Afternoon music
On this day a year ago
Peter Hitchens
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11635997/PETER-HITCHENS-Yes-Drake-did-wicked-things.html
Jack Monroe
It seems to me that the msm, and its “celebrity” endorsers such as Nigella Lawson, have already moved on from “Jack Monroe” but that, at the same time, a hard-core of loony “LGBTQXYZ” types, would-be “socially-progressive” wishful thinkers, naive mugs and/or “fans”, mostly “of a certain age” will continue to tweet in support of her, and that quite a few “mugs” will continue to send her money via Patreon. After all, no less than 634 utter mugs are (as of today) still signed up to send her between £3.50 and £44 each month, despite the disclosures on Twitter, Tattle, and in the msm.
I may be wrong, but I have wondered whether “Anthea Rogers” is in fact “Jack Monroe” herself. Maybe, maybe not.
Once again, a tweeter alleges (by innuendo) that “Jack Monroe” is or was a cocaine abuser. I should not be at all surprised, for several reasons.
Other tweets seen
Import corrupt non-whites to the UK, allow them to become businessmen, MPs, government ministers, and guess what happens? They import, with their selves, their behavioural tendencies.
More “trans” nonsense. Wants to be a Member of Parliament. Impossible? Who knows, now that Eddie Izzard is seeking selection.
See also: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2018/11/15/when-reality-becomes-subjective/.
Harsher than would be my judgment, but they have a point— it shows weakness. In any case, though he often —not always— writes sensibly, Hitchens is “conservative”, perhaps, but not “national” or nationalist: see https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/05/19/peter-hitchens-and-his-views/
Only social nationalism can save Europe now.
She knows, instinctively.
When I was a child of just 12 (late 1968), higher forces impinging on my consciousness probably saved my life.
It happened like this: my family lived at the time on the Cremorne/Mosman border in Sydney, Australia. We decided to go on holiday to Queensland by car, a long journey even now, but longer then, when there were no motorways, only a seemingly endless highway with one lane on each side. No particular destination, but in the end, we washed up in Bundaberg, after 800 miles of motoring in the family Ford Falcon.
The 2-3 day trip had not been without incident or interest. As said, no motorways or dual-carriageways in Australia then, once outside Sydney. The highway took us north, past small encampments of Aboriginals in Northern New South Wales, and also past the banana groves of the region.
The traffic was light, at times very light. At one point, our car was told by police to drive quickly through a limited area of bushfire on both sides of the highway.
We overnighted at a motel at Coffs Harbour [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffs_Harbour], then a very sleepy town which is far busier today. Over the border, we passed through the gaudy oceanside town of Surfers’ Paradise, mostly single storey then, but which decades later developed into what is now the Gold Coast [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast,_Queensland].
“The South Coast region was a very popular holiday destination for servicemen returning from World War II. However, inflated prices for real estate and other goods and services led to the nickname of “Gold Coast” from 1950. By the 1960s the Gold Coast’s infrastructure had grown considerably, and the local building industry was able to support the development of high-rise holiday apartments and hotels (the first of which, Kinkabool, was completed in 1959). Surfers Paradise had firmly established itself as the leading destination and the introduction of bikini-clad meter maids in 1965 to feed parking meters by the beach to prevent holidaymakers from getting parking fines was a particularly popular innovation.”
[Queensland State archives]
In fact, I never heard that region called “Gold Coast” then, but only “Surfers’ Paradise” or simply “Surfers’“.
Now, a large city (600,000 pop.) exists there:
We travelled on through long stretches of sugar cane.
The Millard family holiday in fact nearly ended disastrously when, just after the swift near-tropical darkness had fallen, a slow-moving freight train, carrying sugar cane through the night, just missed the car as it crossed the track. The level crossing had neither lights nor barrier, and not even a warning sign.
I say “near-tropical” because this was about 200 miles south of the Tropic of Capricorn.
My family decided, the next day, to go to a camping area by a beach in the then undeveloped Bargarah area, about 8 miles from Bundaberg, Bundaberg being now, in 2023, a much more sizeable and populated place but then, in 1968, known only for sugar, rum, and Bert Hinkler, an aviation pioneer whose statue stood prominently in or near the quiet town centre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Hinkler; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundaberg; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bargara,_Queensland.
I wandered around under the coconut palms, having a near-miss when a heavy coconut in its fleshy surround crashed down, missing me by inches. A quiet beach on the Coral Sea, with hardly anyone there except a handful of families in tents and, nearby, a small cafe or snack joint of some kind, right by the beach.
The next morning, I felt unwell, and, oddly, told my parents, really insistently (I remember that), that I needed to go to hospital. What prompted that request I have no idea. Guardian angel? Instinct? The pain was (if I recall) not too bad, just a dull ache most of the time.
Anyway, after initial thoughts from my parents that I just needed rest in the heat of the Queensland summer, my mother reluctantly drove me to Bundaberg, where it was soon established at the General Hospital that I needed an emergency appendectomy. Apparently, had the appendix not been extracted, I might well have died.
I was in the hospital for nearly two weeks (that was more common back then), and was then flown back, with my younger brother, to Sydney via Brisbane (where we transferred to a large Boeing jet).
At that time, Bundaberg’s airfield had only a kind of hut as the “terminal”; and I was one of only a very few passengers on the propeller-driven plane, a Fokker Friendship with about a dozen or so people aboard (it had come from other coastal towns first).
My parents and youngest brother drove back to Sydney later; they probably recalled the holiday very differently to me.
Anyway, the incident has always stuck in my mind as exemplifying how the overmind, or “higher forces” (?), can sometimes save people from injury or death.
I have had other such, though non-medical, “saving graces”, including one in Ireland in 1979.
More tweets seen
He is right. “We are where we are”, though…
I heard on the radio yesterday that the UK is getting even deeper into the Ukrainian war by sending the Zelensky regime 12 (it now seems 14) Challenger 2 tanks. Old but certainly serviceable. This gets close to being actually at war with Russia. Madness. I may not much like London and some of the areas around it, but I still would prefer them not to be destroyed by a nuclear attack…
The reaction of the Zelensky regime is that it wants 300 tanks! Their ghetto negotiating style would be funny were it less offensive.
Where would the Kiev regime be without Western aid constantly stoking the war? In Lvov, if not Warsaw, probably. This was a failed state even before the war. Now it may have arms and ammunition funnelled to it by the Western powers, but 20% of the population is outside Ukraine now; the country is largely without electrical power; it has few gas supplies; it cannot manufacture; it cannot export much of its continuing agricultural production.
The only answer (saving Russian occupation of Kiev, Odessa and the territories east of the Dnieper) is for there to be a ceasefire on both sides, pending negotiation of at least an armistice and a freezing of the actual hostilities on both sides.
Incidentally, the largest tank battle of WW2 (and in history generally), Kursk, involved a total of over 8,000 tanks, incredibly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kursk.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 