Morning music
Saturday quiz
Well, another victory over political journalist John Rentoul this week: Rentoul scored 4/10; my score was 6/10. I did not know the answers to questions 1, 3, 7, and 8.
Talking point
Tweets seen
That’s right…it is not…
So, in the end, British free speech and civil rights were killed off, not by “Nazis”, and not by Communists (as such), but by a bespectacled, mealy-mouthed, charisma-free, little bureaucrat-lawyer turned Labour Party MP, with a Jewish wife and some buy-to-let properties.
“Sargon of Akkad” (Carl Benjamin) echoing, inter alia, my recent blog posts about the lack of legitimate mandate for Starmer-Labour. As said previously, out of every 20 people eligible to vote at GE 2024, 8 decided not to vote at all, perhaps because no social-national party or movement exists (as yet).
Out of every 20 eligible voters, and out of every 12 voters who voted, only 4 voted Labour (Con 3, Reform UK 2, LibDems 2, Greens 1), in rough terms.
The Starmer-Labour government has no legitimacy, and no mandate.
Colonies on other planets
Well, sad to say, that is nonsense. Human beings cannot live on other planets (the ones we know about) because the atmospheres are poisonous, and because the gravity is either too little or too great (meaning the human body cannot, over time, take the stresses).
There is no soil or water on other known planets which might be available for agriculture.
Other planets in our solar system are either too hot or too cold for human life to survive.
Several known planets are “gas giants”, and have no hard surface on which even to land or locate an artificial colony.
There is no way (short of somehow living in giant glass bubbles) for human beings even to live on the Moon, let alone Mars or Jupiter. There is also no point in human beings living —if they could— on other planets.
This whole idea of interplanetary colonization is a waste of effort. What it comes down to is a few billionaires who, however you look at it, have far too much money, and who are engaged in a puerile competition with each other, the prize seeming to be the status of having been the first to send loads of affluent tourists on joy-trips around the Earth and, eventually, Moon.
Incidentally, using current technology, it would take 200+ days to reach Mars. Jupiter? Between 600 days to get close, but up to 2,000 days to get into Jupiter’s orbit and/or land. So 2-6 years. Uranus? Perhaps 9 years. Neptune? Estimates vary between 9 and 18 years.
Musk and his fellow-ultra-rich should come down to Earth.
More tweets seen
“The Russian Army has destroyed a column of Ukrainian Armed Forces equipment that broke through in the Kursk region.
The enemy was moving in the Malaya Loknya area – this is approximately 15-20 km from the border.
The equipment stopped, where it was overtaken. The vehicles were destroyed by Ka-52M helicopters, and the infantry in the forest was finished off by artillery.“
The Ukrainian (Kiev regime) advance appears to have no goal other than to reassure the suppliers of money and weapons in the West: “look what we can do!” etc.
The Kiev regime has insufficient men and armour to penetrate Russia more deeply, and it has no supply capability for such a serious operation. The Kiev regime advance will (even taking it at face value) run out of steam and then be unable to resupply its columns.
If the Wehrmacht in the early 1940s found itself lost in the vast prostor (apparently-limitless space) of Russia, how could Zelensky’s pitiful forces do better?
Is the Kiev regime trying to get Russia to use tactical nuclear weapons (either in the field or on Kiev) as a way of dragging NATO into the war directly? Let us hope not.
So despite the relatively young age of the defendant, despite the fact that the judge decided not to ask for any pre-sentence reports, and despite the fact that the defendant pleaded guilty, the judge in his wisdom decided to inflict upon the defendant an immediate custodial sentence of no less than 3 years (plus that mean little extra two months). Purely political, emanating from “two-tier Keir”, his recent poundshop-dictatorship speech, and his pathetic “Lord Chancellor” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabana_Mahmood#Early_life_and_career].
I know nothing about the case or the defendant but, in view of the harsh sentence, frankly my feeling is that he might as well have pleaded not guilty and gone for jury trial. He might have struck lucky.
It occurs to me that the present wave of repression in the UK has, as its psychological foundation, the way in which a medically-camouflaged police state structure of law and regulation was set up during 2020-2021; the years of the “Covid” panicdemic/scamdemic. The System was interested to see how craven most people were, meekly giving in to the demand to “wear a mask!” (in some places but not in others), “keep 2 metres apart!” (in some places) and all the other nonsense, such as the crazy and arbitrary “Rule of 6” made up by stupid poseur “Boris” Johnson. All that and, even more Draconian, the “lockdown(s)”.
We saw during the “panicdemic” how the courts at first went along with all the nonsense, though sense generally prevailed later on. As for the police, their behaviour during the “Covid” scam was nothing short of absolutely disgusting. Now look— they are again acting as a poundland KGB or Stasi.
You must be joking…
“The media narrative that endowed the [defunct] English Defence League & right-wing figures with formidable organising resources was & remains the invention of the propaganda machine of the British Establishment.
No doubt right-wing activists posted provocative statements & a handful participated in rioting. But their influence has been blown out of proportion to inflate the role & threat posed by the far right”
– Frank Furedi Substack.“
Quite. The bottle-throwers and/or “Tommy Robinson” fans are just an amorphous mass, pointed in this or that direction by those behind the “controlled opposition”.
This can only end one way, but under the already -considerable repression in the UK, I cannot specify anything without having to endure —yet again— the boring nuisance of having to talk to police drones at my door (as has happened a number of times in the past decade), and must therefore hope that readers can read between the lines, as in all authoritarian/totalitarian states…
“Britain’s almost 60-year experiment in hate-speech legislation is a warning to the world. We first introduced an offence of ‘inciting racial hatred’ in 1965, in the Race Relations Act. Fast forward to today and we now have laws against ‘incitement to religious hatred’, ‘grossly offensive’ online communications and a police force who routinely harass women for calling men men on the internet. Cops have also taken to quietly recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’ against citizens’ names, when the pesky law gets in the way of their authoritarianism.
The upshot of this is a scale of speech-policing that is surely unprecedented in our history. In 2017, an investigation by The Times found that nine people a day were being arrested for ‘posting allegedly offensive messages online’ – with 3,395 arrested in 2016 alone. Even then, that investigation was limited to one piece of legislation – the Communications Act – and the real number is almost certainly higher, not least because many police forces didn’t respond to the survey. Greg Lukianoff, president of America’s estimable Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, argues that, on the basis of those partial numbers alone, Britain is comfortably locking up more people today for speech crimes than America did during the first Red Scare.
When people think of hate-speech laws they probably imagine some vicious fascist, being dawn-raided for airing toxic, ancient hatreds. There’s still a bit of that. But as those racist rioters remind us, while they are mercifully small in number, censoring racists doesn’t make racists go away – it just forces them to spew their bile out of sight, at the fringes and in fetid echo chambers, where they can’t be clocked or challenged. What’s more, there are many supposed speech criminals who – while offensive to some – are hardly dangerous bigots. There’s Count Dankula, the YouTuber who was convicted in Scotland for making a ‘grossly offensive’ comedy video in which he taught his pug to do a Nazi salute. Feminist Kate Scottow was convicted of causing ‘needless anxiety’ via persistent ‘misgendering’ – thankfully, that one was overturned. Christian street preachers are often arrested by the police for airing their predictably less-than-liberal views on homosexuality and transgenderism. This has been going on for decades now. Indeed, it’s been almost 20 years since Sam Brown, a student at Oxford University, was famously arrested for calling a police horse gay.
More alarmingly, the British state is increasingly taking an interest in things people say in private. There have been a few cases now in which people in England have been convicted for racist posts made in private WhatsApp groups. In Scotland, the great, sinister innovation of Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act is that it forgoes the usual dwelling defence – a feature of existing hate-speech legislation that prohibits arrest over speech uttered in your own home. Now, any Scottish dinner-table chat could be a crime scene.
Certainly, incitement to violence, true threats and so on are crimes in every civilised society – even in America, where the First Amendment renders any censorship of speech and the press unconstitutional. But ‘incitement to hatred’ and ‘grossly offensive’ speech are different things entirely. One man’s hatred is another man’s passionately held moral conviction. Offence is always in the eye of the beholder. We all think we know hate or offence when we see it, but at the end of the day everyone will draw the line slightly differently. You’re then left with someone having to decide, and nowadays that means someone like Keir Starmer – a man who until about five minutes ago thought it is ‘not right’ to say that only women can have a cervix.“
[Spiked magazine]
Part of all that is also to do with the numbers of people now in the UK who are actually either foreign and born overseas, or foreign, born of foreign parents, but in the UK.
Such people are now often to be found in public sector jobs, having acquired a degree from one of Britain’s new “universities” (with their ingrained “antifascist”-type bias). Police, probation people, civil servants, lawyers, academics, MPs, “journalists” (ill-informed scribblers), TV talking heads etc.
They are the foot-soldiers of the “woke” police state, and have no centuries of freedom of expression, or the struggles for that, to look back upon. They just have no inbred respect for free speech.
Sadly, their numbers now include English/British people as well, many of whom are entirely ignorant of English history, let alone world history, and have no respect for, or even understanding of, freedom of expression, free speech.
Another step on the UK’s road to perdition. Already, almost any criticism or even observation made about Jews, or Jewish behaviour, is likely to be treated as some kind of “hate speech”, either by police and CPS drones, or by the self-appointed defenders of Jewish/Zionist “entitlement”, such as the malicious and so-called “Campaign Against Antisemitism” [“CAA”].
Already, the laws of the UK are such that almost any leading historical thinkers such as Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Luther, Marx, Nietzsche etc would be prosecuted were they alive and living in contemporary Britain.
(An old one, but still relevant on the whole).
Talking point
[nb. in the UK, that —American— figure of 2% should be about 0.25%…]
Late tweets
Whatever the nuances of housing supply and demand, mass immigration is the major factor in driving up both purchase prices and rental costs.
Between 500,000 and a million new “inhabitants” in the UK every single year, almost all non-white, non-European, newcomers.
Only idiots such as now-washed-up former MP, Pakistani pro-Israel puppet and Muslim apostate, Sajid Javid cannot see, or refuse to accept, the connection
(Make that 10M+, though, not 4M…)
“Let me get this straight: Keir Starmer is releasing violent criminals from prison just to replace them with people who commit thought crimes on @X. And he is spending police resources investigating and going after people for retweets and Facebook posts when there is a shitload of violent crime all over Britain.“
There is an historical precedent of sorts for what Starmer etc are doing.
In Stalin’s day, the Soviet criminal legal system regarded ordinary, i.e. real, criminals as “class allies“. They got far more lenient sentences for their crimes of acquisition or violence than either the so-called “former people” (aristocrats and the middle classes), i.e. “class enemies“, usually sentenced for what they were, rather than what they had done, or the political prisoners, the most harshly-treated of all, who were regarded as terrorists, saboteurs, or simple traitors, even if they had done nothing but write a socio-political critique, or even a poem.
“Counter-offensive against Russia” – Zelensky’s most risky decision, which has been secretly planned for months, Kiev is taking risks with the army and technology, according to The Times of London, citing sources
Main points from the article citing high sources in Kyiv:
Zelensky pressured the military leadership to start an offensive for months in complete secrecy.
In Kiev, they want to change the narrative that Ukraine is losing the war.
Ukraine would attack Russia even without Western permission.
This is the most risky decision since the beginning of the war, because Moscow will do everything to regain the territories.
The forces allocated for this operation range from 6,000 to 10,000 soldiers (probably more in reality).
The military leadership is ready to risk soldiers and expensive equipment in order to achieve something in this direction.“
As blogged previously, this operation is a propaganda/public relations exercise.
The Kiev regime has no military objective in sight, unless it is to reach Kursk, 77 miles from Sudzha where the front-line seems to be at present.
In the unlikely event that the Kiev-regime forces reach and take Sudzha, and then move up the good-quality 2-lane highway to Kursk, all that will happen will be that those forces will be encircled and destroyed by air as well as armour.
The Kiev regime is running out of soldiers, even recently recruited (pressed into service) ones. It also has no logistics capability to sustain a deep thrust into Russian territory. Russian air power must be all but unchallenged in the Kursk region.
Still there you are. If you allow a sleazy, corrupt, Jewish former TV comedian to pose as President of Ukraine, expect disasters…
Late talking point
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 