic.

Prof. Jihad Bishara, the director of the Infectious Disease Unit at Petah Tikva’s Beilinson Hospital, said that some of the steps being taken in Israel and abroad were very important, but the virus is not airborne, most people who are infected will recover without even knowing they were sick, the at-risk groups are now known, and the global panic is unnecessary and exaggerated.

That’s not the way it is at all. It’s not in the air. Not everyone [who is infected] dies; most of them will get better and won’t even know they were sick, or will have a bit of mucus.”

But in Israel and around the world, “everybody is whipping everybody else up into panic — the leaders, via the media, and the wider public — who then in turn start to stress out the leaders. We’ve entered some kind of vicious cycle.”

He urged the public to internalize that “we’re talking about a virus that is not airborne. Infection is via droplet transmission… Only if you are close to someone who has the virus, and you get the saliva when he sneezes or coughs, can you get ill. And if you don’t then maintain personal hygiene,” primarily by washing hands.

Referring to Italy’s national lockdown, he said that “quarantine is an effective precaution, but there has to be temperate use. You can shut down a whole country, but there are other means.”

At this stage, he said, “we know how the virus behaves, how it spreads, and which groups are in danger. We know now that his virus is primarily dangerous to old people, and to people with a history of chronic disease, and those who are immunocompromised.””

[The Times of Israel]

By the way, if anyone is surprised that I quote an Israeli in my blog, my response is “why not?”

If I want a great performance of Rachmaninov, I might turn to Vladimir Ashkenazi, if I want one of J.S. Bach, I might choose Evgeny Kissin; if Chopin, Emanuel Ax…

So long as “they” do not hold power, all is well. In fact the professor I quoted is, though Israeli, not a Jew, but the principle holds good. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-arabs-in-israel-fight-pandemic-as-first-class-doctors-but-second-class-citizens-1.8681493

The Countess and the Russian Billionaire

Just watched the above-named documentary. The main character was Alexandra Tolstoy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Tolstoy], an adventuress of several sorts, married to but estranged from Sergei Pugachev [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Pugachev], a former “banker” and criminal “businessman”, who is now on the [Russian] wanted list for having allegedly made off with about a billion US dollars’ worth of State assets.

Pugachev is in fact a slightly unusual Russian gangster-businessman, in that he really is Russian (not Jew or whatever). Looks like a “tough guy”, but if the question is whether to bet on a exiled tough guy or the Russian state, I know where my money is going…

Oddly enough, I once met the father of Alexandra Tolstoy, who is the interesting writer Nikolai Tolstoy, a former cavalry officer of the British Army [perhaps so only briefly; Wikipedia says nothing of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Tolstoy]. I was introduced to him in 1981 or 1982 (I think 82) at the Russian Refugees jumble sale at Chelsea Old Town Hall in the King’s Road (the sale is or was a Russian New Year tradition going back to the Russian Revolution(s) and Civil War, when many anti-Bolshevik Russians came to the UK penniless).

A friend of mine flew to Switzerland with Nikolai Tolstoy not long before that, in order to help with information for his book, Stalin’s Secret War. That would have been 1980 or 1981.

As for my impression of the lady in the documentary, perhaps I should not say, but after all she did volunteer to be judged by the TV public…Well, to me she seems as thick as two short planks, for one thing. As to why she divorced her first husband and married Pugachev, I think that a good deal of the answer, probably 90% or 80%, was his wealth, at a mere guess. She has dead eyes.

As for her being too bored in France, it is clear that, for her, the world revolves around London, Harrods, Harvey Nichol’s and her no doubt equally empty-headed friends. Her children too, of course…

Alexandra Tolstoy seems to want us to feel sorry for her, though she could well have simply continued to live in a beautiful belle epoque place on the Cote d’Azur, with her children, and her husband (and his guard force). I have seen too many people really suffering in the UK and elsewhere (including the former Soviet Union) from lack of quite modest funds to feel sorry for a woman who has a “cottage” (actually a quite decent modest house) in middle England, not to mention her parents’ place, a nice house in a pleasant part of Oxfordshire with an outside swimming pool (the pool was not shown in the documentary).

I certainly do not believe that she is in any danger at all from Putin or the Russian state. If she herself felt in danger, she would not now be once again running tours to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, and herself visiting those republics.

Pugachev? He may be in more danger. There are warrrants out for him in Russia, and if he sets foot in the UK, a warrant for his committal to prison (for 2 years) for contempt of a High Court order. If the Russians get him, though, he may end up, like his 18th Century namesake, in a cage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugachev%27s_Rebellion#Defeat

 

Alison Chabloz, Boris Johnson, daily blog, diary blog, environment, free speech, historical, historical revisionism, Party Politics, prepping, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 26 March 2020

22 Comments

Pity that the Economics Editor of the Financial Times cannot spell “exaggerated”, though. Another sign of the times, I suppose.

The above report is re. the UK. Unemployment is now spiking in the USA too:

Re. the Jew exploiter Philip Green

Below: here he is, a few years ago, on one of his mega-yachts, pouring Champagne over the heads of other Jews and various “hoes”:

381E798600000578-0-image-a-4_1473452058034

Blast from the past: the Adelphi, Liverpool

Sorry to hear that the Adelphi Hotel has fallen on hard times. I stayed there for a few days, ungazetted, when an ad-hoc Soviet ballet company (mainly Bolshoi dancers, if I remember aright) was in Liverpool. That would have been in about 1985 or 1986. My then girlfriend’s small suite had a sitting room with a kind of curtained-off bedroom. An entrance hall led to the sitting room and also to a spacious bathroom.

Britannia Adelphi, Liverpool 2018.jpg

The prima ballerina, whose name I forget, was unhappily married and thought to be mentally unstable. She had, I was told, a magnificent suite. For her own protection, both in view of her emotional state and because protesting Jews supporting “refuseniki” (Soviet Jews supposedly wanting to emigrate to Israel from the Soviet Union— most ended up in California) might alarm her, a KGB man slept across her doorway all night, every night, in the manner of Russia’s ancient history.

In fact, that dancer was at risk— she later tried to commit suicide in Sardinia, by slitting her wrists in her bath. Her husband was constantly unfaithful, apparently. Also, she was about 40. Not good for a dancer, though the famous ones have often overcome age to retain public affection: Maya Plisetskaya, Margot Fonteyn etc.

In fact, those dancers (the couple) were living a golden or velvet life in Moscow. His and hers Mercedes cars, dacha, luxury apartment etc. A lifestyle most people (whether in Moscow or the UK) never experience. Still, money cannot, as such, buy happiness. It’s just a dull grind when money is short…

The Adelphi was, I thought, a good hotel at that time (now about 35 years ago). A quartet played classical pieces live in the opulent and huge foyer. Among those listening was the then Chief Constable of Merseyside. The hotel was a landmark in Liverpool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia_Adelphi_Hotel

Coronavirus and Labour

The Labour Party is now weaker than it has ever been, in my view. Weaker even than it was under that unpleasant little hypocrite Michael Foot.

Labour under Corbyn, though weak, was stronger than it now is. Now Labour is going to —eventually— elect a new leader, which could be Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey or Lisa Nandy. All have kow-towed to the Jew lobby, all have otherwise similar policies, though Rebecca Long-Bailey is the most radical of the three. Starmer looks likely to be the choice, because he frightens few horses; as against that, he is as dull as ditchwater.

Labour’s problem can be said to reside in the fact that, outside the Labour Party membership, few people even care which of the three becomes Labour leader.

Labour, for which 10 million voters voted in 2019, is scarcely in the exact position of UKIP after 2015, when UKIP gradually became a joke, an irrelevance and then eventually just a nothing. Having said that, there is a parallel. Labour now has no power to speak of in the Commons, because the Conservative Party majority of 80 can steamroller through almost anything.

Beyond that, there is the point that the Coronavirus rescue package of Rishi Sunak, whatever its deficiencies and flaws, has pretty much shot Labour’s fox on “austerity” etc. All Labour can say is “we would have done more and better…(if we were in power, which we are not, and will not be for years, if ever…)”.

Not a very impressive position. The msm continue to give Labour MPs a platform, as required by OFCOM rules etc, but in reality, Labour has become something close to an irrelevance. In fact, it has been reduced to supporting the Government’s positions in the present crisis.

It is clear that Iain Dunce Duncan Smith’s shambolic “welfare” “reforms” are not only completely stupid but cannot work administratively. Why is this surprising? After all, Dunce only got to Lieutenant in his 6 years of being an Army officer. He never had any responsible civilian job either. How could such a person really conceive a workable social security reform, even if “IDS” were a better person morally than he in fact is?

However, the collapse of the Universal Credit system and other DWP areas, under the weight of the Coronavirus burden, will not help Labour. In fact, any “opposition” will more likely come from within the Conservative Party itself.

I detect no real chance for Labour at present, nor for quite a while into the future. If ever.

Evening foray

I had not intended to make a ratissage on the supermarkets this evening, but in the end I did, mainly to get bread, a couple of food items and some cat treats. I went to the nearest one, a Waitrose outlet a mile or two away. I arrived about 1930, half an hour before closing time. Few customers, but an innovation: outside the wide-open doors, two security men, young and dressed entirely in black. Woollen hats, padded jackets, scarfs wound around neck, covering the lower face. Armbands. Exactly like the militia in the TV series, The Handmaid’s Tale. They lacked only the weapons. They are, it seems, Waitrose “marshals”.

Inside, bought 2 scratchcards (both modest winners, as it turned out), but at first my cash was refused. All part of the new hygiene regime. Card only.

I was curious to see whether the shelves were still being stripped bare. Most bread had gone, though there were a few of the less popular (and more expensive) types available: stoneground rye, sourdough etc. Eggs were very plentiful. Flour seemed to be unavailable. Pasta available, though only the slightly more expensive Italian-made stuff in blue and yellow packing; little of the cheaper “Essential Waitrose” pasta. Pasta sauces mostly gone, though the more expensive Lloyd Grossman jars were there (over £2 compared to £1 for the cheapest Waitrose own-brand line). I bought one jar. Puttanesca. Everything else seemed to be available for those wanting it, even loo paper (only the more expensive brands, though). I found the cat treats. No shortage.

I noticed that fruit, vegetables and everything else that I looked at in passing seemed to be in supply.

My conclusion from that and my drive around yesterday: the supermarkets are gradually getting on top of the bulk-buying/panic-buying wave. People are still doing it, but less so. There must be some people around here sitting on mountains of dried pasta, pasta sauce jars, bread and loo paper. I also noticed that people are obviously not buying the pasta to eat immediately, because there was plenty of fresh pasta for sale.

Anyway, that’s my story…

On the way back, a car would not wait for me at a junction and drove off at speed. A few minutes later, I saw a blue light in my rear-view mirror (when I was learning to drive, belatedly, at age 42, the instructor said that one of my faults as a driver was that I looked in the rear-view mirror more than I looked out of the windshield!). Anyway, I turned off to avoid any contact. Only a few seconds later, the police flashed past down the deserted rural A-road. Were they after that other driver? Was he a suspected Coronavirus “non-essential” driver? Had he been heard humming an Alison Chabloz song about “holocaust” fakery? We shall never know…

Watched a topical film on ITV2: Contagion, about an infectious virus that starts with bats in China, and then gets into the food chain, finally being transmitted person to person until millions are killed all over the world. Wait, wasn’t that the TV news? Oh, no, it was “just a film”…More seriously, I was slightly surprised that an alarming (though well-made) film like that was broadcast at a time like this.

Midnight music…

Update, 21 June 2026

Interesting to be reminded of the fact that, exactly 6 years ago today, even I was, though only briefly, taken in by the “Covid”/Coronavirus propaganda. It took me a few weeks (2-3 weeks) to realize that the “Covid” thing was, 95% of it, a massive socio-political scam or experiment; as many now say, a “psy-op”.

Some people have still, 6 years on, not woken up to that.