Morning music
On this day a year ago
On the blog 5 years ago
Overkill
I agree, for once, with Janet Street-Porter. The whole thing has been overdone. Instead of a quiet, dignified series of events, a mass circus in which good taste and real respect has been —partly at least— left behind.
Tweets seen today
At last the Russian high command is starting to think truly tactically, meaning in this case obliquely.
It will be recalled that the Iraqi Army flooded large areas at one time, in the 1980s and later, both when fighting Iran and when fighting the “Allied forces” (USA, mainly).
I made that point a few days ago on the blog, citing the dictum of Clausewitz about how the ratio “moral” or morale vis a vis the “material” is 3:1.
We tend to forget that, though the southeastern part of Ukraine is a war zone, that does not mean that all areas suffer continuous fighting. Far from it. The Ukraine is about 3x the size of the UK, and nearly 5x the size of England. The southeastern parts known as the Donbass or Don Basin (Donetsk and Lugansk regions) are, together, about half the size of England.
From their foreign correspondents
“…the foreign media cover this long period of ceremonial mourning with less servility. Hardly any British media, for example, dared comment on King Charles III’s rude gesture of impatience during the acclamation.“
[Stefanie Bolzen, in Die Welt]
“...a new recession, heralded by galloping inflation – the real thief in the night for working-class people, has caught the government off guard, with a new PM who has everything to prove, having been elected by a small number of Conservative members.”
[Rafael de Miguel, in El Pais]
“The risk is always that the UK ends up not as Global Britain but Little England. This, too, would have been a nightmare for the Queen.”
[Antonello Guerrera, La Repubblica]
Pound sliding, inflation stoking, and recession likely
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62923994
Still think that closing down the economy for almost 2 years (because a virus was supposedly killing one out of every thousand people, mostly aged and/or with serious pre-existing health problems), and while doling out “free” money to individuals and companies via “furlough” payments, grants, “loans” etc, was a good policy? Think again.
A delusionary time, but what happens once the funeral of the late Queen has been held?
The death of the late Queen, and the consequent ritual arrangements and spectacles, is occupying the msm in the UK to an almost (?) unprecedented extent.
It may be that the Diana death hysteria of 1997, about which I have heard, and the Silver Jubilee of 1977, were similar; I cannot say, having been out of the UK when those two events occurred. In 1977, I was in Rhodesia, and in 1997 I was in Kazakhstan.
In fact, I only heard of the Diana incident 2-3 days after it happened, when I attended a regular Monday morning meeting at my office in Almaty, the then capital.
The British Embassy opened a book of condolence, and I was told by one of my Embassy contacts that, out of all the ~70 British residents (in the city) of which the Embassy was aware, I was the only one who had not signed (though not because I was hostile to Diana, but because of simple lack of interest).
My non-signing may have also been noted because, about 10 months previously, I had attended by invitation a royal reception at the Ambassador’s official Residence, where I had met and briefly chatted to Prince Charles, as he then was. Also, because I was at the Embassy quite often, at least a couple of times per week.
I have blogged in the past about how, on my return to London a few weeks later, friends told me about the collective psychosis (?) that had descended (on London at least), with pubs full of blubbing drinkers etc.
I am now thinking ahead to the day, or perhaps two or three days after the funeral of the late Queen (next Monday, 19 September 2022). What then?
We as a nation (insofar as Britain still is a nation) face huge economic problems, as well as ingrained social problems. The cloud of illusion all too obvious this week on TV, in the Press etc will blow away, and the country may come down to Earth with a very hard jolt.
The sentiment around the enormous queues going to see the late Queen’s coffin etc is somewhat illusory. The hundreds of thousands of people shuffling toward Westminster, or lining the Mall, are still only about 1% of the whole UK population. The vast majority, almost all in fact, seem to be English/British, i.e. white, and most (that I have seen in photos, on TV etc), are middle-aged or elderly.
This will all look very different in six months’ time.
Late tweets seen
“It is not the function of the police to patrol our minds“.
Hitchens knows it, I know it, most other people —I hope— know it, but the police themselves do not seem to know it, and neither does the Jew-Zionist lobby (which exercises far too much influence over some police forces), as witness my own experiences: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2017/07/13/when-i-was-a-victim-of-a-malicious-zionist-complaint/; and https://ianrobertmillard.org/2022/01/15/diary-blog-15-january-2022-including-an-outline-of-the-failure-of-the-latest-jew-zionist-attempt-to-prosecute-me/.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 