The “Minister of Culture” of the Kiev regime has declared that up to 100 million Russian books described as “Russian propaganda”, including classic works of literature, are to be removed from libraries, schools etc in Ukraine, and may be used as waste paper or burned.
There are some well-known Ukrainian classics (almost all, though, written in Russian), such as Bulgakov’s The White Guard, but this dictatorial edict means that the cultural level of Ukraine will now decline further.
This is the police state regime that the “me too” idiots in the West are lionizing.
Tweets seen
💳Savvy travellers have discovered that it could work out cheaper to call time on living at home and sign up for an endless holiday, cosseted aboard a cruise ship pic.twitter.com/XBQyhFicEs
— Telegraph Travel (@TelegraphTravel) May 30, 2022
⚓️This will get you a snug inside cabin ranging from 134 to 205 sq ft…
…where you can turn up the temperature with impunity and banish worries about fixed-price and variable tariffs to the deep pic.twitter.com/7vV6ZVJgFK
— Telegraph Travel (@TelegraphTravel) May 30, 2022
In London the average rental price is £1,804 PCM.
💰That’s up 14.2% in a year; while prices have risen by 12.3% to £774 PCM in Scotland pic.twitter.com/i3UrK78q9D
— Telegraph Travel (@TelegraphTravel) May 30, 2022
Welsh “nationalism”: English home-buyers— bad, but completely alien non-European invaders— good. No wonder the joke “nationalist” party there, Plaid Cymru, holds only 3 out of 40 Welsh seats at Westminster, only 13 out of 60 seats in the Senedd (Welsh Assembly), and only 202 out of 1,231 local council seats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaid_Cymru.
Branscombe Village in South Devon 🏴 Branscombe is found between Seaton and Sidmouth and is one of the most picturesque villages on theJurassic Coastline. It’s believed to be the longest village in the country. pic.twitter.com/xUj0wpdl97
— A Beautiful Culture (@ABeautifulCult1) May 31, 2022
An abomination. The Tower Hotel, next to the planet's most famous bridge and the Tower of London World Heritage Site. pic.twitter.com/SrNt6cNLZf
— A Beautiful Culture (@ABeautifulCult1) May 31, 2022
That bloody place! I have only been there two or three times (and not since the late 1980s) but the bar service used to be abominable, and the whole set-up a rip-off in every way. Wouldn’t go near it after that.
Stuck in the car at a supermarket earlier this evening (stuck because of a fairly short but torrential downpour), I noticed three cranks (one old couple and an anorexic-looking woman) still wearing facemasks. In the open air. In a car park. In a downpour. In winds of about 20 mph.
The Labour voters shown were dim beyond measure (“I vote Labour because my grandparents did” etc…), and the Conservative voters unsurprisingly almost non-existent.
“In 1915 Feinberg traveled to Egypt and made contact with the British Department of Naval Intelligence. In 1917, he again went to Egypt, on foot. He was apparently killed on his way back by a group of Bedouins near the British front in Sinai, close to Rafah.[3] His fate was unknown until after the 1967 Six-Day War, when his remains were found under a palm tree that had grown from date seeds in his pocket.” [Wikipedia].
How about that?! “…his remains were found under a palm tree that had grown from date seeds in his pocket.“
Well, now that the said Feinberg is apparently an Israeli hero-figure (they even have a stamp with his head on it), the suspicion must be that the bit about the palm tree and the date seeds is some kind of fairy tale. Still, it may well be true. These things happen.
I have not included the above in my blog to make any political or other point; it just struck me as interesting. Still, one could reflect on how one never knows how one’s actions may, long after one’s own death, bear unexpected fruit (in the case of Feinberg, literally, of course).
Israeli elections
Readers of my blog will know that I am usually cautious about commenting about the political situation in countries with which I am not directly familiar (even Scotland), but idly browsing Wikipedia while listening to BBC World Service, I heard about the electoral impasse in Israel. I looked up the state of play on Wikipedia:
It seems that there 120 elected members. What is extraordinary is that Israeli politics is so fragmented that the party presently ruling, Likud [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likud], has only 30 members out of that 120. Indeed, the whole minority government coalition headed by Likud only has 54 members.
The second-largest party in the Knesset, Yesh Atid [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesh_Atid] has only 17 Knesset members. The next-largest party has 9. In fact, there are no less than 23 parties and Independent members represented, grouped into 13 factions.
[Update, 31 August 2024: state of play as of date of update—
…Likud now has 32 seats].
Compare that to the much larger UK House of Commons, where there are 16 parties and Independents but where, out of 650 MPs, 562 belong to only two of those parties.
Why is the Israeli parliament so fragmented? It may be that there is something in the Jewish psychology that tends to dissension, dissidence etc. That was certainly true of the various Marxist factions that used to exist in the Western world, especially in the realms of Trotskyism.
There again, the Israeli proportional representation system has a low threshold for representation: 3.25% (it was 1% at one time). In fact, there has never been a one-party-majority government in Israel.
Another aspect yet is that most of those parties were started not long ago. The main Opposition party, Yesh Atid, was only formed in 2012. Several others were formed even more recently, in the past two or three years. Likud, the presently largest party, was founded in 1973.
Well, there it is. A peculiar country. Interesting though. I am interested generally in countries which are contrived or artificial, as Israel surely is. Singapore would be another example. They tend to be small geographically; Israel is almost exactly the size of Wales (or New Jersey), while Singapore is not even twice the size of the Isle of Wight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore.
Farm subsidies
Listening to some typical farm-owner whining on BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. Farmers in the UK always want it both ways, to be treated as independent businessmen and women, but given State subsidy or support at the same time. For me, it just does not wash.
One farmer had the right sort of ideas about small-scale farming, biodiversity, organics etc, yet wanted public money, in effect for not being an environmental vandal. Why should the public subsidize farmers at all? Better to impose environmental and animal welfare regulations, restrict imports, and let the farms be real private “businesses”. Alternatively, to put them largely into State ownership but give environment-friendly farmers or collectives long-term (even lifetime) leases.
Tweets seen
Daily Mail tiptoes to the very edge of #antisemitic tropeland, but manages to find one rare example of a church-going vulture capitalist. Close run thing though. "And if you could see them through my eyes…." https://t.co/UAfkxgfxA0
Stop the so-called 'trials' of e-scooters. Anybody with any sense can see that there's no good case for them (they're not green, they stop people taking badly-needed exercise, they're a dangerous nuisance) , and that they will increase the sum of human misery. Write to your MP. https://t.co/ZWjWNrsUev
"It’s time to rename 'Call The Midwife'. It would be a good way of marking its transformation from engaging historical drama to relentless politically correct propaganda vehicle. May I suggest 'Call The Abortionist'?" https://t.co/kH1TzZMoQT
Yes @michaelrosenyes. But I loathe their habit of referring to institutions by the names of their very different modern successors. I went to the Oxford College of Further Education, known to all as the Cowley Road Tech. https://t.co/wBp8RnBJJW
Soon, there will be the Batley and Spen by-election. I shall be blogging about it in a week or so. The Labour Party vote has suffered a gradual decline in that constituency since the rigged by-election in 2016. After the assassination of Jo Cox, the System parties conspired to get another Labour Party MP elected, so an ex-soap actress was parachuted in, and the Conservative and LibDem parties did not stand. Pathetically, “controlled opposition” UKIP also failed to put up a candidate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batley_and_Spen_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s.
Now Labour is relying, in the Batley by-election, on a kind of “sympathy vote” by putting up the sister of that assassinated MP. Pretty desperate…
Lisa Shaw, a healthy 44 year old woman, had zero chance of dying from covid.
It is therefore ironic that a vaccine deployed against a virus with a 99.97% survival rate killed her.
Believing in UK government covid propaganda has its consequences.
The gradually-emerging UK police state in operation. Quite normal things criminalized, but real criminal acts ignored. Read The Protocols of Zion and you will be on the right track…
I agree with The Guardian : 'This is the biggest data grab in the history of the health service.'The Guardian view on medical records: NHS data grab needs explaining: https://t.co/Sr1KggToE5
Ian Robert Millard 