It includes the fact that California is lowering the standards for its Bar exam, in order to have more black and Latino lawyers passing. At present, most blacks and Latinos are failing the exam. Solution? Make the exam easier…
The above triggered a few personal memories.
I passed the New York Bar exam in 1991, if memory serves. At that time, the New York Bar was the second-hardest American Bar exam to pass (after California). Over half the candidates in New York failed (In California at that time, about 55% or maybe 60% failed the exam). Some states held Bar exams in which the failure rate was only about 10% or 15%. I seem to recall that North Dakota (or possibly South Dakota) was the easiest, or one of the easiest.
I know those statistics (as far as I can remember them) because I took a course called Bar-Bri, a private cramming course which involved going to lectures (pretty good ones, much better than those I recall from the Inns of Court School of Law in London), given every weekday evening for about 3 weeks at the Manhattan Town Hall (just a name— nothing to do with local government in New York) on West 43rd Street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Town_Hall_(New_York_City)
[Town Hall, 43 W.43rd St, Mamhattan, New York City]
Bar-Bri’s excellent written materials (included in their rather expensive fees totalling, in 1991, about USD $1,500) included statistics about the Bar exams of each state, what percentage of candidates passed and —of course!— what percentage of Bar-Bri customers passed).
The New York part of the exam was only a third of the whole exam as it was at that time (it’s different now), the other bits being U.S. Federal (inc. Constitutional) law and “Multistate” law, which is an odd concept, arguably, being the law as it is in a preponderance of the 50 US states. So if 26 states have a rule which 24 states do not have, the right answer will be whatever is right in those 26 states.
To take a very simple example, most states of the USA allow a motorist to turn left on a red stop-light in certain circumstances, but a few states (including New Jersey, where I lived) prohibit that.
The New York Bar exam was pretty tough at that time, the strictly New York law part consisting of about 30 legal topics of which only a small number would be examined. The problem, of course, was that you did not know which. Some topics always came up (notably “New York Practice”), some came up frequently, others rarely. Swotting for them all would have required a photographic memory. I made a choice and was lucky.
A couple of obscure topics on which which I had focussed (including “Commercial Paper”) did come up. I passed the New York Bar Exam with (as I recall) a score somewhere not far short of 90%, maybe 86% or so). On the final day of the exam, I thought that I had probably failed. Fortunately not.
[nb: I understand that the New York Bar adopted a different scoring system in 2016, one not involving percentages, so my reminiscences here are of purely personal or historical interest].
In fact, I was wasting my time taking and passing the New York Bar Exam. I never did practise law in New York, and later only used the knowledge or the status occasionally, though I did work at one time partly from Charleston, South Carolina, with an offshore law firm which dealt mostly with foreign jurisdictions (Russia, Caribbean states and territories, Liechtenstein, Channel Islands etc). The fact that I was an attorney and counsellor at law, New York, was useful in terms of people’s perception, as was the fact that I had worked for a while (in 1997, in Kazakhstan) for a major American law firm, Baker & McKenzie (now simply Baker McKenzie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_McKenziehttps://www.bakermckenzie.com/en/locations/emea/kazakhstan).
Reverting to the idea of making exams or other selection procedures easier so that certain groups (eg blacks who want to be lawyers) can have greater success in entering a profession, the concept is a slippery slope which ends in decadence. We already see, in the UK, that nearly half of young people go to some form of “university”, and that a huge number now get “First” or “Upper Second” degrees (at Oxford and Cambridge, about 94% get one or other such grade). Result? Degrees generally, even “Oxbridge” ones, are near-worthless, both in themselves and in terms of vocational “market value”. And what about the rights of those who will be advised, represented, treated (in the case of medics), or ruled (in the case of politicians) by such graduates?
Tweets seen today
The voice of the bossy nosey parker is heard in the land. From @alkcheet comes a perfect summary of the view of the Mask Zealot: Do what you're told! Who cares if it works? That's not the point. The good citizen is the submissive citizen. (The constitution of the beehive state). https://t.co/AKtZjrmhiC
Surgical masks are fitted and quite unlike the loose bits of cloth you refer to. They are antibacterial, not antiviral, and mainly designed to prevent infective material falling into deep open operative wounds. For the millionth time. @sheenagrindley. https://t.co/hJJwFEtp8O
A good point from Hitchens, and one that most people do not know. They think that their pathetic facemasks and muzzles are equivalent to surgical masks, just as some people think that the urban-operational clothing of the SAS is simply fairly standard black clothing as worn by the public generally, when in fact it is manufactured to be not only very tough, but flame-retardant etc.
Yesterday, I saw the last couple of minutes of some F1 racing programme on TV. Three commentating idiots, in the open air, with not another person in sight, and all three of them standing 6+ feet (more like 10 ft) apart, and all three wearing large black face muzzles. System propaganda, yes, but very stupid as well.
More on the filth that #Asda are pushing on children. "If you tolerate this, your children will be next" – ah, yes, they already are.#boycottASDA paedophilia. https://t.co/rhN3SiZHgW
The society which thinks itself “enlightened”, “diverse”, and even “free”, while in fact becoming a dystopian nightmare and a multikulti slave-society.
1/3 'Spain has a reputation for having some of the strictest policies on masks in Europe, with the public even encouraged to wear face-coverings outside….' https://t.co/DttaWTfpfp
2/3 '…Yet today, Spain’s Health Ministry announced that the number of coronavirus cases has continued to rise, with 9,848 cases counted over the past two days…' https://t.co/DttaWTfpfp
And so to Waitrose. En route, in the car (the subject of a recent, unexpected, and almost miraculous MOT pass), saw a silly rabbit wearing a facemask as he walked down the road, alone, not another walker, nor even cat or dog, in sight. Just a very few cars on the road.
I wonder what answer an idiot like that would give if asked “why are you wearing a facemask, indeed a large black muzzle, as you walk alone down a quiet suburban or semi-rural road with no-one else around?” Would he reply “Government orders!”? Would he reply “I don’t know“? Would he reply “I have a mental problem and feel afraid all the time for no reason”? Or would he reply “I am a truly senseless virtue-signaller“? God knows…
In Waitrose itself, I noticed for the first time this month quite a few people not wearing facemasks or muzzles. A minority, true, but they were there. How they managed to get past the two black-clad Handmaid’s Tale militia loitering near the store entrance, I have no idea. They may have said that they are exempted from wearing the muzzles; more likely, they wore facemasks to pass the militia, then took them off. It was good to see open defiance of the (possibly invalid) new and repressive “law”.
Incidentally, I noticed, on the back of the “militia”, on their black bomber jackets, the words “National Security“! Presumably the company for which they work. The country just gets madder daily. In fact, the “militia” look a dozy lot. I doubt that they deter (let alone catch) many, if any, shoplifters etc; their role seems to be purely to discourage non-mask-wearers. Mad. There again, the country is mad, the “government” of clowns is mad, the mass media too. So why not?
“Come with me, and I’ll show you where the Iron Crosses grow…“
Neither of these interferences in Liberty is justified by the facts. @artes_ph . So, a false choice.I’d rather not have any of this rubbish at all. https://t.co/CPOq8z8yI9
The real state of evidence on face coverings clearly explained by experts : https://t.co/DnhzEMXWG0 (most easily summed up as 'We lack any evidence that they do any significant good').
One of the aspects of the present madness that interests me is not only how supine half of the public has been, but the extent to which the kind of people most rebellious, and also vocal about “rights”, in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, are now the most eager to submit to State authority: the “socialists”, “Left-wingers” (I myself disparage such “right”/”left” terminology, though), civil rights activists etc.
Don’t believe me? Look on Twitter. The kind of people in the categories just listed are all but begging to be “locked down”, monitored, tested, traced, masked, muzzled and generally told what to do, when to do it, and what to wear while doing it.
As I have blogged in the past, the degeneration of that part of the body politic is palpable.
You see it in other ways too: the wish not to leave the EU, because the EU (they imagine) will control things, control them, lay down rules for everything…
Again, you see it in the wish to be subject to the arbitrary constraints of Twitter and other online platforms; and the allied wish to “report” those whose views dissent from the shibboleths of the Twit-pack.
Such people are also the most fervent supporters of the muzzling of the population…
Thank you. @johnsmi50968113 Alas, the new orthodoxy is that it would all have worked if only they'd crashed the economy sooner, and introduced mass house-arrest earlier. Tripe. But informed opposition to this whole farce is simply not given enough oxygen by heavily-biased media. https://t.co/CkBPf4af8j
Below, two tweets about the latest Jewish or anti-Corbyn legal activity:
The same maniac #MarkLewis who represented me back in the day re my phone hacking claim and litterally did fuck all but court the media, and YET my NEW Lawyers took under 3 Months to settle the same claim this Year. Lewis needs to be disbarred, he’s no Lawyer he’s a warmonger
Have a read of the above. Lewis was and is aware of everything I wrote about and against him; his Jew-Zionist friends and allies monitor my writings obsessively and have done for years: Lewis himself has been obsessed with me for years, since 2011 or 2012, and has plotted against me for all that time. Lewis has never sued me, though; indeed, he has never even threatened to sue me, despite everything that I have written, but has tried to strike at me covertly. (((Typical))).
The other Jews in the Mark Lewis/”Campaign Against Antisemitism” etc cabal(s) are aghast that Lewis and his clients cannot extract both flesh and blood from Corbyn; here below, fanatical Jew Zionist David Collier:
<elsewhere he might have more luck. but based on the character of his lawyer and his professional history it’s entirely fair to doubt it’s a claim made in any good faith.
Even Lewis’s enemies often tend to accept him at his own valuation (and self-publicizing) as so-called “top lawyer”; yet at the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal in 2018, those judging him were told by Lewis’s own Counsel that all he owned were a mobility scooter, a private pension worth £70 a week, and his own clothes! Even discounting the usual tendency of Jews (cf. Ghislaine “Maxwell”) to play the Jewish “victim” when caught out, I doubt that Lewis has millions (or anything much) salted away.
@MLewisLawyer a FUCKING Deranged BULLY. You’re misplaced hate seems to have taken priority over your Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis, shouldn’t you be preserving your health ?, suing #JeremyCorbyn is misplaced and won’t replace your inadequaties. Your vanity and wants are GONE 🤷🏽♀️
Of course, the “Jew who dislikes Jews” is a not-uncommon figure: in the historical past, Marx for one, who wrote to Engels “I am in Ramsgate; nothing but Jews and bedbugs“; through those figures cited in the tweet above, and on to the anti-Zionist Jews of today such as Miko Peled and Gilad Atzmon.
The Erdogan regime in Turkey just handed over one of the holiest cathedrals in Christian history to Islamists as a mosque. And no Western politicians so much as squeaked in protest. The leader of Hezbollah has criticised the move as unjust & sectarian. Think about that…. pic.twitter.com/5LCAzXRN2M
I don't think so @masteridrees. In my experience its impact is still huge, and if it decides to exclude certain opinions, then they are badly damaged. https://t.co/RuUJ1qSRxA
It’s Eric Ravilious’ birthday today – he was born in Acton #OTD in 1903, although he spent his young life in Eastbourne after his family moved to #Sussex. I’m glad there are so many of us who appreciate his work. Long may it continue. pic.twitter.com/BXZCxgT0Vn
Nope @_efmb_ A million times next to nothing is still tiny. Give actual figures (deaths per million) on the alleged 'viral threat'. Threat to lives and livelihood comes mainly from panic crashing of economy and throttling of normal health treatments. Compulsion is never small. https://t.co/ZVhGn55gQZ
“I felt like I had to respond, but I wasn't really comfortable responding”. Please read this story about inappropriate texts sent to a distressed and mentally unwell intern by sitting Conservative MP Rob Roberts: https://t.co/JFLsHKJWyV
Yet another MP sex scandal. Almost normalized now. This particular idiot is apparently unsure whether he prefers girls or boys, so ineptly tries to have it off with both.
What still astounds me is the sheer mediocrity (at best) of so many MPs these days. So few have even a modicum of education, culture, or real belief in anything at all, let alone any genuine desire to serve the country or their constituents. Just trash, really.
When I became aware of the existence of Rob Roberts (about an hour ago), I was wondering whether he would make a good candidate for my Deadhead MPs series on this blog, but sadly he seems (judging by his Wikipedia entry) to have nothing interesting about him at all. Nothing. See for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Roberts_(politician)
Coronavirus panic/scam
In the local authority area where I live (a quite large area of nearly 300 square miles in coastal and near-coastal Southern England, rural and semi-rural, with a few small towns and villages), the population is about 180,000 people. The “R” number has been varying below 1 and 2 (ie. number of cases per 100,000 population). In the past week, 1.8. There have been, therefore, about 2 or 3 confirmed new cases in the past week. Out of 180,000 people…
When you consider that only one out of dozens, perhaps a hundred, new cases will die from this condition, you can see that, in this particular area, perhaps one or two people are likely to die from “the virus” over the course of the next year! Sad for those people and their relatives, but not repeat not a reason to shut anything down, nor to make the population wear facemasks.
This is, thankfully, not the Plague.
Tweets seen
🚨 Three men convicted of the manslaughter of PC Andrew Harper 🚨
Three men who were in a vehicle that dragged PC Andrew Harper to his death in Berkshire have been convicted of his manslaughter.
The BBC can now report that the jury in the PC Harper case had to have special protection measures in place, as police had intelligence that associates of the defendants were planning to intimidate the jury in some way
The tweeter above, “Sarah Deech”, or “@londonette”, is the daughter, I believe, of “baroness” Deech, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Deech,_Baroness_Deech, a Jewish woman who, when my “case” was being “investigated” by the Bar Standards Board from 2014 (the case having been brought against me, in effect, by “UK Lawyers for Israel”), was not only the Chair of the Bar Standards Board but also a Patron of…UK Lawyers for Israel!
By the time that the case came up before the Bar Disciplinary Tribunal, it having been decided that my (in the end, only) 5 supposedly “grossly offensive” tweets (out of between 150,000-200,000 tweets and retweets!) merited my being “tried”, “baroness” Deech had in fact been replaced by a different Chair, though only by a former UK Ambassador to Israel, who was extremely pro-Israel and extremely pro-Jewish interests!
I raised the question of perceived bias (in the decision to take me before a Tribunal) at the hearing itself , but the (generally reasonably fair) retired Circuit Judge chairing the 5-person panel told me at least twice that whatever the merits of my claim that the decision-making process was flawed (because, as I submitted, “justice must not only be done but be seen to be done” and “no man can be a judge in his own cause“), it was not relevant , because what mattered was the justice of the hearing itself…
With all respect to that judge, I disagree. If a person is only “tried” because a biased process decided that he should be tried, then he is on the back foot from the start, no matter how “fair” the hearing is.
The above, in my view, is so even if “baroness” Deech took no part in the decision to haul me before the Bar Disciplinary Tribunal, though I find it hard to believe that she was, at the material time, unaware that an organization in which she was a major figure (UK Lawyers for Israel) was complaining officially about me to another organization which she headed and for which she had responsibility (the Bar Standards Board).
As a matter of fact, the hearing in October 2016, though generally fair in the way it was conducted, was wrong about, inter alia, whether my five tweets (the Jews had originally complained about many dozens!) were in fact “grossly offensive”.
In fact, I could have appealed the findings of fact and/or the disbarment penalty, but, having ceased Bar practice in 2008, eight years before I was “tried” and disbarred, it would have been almost pointless. I did not care, though it does deprive me of being able to lunch at my (former) Inn when in London, which is a nuisance; I rarely visit London these days anyway.
[The Great Hall, Lincoln’s Inn, London]
Actually, the BSB did write to me a couple of years after I was disbarred, saying that I should have had the right to challenge the allocation of my case to a 5-person panel instead of a 3-person panel (only a 5-person panel can disbar) and that I could do so if I wished. I could not be bothered and so did not take that up.
Finally, I took a look at the composition of the present BSB (the actual governing board): 13 members (a coven? Only joking…), out of which 3-4 Jews. The kind of disproportion one sees everywhere.
Unresponsive @winterfellt. I point out that even the government which mandates muzzle wearing agrees they are of little use. You neither acknowledge nor rebut. You have seen no evidence to justify compulsion, the subject under discussion, because there isn’t any. https://t.co/EqGgfO1txo
and the Boris-idiot government has decided that you will wear muzzles or facemasks in supermarkets. Not in pubs, though! Or restaurants. Or at work. Yet many rabbits are still going to be out tomorrow wearing their silly facemasks and denouncing anyone not doing the same!
Wearing a facemask muzzle is not a “necessary” public health measure but an experiment in herding or corralling the populations of a number of countries, including the UK. Think of women in traditional hardline Islamic societies: hooded, veiled, without much personality, unable to do much or say much about society; compliant; submissive… That is exactly what ZOG/NWO wants for the British people, among others.
ZOG has obviously been emboldened by the “success” of the lockdown. Success, but not in stopping “Coronavirus”. The virus had already peaked, just before the “lockdown” shutdown was even imposed. No, the “success” was in getting the population to be compliant, driven by fear of a plague that never was, and by the vague “laws”, “rules” and “advice” sprayed out from government and the toytown police (state).
To keep up the fear levels. This government has no true source of authority, being a cabal of ignorant teenagers, so it distils power out of fear . @kestokes2https://t.co/ylL3eZypMd
Many years too late, even the liberals begin to grow uneasy over the demographic disaster & civilisational suicide produced by the ideas, mores and technologies of their carcinogenic '68 revolution.https://t.co/JZEHD3jdHn
Maybe the British people “chose” their future by not opposing it by a better vision, and thus condemning us to a future (present) where ultra-wealthy Jews have three mega-yachts in Monaco, and Gary Lineker etc get a million a year for gassing about football on TV, but most British people are caged in a multikulti zoo, in poverty or near-poverty.
So, yes, the British people bear some of the guilt and blame, but the weight of that must rest with NWO/ZOG conspirators, and with the traitors in Westminster, BBC, Sky News, the Press, publishing and academia.
“NHS is not for sale”…
The dumbing down of society
This goes beyond poor cultural levels or levels of general (or any) knowledge. There is less and less understanding, even among (perhaps especially among) those who are supposedly educated, for concepts such as free speech, personal liberty, society under law, respect for others, decent behaviour generally.
You see it in the pronouncements around the “Black Lives Matter” nonsense. The Superintendent of police in Bristol who thought it best to allow the multikulti mob to tear down an old statue because (in his world?) it would look bad for his men to be seen protecting the statue of someone who once dealt in slaves (250 years ago). In which case, tear down anything to do with Elizabeth I, Charles II, James I, Queen Anne etc. Maybe that is or will be the next step of those behind these “protests”.
The Superintendent in question took refuge in the idea that if his men protected the statue, not only would it look questionable (he thinks) but windows nearby might be broken by the mob and that would be terrible in the “Coronavirus” sitation, when Bristol retailers are already suffering.
Where does one start, in unpacking such nonsense? First, the retailers are suffering mainly because an incompetent government has scared the population out of its skin and shut down the economy. Second, it is simply not the job of a police superintendent to concern himself with the wider economic effects of his doing his duty. His job is just that: to do his duty, prevent any mob breaking the law, and to arrest those so breaking the law. Das ist’s!
That is one example of the sheer lack of intelligent thought around. For others, look at, eg, Twitter. Examples abound.
There are many people who say that “you have free speech, but are not free from the consequences of your speech”. A law lecturer called Paul Bernal, from East Anglia, is fond of tweeting that or similar formulae.
I feel sorry for the students of someone so unthinking. According to that formulation, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Khmer Republic (Cambodia) etc all had “free speech”, because you could say whatever you liked in those societies, so long as you did not mind “the consequences” (being shot, sent to labour camps, or having your head beaten in by rifle butts).
Musical interlude
Memory Lane…
Someone found me this on the Internet: an article I wrote in 2004 about legal advice I gave in 2001 or early 2002. “Life’s rich tapestry”.
Yes, @gerejeff the railways in Britain are trying to pretend that muzzles are obligatory in stations, though the law is clear it only applies while boarding and travelling on trains. Bad ideas are like weeds, they spread and flourish if not vigilantly controlled. https://t.co/jC9WbejWay
On the contrary @kes76150286 I love traditional English policing by consent and regular foot patrolling and long for its return. Not so keen on the swaggering , absent ‘ We don’t need you and we expect the same’ modern types. But who is? https://t.co/Lbo5E2We4A
Yes, Dame Cressida’s call for public shaming of muzzle dissidents suggests an ignorance of the law not easily pardonable in a Metroplitan Police Commissioner ..She should withdraw it. https://t.co/fifCEGOEZK
The sickness in the UK and across the Western world has reached a point where white people are colluding in the destruction of their own history and culture, slavishly (ironically). Where history and culture are removed, people usually follow.
Even the Daily Mail which reports the story will not use the poor deceased companion animal’s name, but only the horrible Americanism, “a racial slur“. I try to avoid swearing on my blog, but GO FUCK YOURSELVES!
Tweets seen
% of Britons who are comfortable with doing [X] in the same way as before the Coronavirus pandemic.
The fear propaganda spread by Government and the msm has really taken root in the fragile mass psychology of the British and others resident in Britain. They are scared of their own shadows.
I think that we can say goodbye to much of that part of the economy centred on pubs, bars, cafes, restaurants.
Cafe Rouge, etc
I see that Cafe Rouge has closed or (much the same under current conditions) has gone into administration. I used to use their Little Venice (London) cafe occasionally, about 25-30 years ago. How time flies…
I preferred Raoul’s (just across the street), which I patronized for years; I went there almost daily (on weekdays only; weekends, the yuppies and other loudly braying riff-raff tended to crowd out Raoul’s). I used to breakfast at Raoul’s on weekdays, c.1993-95, before going (quite often) to appear in the High Court. If not in a hurry, one could get a no.6 red bus from opposite the cafe and direct to Aldwych, where it terminated.
[above: Cafe Rouge, Little Venice]
[above: my old haunt in the 1980s and early 1990s— Raoul’s Cafe, Little Venice]
Reading about Raoul’s now, or as it was until “lockdown”, I see that the interior looks horrible now. The old large round tables have been replaced by little square ones against both walls, presumably in order to squeeze in more customers. Not very nice. Very unaesthetic. It must have destroyed the atmosphere. Also, back in the 1980s and 1990s, the chairs were rather more stylish.
I see from a newspaper story that the owner is still the same, a lady called Geraldine, an attractive blonde from the North-East (if I recall), who was a bit of a social climber (it seemed to me) and had lost, if she ever had one, any semblance of a Northern accent. She was married to an anglicized Greek fellow with blond (bleached? I never know such things) hair, who occasionally sat over a coffee in the cafe. We chatted a few times. He was said by others to be related to the Onassis family, and was a pretty good painter (as far as I can judge). I once went to an exhibition he held at a gallery in Cork Street, off Piccadilly.
I have to say that, though she could be a bit tough in manner at times (she complained to me once or twice about my reading documents for hours there!), Geraldine was usually quite charming. I rather liked her. Another charming person was the one-time manageress, a young woman called Laura, who was the daughter of the entertainer, Bruce Forsyth. Once, a large chauffeur-driven limousine drew up and out came Bruce Forsyth, on his arm a most beautiful lady much younger than him. He came in as his daughter was chatting to me; she rushed off to greet her father. Quite an entrance. No TV silliness; in fact, more like a royal entrance than one from The Generation Game.
That little piece (which misspells “Fresno”, apropos of nothing) says that, at one point (presumably in the 1970s), Michael and Geraldine Leventis had to leave London because “unable to support themselves”! Incredible. In the years when I used the cafe, 25-40 years ago, they were loaded! They had a house that backed onto where I lived (a stone’s throw from the cafe), another in the Lot area of France, and seemed to live in some luxury (so I was told by someone who had visited their home).
Amazing to me that that lady is still running the cafe, 30-40 years later. She also ran, briefly (I think that it only lasted a year, if that, around 1987), a Raoul’s Restaurant across the street, which was a really good Italian, with excellent wine, served in beautiful glasses, but charging very high prices. The decor was very aesthetic.
Reverting to Cafe Rouge, there was an old Jew with a stout walking stick, who looked like something out of Montmartre circa 1880. He used to sit over coffee in Raoul’s with a small circle of other old Jews at one particular round table. Around 1990 or so. His son was said to have been the owner and founder of Cafe Rouge and to have sold it (about that time or a few years later) to a large company for £46 million.
Little Venice, and Maida Vale generally, had quite a few Jews. Another who used to come into Raoul’s occasionally, like a wraith, was said to be the mother of the Guinness Trial defendant, Parnes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Parnes. She lived in nearby Hamilton Terrace, St. John’s Wood, which starts the other side of the main Maida Vale avenue (the extension of Edgware Road).
It all seems a long time ago now. As it was.
I cannot see the cafe/restaurant/pub sector doing well as long as all these new restrictions continue. Why would people pay rather much, quite often, to sit in a restaurant, served by someone dressed as for a laboratory and possibly surrounded by perspex screens?
The madness continues and grows yet madder
We’re starting with a set of words we want to move away from using in favor of more inclusive language, such as: pic.twitter.com/6SMGd9celn
Last week, I did much better than John Rentoul (for what it is worth). This week, I still beat him, just, getting 5 out of 10 to his 4/10. Narrowly missed one other correct answer.
How dispiriting that people actually *like* this dim straw man of a tweet. Al Johnson has already wrecked the economy, people. Now it’s your personal freedom that is going down the gurgler. https://t.co/ImkWS8bpdU
Yes @stevecageauthor, I was particularly struck by that remark. I think the inadequates and third-raters who form our government have much enjoyed the unearned power and authority the panic has given them, and are reluctant to let go of either. https://t.co/ifjQb4p1NE
#Seattle this evening. This really isn't going to end well. The liberal elite decision to keep it off TV news will make no difference, other than to make what's coming down the tracks even more shocking for the few who still let the MSM mould their view of the world. pic.twitter.com/0of7hBu6jQ
This sort of black or multikulti urban militia should be shot down on sight. If the USA tolerates this, then it will evetually have “Beirut” situations developing.
This is no joke. It shows how the legal system has been captured by leftist revolutionaries who hate this country and the people whose ancestors built it.
The fortunes of a football club would usually not interest me much. This does, partly because it is one of a wave of company and other collapses supposedly as a result of “Coronavirus”, though actually more the result of this incompetent government’s “lockdown” (shutdown) of the society and economy.
The other reason the above news report caught my attention is because I once represented a Wigan Athletic footballer at Manchester County Court sometime around 2006. I remember the case well even though I have forgotten the name of the footballer (his first name was something Biblical, I recall; I presume from that and other facts that he was a West Indian, but he was not present in Court).
Part of the reason I remember the case is because I had to get up at about 0430 to avoid traffic. I started driving at about 0500 hrs, and made the 250 miles from Dunsford, about 10 miles west of Exeter, to the outskirts of Manchester, in little more than 2 hours, though it then took me half an hour or more to get to the Court itself, which was then at a place called Crown Square in the centre of the city (a city which I have only visited a few times in my life).
Other reasons that I recall the case are that the solicitor had been at school at Repton, an institution known for its unusual championing of football instead of the usual rugby, and the fact that the young footballer in the case (which revolved around identity, and title to goods) was on a contract salary of no less than £16,000 per week. At 18 or 19 years old. Maybe not the Wayne Rooney level, but still rather striking for the solicitor and me! If anyone is interested, which I doubt, I won the case. In fact, and in all honesty, it was an easy win in the end.
Mass immigration
Good grief.
Dominic Raab confirms the UK is offering citizenship rights to all 2.9m Hong Kong residents with BNO status. Dependents are also eligible. He says there "will be no quotas on numbers." https://t.co/jKqtmEI5t8
Below, a drone of the (((controlled))) msm “Lugenpresse” (Judenpresse) tweets that letting up to 3 MILLION Hong Kong Chinese into the UK is “the right thing to do“! Why? Because the UK is the world’s dustbin now? Or because the UK had a 100-year lease on Hong Kong, which lease expired 23 years ago?!
Note also that that tweeter is Political Editor of the Daily Mirror, notionally “Labour”…The people of Britain cannot rely on any of the System parties to save them. LibLabCon…it’s all a con-trick, and the British people are the “marks”, the mugs.
What this means is that if the Hong Kong Chinese (actually about half of them, because the whole population is about 7.5 million) want to come to live in the UK, they can…
True, perhaps “only” a million may do so, but…I would call this crazed government simply mad, but of course behind it stands (((you know what))), meaning ZOG/NWO. The Great Replacement…
What does it take for the people of Britain, the peoples of Europe, to wake up to what is happening all around them?
Some tweets seen
Starmer's jibe that Johnson's "flippant" could be the start of a Labour new line of attack. As people lose jobs and businesses shut and the virus continues to kill, the PM's jester act will earn jeers not cheers
Attacking @NicolaSturgeon over refusing to rule out quarantine measures for people coming to Scotland @BorisJohnson said “there is no such thing as a border between Scotland and England “. This is me yesterday in Coldstream – that’s the Tweed. The border. pic.twitter.com/YnYMigtSJ6
If Nicola Sturgeon tries to play the Coronavirus situation for SNP/”Independence” political advantage (by instituting a de facto firm border between England and Scotland, e.g. by police on the Scottish side putting up road blocks at that line), that would cause a constitutional crisis.
2/2 @michaell61 I have only explained this, with references here, about 17 million times,so you have every excuse for beng unaware of my case, and of the evidence I produce to back it up. I am not a blinking 'contrarian'. And being ordered what to wear by the govt is not 'small'. https://t.co/xwXz6rHt9f
The great Persian poet, Hafiz, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez, is said to have criticized the use of marijuana and its effects on society.
Thinking back, I recall the people I knew who, starting in the 1970s, were regular users of cannabis (which was, as I understand, less strong back then). All dropped out of society to some extent, but were mostly from at least not impoverished backgrounds, so did not slide (the ones I still track) into complete degradation. I must blog about them in detail sometime.
I am told that two of my great-uncles on the maternal side were killed in the First World War. One was killed in the Battle of the Somme, the other in, I think, 1915. Both are said to have been captains in the “Ox and Bucks”, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordshire_and_Buckinghamshire_Light_Infantry and (according to my now long-deceased grandmother) they “rode white horses”. My grandmother was —just— a Victorian, born in 1900.
I always find it funny and rather instructive that, if European people (inc. British) speak or write of deceased relatives, even those that they knew personally, let alone ancestors or family members from long before they themselves were born, they do not get overly emotional about it. Then look at the Jews. Completely different.
The Jews pretend to be very emotional about people whom they did not know, and who died long before they were born. You see tweets, eg “I lost family in the holocaust!” (so how dare you criticize Jews or Israel, ever?!!!). “Family” meaning Jewish relatives who died years or decades before the Jews now howling were ever even born!
Hey, @GreaterGlasPol, your job is supposed to be keeping law n order, not telling the people who pay your salaries what to think & say.#ThoughtPolice disgrace. pic.twitter.com/50OolQQpqm
The Jewish-Zionist (and also “politically-correct”) influence seems to be very strong in Police Scotland. I have noticed that over the years. A poundland KGB. If Scotland ever achieves (fake) “Independence”, it will be a truly repressive little place in which to live, I think.
Don’t be misled by the above: I am as “anti-Soviet” as most people, if not more so, insofar as one can be pro or anti something now not existent. The Soviet Union ceased to exist decades ago; its history is part of world history (as is that of the German Reich or the Western “democracies”).
Claudia Webbe
I have found a new candidate for my “Deadhead MPs” blog series!
The House of Commons, indeed Parliament as a whole, has long been called “the Westminster monkeyhouse” but this really takes the biscuit. Not only the ever-ringing telephone, which is a feature of our pedestrian age, but the stumbling (and meaningless) “speech” being read by this black woman.
Subject to correction, I believe that it was once against the standing orders or other rules of the House of Commons to read a speech, rather than delivering one extempore.
Well, what do you expect? The great orators of the past, such as Oswald Mosley, Churchill, Lloyd George, Enoch Powell, F.E. Smith (later, Lord Birkenhead) have all long gone. In their place, at first, came lesser speakers, such as William Hague, Michael Heseltine, Michael Foot and Tony Blair. Now, however, we scrape what (surely?) must be the bottom of the barrel, including ignorant black women who would be more at home in the local market or social workers’ bureau.
I should add that Rory Stewart is said to have given effective speeches when he was an MP, but what was his subject when giving his first speech in the Commons? Hedgehogs. Now, I like hedgehogs, they are lovely little creatures, and native to these islands (and are sadly endangered now), but there are other matters of importance to occupy MPs.
— Persephone H #AmazonDiscriminates ☹ (@HenryPersephone) June 28, 2020
Three million Hong Kong Chinese invited into Britain by a government elected on a pledge to slam the brakes on #Immigration. In case you hadn't noticed, Tories always lie!
Nick Griffin is, of course, correct. The “Conservatives” have been “talking a good war” on mass immigration for decades, but have never delivered. Cameron-Levita lied, Theresa May either lied or was simply incompetent. Now this stupid monkey Boris-idiot! Three million!
As for equally-misnamed “Labour”, I was watching a couple of minutes of thick Lisa Nandy being interviewed on TV. today. Any problem with the UK being swamped by three million Hong Kong Chinese? No, none at all…
The politicians of all three “main parties” (System parties) are really, at root, one party, and that is a pack of evil traitors.
Twitter has stopped us from retweeting this, so we have posted it in this way! pic.twitter.com/Z3ZfBKKQXp
— Family Defence League (@FamilyDefence) June 28, 2020
Most replies to that tweet were disgusted both at the African and at the fact that he and millions similar are in Europe, but look now at what a typical “centrist” “Conservative” vomits, by way of excusing the Untermensch!
Awful, but if he has no food?
— Persephone H #AmazonDiscriminates ☹ (@HenryPersephone) June 30, 2020
No doubt well-meaning, but this is war. War has been declared on white European culture and civilization.
Sometimes, such people look for any excuse to be weak, so as not to have to defend our culture and civilization from savage invaders…
Her Twitter profile? “Tory & eternal petrolhead (sadly!) Carer to adult autistic son. Royalist. Unionist. Brexiteer“. Such people think that they are being “Christian”, “kind” etc, but their thoughts and votes are leading all Europe to destruction.
More music
Late entry…
More multikulti “enrichment”. of our society..
“Police are searching for a suspect who attempted to kidnap a teenage girl in central London on Wednesday afternoon.
British Transport Police released CCTV images of a man they would like to speak to in connection with the incident which took place at 2.30pm on Wednesday.”
Well, I went out two evenings running, early evening. Only to Waitrose, though. On the main road (a rural or semi-rural A-road), some traffic, more than before (again). It is clear that the “lockdown”, put in place by a frightened and indeed panicked government of fools, is fraying at the edges.
Waitrose was slightly busier than yesterday, but on both days no queue to get in, and I have noticed that the black-clad Handmaid’s Tale militia (Waitrose marshals) have slackened off over the weeks. Still there, still going through the motions, but not as officiously as (one or two were) a few weeks ago.
Actually, I do not think that many people have died of Coronavirus in this part of southern England. I have seen two cases reported in the local Press since the scare began. That is in a population of 15,000 locally and, in a town about 12 miles away, another 20,000. Other small population centres as well. I have not been told personally about anyone at all who has even (knowingly) had “the virus”, let alone been hospitalized with it or died from it.
I saw a few idiots wearing what looked like home-made face-masks. Three, in fact. One ancient woman shopping with her husband (sans mask), one thin, brittle and unpleasant-looking woman aged around 60 (that’s youthful around here), and one typical male Guardian-reader, about 40 at a guess, complete with tote-bag. Yes, I am assuming wildly; I blame the “lockdown”…
As for panic buying, that seems to be yesterday’s news. Some types of pasta not available, and the flour shelf looked depleted, but the other most-scooped-up items, such as bleach, loo paper, kitchen roll etc were all in good supply. As for bread, over-supply, with many loaves on sale reduced to as little as 10p. What a difference a month makes.
As a matter of fact, I wonder how many (older) people remember the absurd sugar panic of (?) sometime in the late 1970s. It only lasted a week, had (as far as I can recall) no obvious cause, but had shoppers lining up to buy a dozen bags of sugar at a time. There were even a few scuffles or arguments in the aisles, I think. The “madness of crowds”.
1974. Earlier than I thought. Memory, even mine, is fallible. At least I did not “remember” having been gassed (6 times, in one case!), like some “holocaust” fakes!
“Selected patients for experimental operations with a high risk of death…”? Most of the criticisms of medicine and psychiatry in the Reich (sometimes justified criticisms) could be applied with as much or greater justice to the UK or USA. Fact. But Germany lost the War. Das ist’s…
Not sure that I believe the anecdotes in the first paragraph, but I suppose that I could be wrong.
On the way back to Schloss Millard, called in for a small amount of fuel at the (only) filling station. I saw an unmarked police car, a white Jeep-like vehicle with dark windows, akin to a Hummer (I never would have taken that to be a police vehicle) suddenly roar along the by-then empty main road, blue lights flashing (including a Kojak-style magnetic one on the roof).
What was that all about? A big undercover police operation in the area? A pensioner seen sitting on a clifftop bench, or walking along the pebbly shore, in defiance of “lockdown” “advice”? Maybe a dangerous “neo-Nazi” had been seen in the neighbourhood…In fact, Kojak‘s car light was red, but you get my meaning
After my shopping expedition, I sat down to watch the excellent Reilly, Ace of Spies on the nostalgia channel. I used to have it on DVD and, before that, on video. On this occasion, I was 15 minutes too early, so watched the ending of a marginally amusing “reality” show called Celebrity Dinner Date. What can I say? The “celebrity” (of whom I had never heard and whose name I have already forgotten) turned out to be a simian person of mixed race. He is apparently featured on the “Year of the Sex Olympics” show called Love Island, which I have never seen but understand to be a competition in which various instant “celebrities” have it off with each other somewhere in the tropics or subtropics.
The three girls who entertained the “celebrity” in turn were all English. The Germans have a word for it (as usual): Rassenschande.
Tweets seen
-Sweden has no lockdown -Sweden's spread rate has been under 1 for weeks -Meaning Sweden's deaths per day are reducing -The UK doesn't need a lockdown to reduce deaths
She wants “full, policed lockdown, with clear orders…” I wonder whether she might be more at home somewhere like China, or North Korea? She has obviously no respect for what we English people used to call “civil rights”…
I was so struck by that tweet (though there are now many like it) and by the apparent fact that this Indian woman is (she claims— I had never heard of her) a regular face or voice on Sky and BBC, that I looked up her Wikipedia entry:
Looks like “Bidisha” peaked over a decade ago in career terms but is still making a good living (?) in the msm/literary milieu, while arguing for even more immigration into the UK…
As a matter of fact, “journalists” and other scribblers not only often fail to report the truth, or report untruth, but do not seem even to know it when it should be within the ambit of their own lived experience! Look at the blog post, below, by Anna Blundy, who was, at the end of the 1990s, the Bureau Chief in Moscow for the London Times.
Ms. Blundy, who was (she says) part-basis for the fictional character Bridget Jones, writes this:
“I was born in 1970 and grew up on my own with my mum while dad flew around the world to wars and summits. It was odd in those days, when most people didn’t go abroad, to be watching the news (in black and white) and taking it personally.”
“When most people didn’t go abroad“? In (what must have been, at earliest) the late 1970s?! I can assure her that many many people, maybe even most people, in the UK did “go abroad” in the late 1970s! Maybe not to El Salvador, true…Do many go there even now? And she watched the TV news in black and white? In 1975 or 1980? Come on…
What a country we live in. People can dress up in all sorts of appalling ways so long as they are on an “LGBT” march or the Notting Hill Carnival, and anyone objecting can FO, but one man or woman dressing like a 17thC “plague doctor” (presumably to satirize the present “lockdown” nonsense and/or Coronavirus scare) and the police are out seeking to find him to lecture him, in case he “scares” anyone. After the population has been scared out of its skin by its own government! You couldn’t make it up!
Happened to see this
If there is a mass exodus from the criminal bar then the first victims will be those without independent wealth.
For those of us that dedicate our time to social mobility and mentoring – it’s gut wrenching to think it will have all been for nothing.
All I can say is that when I was first appearing, as a “second six pupil” (green, newly-qualified, barrister), in the County Courts and magistrates’ courts in London in 1993, the lower criminal and family courts especially were awash with black barristers. I did some criminal work, but not family. If I am honest, in the next few years I saw not one black (or brown) barrister who was anything other than incompetent. Maybe I was unlucky…I even saw an appalling creature (with teeth sawn to points, like a cannibal) at the High Court in 1994, where he was (thanks to his friends on scandal-hit Lambeth Council) defending a judicial review application. I could say more, but what’s the point?
Only for one brief period in my life did I any baking of bread; in the early 1980s. It lasted a few weeks. I got some excellent recipes from a book by the now-forgotten Robert Carrier (famous in the 1960s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Carrier_(chef)
My first attempt and several others were all successful. It was only then that I went a bridge too far, making from Carrier’s book something called (if memory serves) Old English Spice Bread, which ended up the size, consistency and —almost— weight of a cannonball. It was not that I could not eat it, but that I could not even cut it! I tried to break it open by casting it down, with force, on a pavement. Result? a clunk, as if a piece of concrete had been dropped.
The cost was tremendous. A large amount of double cream, and various other ingredients. All for something half the size of a football and weighing a ton.
Turns out that Professor Ferguson broke his own lockdown in order to meet with his girlfriend (whose husband must be un mari complaisant). Ferguson has now resigned because of that trivia, not because his flawed advice (that there could be 250,000 deaths from Coronavirus in the UK) has led to the shutdown of most of the economy, to the imposition of a “police state-lite”, and maybe to the end of the UK as we have known it.
I knew as soon as I saw that bastard Ferguson that there was something wrong about him. I thought maybe drugs, but it seems that his craving lies elsewhere. It has to be admitted, though, that his girlfriend is not unattractive, on the face of it…
My mother, who endured the bombing, was a good deal less worried about bombs than a lot of people seem, to be today about a virus. 'If it's got your name on it…' was what she and all her friends used to say. And I promise you, bombs had a much higher CFR than Covid-19. https://t.co/O0Ed2RbCRh
Question's one of proportion @jacquip537 . My parents both went through the war, my mother in the Liverpool Blitz, my father on the Russian convoys. They would have laughed at us cringing at a virus, and been appalled at us giving up the freedom they defended. https://t.co/lMp0XHvNaL
Why make excuses for Imperial's wild and damaging over-estimate of mortality? Surely @maajidnawaz scientists should wait for tested facts before proposing plans to deal with problems they have yet to measure? Especially when those plans are so devastating. https://t.co/mJrUoxnRM2
Indeed. The Johnson government, the Cabinet of None of the Talents, drifts in the current, unable to admit error or to stop the haemorrhage of national wealth it has caused, threatening not just the sacred NHS but life and health in general. https://t.co/9WEnk6k6yq
Important news: 'the absence of a link with China and the lack of recent travel suggest that the disease [Covid-19] was already spreading among the French population at the end of December, 2019.' https://t.co/NJnfecDEdf
1/2 It was when Al Johnson was Foreign Secretary (Boris is a stage name designed to suggest a cuddly bear, which he is not) that his deep lack of actual knowledge or experience was demonstrated beyond doubt. But apart from the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe most did not notice. https://t.co/y2b91O1Cjq
2/2 By the time Winston Churchill was Al Johnson's age, he had been in battle and under fire many times, had been captured, held as a PoW and escaped, and had held I think seven major ministerial posts. https://t.co/y2b91O1Cjq
Melanie Phillips is desperately trying to boost Boris-idiot by applauding his crazed “lockdown” nonsense. That has put Hitchens off her. I have to say, though, that his perspicacity fails him at times, as here below:
Well, @Melanielatest ( along with a number of other surprising people) took a major step when she supported the Iraq war. I am glad I had the sense not to do so, because look where it leads https://t.co/OWwFmFLyLk
Was it really so surprising that a Jewess who is fanatically pro-Israel supported the war by which the major Western powers defeated one of the two or three greatest threats to Israel, i.e. Iraq under Saddam Hussein? Thus doing Israel’s dirty work. For which Israel paid not a shekel.
Anyway, back to the virus scare and the “lockdown” nonsense:
The dental blockade is astonishing. There never was a country that needed dentists so badly. https://t.co/1Fjwh6Ro4d
It's not an analogy @yoycation. It's a comparison: 1940- British people calm in the face of the Blitz, and determined to defend their freedom. 2020 – British people panic in the face of a virus, and uninterested in defending their freedom. https://t.co/1ARLLlpzkA
Hitchens has a long series of altercations with some Jew called Margulies, a lecturer in politics at the University of Essex, no less. The tweet below, is at or near the end of the exchange, as Margulies is put back in his box…
Are you really unaware of the alarmist forecasts of deaths which were made and did not come true? You are becoming increasingly incoherent and uninteresting, and also seem to be startlingly ill-informed. I think you may have to go now @chequeredfuture. https://t.co/VyVMC21miX
Nope. Plenty of scientists, doctors, epidemiologists dissent from the policy. Check my blog, you can find out all about it. You really do need to stop swallowing govt propaganda and range a bit wider, @chequeredfuture, sweetie, but you do have to go now. You're wasting my time. https://t.co/oMRgnyy3B0
Good to see that the reputation of the University of Essex is being, er, maintained!
Johannes Leak in ‘The Australian’ suggests the reaction to Covid-19 might be a little out of proportion. Has any cartoonist been so subversive of conventional wisdom? pic.twitter.com/yhDMtecxMb
Soros and the Great Replacement of populations in Europe
The New World Order [NWO], imposed through Zionist Occupation Governments [ZOG] does not need real Europeans. It is replacing us with lesser types. One has to ask the question, is Coronavirus connected with all this manipulation?
Back to tweets seen
ALEX BRUMMER in the Daily Mail : the nation is heading for a slump, a surge of insolvencies and levels of unemployment almost certainly not seen in our lifetimes. Madness to keep under-45s from work while economy burns https://t.co/qrCs7IM9XI via @MailOnline
“We are not just condemning a generation of young people to long-term joblessness, we are also encumbering the country with levels of debt which it will take decades to pay off and could even linger into the 22nd century. (Remember, the debts incurred as a result of World War II were only finally paid off by Gordon Brown in 2006.” [Daily Mail]
The Jamaican singer, Millie (Millie Small) has died. 73 years old. So I must have been only 7 when her one UK hit came out and was frequently on the radio and TV. I remember it well, maybe partly because “Millie/Millard”— similarity of names.
West Indians were then (1964) few in the UK, incredibly (despite what the msm propaganda would have people believe now). In the early to mid 1960s, I cannot remember ever seeing one —one!—, even in the poorer parts of Reading, let alone where my family lived, on the border of South Oxfordshire), until my family returned to the UK in late 1969, after nearly three years in Australia.
My first thoughts about Stewart (at the time, as potential Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister) underwent change as I discovered more about him. Now, my judgment is far less favourable than it was a year ago.
Responsible not only for instituting a poundland KGB attitude to the public under the “lockdown” nonsense, but also in respect of the Alison Chabloz case. His “officers” (toytown police woodentops) behaved disgracefully on several occasions.
Now let’s hope that the Derbyshire voters also get rid of the “Police and Crime Commissioner” for that force, a dim Sikh who is in the pocket of the Jewish lobby.
“Lockdown” nonsense may start to be removed next week
About time. If I see much more of the (endlessly-repeated on radio and TV) braindead slogan “Stay at home; Protect the NHS; Save lives“, I myself may require immediate help as my blood-pressure goes into orbit.
Stray thoughts
Was he wrong? I would have agreed with his sentiment even a year ago. Now? [sighs]…millions of rabbits under house arrest, scared of their own shadows, lining up six feet apart; then there are the bookburners who think that books written by those they and their sort call “Nazi” should be burned, destroyed etc….and the bookburners include crazed women in academia, “professors” of third-rate universities, writers, journalists…the very people who, even 30 years ago would mostly have supported at least basic intellectual freedom. And so on.
Tomorrow the rabbits and their police zookeepers will all be clapping on command (according to the msm lie machines, anyway…in fact, I suspect that relatively few are boring the pants off the rest of us…not much clapping is happening where I live).
The general level of quality is shockingly low now in the UK, from government and Parliament to the Press and TV “journalists”, to teachers and exams, to the “learned professions” (certainly the Bar and the solicitors’ profession), to the degraded “universities” and their fake “professors”, to the police (now on the lowest level imaginable).
So, while I feel that “never say never”, on this occasion Enoch Powell may not be right…not in the exact terms, anyway.
Tweets
Denying what, @nastylucas? When have you or anyone else produced a speck of *evidence* that throttling the economy and confining people in their homes for weeks have in fact saved a single life? What is it? Where? You've nothing but pathetic blind faith in what Johnson tells you. https://t.co/QbuJhyMMOF
Are they, James @james_macintyre? I've been surprised at how *little* coverage this event has had in the liberal zone. The Guardian's headline must be one of the dullest ever written. And the BBC! They hate it. But the coming*economic* catastrophe is inadequately covered. https://t.co/H4yvcKjbJu
Well, as you can't even spell my *name* "@janetvolpe2, I don't expect you could manage the other thing either. Best not get involve din things you know nothing about. https://t.co/r5ystdpa2T
Thank you @seantubegaming. but it reminds me of what anyone with any serious case to argue is up against, and gives me an opportunity to mute lots of silly puppets so I need never be troubled with them again. https://t.co/TWMhu9S0uU
Turned on the TV, to see that The World at War is again being shown. Interesting to the extent that many people who were in quite high positions in WW2 were still alive and able to be interviewed in 1973 when the series started. Not the top leaders, of course, but (mainly on the British and German sides) the secondary or lower commanders and other personalities: Speer, General Warlimont, Stalin’s interpreter etc.
As before, I was struck by how close the Wehrmacht came to capturing Moscow. As I have blogged before, in 1993 my driver made it from the Khimki memorial (the point of furthest advance in 1941) to close to the Kremlin in 15-20 minutes!
A 1941 German tank would take longer, but even so… (yes, since both 1941 and my first visit in 1993, an IKEA store has appeared there!).
Annoying that, in World at War, Laurence Olivier, doing the voiceover, attempts a kind of faux-Russian pronunciation which is in fact wrong in both Russian and Western usage, eg “Shtalin” for “Stalin”.
Ash Sarkar
Ash Sarkar, who taught briefly at a new university (and now at some institute in the Netherlands, founded by a Dutch Jew), is now seen quite often on TV in the UK as a kind of “licensed Bolshevik”, following her rather silly “I’m literally a communist” outburst on a daytime TV show a couple of years ago. She is 28 today. That fact is “trending” on Twitter.
Ash Sarkar is part of the Novara Media set-up, along with Aaron Bastani.
Here is not the time or place convenient to examine the inanity of being both “communist” and “libertarian” (which is what both of the above claim to be; they also both claim to be “feminist”). To go into the full depths of their political childishness would take too long today. I have blogged about them, en passant, in relation to wider issues:
Neither is here and now the time and place to examine how it is that Anglia Ruskin University had someone whose degree and MA were both in English Literature teaching “Global Politics” for a year. We are talking about someone who defined Communism as “the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled, while also having fun“… I wonder what Marx (let alone Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky) would have thought of that!
As said, Ash Sarkar has taken over from Owen Jones the mantle of the “licensed Bolshevik” or “System-approved faux-revolutionary” on the msm in the UK. She appears, despite her “I’m a communist” outburst, on BBC, Sky etc. I wonder whether the System msm would have been so accommodating had someone said “I’m literally a National Socialist”? Or even “social-nationalist”? Of course not. Blackballed at once. So Ash Sarkar fulfils the role of pseudo-revolutionary or radical. The BBC or Sky can then say “look, we’re an open and free mass media outlet. We even have revolutionaries on our shows.” Yes, of course…
The Ash Sarkar trend on Twitter provides yet more evidence of how little Twitter reflects the real political world. I read that Novara Media has grown from having only a few thousand readers in 2015 to hundreds of thousands, on occasion 1 million or more, now.
However, there are 70 million inhabitants of the UK. If you looked only at Twitter, you might imagine that most support a “Novara Media” political position, when in fact Labour as a whole (and there is little organized “socialism” outside Labour) only has the support at present of about 25% of the population, and an Ash Sarkar position some very small proportion of that.
Twitter has expelled most truly dissident personalities (including me, in 2018), mostly at the behest of the organized Jewish lobby. Increasingly, one can almost judge the public mood by seeing what is favoured on Twitter, then reversing it.
Westminster Bridge clapathon for idiots
I blogged about this yesterday. I have to agree with this fellow:
This country is the world leader at empty gestures. Give the key workers proper protection and increase their pay! Nobody cares about the feds doing nee naw nee naw on Westminster Bridge. https://t.co/6zdGASnvxw
(though I wish that some people would stop referring to the British police as “the feds”! Did that come from American TV via the blacks in the UK, somehow? How silly it is…)
The UK as North Korea-lite, complete with emotional blackmail (if you don’t clap, and more importantly if you don’t support “lockdown”, or if you doubt the official narrative, you must be a bad person, almost a murderer…)
The Government of fools
It seems that little Matt Hancock and his fellow-clowns may “instruct” anyone over 70 and also anyone under 70 with health problems as common as high blood pressure to stay “indefinitely” in “lockdown”, i.e. under house arrest! For years, or for the rest of their lives!
I suggest that little Matt Hancock and this government shut up before they really do cause a (typically British, quiet?) revolution in this compliant nation of serfs.
The only reason that I am not going out wherever I please on a daily basis at present is because I have nowhere much to go anyway! If the proposed restrictions (beyond May) are mandated, however, I may have to go out with the specific intention of “flouting” the UK’s toytown police state “laws”.
Meanwhile…
Around 15,000 people a day are still flying into the UK. Their medical condition is not checked on arrival. That's the equivalent of 105,000 passengers a week, including those with serious Covid-19 outbreaks, like the US, China, Spain and Italy.
Below, UK North Korea-lite riot squad goons (“Territorial Support Group” in the Metropolitan Police) getting very agitato at a (Jew) journalist who tried to film an arrest (probably a pointless one):
This is always the problem, in any country, when you give the police too much power. They tend to abuse it and/or treat government preferences as “law”. What the government wants is not law. Look at the sergeant in charge there, in the clip. Shouts out that the journalist “is killing people” by standing outside a park, filming. How bloody stupid can you get?! When will the sergeant call in an air strike?…
This, below, is how the UK Government of Fools runs its toytown “war effort”:
The gov't said it's delivery of free food to vulnerable would be the 'biggest effort to deliver supplies to those in need since World War Two'. They gave the 6,500 people in Wirral just 11 cans of beans, a handful of Kit Kats and a few other items https://t.co/1GSqKKHz1G
I don't think so @dproffitt. Media are already becoming far more critical, over govt incompetence, and over economic damage. And public beginning to realise that the economic damage is real and reaching into their own lives. But it takes time. https://t.co/L07K6u0zZ3
I hadn't observed any polls about the Tory Party. I think a lot of people have forgotten that this *is* a Tory government, judging by the widespread leftist support for its actions. I hope that one day we will grow out of imagining that it is always 1940. It is not. It is 2020. https://t.co/eeSv3uxLTG
Hubris is A Bad Thing, so I shall not claim that Peter Hitchens is [see below] copying my blog remark of yesterday, which compared the government of fools’ “lockdown” with the actions of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. After all, the parallel is rather obvious.
The government, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, has called into being forces it can no longer control. It persuaded public opinion to back a shutdown. It still does.But many ministers fear that with every day of stoppage they are destroying the economy for the foreseeable future.
Fraser Nelson notes: 'What can never be repaired is the long-term damage to children's education, or the lives of those whose cancers might lie undetected in this interregnum.' https://t.co/TEgS2NsthM
Fraser Nelson in Telegraph: 'One fairly obvious alternative to a mandatory lockdown is moving to a Swedish-style system of consent: asking people to be careful, rather than sending the police after them'. https://t.co/TEgS2NsthM
'Fraser Nelson on the fix the government are in : 'Their mission was to prepare for a Wuhan-style Covid onslaught. The onslaught has simply not arrived in the form that was feared' https://t.co/TEgS2NsthM
A few years ago, a pack of Jews, including some public entertainers, got together and, via the Jew-Zionist fake “charity”, the “Campaign Against Antisemitism”, had the satirical singer-songwriter Alison Chabloz barred from the Edinburgh Fringe, part of the Edinburgh Festival. How they laughed! Well, guess what? Most of those singers, monologuers, comedians etc were hoping to appear and make money, or advance their careers, at the Fringe this year. Oh, no, wait. Coronavirus…
Festival cancelled. Fringe cancelled. As Windsor Davies used to say, “oh dear, what a pity, never mind”.
L’homme qui rire…
The same is true of all those barristers who either applauded my getting disbarred (via an allied pack of Jews) in 2016, or who failed to defend me publicly (not one did defend me, in fact). Coronavirus has now shut all of the courts, or almost all (I believe that some magistrates’ courts are still ploughing their way through their pathetic daily lists of minor crimes). Much of the Bar (despite “virtual hearings” here and there) has had its court work frozen. Not all have paperwork to do.
I sincerely hope that those who attacked me or failed to speak up, not so much for me personally, but for freedom of socio-political expression, suffer stinging blows; and well-deserved.
Unfortunately, many barristers have plenty of capital on which to draw, but many do not. I hope that those who opposed me and especially those who tried to kick me when I was down (via Twitter etc) will take a hit. They will anyway, eventually, one way or another, but now (in the pocket) would be a good start.
A tiny glimmer of commonsense (but not much)
“Driving to the countryside and walking – where more time is spent doing the latter than the former – is among a list of reasonable excuses for Britons leaving their home during the coronavirus lockdown, according to advice issued to police.” [The Guardian]
…yet still no sign that the “authorities” or the police or public understand that, in terms of commonsense, there is nothing wrong in driving around just to get some change of air (with window down, for example). It neither exposes anyone to the virus, nor spreads it (because the virus is only able to move in air, briefly, in droplets of water, as when someone sneezes).
Prison Island UK
So the Government of this country, unlike all others in Europe, at least so far, is suggesting that 10% or 20% of the population is going to have to remain under house arrest for months, maybe years, until a vaccine is found or…when? Until the next Chinese virus is upon us? First thought: tell the Chinese to stop eating bats, rats, pangolins, birds’ nests and all the other disgraceful stuff they eat.
It is not acceptable for a British government to place a substantial minority or indeed majority of the population under house arrest. The only reason that the UK is in a bad position vis a vis this virus is because the Conservative Party governments have been for years cutting to the bone the NHS, care homes, social care in the community, and other relevant areas.
Do we see in Germany, France, Scandinavia etc this panic about shortages of equipment, of staff, of beds, of hospitals? No. Do we see in those other countries officially-approved “clapothons” to “celebrate” the health service? No. Do we see individuals having to (or deciding to) collect funds for the health service via crowdfunding, because that service is underfunded? No.
Well, I drove out on a couple of connected errands, both (I regret) within the new toytown police-state “rules”; two errands, one drive, as the Chinese might put it. My first afternoon drive for weeks.
My impressions: more cars than when the “lockdown” was first imposed, though fewer than when the UK lived what was then called “normal” life. No obvious police presence, though I hear through local sources that the police have been quite active in the wider local area in the (presumably) late evenings, i.e. after the supermarkets and convenience stores shut (mostly 2000 hrs). They have apparently been stopping cars, checking people out etc.
The little village shop a couple of miles away is now operating a “1 out 1 in” system, with only 2-3 people in toto allowed in at any time. I was able to buy some artisan trout pate and trout pate with horseradish, and a couple of bunches of local asparagus, as well as a few Lotto tickets.
It strikes me that “social distancing” is having a quite powerful psychological effect on people, a mental or emotional distancing too. Fewer smiles, a feeling around of wariness. What is really behind all this? As with the mass sacrifice of cattle during the Foot and Mouth emergency, there seems to be at least one hidden agenda.
China
I am coming to the provisonal view that the world as a whole is going to have to treat China as a deadly enemy. I am not happy about that tentative judgment, but I cannot see an alternative, the way things are. We must see things as they are, not as they might be in a more perfect world…
A part of London I know slightly but not well. A couple of times, c.1980, I had a beer in the pub just about where the incident occurred. A few times, round about the same year, I had a milkshake or whatever in the local McDonalds (the first one I had ever patronized, I believe, and quite possibly the last, except for the odd visit to the ones in Victoria Street and at Marble Arch, and one in Maryland). I also had a (dishonest and generally non-paying) Sri Lankan instructing solicitor in Streatham in the early 1990s; I attended her office for a reception once. She killed herself a few weeks later. I think that the last time I was in Streatham was probably about 25 years ago.
Leaving aside reminiscence, it seems that the Government response to the latest terrorist incident is to say that —ill-defined— “terror” convicts will in future have to serve more or less their full sentence, rather than be released on licence earlier (most prisoners get out at half-time).
Tweets about the incident, many misinformed or simply laughable, now rain down…as do comments by the sort of idiot-MPs we now have in Parliament. For example, here is Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the MP for Streatham, who went to the scene of the attack. She said: “The perpetrator didn’t serve his full sentence, which is questionable – what is more questionable is why he needed to be under surveillance. If someone needs to be under surveillance it brings the question on why they were released in the first place.” [Guardian]
So…Bell Ribeiro-Addy has, as well as her grand-sounding but probably rather easy first degree and (ditto or double…) Masters’ degree, a “graduate diploma in law”, yet she seemingly cannot understand the simple concept that people are released from prison according to strict rules and regulations under law. They cannot be kept in prison for arbitrary reasons. This is the UK, not a banana republic like Ghana, from where Ms. Ribeiro-Addy’s parents came. The UK may be becoming a banana state, and MPs such as Ms. Ribeiro-Addy are accelerating that process, but we are, thankfully, not quite there yet. I feel a blog article in my “Deadhead MPs” series coming on…
The “Secret Barrister” on Twitter, often worth reading, has this to say about the governmental response:
I don’t know for sure what changes to the criminal justice system will comprehensively “deal with” the risk of dangerous terror offenders. But I guarantee that something cooked up overnight by Dominic Cummings so that Priti Patel can posture in front of the cameras will not be it https://t.co/BLpovnUW3g
1. Early release of offenders imprisoned for the type of offences committed by Sudesh Amman was ended by the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019.
2. If other obvious measures were not included in that Act, questions should be asked of then-Home Secretary @sajidjavidhttps://t.co/gPz5x9OQQf
The tweeter below attacks the “Secret Barrister”, but he himself has little (in fact nothing) intelligent to say, which means that he has a good chance of becoming a “Conservative” MP at some point in the future, so long as the Jew lobby does not dislike him.
The Secret Barrister is already furiously typing up a long Twitter thread on why this is actually good, and why the rest of us plebs should stop questioning our glorious, perfect legal system. https://t.co/3ivBZ6wZEA
Another tweeter seems to imagine that the terror attack might have been stopped, had the local police station still been open and full of police, though she adds a rider:
Thus speaks a would-be “journalist” who writes for the Huffington Post joke “newspaper”. Her assignment for today? To look up the meaning of the word “uncanny”…Her usage reminds me of how (until someone told him he sounded stupid) Barack Obama would, in almost every second or third sentence, use the word “extraordinary”, and with great sonority…
As to the police, I do not see how their response can be faulted. They took out the terrorist only minutes (perhaps less than one minute) after he started his rampage.
It may be that the terrorist knew or assumed that he was under close surveillance, and that that was why he stole a knife rather than simply buying one with cash: had he bought one, the watchers would have assumed that he was about to attack; he probably underestimated the skill of the surveillance people, thinking that he could steal a knife without anyone seeing that he had done so. Having said that, some witnesses are saying that the terrorist took the knife openly. If that is right, my theory falls and I do not know what to think except that maybe the terrorist was seeking some spurious Islamist “martyrdom”, i.e. “suicide by cop”.
The governmental response is pathetic. The terrorist had served a relatively short sentence. Had he had to serve the remaining months, would that have changed anything? No.
Now, while it is true that most (the vast majority of) Muslims in the UK would not commit such acts, or (arguably) even support them if done by others, a certain percentage of that Muslim population would either do them or support them. Active would-be terrorists are few.
There are, officially, about 2,660,000 Muslims in the UK, so the real figure may be about 3 million. Let us say that 1 in 10,000 is a terrorist or a would-be terrorist. That’s still 300. Not huge, but the State does not have the resources to keep 300 possible terrorists under 24/7 surveillance. What if the ratio is 1:1,000? That would be 3,000 terrorists. You see the problem. It takes dozens of operators, or at least 20 as a minimum, to keep close surveillance on even one person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 300 x 20 = 6,000 officers. 3,000 x 20 = 60,000 officers. No can do. Even if the number of police/MI5 etc needed is only 3,000, the burden is still too heavy. It’s not possible.
The only long-term solution is for the UK to become a relatively-homogenous ethnostate.
Of course, kneejerk “antifascists”, bien-pensant scribblers etc will denigrate someone of this sort, but Hoare was a hero who saved many people from torture and death during the Simba rebellion in the Congo (1964-65). Not only Europeans, but Africans too. Nuns etc. Read Congo Mercenary before you judge him harshly:
For myself, I am content to let the Scots leave the UK should they wish it, though in my view it is an unconvincing “independence” that would see Scotland dominated by the EU and international finance, by (presumably) NATO too, and with a population likely to be swamped by mass non-European immigration over time (though Scotland is at present over 95% white, which is probably why few Scots sympathize with English people who despair at their country becoming black/brown— “I’m All Right, Jack”…).
Any pull-out by Scotland would of course have considerable repercussions in terms of rump-UK politics. The 650 Westminster MPs would become 591 and, with boundary changes, perhaps only about 560. The Conservative Party would be dominant in the short-term, with the Scottish SNP and LibDem contingent no longer there.
I am now writing about a personal experience, because I feel that some people might find it interesting anyway, and because I also feel that, inter alia, it says something about the EU and the way it operates.
The facts
In 1998, some months after my return from a several-months sojourn in Egypt, I was telephoned by someone whom I did not know, Leasor by name, who told me that my name had been suggested as someone who might be a suitable candidate for a project funded by the EU, and would I meet the next day to discuss it? I was interested, not least because I needed a job.
At the time, I was staying temporarily with my parents, at the yachting haven of Hamble, in Hampshire. As I say, I had been in Egypt for quite a while, had then spent three months penniless and effectively homeless in London (a dystopian nightmare), and since that time another lucrative work possibility, in Odessa (Ukraine), had just recently fallen through. The small financial settlement I had been paid (after having had to issue court proceedings against a Jew fraud —will blog about that another time—) was running out rapidly. So I was happy to investigate this new idea, whatever it might be.
A day or two later I was in London, lunching in a smallish and pleasant Italian restaurant in Pimlico, a stone’s throw from the Vauxhall Bridge Road. My host, Leasor (I forget his Christian name), was easy to talk to and explained that there was an EU TACIS project coming up for tender. TACIS was “Technical Aid to the Commonwealth of Independent States”, a foreign aid umbrella supposedly helping out the former Soviet republics by providing “expertise”. I regarded it as largely a boondoggle, a major aim of which was to help out not the former Soviet Union but large Western law firms, accountancy firms, “consultancy” firms and industrial concerns.
I believe that, since our telephone conversation, I had faxed my CV to Leasor, so he knew my work background, qualifications etc. He also knew that I had been, during 1995-1996, on the Committee of the Central Asia and Transcaucasia Law Association [CATLA], also connected with TACIS; the CATLA committee met every few weeks at one or another plush office of law firms in the City of London or West End. I remember that they included Clifford Chance, Norton Rose and other large firms. CATLA had been set up by UK law firms with interests in the new states recently carved out of the Soviet Union.
As for Leasor himself, I do not think that he said much about himself, save for the fact that he had been involved in a few similar deals in recent years. I am not someone who questions people closely (leaving aside my years at the practising Bar); I always think it rather rude. Neither did I enquire how he got my temporary home telephone number.
I had spent a year in Kazakhstan (1996-97), and had, a few years earlier, visited post-Soviet Moscow. This was of interest to the consortium which was bidding for the contract in Uzbekistan; also useful was my far-from-perfect but serviceable Russian language (both reading and speaking).
After lunch, Leasor took me to see his brother (in fact he had or has at least one other, but I did not know that then). His brother had been Adjutant of the 17th/21st Lancers, a smart cavalry unit now (at time of writing) not in independent existence; that brother was running what was basically a public relations outfit in a small office in Westminster. The brother or his firm would also be part of the bid consortium. I found both brothers pleasant and polite, though the ex-officer one did carry light traces of his former profession of arms in his speech and manner.
The next meeting was at the offices of yet another part of the consortium, the large law firm Simmons & Simmons, in the City of London. The meeting was chaired by its then “emerging markets” partner, a small Jew with a name so Scottish that the possessor of it should have had bagpipes and a tartan Tam O’Shanter. I had met him before. Also present was a City of London bod with a good line in convoluted financial jargon.
The project in Uzbekistan was to be based in the capital, Tashkent, the largest city in Central Asia. The title of the project was something like “Secondary Markets in Uzbekistan”. What I knew about secondary markets could be written, if not on a postcard, then certainly on a single side of paper, but no matter: the financial bod and the law firm would jointly take up that slack. My role would be to be second-in-command, so to speak, based as sole resident representative in Tashkent. All that was really required of me was legal and resident experience in the region (Uzbekistan borders Kazakhstan) and serviceable Russian. The others would be based in London.
It turned out that this was the EU’s second attempt to get a secondary market going in Uzbekistan. The first had sunk without trace, taking about £2 million in EU funding with it. I discovered that the team who had won the previous bid (I think French) had blown almost all the budget on salaries and on staying in the most expensive hotels in Tashkent, Moscow and European capitals, leaving nothing for publishing useful (educative) information or for effective liaison with the government of Uzbekistan.
20 years have now elapsed. I realized only years after the events now chronicled that, in overall charge of TACIS projects for that part of the world from 1994-1996, i.e. not so very long before I got directly involved in the region, was one Nick Clegg, since then of course MP (2005-2017), UK Liberal Democrat Party leader (2007-2015) and (2010-2015) Deputy PM, but then just a wealthy “trustafarian” whose parents had got him a job in Brussels:
“He took up a post at the European Commission in April 1994, working in the TACIS aid programme to the former Soviet Union. For two years, Clegg was responsible for developing direct aid programmes in Central Asia and the Caucasus worth €50 million. He was involved in negotiations with Russia on airline overflight rights, and launched a conference in Tashkent in 1993 that founded TRACECA—an international transport programme for the development of a transport corridor for Europe, the Caucasus and Asia.” [Wikipedia].
No wonder the project for which I was recruited had failed at its first attempt! Clegg! I note also that only now, a quarter of a century later, is the “new Silk Road” coming into being. I wonder how much EU money Clegg wasted overall…
Coming back to a micro level of economics, my own proposed salary was, if I remember rightly, going to be somewhere around £100,000 (I think more) taxfree (and paid offshore), equivalent to maybe £150,000 or so taxfree today (educated guess). I think that accommodation and flights were also on offer. This was more than attractive to someone who had, that very same year, been for months all but destitute in London (where some of my adventures would make amusing reading, were I able to write them down).
So to Brussels…
The two Leasor brothers and I flew on a small business airline to Brussels. The jet was almost empty and arrived just as darkness was falling, around 1800 hrs. A confusing taxi ride through endless tunnels and we were there, in the middle of Brussels, a city to which I had never been (though I had visited Belgium itself on a number of occasions, starting in (I think) 1963, aged maybe just 7, when my family flew Sabena from Heathrow to Ostend, a service long-since discontinued).
In the morning, after an excellent dinner (Brussels is noted for cuisine) and a night in some hotel which appeared to be exclusively occupied by delegates and supplicants to the EU Commission or Parliament, we set off on foot to our own appointment with the Commission.
At the Commission (not the famous main building but a quite neglected smaller one nearby), we were ushered in eventually to a room set up like a tribunal, with EU flags on vertical poles and tables for us, the Uzbek delegation and the Eurocrats judging our bid.
The Uzbeks were a government minister (I forget now, 20+ years later, whether it was the Foreign Minister or Minister for Foreign Trade, I think the former) and his English-speaking assistant, a clever-looking young man who had “KGB” or the equivalent written all over him.
The “tribunal” consisted of a troika: the chairwoman was a French or Belgian woman, maybe 50, very much conscious of her importance (whatever that was) and looking somehow lacquered, as if her hair or face might crack if she were to fall over. There was also a besuited person of, I think, Belgian nationality and an English or maybe Scottish civil servant, looking scruffy and wearing a roll-neck jumper, making him look like the once-famous 1956 publicity shot of the young Colin Wilson, writer of The Outsider, pictured as enfant terrible of popular philosophy.
After one of the others gave an overview of our bid, it was my turn to be grilled. The main thing was to ask about my legal background and then to test my facility in Russian conversation. That was done by the minister, with help from “KGB” assistant. After a while, the KGB assistant carried on, until one of the troika interjected and said “I think that we have established that Mr. Millard has a good command of Russian…we are running short of time.” The KGB assistant wanted to carry on interrogating me but had to shut up. Not before time. The bastard had pretty much reached the outer limits of my fluency. As he subsided, he flashed me a smile and a sharp glance as if to say “I’ve got your number…”
We went back separately to London. I thought that we had done enough to win the bid, as had the brothers, but in the end it turned out that, for purely political reasons, a consortium from, if I recall, Spain had to be awarded the contract, because Spain had not had enough of a bite at the TACIS cherry…
Aftermath
My visit to Brussels over, I only heard once more from Leasor (the one who contacted me initially). I ended up, not long afterward, going to live for a while in the Caribbean and elsewhere. To this day, I have never visited Tashkent.
It was only much later that I started to wonder whether there had been something else behind that —superficially— purely commercial bid. Uzbekistan, like Kazakhstan, was just then, in 1998, becoming pivotal in geopolitical terms, as “Western”/NATO/NWO power rubbed up against an upsurging China, a Russia starting to be resurgent, and Islamism from the South. Maybe Professor Haushofer was at least partly correct…
Uzbekistan was under strict dictatorial control and at that time had not yet committed itself to cooperation with NATO. It might be that our bid was really an opening gambit to insert an intelligence post into Tashkent, with me as “clean” figurehead, at least at first. The project would have provided access to Uzbek ministers and advisors at or near the top level of their government.
Evidence? Not much. Was it relevant that I was called out of the blue? Not necessarily (headhunters had done that before and would do so again). Was it relevant that the Italian restaurant was near Vauxhall Bridge Road? Not necessarily. Was it in any way relevant that —as I only discovered a few years ago— the brothers were the sons of the writer James Leasor, who was a WW2 officer, later a foreign correspondent and writer of famous books on war and espionage, some of which were filmed: The One That Got Away and (filmed sub nom The Sea Wolves) Boarding Party? I suppose not. Straws in the wind, as we are in life…
Now many who read my blog will know that I was, in the 1991-2008 period, at various times a practising barrister (in England) and an employed barrister (mostly overseas). Defamation was not one of my specialisms. I would have liked it to have been. It is an interesting and lucrative field, often involving interesting and/or famous people, though certainly not demanding the highest legal skills or intellectual gifts (contrary to the general public belief).
I did a few cases of libel while at the Bar, though all were advisory; none reached a substantive court hearing. I did advise, pro bono (unpaid), and when only a student, on a libel matter the result of which made the front pages of the more serious newspapers: Flegon v. Solzhenitsyn [1987].
Unable (as a mere student) to appear before the judge and civil jury (all defamation cases then had a jury), I nonetheless attended court most days, sometimes all day, wrote (mostly ignored) instructions and good advice for the plaintiff (now dumbed-down to “claimant”), and advised generally on tactics etc (also mostly ignored). I was told by another attendee that once, I having told Flegon’s assistant to give Flegon a note while he, Flegon, was (speaking very loosely) “cross-examining” a witness, I bowed myself out of [High] Court, only for the judge to demand of Flegon, as soon as I had gone, “to see that note that you have just been given”. Apparently, the judge read the note and told Flegon (who was proving a massive pain to the judge in various ways) to “listen to the good advice that you have been given, Mr. Flegon”! My first commendation by the Bench!
The Daily Telegraph said, when Flegon died (16 years later, in 2003):
“His remarkable success at repeatedly getting manuscripts out of the Soviet Union led to the widespread view that he must have had contacts in the KGB; but in 1987 he won £10,000 libel damages in the High Court from Solzhenitsyn over an allegation to that effect in the Russian version of The Oak and Calf. Unable to afford a barrister’s fees, Flegon conducted his case himself, in faltering English.”
Well, returning from the past to the present, we often see people, usually on Twitter, either talking about suing this or that person (often another “tweeter”) or expressing an opinion on defamation cases before the courts.
The average Joe has no idea about legal matters, and yet many opine about the law and practice of defamation, perhaps because it tends to attract msm publicity. For example, the tweet below betrays no hint that the tweeter knows that people have never been allowed to get legal aid for matters of defamation.
"Kezia Dugdale wins £25k defamation case brought by Wings Over Scotland"
This seems to me a balanced and reasonable judgement. A Win-Win. But who will pay the costs of the action? Shared costs between plaintiff and defendant? The taxpayer? I hope not …https://t.co/ix1WbN1CBQ
Despite having been expelled from Twitter, I read the tweets of others, particularly those whom I consider “persons of interest”. Often, en passant, I see tweets by various idiots either threatening others with legal action or recommending that others sue —often named— other parties in defamation. Few seem to understand either the relevant law (which has changed somewhat in recent years) or the practical aspects.
In the Kezia Dugdale case reported today, the Scottish judge decided that the words written were defamatory, but that the defendant, Ms. Dugdale, had a defence (that of fair comment). By the way, note that that defence has now been replaced, in England and Wales, by a defence of “honest opinion”, but this case was heard in Scotland under Scottish law.
Now the claimant in that Kezia Dugdale case, a Mr. Campbell, obviously does not understand the law, having tweeted only today that the law or legal system is, in effect, asinine because the judge decided that the words were defamatory and yet had decided against him! Like many many others on Twitter etc, the said Mr. Campbell does not seem to understand that even if words are defamatory on their face or by implication, the defendant might yet have one or more of the available defences.
Time and again on Twitter (I am not on Facebook) I see people, innocent of any useful legal knowledge, claiming that words which are not defamatory anyway are defamatory, or (where the words might be defamatory) ignoring the available defences.
Prominent among the above are Jews on Twitter, who often invoke the name of “Mark Lewis Lawyer” (the Jew-Zionist lawyer who recently fled to Israel after being found guilty of professional misconduct: see Notes, below). In fact, his publicized defamation cases were all (the ones I saw anyway) very simple and straightforward, requiring little real legal expertise. My honest opinion is that he is a copper-bottomed self-publicizing poseur.
Take a look at the above paragraph. It might or might not be considered in part “defamatory” (or it might be considered as a whole or in part a “mere vulgar insult”, which would not be actionable in any event). Also, even if the statements above, or some or one, were to be considered defamatory, I have defences open to me should the supposed “top defamation specialist” reach out from his mobility scooter or wheelchair in Israel to sue me (he has so far not done so in respect of any of the rather many blog posts which I have written about him in the past months). I have the defences of, inter alia, “Truth”, “Honest Opinion”, and “Publication on a matter of public interest” available to me.
There again, the armchair lawyers of Twitter rarely consider other factors, chief amongst which is whether the defendant has any funds. If not, large sums (in some cases, hundreds of thousands of pounds) might be expended in pursuit of a defendant who (like me) would simply declare bankruptcy if faced with a money judgment. Bankruptcy in England is now little more than an inconvenience lasting for a year (in most cases) for someone without capital (whether in cash or real or other property) or income. There are few advantages to being broke (as I now am and, incidentally, as “Mark Lewis Lawyer” now is); one of them, though, is the useful one of being effectively “unsueable”.
There are other factors, but this is a blog post, not a legal treatise.
It is usually the case that the best advice that can be given to a potential litigant in defamation is “don’t”! Three examples:
Oscar Wilde. Wilde need not have brought the libel action which eventually led to his disgrace, imprisonment, exile and early death;
David Irving. A fine and persecuted (by the Jew lobby) historian, but not a lawyer. Need not have brought the case against Deborah Lipstadt, an American Jew-Zionist academic supported and funded by the worldwide Jewish/Zionist lobby. Insisted on appearing for himself. Said to have lost £2M in costs to the other side, at least on paper. He also, more importantly, had his books removed from large bookshop chains; some were even pulped. Large publishers dropped him;
Count Nikolai Tolstoy. The only one of the three whom I have ever met (once). The only one of these three who was the defendant (there was also a co-defendant in his case). He lost, but eventually paid only £57,000 of the £1.5M awarded against him initially; he paid the £57,000 years later and only after the death of the plaintiff, Lord Aldington.
So, Twitter armchair lawyers and the perpetually outraged: don’t put your daughter on the stage, never wear brown in town and stop threatening libel suits against people, even if you can get lawyers you can rely upon…
