Afternoon music

Nature, managed Nature, homesteading, permaculture, rewilding, and the potential symbiosis of rurality and advanced technology

Some of the background to the Nastya and Village Life videos.

Incidentally, that person makes a very good income via YouTube: see

She gets some direct donations, even if only a few hundred U.S. dollars per month. She seems to have an overall income from online activity somewhere in the region of USD $7,000 per month at present, which is decent, to say the least, especially in Russia, and even if (as I expect) it is taxed at about a third.

I had noticed in some of her videos that she (or her now-ex husband or boyfriend) owned a foreign vehicle; her German kitchen appliances etc were also noticed.

Not that I am criticizing. It is very clever to mix a rural life with an income largely derived from the most up-to-date technical advances, such as online vlogging.

Another example of similar or not entirely dissimilar (though more “eco”-oriented) activity would be Bealtaine Cottage, in Ireland: https://bealtainecottage.com.

https://www.youtube.com/user/BealtaineCottage

As a matter of fact, when I had a Twitter account (a pack of Jews had me expelled in 2018), the lady from Bealtaine Cottage used to retweet my material sometimes; then the same Jewish cabal harassed her, and tweeted to her about how I was supposedly “mad, bad, and dangerous to know“, as Lady Caroline Lamb said of Byron. The Bealtaine Cottage lady then blocked me. Still, I am bigger than that. #MoralHighGround…

Tree cover in Europe varies from a mere 1% on Malta to 74% in Finland. Ireland has only about 11%, so the example of Bealtaine Cottage is well worth both noting and emulating.

The UK is also deficient in tree cover (about 13.5%, though possibly increasing slightly). I believe that, immediately after WW1, the situation in the UK was even worse, about 5%, which is why the Forestry Commission was established in 1919, though at first only to grow conifers for timber production.

If you see old photos and film of England from the First World War era, or even 1930s, the denudation of the landscape in many rural areas is clear.

Ireland, after WW1, had a miserable tree cover of only 1%, incredibly, so even the 11%-12% presently seen is a huge improvement, even more so than in the UK.

Both countries are moving over to Nature-friendly broadleaf planting now.

Bealtaine Cottage has only 3 acres, in fact (though the dense vegetation makes the plot seem larger), and the lady owner has planted 1,000+ trees herself, mostly from seed or from cuttings. The so-called “power of one”:

The “power of one” indeed, but that just emphasises how much more a group, even a small group, can do (in any area of activity). When scaled-up to a whole society doing things, the available power of transformation can be huge (again, in any field of activity, not just ecological and environmental).

The main point made, though, is that you do not, in the end, need a group or organization. One person can do it, alone.

The cartoons below show what can happen when biodiversity is reduced, but not everywhere is going in the wrong direction.

As far as Bealtaine Cottage is concerned, this is what Google AI has to say:

“The lady behind Bealtaine Cottage is Colette O’Neill, a native of Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Born into a large family of eleven children, her journey to creating her famous woodland sanctuary involves a fascinating mid-life reinvention. [1, 2, 3]

Early Life & Teaching Career

• Education: Colette won a scholarship to attend the Loreto Convent Grammar School in Omagh.
• Life in London: She spent a major portion of her adulthood living in London, raising her three children. As a mature student, she attended Middlesex University, graduating with honours in education in 1992.
• Profession: Prior to her ecological work, she spent over a decade working as a full-time schoolteacher in London. [1, 2]

The Escape to the “Good Life”

By 2004, tired of the relentless pace of London life and single in her late 40s, Colette plotted her return to Ireland to pursue a simpler, self-sustaining lifestyle. She spent holiday weekends hunting for property, eventually buying a derelict, roofless stone cottage sitting on three acres of severely waterlogged, north-facing bogland in County Roscommon. [1, 2, 3]

Despite having no plumbing, electricity, or local family support, she moved in alone to prove that one person could restore the poorest land into a thriving ecosystem. [1, 2, 3]

Current Identity & Work

Now in her late 60s, Colette has lived at the cottage for over 21 years and identifies deeply as a writer, folklorist, vegan, and Pagan “Tree Mother”. Her daily philosophy has evolved from standard permaculture into what she calls “Goddess Permaculture”—a deeply spiritual, mindful connection to the Earth. [1, 2, 3, 4]

She is a officially recognized artist by the Irish government and funds her lifestyle entirely through her ad-free YouTube channel, Patreon, and Bealtaine Cottage Publishing, through which she has written and self-published several books, including A Cottage and Three Acres and Walking Between Worlds.”

So there you see the practical aspects. Her 3-acre plot does produce quite a lot of food, probably all or most of what she needs. She even sells any surplus locally. Heating is mainly from wood she has planted, cut, and dried.

Apart from that, the Bealtaine Cottage lady has no direct income via her YouTube channel, (ad-free, by her own choice, which is very principled, in view of the fact that she has 90,000 YouTube subscribers). She could otherwise get maybe £1,000-£1,500 per month from that source alone.

Actually, I am seeing ads on her vlogs, but whether she herself profits from them, I have no idea.

She does get donations (at least £300-£400 per month) via Patraeon (~127 subscribers), and a little more via other online donation sites. Her own books, self-published, must bring in some income, and that is all tax-free in Ireland, because recognized artists, writers etc are untaxed.

I do not know whether she gets any direct income via Twitter/X; maybe not.

At age 65-70, that lady must also get UK and/or Irish state pension payments, and probably also has a small private pension from her decade teaching in London.

My point is that the lady has diverse income streams (and few expenses). The Russian lady, Nastya, is more limited in where her income originates.

Ideally, one does not put all eggs in one basket.

I always recall seeing a TV show, circa 2001, about a black American financial specialist adviser. One person advised was a young man from somewhere like Luton or Bedford who had arranged to hire a jet airliner simulator. He then sold blocks of time for 30 minutes at a go, as a novelty. He was making something like £100K a year in the money of 2000 (you could double or triple that in the money of 2026).

He was offered £650,000 in cash (so over £1.5M in 2026 money) for his business —and was advised to accept— but refused. A few months later, the 2001 attack on New York happened, and BA (who owned the simulator) and all other airlines were told by government not to allow any stray people to use flight simulators. The young man’s business collapsed overnight. He vanished into obscurity, having thought of himself as an “entrepreneur”, when really he had just had one lucky and time-limited success.

Eggs. Basket(s).

Another case. I knew via a friend, a middle-aged Scottish lady who thought she knew everything about finance and business, but in reality knew nothing. Her father had owned a very large business in Scotland; it produced hydraulic pit props (for coal mines), I believe. By the time her father died, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the National Coal Board was not ordering many such props. The business was insolvent. It employed thousands of people.

The lady of my fairly slight acquaintance was a civil servant in London. She took over despite knowing nothing of business. Her motivation, well-meaning but silly, was to try to keep the business going for the sake of its employees. All that happened was that the collapse, which might have been mitigated, was total, and delayed by only months, not years. All the employees were left with neither employment nor even corporate redundancy payments.

After that, the Scottish lady had some money, and a large mansion flat in St. John’s Wood High Street, very close to Regent’s Park. Such apartments, especially of that size, are now valued in the millions. Even then, the value was very high. She sold it and, with a proportion of the proceeds, bought the one-time private residence of Ribbentrop, from when he was Ambassador of the German Reich in London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_von_Ribbentrop#Ambassador_to_the_United_Kingdom. That detached house, in Barnes, just south of Hammersmith Bridge, and down a quiet side road, had a pleasant garden with mature trees, at least by the early 1980s when I saw it a couple of times, and a large number of bedrooms.

The Scottish lady rented out at least a dozen rooms to foreign girl students, cash in hand. I suppose that that would have brought in the equivalent (in 2026 money) of a couple of thousand pounds, perhaps more, each week. In cash. Almost certainly not declared to the tax authorities. Was she satisfied with that? No, of course not…

The Scottish lady conceived the idea of a clothes shop with nice fashions for fat women (to put it bluntly). She herself was enormous. Clothes for very fat women were, at the time, apparently hard to find in the UK, so she went to the USA to source stock.

She actually mortgaged her house in order to launch this doomed venture. A shop was leased, in Marylebone High Street, and its name emblazoned above the doors— Largesse. Maybe not a very diplomatic name…

I myself, then in my mid-twenties and not yet embarked on my law degree, actually slept on the shop’s floor overnight once or twice, because the burglar alarms had not been installed.

Anyway, suffice to say that that shop failed, spectacularly, and the lady eventually died, about a decade later, effectively and maybe actually bankrupt.

Lesson? Self-knowledge prevents too-ambitious an undertaking. Also, that sometimes one can get by quite well on what one has. That Scottish lady had few essential expenses and, in the money of 2026, a cash income, untaxed (in effect) of at least £10,000 per month; significant capital as well.

Compare that to Ms. O’Neill of Beltaine Cottage, who has a small fraction of that income, yet lives, it appears, rather well on it. As a friend of mine at the Bar once remarked to me, “it’s not what you make, it’s what you spend.” Trite, of course, but true.

The way forward for many may be to disconnect as far as possible or convenient from the general society, to link up with others fairly loosely, and to prepare for the quite likely collapse of that general society.

Naturally, everyone will have a pathway that suits the individual circumstances; the knowledge-level of Ms. O’Neill in Ireland is very greatly higher than that of the Russian girl. Both cases, however, are worth studying for what they can impart,

See also:

A recent vlog from the lady at Bealtaine Cottage:

I have only just seen that vlog post, and it answers some of the questions or speculations that I wrote about only today. Synchronicity, perhaps.

Tweets seen

Housing for migrant-invaders, while British people struggle.

As previously noted on the blog, Labour Friends of Israel, Bilderberger, NWO/ZOG, and part of the Mandelson cabal at one time.

System MPs such as Lucy Powell are just clowns, really.

Good grief, just listen to that silly bitch spouting her soundbites about “decent, well-paid jobs“, good housing etc. Meanwhile, in the real England and Wales, migrant invaders are still flooding in, there is a near-collapse of law, order, and previous social norms and, in soundbite language, the rich are getting hugely richer, and almost everyone else is sinking, as shown in the cartoon below from 15 years ago (and still valid):

Anyone supporting the migration invasion should also be placed in a detention centre, if you want to call it that. Or work on projects creating canals, or in forests.

“Man… “, meaning African migrant-invader.

As for “what is happening“, what is happening is relatively slow-burn social and political collapse, for which System politicians and (((the usual suspects))) are largely responsible.

“Loan“? Ha ha…

Incidentally, I wonder what odds the bookmakers would offer against Ghislaine “Maxwell” getting a Presidential pardon from Trump in his last few days in office in 2029? Might well be worth a good substantial punt, in my opinion. I wonder whether they would offer 10/1. My own assessment of the real chance is nearer 50-50…

Translates to a Commons with about 226 Labour MPs (100 short of an overall majority); 221 Reform UK (strong official Opposition); 57 Cons (about half of the present number); 52 LibDems; 43 SNP; 14 Greens; 12 Plaid Cymru [etc].

A hopelessly hung Parliament. Burnham would only be able to pass legislation with the assistance of all the LibDems, all the Greens, all Plaid, and all SNP (adding up to 121, so even then several short of an overall majority, but about half a dozen more than a bare working majority. Hopeless.

As a matter of fact, I think that a Burnham government is going to become pretty unpopular pretty quickly.

I cannot see Burnham holding a general election at present, i.e. later this year, because I am assuming that Labour’s large present majority would disappear (as it loses 200+ MPs). On the other hand, if Burnham just takes over, as Sunak did from Liz Truss/”Boris”-idiot, and refuses to call an election for years, then we are back to square one, and Labour is toast.

Good for social-nationalism, probably.

Ambiguous (the actual interview).

Another village. Where are the gamechanging moves?

Late tweets

Quite. All the same, I remain sceptical of the primary assertion. Finland the happiest country? Seems unlikely to me, frankly…

I never use the “right”/”left” terminology, but it is good to see many, especially many young, awakening to reality.

[“SHE NAMED 270 ABUSERS. THE COUNCIL GAVE HER A DIVERSITY COURSE INSTEAD In 2001 a Home Office researcher called Adele Weir mapped a child abuse network in Rotherham. She found at least 270 victims and named the men running it. The Hussain family was on that list. Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police had the names, the cars, the addresses. Their response was to tell Weir to never mention Asian men again and book her onto a two day ethnicity and diversity course. A few months later her files vanished from a locked office. Computer records were altered too. Nobody was ever charged for that either. It took until 2016 for Arshid Hussain to get 35 years and Qurban Ali to get 10. Fifteen years after Weir handed the council the names on a plate. The Jay Report in 2014 confirmed 1400 children were abused in Rotherham. The Casey Report in 2015 called the council not fit for purpose and pointed straight at a culture that put political correctness above child protection. This keeps happening because the playbook never changes. Raise the alarm and you get managed. Stay quiet and you get promoted. Weir did her job. The people whose actual job was protecting children sent her to a workshop. Sources: @thetimes @BBCNews @yorkshirepost.”]

Neither Muslim nor Jewish individuals should be in the police, civil service, or government, whether at local or national level.

The multikulti society can never function properly.

I saw on TV news a clip from the speech. As I have already predicted on the blog, the Andy Burnham Labourite circus, like some wine, does not travel far from its native terroir, in this case Manchester.

As predicted, Burnham is already a disaster, and he is not yet even elected by the Labour MP drones as their chosen leader (and so, Prime Minister by default).

Our present electoral and political system is a (contrived, rigged) joke, as is Burnham.

Of course, behind Burnham stand Labour Friends of Israel. In short, the “you-know-who” (((them))).

Late music