Tag Archives: Green Shield stamps

Diary Blog, 6 August 2023

Afternoon music

[Johann Messely, The Terrace]

Battles past

Peter Hitchens

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-12376823/PETER-HITCHENS-Meet-liberals-condemn-Trumps-failed-putsch-happily-condone-real-one.html

Tweets seen

Exactly. Numbers of people, not whether (as such) they run cars, or burn coal. The primary fact is the overall number.

See also: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/01/26/the-tide-is-coming-in-reflections-on-the-possible-end-of-our-present-civilization-and-what-might-follow/.

The most interesting secondary fact is that the two main System parties are only supported by two-thirds of the voters. However, that is almost irrelevant from an electoral point of view, thanks to the UK’s First Past The Post electoral system. Those two parties will probably take not merely most of the seats in England, or even two-thirds, but almost all of them.

1956, the year of my birth (as well as the year of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the Suez Crisis, and the Hungarian Uprising). That scene now looks like a very long time ago indeed.

As I have blogged previously, Ukraine as a state has no future. In the past year, 350,000 (almost all men) killed or injured on the battlefield, while 20% of the population (mostly women and under-18s) is living outside Ukraine, and on top of a very low birthrate even before 2022.

More music

Rare 1930s/1940s film with music

[part of the oasis of Siwa, Egypt/Libya border, where I myself spent a month in 1998]

More tweets seen

I do not claim to know much about cars; is that a Corvette?

In 1995, the twins, Kyrie and Brielle Jackson, were born 12 weeks premature, each weighing only about 2 pounds. They were placed in separate incubators. One twin was not expected to survive. She went into critical condition. Her heart rate was rising while her oxygen level was dropping significantly. They were about to lose her. It was then that one nurse, Gale Kasparian, went against the hospital rules and standard procedure, putting the healthy twin next to her struggling sister in the same incubator. This decision turned out to be life-saving. Once the twins were close to each other, the struggling sister (Brielle) snuggled up to the healthy sister (Kyrie) who put her arms around Brielle. Almost immediately after, Brielle’s vital signs started stabilizing. Her heart rate and oxygen levels normalized. Both twin sisters eventually survived and grew into strong young women. The picture below came to be known as the rescuing hug and would change a part of our understanding of medicine. Hugging that is coming from the heart is proven to have calming and healing effects. Maybe there is someone in your life that can use a warm and heartfelt hug right now.”

https://twitter.com/redordead182/status/1687377568826011648?s=20

https://twitter.com/redordead182/status/1687458551512375296?s=20

When it rains in England, I rejoice, because it keeps several kinds of untermenschen off the streets. Looks like it has the same effect in Sweden.

From the newspapers

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12368239/Life-Londons-shanty-town-Labour-council-charging-1-560-month-old-shipping-containers-piled-rundown-estate-rife-drug-gangs.html

“Caring sharing” Britain, 2023…

I wonder how many more shantytowns of the same sort will be built under the expected “Labour” government after 2024, in order to shelter the million unwanted immigrants (migrant invaders) arriving here every single year. Mostly useless parasites.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12378035/One-stop-shop-Resurfaced-Argos-catalogue-1973-containing-harpoon-gun-underwater-knife-leave-online-shoppers-stunned.html.

Interesting, as are a few of the readers’ comments.

Argos was started by a man who “invented” Green Shield stamps, a ubiquitous thing in 1960s/1970s Britain. In fact, he “borrowed” the idea of those stamps from the USA, where they had been around for about half a century.

When that man, Richard Tompkins, started Argos, almost all the “experts” in the newspaper financial and business columns of the Press thought that it would not work. The “experts” were wrong, as usual (the same columnists and other scribblers also thought, in the 1980s and 1990s, that Sky TV and Amazon respectively would not succeed).

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_(retailer); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_(retailer)#History; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Shield_Stamps#History; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tompkins.

More tweets

More music

A warm heart, a cool head, [and] clean hands“…Had the KGB and other organs stayed true to that, the Soviet system might not have fallen, or might have transitioned to a better system, rather than to Jew-exploitative fake “democracy” under puppets such as Yeltsin and the others of his sort, which led on to the “crony capitalism” now operative in Russia.

Late tweets seen

So, “as soon as possible“, the Labour government of (?) 2024/2025 will move migrant invader hordes out of hotels and camps and barges, and put them…where? In millions of new ugly housing estates covering the countryside? Into council housing that should be reserved for ENGLISH/BRITISH people only? Into private rentals (and paid for how?), thus pricing out British people? Where?

Well, the girl, er, fronting that demonstration is very noticeable…

Diary Blog, 30 July 2020

When I first had a Twitter account, a decade ago, I began to tweet, inter alia, about the need for a wildlife grid in the UK. I meant a grid of strips or parcels of land, even if very narrow in places, that would link larger areas full of wildlife, such as woods, forests, national parks etc.

That idea is even more important today. I am heartened that, since I started to tweet and, later, blog about it, others have taken up the idea; some are well-connected, wealthy, famous. I think that, eventually, something can be done.

My concept was not nationalization of those strips of land, but a voluntary co-operation, co-ordinated for the sake of convenience and efficiency, but the ownership remaining, in most cases, in private hands, at least initially.

The area where I spent much of my childhood, the border of South Oxfordshire and Berkshire, near Reading, as now seen on Google Earth, exhibits the kind of changes that are all too common: high hedges replaced, usually by sterile fencing, some gardens in front of houses turned into gravelled or even concrete car parking. Sad. Why do people spend what is now the best part of a million pounds on a house in a leafy area, where suburb meets country, only to aesthetically trash their own house and gardens? Just to save a little inconvenience trimming the hedges? To save the cost of hiring a man to trim the hedges? It’s so tawdry…

A few blog posts around the subject:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2016/12/16/a-wildlife-grid-for-the-uk/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/10/07/rewilding-and-reafforestation-of-parts-of-the-uk/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/the-british-countryside-under-the-future-ethnostate/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/social-nationalism-and-green-politics/

A wildlife grid is probably the most important single measure that can and should be taken to help the survival of wildlife in the UK.

Tweets on other matters seen so far today

In 1976, as an occasional (19 years old) reader of the anarchist newspaper Black Flag, I saw an article by someone saying that the State wanted to track and trace everyone, “because the human insect must be controlled at all times“. It seemed far-fetched to me at the time, but it stuck in the mind. Now look! A technologically-updated version is today’s news on the BBC!

I suppose that that sort of thing happens more often than we suppose. Around the same time, I read in an American journal, the name of which escapes me, that before too long the U.S. Marines would be deployed to help Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean. They even had a parody version of the U.S. Marines Hymn, replacing “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli” with “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tel Aviv.”

I thought that unlikely, but a few short years later both versions turned out to be correct, the first almost literally, though the “Tripoli” in the Hymn is the one in North Africa, not the one in Lebanon; the second, about Tel Aviv, only in effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Derna_(1805) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marines%27_Hymn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripoli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripoli,_Lebanon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_Force_in_Lebanon

More tweets

Argos

I see that Argos is stopping publication of its catalogue after nearly 50 years. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jul/30/argos-to-stop-printing-catalogue-after-almost-50-years

That news led me to muse on human nature. Argos was started in 1972 by Richard Tompkins, the man who brought Green Shield stamps to Britain in 1958 (he copied the idea from stamps already in use in the USA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tompkins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Shield_Stamps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_(retailer).

Green Shield stamps are of course unknown to anyone under about 35, having been withdrawn in 1991 and having been in the doldrums for years (their heyday was really the late 1960s and early 1970s). What I find interesting is something peripheral to them and Argos.

When Tompkins, then a fairly famous fellow in the UK, founded Argos in 1972, the conventional wisdom of the “experts”(newspaper business pundits etc) was that Tompkins was a bit of a maverick or even loony, not a serious businessman, and who had bitten off more than he could chew. Argos would probably fail fairly quickly. I recall those judgments from when I myself was at school.

Well, that was over 48 years ago. Argos was sold by its founder in 1979 to BAT; the last time it changed hands, a few years ago, the price tag was £1.4 billion…

There are always those who are ready to criticize those others who are willing to break new ground. Another similar time was in the 1980s, when Rupert Murdoch moved into satellite TV broadcasting. I recall someone then looking at the Daily Telegraph business pages and saying that “everyone” says that this would break Murdoch. Well, it nearly did, but he persevered, and now look! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Television_(1984%E2%80%931990) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_UK

Beware the “experts”, who often know a lot but, equally, are often wrong in the end. Like fire, a good servant but a bad master.

Tweets seen

The tweet below made me laugh.

The latest nonsense from the “Government” of the toytown police state

“Lockdown” (shutdown) does not work. It —and the facemask nonsense— are attempts at social control, not disease control.

Trump

Seems that Trump wants to “delay” the Presidential election. Is that simply a wild tweet, or is this the beginning of the end for the American republic and its accustomed form of democracy? Too early to say.

Tweets seen

The tweeter above forgot to add “baroness” Deech…

“GnasherJew”

Seems that the notorious “GnasherJew” account on Twitter has fallen victim to the occupational disease of self-described “anti-fascists” (especially the Jewish ones)— mental instability.

I have blogged about the phenomenon previously:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/07/18/theyre-coming-to-take-me-away-ha-ha/

That account is or was run by a small cabal of Jews who take or took turns to post: https://www.thejc.com/news/features/twitter-warriors-labour-antisemitism-jeremy-corbyn-1.470568 https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/twitter-account-battling-labour-anti-semitism-defiant-after-twice-being-suspended/

Whatever the reasons, if they are going, good riddance.