Afternoon music
On this day a year ago
Tweets seen
That idiot is such a hypocrite that he probably does not know that he is a hypocrite.
Incidentally, reading Clooney’s entry in Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Clooney], I realized that I have seen not one film or TV series featuring him. That must be why I was puzzled, many years ago, when I kept hearing things about him on the TV; I was thinking “George Clooney? Who’s that?“.
He has good taste in domestic property, though. His house on a river island at Sonning, Berkshire, is very classic (Georgian), and in a beautiful location across the Thames from some of the grounds of the school I unwillingly attended in the nearly 4 years 1970-1973; and his house on Lake Como, in the Italian Lakes region, is also beautiful and in a beautiful place.
The evil and yet idiotic “SAGE” “scientists”, msm “me too” groupthinkers, and UK “health” bureaucrats would have been right at home in early Renaissance Italy, insisting that the Sun goes around the Earth and describing the truth as “heresy”.
State “quiet killing” of hundreds of thousands of elderly people thought of, by the State, by ministers and by most MPs, as simply “surplus to requirements”.
I examined some of the history of “democracy” a few years ago: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/01/15/has-parliamentary-democracy-as-we-have-known-it-until-now-had-its-day-in-the-uk/.
“Jack Monroe” attracts the very worst supporters on Twitter, perhaps even worse than the “FBPE” loonies. Her core “constituency” is not “the poor”, but the unpleasant and/or mentally-disturbed.
I think that there are at least half a dozen regular “Jack Monroe” Twitter “sock accounts” regularly posting while she pretends to be “taking (another) rest from Twitter”.
It took me a while to realize the extent of it, but my opinion now is that “Jack Monroe” is, or has become, an outright fraud.
Incidentally, the new book by “Jack Monroe”, Thrifty Kitchen (which seems to consist, judging from what one reads in the msm and on Twitter, of recipes from the BBC and other sources already available for free online), is not selling.
At present, according to the Amazon Book Sales Calculator, only a few dozen copies a day, if that (about 600 per month) are being sold on Amazon (which must be the major outlet). In fact, nearly new copies (the book was only released a few weeks ago) are available on Amazon for as little as £7.
I was interested to see the reviews on Amazon. The 5* ones (about 70%), may or may not be genuine, and have only a handful of up-votes each, suspiciously, whereas the 20% of reviews awarding only 1* (with some wishing that they could award zero stars) have hundreds of up-votes: 400, 500, or more. Telling.
All the same, 498 utter mugs are still signed up on Patreon to send her a total of between £1,743 and £21,912 per month (probably in the region of about £5,000, realistically). The very silly, or outright loonies, I should imagine.
More music
That composer, of whom I had never heard until today, seems to have been one of the millions displaced by the large-scale disruptions and dislocations of the 20th Century.
Stray thought about the NHS
I suppose that, as usual, I have to preface my remarks by repeating that I do favour the core principle of the NHS, i.e. that it should be free at point of use.
Beyond that, I was just trying to think of any other service or product which is defended mainly on the ground that it is free or cheap. Air travel using “low-cost” rubbish airlines, such as Ryanair? I suppose that that is one.
I understand that what people do is pay a ludicrously-small amount (eg £50, £20, or even £10) each way for the flight, but then have to accept that everything usually provided gratis is charged for, and that the flight will land a long way from where you really want to go, such as “Paris Beauvais” airport (Beauvais is 55 miles from Paris) or, I think in the past, even “Paris Amiens” airport (Amiens is 160 miles from Paris by road or rail).
Still, I see the point. Hard to complain about £10 each way London (Stansted) to/from La Rochelle, even if the service etc is near rock-bottom (though I concede that I myself have never used Ryanair). Incidentally, La Rochelle Airport is right by the city.
Ryanair is very successful, so people obviously buy into the concept at the prices on offer. See also: https://www.ryanair.com/flights/gb/en/flights-to-france.
What else do people accept almost purely on the basis that it costs little? Not much, I think. State primary and secondary education? Possibly.
Still, Ryanair flights do arrive as promised, much of the time. Can the same be said of the NHS? I fear not, or often not, these days.
No-one (except perhaps the ultra-wealthy) wants to swap the NHS for an American-style system, but there are alternative systems that might be examined. What is not helpful is for people to shout out meaningless slogans about “our NHS” etc, to refuse to see what a poor service it is often —not always— offering now, and to refuse to think about how (beyond simply funding it better) the NHS might be improved.
More tweets
Interesting. Is that a ploy to get “Boris”-idiot back? Or maybe some of them want sinister “let’s bomb Russia” candidate Tobias Ellwood as PM. That would solve all our problems— permanently…
While it is true that Labour are only popular by default, in a basically unfree and binary system, they are still well ahead at present.
I am not so sure that the Conservative Party might not be electorally better-off ditching the Indian money-juggler, and even going back to “Boris”-idiot, but better not that latter; they really need someone relatively untainted, and someone British/English, i.e. not non-white. That might not save them completely re. the next general election, but it might be enough to produce a hung Parliament.
I sense that Labour is, even in these conditions of shambolic incompetence in government, not truly “popular”, but many people are becoming desperate for something. If only there were a proper social-national party, credible and organized, but there is none.
A new Conservative Party leader would mean yet another unmandated or unvalidated PM, the fourth since 2015 (or fifth, if you include the first two years of “Boris”-idiot). What price “democracy”?
More tweets
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 