Tag Archives: Sergei Komisarenko

Diary Blog, 3 February 2025

Morning music

[Soviet painting of the Socialist Realism school, depicting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin]

Talking point

Arabic might be considered the richest language in words based on its complexity. According to The National – the United Arab Emirates’ leading English-speaking news outlet – on average, a single written word in Arabic has three meanings, seven pronunciations and 12 interpretations.

Not merely a philological curiosity; it means that the meaning and/or intent of the Arab is not necessarily clear-cut.

True, the same word in English can have several meanings (some words can, that is), but I do not think that that is quite the same, mainly because, in English, the meaning is usually obvious from the context. Also, it applies to a relatively few words, not “the average“.

Something for the Arabists in the Foreign Office to consider, if they have not all been purged, and replaced by Zionists (which may well be the case, looking at UK representation in Ukraine and Israel in recent years).

Tweets seen

A few years ago, I posted on the blog my experience, sometime around 1994 or 1995, of having visited the UK’s biological research laboratories at Porton Down, Wiltshire, in company with the then Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK, who later became both an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency of Ukraine and the director of a biological facility in Ukraine (he was a biochemist/microbiologist by training):

Bill Kristol [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Kristol#Early_life_and_education].

It’s always “them”. Every. Single. Time.

ELON: YOU COULD EASILY POWER THE ENTIRE US WITH SOLAR Elon: “You could actually power the entire United States with a 100 miles by 100 miles of solar.” Joe Rogan: “So you could just pick some dead spot that you fly over, cover that sucker up with solar panels, and charge the whole country, 24/7?” Elon: “Absolutely. We need batteries, but yes. It’s not hard, meaning it’s very feasible. The sun is converting over 4 million tons of mass to energy every second, and it’s no maintenance. That thing just works.” Source: The Joe Rogan Experience, October 2023, @joerogan.

Very interesting from the point of view of American autarky and isolationism.

Reform UK

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/02/reform-uk-can-win-scores-of-labour-seats-in-england-and-wales-says-study

Reform UK can win scores of Labour seats in England and Wales, says study.

Analysis of a mega poll shows Keir Starmer would lose more seats than Tories amid voter discontent with main parties.

Labour faces losing scores of seats to Reform UK across England and Wales as a widening section of ­voters lose faith in the mainstream parties, according to a new analysis seen by the Observer.

With senior figures in the Labour party now privately talking about a “change of era” in which more ­moderate voters are turning to Nigel Farage’s party, new research on Reform’s influence suggests it will take far more seats from Labour than from the Conservatives on ­current trends.

Reform would win 76 seats if an election were held now, according to a constituency-by-constituency model. Of those, 60 would be won from Labour, including seats across the “red wall”, as well as in Wales and across the south of England.

However, the analysis also reveals that even a relatively small further swing towards Reform from Labour could see the party pick up another 76 Labour-held seats.

The narrow Labour lead in many seats means it is susceptible in the event of a high turnout among Reform voters, a surge in Reform’s support, or a drop in Labour turnout.

The huge study, commissioned by the Hope Not Hate campaign group, has been carried out by the Focaldata polling company using a mega-poll, or MRP, made up of almost 18,000 voters.

Its analysis of almost 4,000 ­voters currently minded to back Reform found that one in five were “moderate, interventionist” voters who were unlike those who had backed Farage at the last election or supported Ukip or the Brexit party in the past.

[The Observer/Guardian]

So there it is. Reform could end up with 152 seats even on present polling and trending.

As frequently noted, Reform is part of the journey, not the ultimate destination, but this news, overall, is very good.

I only believe stock exchange speculators when they start jumping out of windows.

You may as well ban cars because a few lunatics deliberately or carelessly misuse them to hurt others. There must be literally billions of knives, even of the type(s) mentioned, in the UK.

Most knife crime is done by “the blacks and browns”, followed by other ethnic minorities, yet contemporary msm scribblers, talking heads, Westminster Bubble drones want to get rid of knives (or certain types of knife)?! Get rid of those doing the crimes. Get rid of them.

That Tom Calver person is, apparently, a Times columnist. No wonder people do not want to pay, for content of that sort.

Laughter, the best medicine“…

Over the past few decades, the newspapers have gradually filled with idiots of the Tom Calver type, all trying to present themselves as “serious” commentators. Some, such as pro-Jewish lobby and pro-Israel expenses cheat, Michael Gove, even made it into government.

As for “celebrity” Idris Elba, is there “some chance” that he might be biased? I merely pose the question.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad“, and Britain certainly has gone mad. Not so much the “broad masses” of the population, but mainly the Westminster Bubble, the msm scribblers and talking heads, the ivory tower fake academics etc.

In the words of Katie Hopkins, “Batshit Bonkers Britain“…

The world has changed out of all recognition since 1951.

Talking point

More tweets seen

More music

More tweets

At last.

Look at the odd man out— the “Conservatives”. I think that they are in a death spiral.

Of course, the System MPs (rather than voters) will fight to keep FPTP, but proportional representation is an idea the time for which has finally arrived.

Looking at it another way, it is certainly the aged who still support FPTP, because they have grown up with it, are used to it and many of them are too stupid to see that its time has gone.

As is she…

That is more or less my view, too.

I wonder how many of those in charge are Jewish? In the USA, psychiatry and psychology are heavily-Jewish areas, but I do not know whether that is also the case in the UK.

“I spent the weekend in an act of ‘wild service’ helping to restore nature & maybe helping to heal some if the urban/rural divide.

In an event organised by @StEthelburgas & @letterstoearth_, a group of urbanites came together in the glorious welsh countryside to plant hedges & trees.

The method of planting 100’s of metres of hedges to connect up existing habitats (copses, ponds, areas of scrub etc) cleverly balanced allowing the land to be used for farming whilst giving more connected space for Nature.

The thing I wasn’t expecting though was crossing cultural divides. Witnessing some of the farmers on twitter & in the media who repeat culture war bait about hating both Nature & urbanites in the countryside had coloured my impression of farmers more generally. However, our host Dave was so kind & welcoming to his land & seemed genuinely touched that we had come out to help plant & restore; the jar of homemade honey he gave to each of us was a wonderful reward for a weekend well spent.

Trees add so much to a cityscape or suburb, not only to the countryside.

Just had a look at that Brooker person. Supports the malicious and mainly Jewish “Hope not Hate” cabal, U.S. Democrats, Jess Phillips etc. Oh, and “anti-racism”. Retweets likely State asset and faux-socialist Paul Mason. Seems unclear what, if anything, he knows about the environment (etc).

Sounds like a box-ticker (at best)…

Talking point

National Carrot Cake Day

Carrot cake was introduced in the UK (or reintroduced, having been known from at least the 16thC, probably much earlier) on a large scale in the early 1940s days of food rationing, to use vast stocks of carrots (unrationed) in lieu of sugar. It then became popular, and has remained so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot_cake.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom#Second_World_War_1939%E2%80%931945.

More tweets

“Carpetbagger Kemi” steering the “Conservatives” straight into a crash landing, or just a crash.

LibDems, as usual, the “dustbin” or “cockroach” party, surviving and even thriving by reason of not being Con or Lab label…

Electoral Calculus suggests that those figures might mean Labour largest party (237 MPs), Reform UK second (148 MPs), Conservatives 125, LibDems 78, Greens 6. So Labour could form a weak minority government with LibDem and SNP (etc) support.

On those figures, the Con Party would not even be the official Opposition, thus weakening their shattered credibility further.

For Reform to be the largest party in terms of seats, its vote will have to increase to at least 27%, if not 28% or more. https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html.

Castro and Cuba

I had no intention of writing about Cuba or Castro following the recent death of “Fidel”. However, the public and mass media reaction, much of it an outpouring of adulation and “me-too” faux-liberal compromise, has impelled me to write.

There is no doubt that Cuba before Castro was corrupt and, for many, poor. Before Castro there was Batista and before Batista, Prio (Carlos Prio Socarras), of whom the British historian Hugh Thomas wrote, memorably, in his mammoth history of the country, that he “fell like a rotten fruit, full of its own corruption.” Prío himself later said of his presidency: “They say that I was a terrible president of Cuba. That may be true. But I was the best president Cuba ever had.”[see Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. New York: Houghton Mifflin (2002) p 216].

Prio was in fact someone who tried to keep to constitutional proprieties and it was his decision not to act extra-judicially which allowed the harsher figure of Batista to seize power in 1952, Prio himself having been elected (by free and contested election) in 1948.

Cuba in the 1950s was sometimes described as somewhere between a Latin American country and a detached, poorer, part of the United States, the latter for long its effective suzerain.

It would be easier to make a quick judgment of Castro’s rule had the United States not (and typically) engaged in ham-fisted great-power and quasi-colonialist geopolitics over the island. Those American interventions continue to muddy the waters: attempts to assassinate Castro, the Bay of Pigs “invasion” of 1961; above all, the partial embargo (which Cuba called a “blockade”) imposed initially in 1960.

No-one can say for sure whether Cuba would be much different had it had the chance to trade freely with the USA, its neighbour and natural main trading partner. Probably not much. Venezuela is another and more recent example of the inability of a Latin American socialist economy to perform adequately for long.

The  bien-pensant “usual suspects” in the UK (the absurd Tariq Ali, Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn etc) are now saying that the Castro dictatorship was sort-of acceptable because Cuba had good education and good medical services. On that basis, they should be very kind indeed to German National Socialism, which provided the same and in fact far more (and with far less repression, in reality).

In fact, long before the Soviet subsidy disappeared, Havana was falling to pieces, as were the Cuban roads and railways. I myself had fleeting and peripheral contact with Cuba, otherwise seen by me only from the sea (between Cuba and the Bahamas) and the air (flying over Cuba between Tampa, Florida and Grand Cayman).

I was asked, when a practising barrister in London circa 1995, to help a scientific start-up based at Porton Down, Wiltshire, the high-security  biological warfare facility, then recently partly-privatized. A small company of scientists had a bacterium which turned biomass into fuel (unscientific me calling it the turning of straw into gold). I thought of Cuba with its sugar-cane detritus, lack of fuel and high technical-education levels. Unfortunately, the Cuban Embassy in London did not respond, unlike the Ukrainian: I visited Porton Down with the then Ukrainian Ambassador, Mr. Komisarenko [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serhiy_Komisarenko]. Nothing came of that in the end, but it seems that, in more recent years, a company called Havana Energy, headed by ex-Labour Party MP Brian Wilson, has been producing energy that way in Cuba. The Cuban Embassy’s unresponsiveness told me all I needed to know about the Cuban bureaucracy: unalert, lethargic, useless, bearing in mind the country’s crying need for fuel.

Since the early 1990s, Cuba has gradually been moving towards a capitalist economy. No doubt that process will continue. Eventually, some kind of greater rapprochement with the USA will happen.

In this blog post, I am more interested in the puerile reaction of the kind of people in the UK who are letting off Castro on human rights and economic efficiency because Cubans have a health service and a school system. Jeremy Corbyn has excelled himself in ignorant misunderstanding. He just digs himself deeper with every statement.

The mass media and in particular the BBC is, as one might expect, doing its bit to eulogize about Castro, saying that he “turned a small island into a major force in world affairs.” Where does one start in unpacking such nonsense?

The reaction to Castro’s death tells me something else: those in the UK who think themselves “socialist” are willing to turn a blind eye to historical, political and economic realities so long as the label is right.

Update, 5 January 2019

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6558991/Rich-kids-COMMUNISM-Fidel-Castros-model-grandson-flashes-wealth-European-vacations.html