Afternoon music
Saturday quiz
Well, this week I am back on winning form— 6/10, compared to political journalist John Rentoul’s 5/10. I very nearly got more, but could not bring the answers to questions 7 and 10 to mind for some reason; I had no idea about question 5, and guessed wrong on question 9.
Announcement
Regular readers will please be aware that, despite my trial, conviction, and sentence in respect of alleged breaches of the notorious Communications Act 2003, s.127, this blog will continue to be published.
I shall blog later (probably later today) about the trial (held in November 2023) and sentencing hearing (held 14 March 2024).
The blog will continue to be published, but the style will have to change, inasmuch as my freedom to express views and to explain current and historical events has inevitably been restricted by the trial and sentence.
I am not in fact under any greater legal prohibition now than I was a year ago, but it will be readily understood that my having been convicted does apply somewhat of a chilling effect on my freedom to write what I want, or in such terms as I should prefer.
The “usual suspects”, and their dupes in the police and Crown Prosecution Service, will now be watching and “monitoring” (spying and snooping on) my blog in even greater detail than was previously the case.
They may think that they have scored a narrow victory “on points”, as the sport people say; I say merely that we shall see…
Like Sir Thomas More, I shall express my views and opinions in compliance with current law (however misguided and abused that law may be), so far as I can do so without compromising principle and honour.
Quite apart from that, I think that, in the circumstances of repression and “control” in which we (in the UK and some other countries) live, all social-national people have to look beyond the mere expression of views and the mere analysis of events to actually accomplishing the germinal basis of a different and more advanced society.
[Update, 9 June 2024: I should point out that my sentence, which was called (some days or weeks later) “absurdly lenient” by the malicious and conspiratorial Jew-Zionist group, “Campaign Against Antisemitism” (which admits to having pushed for 7 years for me to be prosecuted), was made by the learned (and generally quite fair) sentencing judge on the specific recommendation of the Probation Service officer who met me in mid-December 2023 and later drafted a pre-sentence report for the Court. The sentence itself (a “community order” with 15 “rehabilitation days”) exactly followed the recommendation made in that report.]
More music
Of all the types of music of the Renaissance (and/or as modern-day composers have reinvented it) for me the best is the stately Pavane.
Old England, in the morning of its glory.
Talking point
[from the Daily Telegraph]
“A former Nato commander predicts our future – and it looks terrifying.
Ever since Erskine Childers’s 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands urged the British government to treat Germany, not France, as the leading threat of the new century, thrillers have often been co-opted as a means of warning policymakers about under-appreciated perils – with the advantage that such a book may be more likely to keep the reader awake than a dispassionate report.
Three years ago, the novelist and decorated ex-Marine Elliot Ackerman collaborated with former Nato Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis on a political thriller called 2034.
The novel imagines – or predicts; we’ll see – that in the next decade a complacent America will suddenly find its military technologies outclassed by those of its rivals, and when pulled into a conflict with China in 2034, will resort to tactical nuclear strikes, resulting in the tit-for-tat annihilation of Shanghai and San Diego.
The book ends on the brink of a new world order, with a truce called but the US and China so badly damaged that India and parts of Africa are able to vie with them for superpower status.
Now, Ackerman and Stavridis have dusted down their crystal ball for a sequel: 2054. This time, the threat facing humanity isn’t nuclear destruction, but the event that keeps futurists awake at night, “the Singularity”, defined here as “an ‘intelligence explosion’, the equivalent of thousands of years of biological evolution crammed into months or even weeks when machine and human learning [will] integrate into a single consciousness”.
The Singularity may bring about such advantages as immortality, if you’re happy to have your brain uploaded into a mechanical super-body: useful in a future in which pandemics are commonplace. But it’s going to be bad news for the enemies of whichever nation or corporation wins the race to develop the tech.“
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/2054-by-elliot-ackerman-and-james-stavridis-review].
A question which has concerned me since I first read predictions of what seemed to be possible human/robot melding in then-unpublished manuscripts by Rudolf Steiner and Valentin Tomberg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner;
https://www.biodynamics.com/steiner.html.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Tomberg.
As far as I know, the relevant Steiner manuscripts, and probably also the Tomberg ones, are still unpublished. I do not know whether they might be in that online archive. Probably not. I read them well over 40 years ago, in a basement, from dusty files containing brittle old typescript.
Tweets seen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Gething
The Great Replacement. The Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalergi_Plan (ignore the pretty blatant vandalistic “editing” carried out by some of “the usual suspects”).
Not that I fully favour Marine le Pen (her father was better), but this has to be a positive move. The “Overton Window” is moving, and it is moving across Europe, except in Britain, where the “usual suspects” have a stranglehold on the mainstream media, politics, the legal system etc.
That is not to say that nothing is happening in the UK, but it is happening under the surface, as in all police states; for that is what the UK is becoming. Not a full police state, as yet; very much (usually) a “velvet glove” (“iron fist in velvet glove”) one.
The direction of travel, though, is pretty clear, looking at what happened during the “Covid” panicdemic/scamdemic.
Most of the population complied with every last stupid, silly, pointless, made-up-on-a-whim, completely ridiculous “rule” invented by “Boris”-idiot, Little Matt Hancock and the misnamed “SAGE” committee (I always called it “DUMB”, i.e. “Department Under Matt and Boris”): “the Rule of Six”, “social distancing” of 1, 2, or 3 metres, the facemask nonsense etc.
Most people complied with being shepherded about in, or outside, supermarkets by bossy “security” dogsbodies or insolent little shop-girls. How the latter must have hated having had to give up instructing shoppers where to stand and walk, and having had to return to their usual routine of filling shelves and serving customers, rather than barking at them…
Quite a number of members of the public, either from misplaced fear, or from sheer malice, were willing to “report” (denounce, as it was always called in the Soviet Union under Stalin) their neighbours for “crimes” such as taking a ride in the car or on a motorbike, or having a few friends over for a drink at home.
The very compliant ones, and the enthusiastic collaborators, can be written off. Useless people. Our interest, at this stage, is in the non-compliant part of the population. They may still have some fight in them.
More tweets seen
“The real situation of the army of the Israel.
Yitzhak Brik (Major General of the Israeli Army Reserve) : Many years ago, I repeatedly warned about the inadmissibility of reducing ground forces in the army, but today everyone is aware of the extent of the error of reduction.
The ground army is a small force that does not have surplus forces; in order to strengthen one sector, it is necessary to bring in forces from another sector. The situation is so bad that the army does not have the strength to fight in more than one and a half sectors.“
“Former head of the Czech intelligence service: Russia is crushing Ukraine, heading for victory.
Russia is systematically destroying the Armed Forces of Ukraine, thanks to its industry and logistics, and the West is unable to oppose it, said the former head of the Czech military intelligence service, General Petr Pelc, in an interview for “Radio Universe”.
“Russia is crushing Ukraine in a slow and systematic way. We all send it money, part of which disappears somewhere, part does not even reach Ukraine, and thus we only prolong the agony and increase the number of dead people,” Peltz believes. – “
Weapons and soldiers win battles, and industry and logistics win wars. That’s all. The question is what we call a military victory. In two years of this armed conflict, Russia increased the productivity of its military-industrial complex 15 times. We are not for that, of course capable ,” he stated.“
As I have always said, short of a palace revolution in Moscow followed by complete anarchy, Russia cannot lose this war, and will not lose it.
My recent trial and sentencing hearing
Background
On 30 November 2023, I was tried under Communications Act 2003, s.127 in respect of 5 counts of having breached the said Act by having allegedly posted 5 pages of this blog.
In fact, only small parts of those 5 pages were alleged to have been “grossly offensive” (a few comments, remarks and cartoons).
To put the accusations into context, today’s blog post is number 1,799; tomorrow’s will be number 1,800. 1,800 blog posts published since November or December 2016.
Even taking the last few years, there have been blog pages posted almost every day, at least 1,000 in the past 3 years. I stood accused of having posted 5 pages, out of which pages about 2% of the content was supposedly “grossly offensive”.
I do not propose to go into the decade of persecution of me engaged in by Jewish Zionists, pro-Israel Jews. Anyone interested in the background can find it on the blog easily enough via the search box. Suffice to say that there has been a decade of false complaints and reports to police, politicians, professional regulators etc.
The organizations persecuting me (and many others, from Al Jazeera TV to David Icke, to Alison Chabloz, to various social-national political figures) have been the Campaign Against Antisemitism [“CAA”] and UK Lawyers for Israel [“UKLFI”]. The memberships or supporter-cadres tend to overlap to a degree.
I was wrongfully and (as it later transpired) unlawfully disbarred in 2016. I was later invited to re-open the matter, but declined, partly because I might have been re-instated at the Bar but fined heavily; in any case, the Bar is now a dustbin as far as I am concerned.
Various malicious and false (based on lies) complaints were made about me to the police from about 2012. All such complaints were from CAA-connected Jewish individuals. Not one was upheld, but I was subjected to two “voluntary” police interviews and a number of insolent telephone calls from police drones.
The last such lying complaint about me was made in 2021 by one Stephen Silverman, who grandly styles himself “Head of Investigations and Enforcement” at the “CAA”. My account of that can also be found on the blog. That complaint was thrown out by the Crown Prosecution Service [“CPS”] in early 2022, but the “CAA” persisted in trying to get the matter re-opened via the so-called “victim’s right of review”.
In a clear misuse of their powers, the CPS, having informed me that I would not be prosecuted for the (completely untrue) “racially-aggravated harassment” of Silverman (for which there was no evidence whatsoever), dropped that potential charge, but then (a year later) charged me of having posted 5 “grossly offensive” pages from this blog. Though never arrested, I was charged by post early last year, 2023.
The “CAA” are still tweeting and scribbling on their website that they have pursued me for 7 years (in reality, longer), and that my “case” was only brought to court after “Lord” Ian Austin (former Labour MP) wrote directly to the Director of Public Prosecutions to demand that I be prosecuted.
The prosecution of me was purely political.
So far, in the past days, no tweet from them about my sentence, which they no doubt think too light.
The trial, and later sentencing hearing
The trial took place over one day in November 2023. It was presided over by District Judge [stipendiary magistrate, in the formerly-used title] Greenfield at Southampton Magistrates’ Court. I represented myself.
The old saw has it that “a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client“. Very true words, but I had reasons for doing so. Firstly, I have not been, nominally, a barrister for many years, and not a practising barrister for about 16 years.
I have not been involved in criminal law (except some corporate “crime” and international extradition matters) for even longer, since the early/mid 1990s. I was therefore treated more loosely by the Court, as being a non-lawyer. Also, I have little but contempt for the spineless Bar of today, and would not wish to be represented by one of them, even though in some respects I might have been better off having an advocate who was current on the law and practice of the criminal courts. I undoubtedly made mistakes in my Court presentation etc.
I found the judge to be generally courteous, eminently fair in most respects, and willing to put the rather poor police and CPS case to the test where he felt that it was particularly weak.
The judge was, however, unwilling to listen to argument about why I had even been charged, i.e. the obvious (and now admitted) political pressure brought to bear on the CPS, which had caved in to pressure from the Jewish/Zionist lobby (as the “CAA” itself admits on its website and Twitter/X account).
The judge (fairly enough, in a sense) made the point that I could go to the High Court on a judicial review application, work that I once did as Counsel, about 30 years ago. That would have had the effect of automatically staying the criminal prosecution, possibly for a year or more. Yes, in theory, but someone on his own, without money? Difficult.
Silverman from the “CAA” was in Court, but he was not a witness, and gave no evidence; just sat at the back of the Court. Afraid of being cross-examined, no doubt, and as I had pointed out in preliminary documentation.
I have no idea why the police never charged Silverman with, at very least, wasting police time over his demonstrably false accusation that I had “racially and/or religiously harassed” him in 2021, which brought two police drones to my door (on my birthday, at that) and effectively compelled me to attend two “voluntary” interviews (the first called off for technical reasons when I had already attended).
In my view, Silverman could have been charged with perversion of the course of justice: “Perverting the course of justice and witness intimidation are serious offences that undermine the administration of justice by falsely accusing people or withholding crucial evidence thus potentially damaging police investigations and wasting courts’ time” [Sentencing Council].
As in other aspects of this case, there are serious questions to be answered around the role of Silverman and the “CAA”, and his/their apparent influence over the police and CPS, but as matters stand they remain unanswered and may remain unanswered.
Reverting to the trial itself, I had been intending to make a submission at “half-time” (after close of the Prosecution case) of “no case to answer”, and on at least two grounds, but the judge (very fairly) pre-empted that (because I was treated as a non-lawyer and unrepresented by a practising advocate), and did it for me, in effect, by grilling Prosecution Counsel (instructed by the CPS) for a bit, before retiring to consider the matter over the lunchtime adjournment.
Sadly for me, the judge decided that the case could continue (I think that it was touch-and-go), so it did. I should not have bothered to give evidence but did (a mistake; I was very tired), and was briefly though not much cross-examined.
The judge gave a fairly brief summing-up and, in my now almost-lay opinion, said one or two things that seemed to me to provide possible appeal points, before convicting me on all 5 counts. A short discussion about potential sentence level then occurred between judge and Prosecution Counsel, and I had to get up and politely insist that I thought that another view was possible about level of sentence; and that was that. Adjourned for 3 months.
The matter reconvened in early 2024 and was adjourned after the Prosecution applied to ask for a Criminal Behaviour Order restricting my blogging slightly.
The sentencing hearing took place on 14 March 2024. The sentencing judge (District Judge/magistrate), District Judge Callaway (a former Deputy Chief Metropolitan Magistrate) presided, District Judge Greenfield having in the intervening period been gazetted and appointed to the Circuit Bench as His Honour Judge Greenfield (now sitting at Reading County Court).
I have to say that I found the sentencing judge, D.J. Callaway, to be as generally fair and courteous as had been the trial judge, D.J. Greenfield.
I had drafted in advance a Defendant’s Argument on Sentence, examining the relevant law as well as my own circumstances, which the sentencing judge was kind enough to say “was very well put together“, if I recall his words correctly. Maybe I still have the remnants of the barristerial skills that (if I may immodestly remember) led some (though not all!) judges to commend me in Court all those years ago. A different world…
The cutbacks in court funding led to one farcical situation when it transpired that the sentencing judge had not seen the long email (about various other matters), and which I had emailed about 10 days in advance of the hearing, requesting that it be printed out and supplied to the judge.
Not only that, the very efficient Clerk of the Court was unable to find the email at all. Fortunately, Prosecution Counsel, not present in person but appearing like a disembodied spirit via video link (something I had never seen before), and on a small TV high up on a side wall, was able to forward the email (which I had copied to the CPS as a courtesy).
The Prosecution’s application for a Criminal Behaviour Order against me re. my blogging was refused, the judge agreeing, in effect, with me that the proposed Order had been so badly-drafted that it would be impossible to enforce and anyway added nothing useful.
The CPS really are a bunch of clowns; not even honest clowns, looking at the way I have been treated over the past two and a half years.
My submission on sentence, that it should be a conditional discharge, or small fine, was not upheld by the judge. Prosecution Counsel, who on the previous occasion had intimated that the CPS were looking for an uplift on sentence based on the idea that my case was a “hate crime”, despite there being no actual victim (accepted by the trial judge and the CPS at and prior to trial), agreed with the sentencing judge that a “lower level community order” would be the correct penalty.
I was sentenced to a “community order” (akin to the “probation” of former years), which involves 15 meetings with the Probation Service, spread over 9 months, so about one meeting every 2-3 weeks.
In addition, I am to pay a total of nearly £800 in costs, including a notional “surcharge”. Money that I do not have right now.
Crowdfunder
In relation to the above-mentioned costs, I have just set up a crowdfunder. If anyone can help, either with a money donation, or via sharing the crowdfunder link on social media or elsewhere, I should be most grateful.
https://www.givesendgo.com/GC14J.
I shall blog about the (slightly amusing) aftermath of the trial and sentence tomorrow.
[Update, 9 June 2024: I should point out that my sentence, which was called (some days or weeks later) “absurdly lenient” by the malicious and conspiratorial Jew-Zionist group, “Campaign Against Antisemitism” (which admits to having pushed for 7 years for me to be prosecuted), was made by the learned (and generally quite fair) sentencing judge on the specific recommendation of the Probation Service officer who met me in mid-December 2023 and later drafted a pre-sentence report for the Court. The sentence itself (a “community order” with 15 “rehabilitation days”) exactly followed the recommendation made in that report.]
[Update, 13 September 2024: As of yesterday, I do not have to attend any further meetings with the Probation Service, despite not having actually attended very many: see https://ianrobertmillard.org/2024/09/13/diary-blog-13-september-2024/. My sentence is therefore effectively at an end. “The usual suspects” ((( ))) will be fuming].
Memory Lane
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 