While I have no reason to think that “Captain Tom” was other than “well-meaning”, that whole thing was just a ridiculous “silly season” kind of story, and was pushed by the mass media because it tended to validate the idea that NHS service is wonderful and that the NHS was only failing in its main mission because overwhelmed by the “Covid” virus (that in fact, statistically, killed very few people).
I was always suspicious of the hangers-on, especially the daughter, who now turns out to be yet another “grifter” or even fraudster, like so many around today: “Jack Monroe”, “Supertanskiii”, Jolyon Maugham, “Man Behaving Dadly” etc. Hundreds of this or that type are on Twitter alone.
As for the NHS, the cartoon below seems to encapsulate the public debate:
The NHS principle (“free at point of use”) is one I support, but it is clear that the NHS has lost its way. It —like the Welfare State generally— cannot work when mass immigration causes an endless line of new demand for its services. Also, maladministration has been patent for years, indeed for at least two decades. At present, the NHS is not really “doing what it says on the tin”. It is now a very hit-and-miss service.
Stopping the boats is much harder than the Govt thought it would be…. https://t.co/Ke4wgINUCS
They never really tried. Yet another political scam. The Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan requires Europe to be invaded by non-Europeans, particularly blacks and browns, and to be ruled by Jews and part-Jews. Look around you…
As far as the Channel migration-invasion is concerned, once a small number of boats were sunk (by Britain’s otherwise now-pointless Royal Navy), and that fact publicized, few others would even try; but the existing political system is either too weak, or implicated in the Coudenhove-Kalergi conspiracy, to take the initial harsh decision required.
Thus, instead of sinking the boats of the invaders, the Navy ferries the invaders to Dover, assisted by other corrupted organizations such as the RNLI, the Coastguard, the Border Force (“Farce”) etc.
Point proven. Not that humour is everything, but it helps.
🔦 Saturday spotlight on… Water voles 💙 Currently one of Britain's most endangered species, these endearing characters burrow into steep canal or riverside banks, forming a complicated system of underground tunnels and nesting chambers 🤩 Have you ever spotted one? 👀 pic.twitter.com/9gF9MuQCy6
— Canal & River Trust (@CanalRiverTrust) July 8, 2023
The failure of the assault of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the northern flank of Artemovsk The UAF is constantly attacking the strategically important settlement of Berkhovka, trying to break through the northern flank of Artemovsk pic.twitter.com/ikOeUWCK7z
Telegraph: Germany is trying to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO
An English newspaper, citing sources in NATO, reported that Germany plans to postpone Ukraine's accession to NATO as much as possible at the summit of this alliance in Lithuania.
Guess which countries will suffer the most if a major conventional war breaks out in Eastern Europe and then Central Europe? Germany and Poland. Naturally, Germans are concerned. As to the Poles, God knows.
‘Sergeant Major, what’s going on?’ ‘The geese know something we don’t, Sir.’ ‘What do you think it is?’ ‘I don’t speak goose.’ ‘Of course. How do we find out?’ ‘I’ll talk to the swans. They’ll know.’#birdwatching#wednesdaythoughtpic.twitter.com/sIEEPrNkSH
— Sgt Maj Norman French (@SgtMajFrench) June 7, 2023
Rewilding is NOT anti-people.
Quite the opposite: it can be a very powerful antidote to rural decline, revitalising not just nature but local economies.
It's happening right across Europe, let's embrace rewilding in Ireland too: we sure as hell need it.https://t.co/n3lHTSbNzg
The British have sharply accelerated the transfer to Ukraine of military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine undergoing combat training, and some of them are not fully combat ready pic.twitter.com/FkmYuIWynV
Crazy Jewish woman, who holds herself out as being an expert in international relations and foreign trade, displays a complete lack of understanding, perhaps wilfully.
If Ukraine (Kiev regime) is allowed to join NATO, before very long there will be a situation created which might trigger “Article 5”, meaning that there would be war between Russia and the NATO states. The UK might then be subject to attack by strategic nuclear weapons. Nein danke…
Zelensky: “There is a signal that there may be another rebellion, a revolution in Russia. Moreover, there are many people who can support such a rebellion.” pic.twitter.com/6IwJUKjpSD
That is, in fact, Zelensky’s only real chance of achieving any sort of “victory” in this war, to have a revolution in Russia, thus collapsing the front-line; as in 1917, when Russia was facing the Central Powers.
“Russia is sliding off the oil needle”: the Russian budget returned to a surplus, and in June broke a record since March 2021
Last month, federal budget revenues exceeded spending by 800 billion rubles . And this despite the decline in oil prices and production cuts pic.twitter.com/6SHoo3OaN1
Russia has money coming out of its ears. The economic sanctions put in place by the EU, USA and UK have actually strengthened the Russian economy and strategically-hastened the fall of the post-1945 international order. The sanctions have mainly hit the taxpayers of the Western powers.
Russia should not allow anyone to "undo" its values — Medvedev According to the Deputy President of the Security Council of Russia, love for the motherland and the desire to defend it from the enemy are based on loyalty to one's family, care for loved ones, respect and support pic.twitter.com/fsgqmM6O0Z
Russia needs to strengthen its culture, and cut back on the products and values coming out of Hollywood, New York and other such centres of decadence. Films, TV, pop music etc.
I remember Bill Bradley from when I lived in New Jersey in the early 1990s. One of those “best President (or Prime Minister)who never made it” figures, like (in the UK) Rab Butler, Enoch Powell etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bradley.
On the main question here, the Russia-Ukraine situation, we see above a number of figures from, inter alia, the U.S. State Department, the CIA, the British Foreign Office, not to mention the American, Australian and other political establishments, all warning against NATO expansionism and against stoking Ukrainian political and military aggressiveness.
Few of those political and diplomatic figures can be, plausibly, written off as “Russian shills” and the like, as we see all too often written on Twitter and elsewhere, as the unthinking “I stand with Ukraine” mob bay for anything up to and even including nuclear war with Russia.
The disastrous policy of actively supporting the Jew-Zionist kleptocracy in Kiev headed (or figureheaded) by Zelensky is bad enough in itself (and is soon going to result in recession and/or stagflation in the UK and the EU) but, worse than that, may develop into a military situation between NATO and Russia which may then slip or slide into a nuclear conflict which would devastate the UK, much of Europe, the industrialized parts of Russia, and the cities of the USA.
Other tweets seen
Andrew Pierce shredded by Ed Balls. Nothing more than a pathetic Tory apologist and hypocrite. Pierce now wants more government borrowing after years of supporting austerity. £2.5trillion national debt. Twelve years of total economic failure.@GMB@toryboypierce@edballs
I may not like moneygrubbing expenses cheat and Bilderberger, Ed Balls, and the same goes (double) for his venal, hypocritical, “refugees welcome” (but not in her own several homes) wife, Yvette Cooper, but it has to be said that Balls is a trained economist, and did criticize at the time the ludicrously wrongheaded “austerity” nonsense put forward by the part-Jews David Cameron-Levita and George Osborne from 2010-2015, a policy which has run Britain threadbare.
#GMB Andrew Pierce ‘Kwasi Kwarteng has a brain the size of a planet’
Says the man who spent nearly three years bullying and blackmailing the Bri oh what’s the point it’s the same shit every single time. https://t.co/dgSjYRkRHh
A salutary tale, and one which I have just reread, this time also reading many of the readers’ comments. Some had had similar experiences.
I was reminded, reading all that, of an experience of my own.
Over twenty years ago (how time flies in this world when one is no longer young), I was invited, with my wife, to the wedding of a friend, and former teacher at a language school where I had been a part-time student in the early 1980s.
I had become very friendly in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Ig, a noted translator of Dostoyevsky; Ig was divorced (from decades before) and lived in a semi-detached house with a large garden, in North Finchley (London outskirts).
Ig worked at a language school near Warren Street, in Central London, an institute where most of the Russian-language faculty were exiles of one sort or another. He himself had been born in Latvia between the world wars; when he was 14, his family fled to Germany, at the end of WW2, and as the Red Army advanced from the East. They had then settled in the UK.
I sometimes enjoyed a drink, and occasionally a curry in Drummond Street (also near Warren Street), with Ig and one or other of his friends, such as “Uncle John”, a divorced fellow whose wife, Alla from Leningrad, was another language teacher of mine at one time, or with Guy Churchill, a pleasant retiree and one-time SAS soldier (during the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s), who had the odd habit (never seen before or since) of breaking the filter tips off his cigarettes before smoking them.
Ig was rather eccentric, and sometimes did things which were very surreal, as when he took me, for no obvious reason, to have tea with the writer, Doris Lessing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing], at a cafe-bar near the language school. A strange, awkward, rather Kafkaesque experience.
It never occurred to me that Ig, not far off retirement age, might remarry and so compromise his bachelor life of Russo-Soviet culture, beer, and collecting railway clocks (several were in the main room of his house). I was therefore surprised to be invited to his wedding, at a Register Office somewhere on the extension of Edgware Road, far up that road, maybe near Brent Cross (I cannot now exactly recall).
My wife and I attended the short ceremony, and met the bride. She was Russian but had been resident in Latvia, where Ig had met her (not sure where or how; possibly at a bus stop or the like). She was supposedly mid-twenties (my wife thought older), and looked a bit lost amid Ig’s rather grey-haired friends, who included a couple of occasional teachers of mine at that language school, one being a one-time Army linguist (and keeper of goats), another being Gerald Brooke, who had spent 4 years in prison near Moscow before being swapped for the Krogers: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Brooke; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Cohen_(spy); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lona_Cohen.
That was the wedding. Some time later, Ig asked me to take his new wife to lunch at Lincoln’s Inn. She was friendly, pleasant, and told me that she had a law degree from Latvia, maybe Riga.
Scroll forward. My wife and I took on the lease of a large country house, one of the largest in North Cornwall.
We invited Ig and his wife to stay for the weekend. They arrived, but right from the start there was something wrong. For one thing, in a cold autumn, Ig’s wife came in a short dress, no coat, no gloves, perhaps unaware of how cold a large English country house can be, despite large fuel bills (one January, I spent nearly £700 on oil alone; plus coal and firewood. £700, in one month, 20 years ago).
Ig’s wife was actually quite rude from the start, not at all friendly to my wife, treated her like a serf, did not offer any help or whatever (we had the big house, but not any domestic staff as such), and just seemed to be sulking constantly. We assumed that the ill-matched couple had had a spat on the way down.
Anyway, after a weekend which —without going into great detail— tested my wife’s patience to the hilt, and when the pair were almost ready to go home, my wife thought to take some extra towels to their room (the house had originally had 26 bedrooms). She saw that Ig’s new wife’s suitcase was open on the bed; on top of the contents, a silk scarf belong to my wife, from Hermes. Ig’s wife had actually stolen the silk scarf (and other items, including bottles of scent) and placed them in her suitcase. The item were retrieved, and a diplomatic way found to raise the matter with the guest/thief.
Not an entirely successful weekend.
After that, I received calls from Ig’s Russian friends, begging me to think of a way to “save him from that stupid girl, who knows nothing but films and fashion“.
In fact, Ig did try to divorce her, after he overheard her talking to her mother in Riga, and the pair plotting to divorce him and so get half of his quite valuable house. In the end, the divorce never happened, despite preliminary court hearings.
Ig was prevailed upon to change his mind and, looking at that Guardian obit, they seem to have remained married until his death some 11 years later. I hope that the woman was not unkind to Ig in his last years, because he was a good fellow, but I never saw him after the disastrous weekend, and only spoke to him a couple of times when (maybe at her instigation) he wanted to bring her down again to Cornwall. I could not put my wife through that sort of nonsense again, though.
I presume that that woman got his house, I believe worth (in 2013) about £800,000 (and I suppose worth twice that much now), and other financial benefits.
However, not all Russians, Ukrainians etc can be tarred with the same brush. For example, I knew one girl (from Kiev) who was offered marriage by a British diplomat (who became an ambassador only about 2 years later) but refused him.
Many Russians (and, no doubt, Ukrainians too) are very fine people, but they come from a very different cultural and social background than English people. History has been harsh in those regions, and attitudes are fashioned out of such history.
Truss’ Cabinet picks are genuinely terrifying. We must brace for the utter turmoil which is no doubt ahead of us all. It’s going to be a long, dark winter.
The last Cabinet contained only sycophants prepared to ignore Johnson's epic unsuitability for high office. The new one will contain only sycophants prepared to ignore Johnson's epic unsuitability for high office who haven't criticised or upset Liz Truss. It's a narrowing field!
The main surprise is that Nadine Dorries is not there, it being rumoured that she is about to be elevated to the Lords. Well, why not? After all, a woman (Michelle Mone) who faked a “success story” about her insolvent bra company is there, as are several absurd black women, one of whom is only there because her son was killed in a scuffle with white yobs at a bus stop. Just a few examples of the deadheads in the House of Lords (Oona King is another one).
If Truss freezes energy prices but makes working people pay for it rather than the big oil and gas companies, she’s going to be out of office pretty quickly.
In principle, correct, but there is no mechanism, as we have seen in recent years, for the public to be able to dispense with even the most ridiculous Prime Minister, until given an opportunity at a general election.
New Foreign Secretary James Cleverly voted to reduce Corporation Tax 9 times, yet he has voted to cut benefits 23 times.
Not many people know Cleverly advocated scrapping the minimum wage in 2013.
Another humiliation for Britain, having this ridiculous creature as Foreign Secretary, complete with his “degree” in Hospitality Management from West London Poly.
In fact, apart from a couple of years as a sales manager, Cleverly seems not to have had a job for much of his life, unless you include his Territorial Army officer activity. He was never commissioned into the Regular Army, by reason of a supposed leg injury (unspecified); nor is it known whether he dropped out of Sandhurst or other training institution.
A couple more bits of news about the new Cabinet
That little pissant Robert Jenrick, a total puppet of the Jew-Zionist/Israel lobby, has been appointed a Minister of State despite his very “questionable” links to Jew property speculators.
Jewish wife; children brought up as if full-Jew. Completely in the Zionist pocket.
The other news is that ex-officer Johnny Mercer, who seemed like a rare breath of fresh air in the Commons at first (but who, disappointingly, turned out to be a moneygrubber, at least from what I have read), has been kicked out of Government, and his wife, seeing the extra salary etc disappearing up the chimney, is livid.
Prime Minister Liz Truss has been branded an "imbecile" by the wife of sacked minister Johnny Mercer.
Felicity Cornelius-Mercer said the cabinet system “stinks” and “treats people appallingly” after her husband was removed as veterans affairs minister.https://t.co/ghjIelYWOG
I suppose that Mercer was hoping against hope to be appointed at some later stage as Defence Secretary, though his “bring it on!” rhetoric about nuclear war with Russia hardly inspired confidence in his judgment.
As for Mercer’s wife, Felicity, of whom I knew nothing until today, I award her 9 out of 10 for honesty, 1 out of 10 for diplomacy, and another 9 out of 10 for making my day more amusing.
You see that sort of thing all the time on Twitter— a cavalcade of talking heads, supposed “comedians”, sports talking heads etc, all paying lip-service to the BBC which, in most cases, pays them. Sickening homage to patronage.
Look at that Sweet bastard (whoever he is). Begging for state censorship.
It was this @bobscartoons cartoon which the complainant took offence to. This is, from my perspective, a valid representation of school curricular overemphasis these days. But the point is that @WHSmith should be selling the FULL spectrum of opinion for us. Not choosing for us. pic.twitter.com/nKGeVI6ZLH
@kerr649, @louisemensch has never forgiven me for a long-ago column item in which I laughed at the way she wandered in and out of New Labour back in the 1990s, when she was still writing chick-lit. I actually agreed to meet her to discuss it. https://t.co/eXpofp8ZWw
Louise Mensch. A blast from the past, now just a washed-up, divorced Twitter twit who, after I was —both wrongfully and unlawfully— disbarred in 2016, actually tweeted directly to me, threatening (ignorantly) to have me disbarred in New York as well. Never heard anything more about it.
Louise Mensch was, inter alia, a drug abuser, and admitted that her drug abuse “messed up her head“. A rock “music” “groupie” at one time long ago (when at University), who became, at least metaphorically, an Israel- lobby “groupie” later.
Ian Robert Millard 