Tag Archives: shipping

Diary Blog, 12 August 2026

Afternoon music

12th of August thought

Good luck to all grouse today. As people now say, “stay safe”.

On the blog 3 years ago

How time flies— there is my blog post from 3 years ago today, and that dates from three months before my free speech trial of November 2023. Nearly three years ago. Hard to believe. Still, nice to reflect on the fact that the malicious Jews of the so-called “Campaign Against Antisemitism” [“CAA”] failed to shut down the blog, even during the trial itself. It has been published almost daily since the trial and sentencing (of March 2024), and is still being published at least 25 days per month.

Tweets seen

I was blogging about that months ago. Action causes reaction. Many effectively Russian ships fly flags of convenience. So do many effectively British ships, and the same applies across the world. This is the 21st Century, yet we are now seeing state piracy on behalf of the Kiev regime. Do not think that Russia cannot respond.

The madness should be stopped but, with the ruling circles in the West set on conflict with Russia, the situation may well escalate.

True, but —as with the Ukraine situation— this is also partly an excuse to make people forget that the disastrous and utterly stupid (but on one level, planned) “Covid” “lockdown” immediately placed the UK economy on a permanently lower level, and quite deliberately.

The sheep (you know, the voters…) almost all complied with the ludicrous farrago of fake laws, “rules” etc put out by “Boris”-idiot, little Matt Hancock, and others.

Now those sheep are suffering, or starting to suffer, and the villain is supposed to be Russia, or Iran, or anything but the Western cabals who imposed those fake laws and closed down the UK and other economies for months and years.

I was shocked to see how easily the sheep were led by those with control of the levers of mass propaganda.

“Lockdown”, “social distancing”, “the Rule of Six”, the facemask nonsense etc. All entirely unnecessary (in reality, only a handful of people in the UK actually died of Covid).

As I blogged at the time, on one level the whole “Covid” thing was a massive psychological experiment; sadly, millions of people went along with it and probably even today believe it. Even years later, I occasionally see poor loonies wearing a facemask. Probably the same contaminated piece of cloth they have been breathing through for 6 years. Complete idiots, and victims of a “psy-op” which actually was not hugely sophisticated, though plainly co-ordinated at the start.

A kind of comfort blanket for the weak-minded.

I should love to hear the real views of people such as Sir Richard Dearlove [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dearlove], though I am not convinced that such people know a great deal more, overall, than me. They just know more detail (arguably).

Burnham continues to underwhelm. The weather this year is fairly brutal, but political leadership cannot change it one little bit.

As for “climate change”, the evidence for its existence is patchy, and its causation via “emissions” not proven, as far as I am concerned.

Further, even if there is climate change and even if it is caused by the said emissions, only what is done by the largest industrial powers, notably China, India, and the USA, would make a real difference. Britain is only sending out 1% of the said emissions, if that. In other words, even if Britain disappeared completely, or achieved “Net Zero”, the difference in emission-output would be somewhere between 1% and zero.

What political leadership in the UK can do is to plan ahead and to take strategic decisions that have practical outcomes.

The most important action that should be taken is to stop mass immigration. All the millions of migrant invaders (“small boat” invaders, “legal immigrants”, and those born to immigrant mothers or to stupid British women impregnated by non-Europeans) use water, for one thing. 55 million people lived in the UK when I was born (1956); now, 65-70 million.

The next thing that government can do is to ameliorate the effects of continued hot weather. Build more reservoirs. Not one public reservoir has been constructed in 34 years in the UK. I now read that some are being planned and that a few have even been started. However, it takes years to construct a large reservoir, and months or —more usually— years for such reservoirs to fill, especially in periods of low rainfall.

A further action that would help is to give some financial help to planters and growers who want private reservoirs (which can cost up to £2M). That helps because the water for irrigation would then come from the private reservoir, not from public reservoirs, rivers, and aquifers.

Of course, none of the above can change the weather, but those and other measures might help to mitigate the effects.

I once lived for a while on a Caribbean island without reservoirs or (when I was there) any desalination plant (one was being built while I was there). In fact, there was no mains water on the island at that time. However, all large or medium-size houses were built around a large tank, so that when it did rain (torrentially, in hurricane season), water was retained. Certainly, the villa in which I lived never ran out of water for showers etc (you had to buy drinking water, imported from the USA, mostly).

UK governments should make new buildings include such tanks, and also potential air-conditioning. Yes, there is a cost penalty; well, boo-hoo. It is necessary.

Reverting to Burnham, my initial view of him as someone who just wants to do what appears popular (except for stopping the migration invasion, of course) is daily reinforced.

Look at the “P.C. Harper” case, re. the tinker/”traveller” criminals who killed a policeman a few years ago. The big picture strategy would be to remove or eliminate such “traveller” criminals, if necessary as a whole “community”, rather than horse around, as Burnham is, trying to prevent a few individual ones from getting early release from prison. In fact, he is only doing that because he does not want the mass media to report that he is doing nothing.

Strategy, not day-to-day tactics.

Hegel on Race and the Germanic World

[1831 portrait of Hegel by Jacob Schlesinger]

https://chadcrowley.substack.com/p/hegel-on-race-and-the-germanic-world

A typically-interesting blog post by that Substack writer.

More tweets seen

Late tweets

Underwhelming. I saw the last one, in 1999, which on the Dorset/Hampshire coast where I saw it was about 99% and very memorable. Around midday, the skies quite suddenly darkened, and stayed dark for several minutes.

For some reason, the BBC has gone crazy about this not terribly interesting partial eclipse (in UK) of 2026. It leads the news broadcasts. Senseless.

Ah, I must have missed the fact that that Heath individual is now the Editor of the Sunday Telegraph. That explains much. I had been wondering why both the Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph, pro-Jewish lobby and pro-Israel for many years anyway, had apparently become manically so more recently.

[“The cost of chartering the largest oil tankers on the route from the Middle East to China has reached approximately $500,000 per day. At the beginning of the year, this amount was around $25,000-$30,000.

A German news agency reported that due to the increased risks of transiting the Strait of Hormuz, many shipping companies are refusing to pass through the strait. This has led to a reduction in the number of available oil tankers and a sharp increase in prices.

The largest oil tanker carries 2 million barrels of oil, worth $200 million. A 30-day voyage from the Persian Gulf to China costs an amount equal to 7.5% of the cargo’s value. That is, one barrel out of every 13 goes towards the cost of transportation.“]

Final thought of the day

Saw “Engels” trending on Twitter/X. Was intrigued briefly, until I understood that the Engels in question was not Friedrich Engels [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels] but some footballer with the same surname…

Never assume…

Late music

[public statuary, The Freedom of the Human Spirit, Birmingham, Michigan, USA]

Diary Blog, 7 July 2026

Morning music

Tweets seen

Translates to a Commons with about 260 Reform UK MPs (about 66 short of a bare majority), Lab 106 (very weak official Opposition), Cons 104, 51 LibDems, 46 Greens, 45 SNP, 12 Plaid [etc].

So much for the “Burnham Bounce” the msm scribblers expected.

I blogged, after the Makerfield by-election, that Burnham’s supposed popularity, an entirely contrived idea anyway, would not travel far outside Manchester. I think that it is becoming obvious that that is so.

Farage is under attack for his various sleazy connections, but people are voting, or intending to vote, Reform not because they much agree with or much like Farage or Reform, but precisely to hit out at Lab and Con, to do them down. An anti-System tendency.

I saw Annie Machon once, with her then boyfriend David Shayler. They jumped onto the platform of a bus I was already on, in Baker Street, at the traffic lights at Marylebone Road. I believe that such buses with open platforms no longer exist; what a pity— brilliant and useful design.

I have no idea whether that was their way of throwing off surveillance, or whether they just wanted to catch the bus. I recognized them immediately.

At that time, Shayler and, by association, Annie Machon, were fairly if briefly famous, and were in the newspapers fairly often. Must have been around 2002. I think that they were on their way to what had once, in the mid-1990s, been my old stamping-ground, the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.

Small world. I later spoke, in 2017, at the London Forum, where Shayler also gave a talk about half an hour before me, though I did not actually meet him or exchange any words with him. By that time, he had already been —and then not been— both a sort-of transsexual “cosplay” and, by his own account, the Son of God.

Actually, I quite enjoyed Shayler’s talk at the London Forum.

As for Annie Machon, I believe she lived in Iceland for a while, though her Wikipedia entry does not mention that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Machon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shayler

[“The Government has confirmed that its so called ‘independent’ Digital ID Advisory watchdog, will not have its minutes published.

We are expected to carry out parliamentary scrutiny on one of the most significant erosions of our civil liberties for decades, and yet we are not told the group budget, member selection process, or given the minutes from their meetings. Journalists have also been excluded from advisory panels.

The Government must give us answers on this sinister policy, and rethink its current course.“]

We do not really live in a democracy but in a thinly-disguised oligarchic tyranny.

That bastard Ellwood is one of the worst criminals in this country. If the UK becomes a radioactive wasteland by reason of a pointless and unnecessary war with Russia, a major part of the guilt and blame will be his.

What is often forgotten is that the sale of fighter jets is not merely a matter of the aircraft themselves but also of the technical add-ons and training that usually form part of the sales package.

“Journalists” (scribblers, talking-heads etc) in the UK are mostly scavengers and similar riff-raff.

Farage must be odds-on to win the by-election. He got a vote-share of 46.2% in 2024.

At GE 2024, the Con Party put up their (former) MP candidate, retired actor and Garrick Club member, Giles Watling, at Clacton; he came second with 27.9% of the vote. Labour put up some young African, which was a deliberate insult to the English people of Clacton; the African got 16.2% of the vote.

Since 2024, Labour’s popularity has sunk, and I doubt whether the expected replacement of Starmer by Burnham will change much; it might even compound Labour’s problems.

As for the Conservatives, they have, it seems, now decided not to stand a candidate at the by-election. They may be afraid that their 2024 27.9% would sink to somewhere around 20% or even 15%. Whatever the truth of that, their absence must mean that Farage is a shoo-in. He may end up with over half, or even three-quarters, of the vote.

I cannot recall a (former) “main party” in the UK ever failing to put up a candidate at a Parliamentary by-election.

I have just now read that Labour will also not be standing a candidate at that by-election, and presumably for the same reasons— fear of getting a very humiliatingly-low vote; maybe about 10% of the overall vote. Farage is thereby guaranteed to get something like 75% of the vote.

[“Tories will never have an easier by-election again. Everyone else has stood aside. And they still don’t think they can win. No courage, no fight, no desire to change a frankly disastrous narrative. If they’re down to 40 seats it’s entirely their fault. Every single message or policy they put out is appalling. The strategy suicidal. Under anyone else they’d walk Clacton.“]

Not sure that I agree with the lady’s conclusion, but the failure to stand a candidate does scream out “we are afraid of getting a tiny vote“; same goes for Labour.

Late tweets

Our animal friends.

NATO and the EU are pushing hard. One day, Russia may decide to push back equally as hard, or harder.

[“Ishchenko: To avoid war with Europe, Russia must eliminate Ukraine as a Western war platform.

ALL PARTIES INVOLVED IN THE CONFLICT ARE NOW MANEUVERING BEFORE WAR – THE BRITISH ARE LEADING THE CHARGE TOWARDS WAR.

Currently, Britain is actively pushing towards a major European war. They have already made their decision. And, judging by the reactions of their nominal allies, Germany, Finland, and the Baltic states share this view. Poland is afraid, but also shares this sentiment.

A new phase of escalation may only begin after the war in Ukraine. And, judging by the determination of the British, who are organizing provocations at every turn, they will ultimately lead things to war.

A significant portion of Western Europe is, in one way or another, prepared to support the British plan for a major European war with Russia.”]

I think that the Kiev regime may only disappear when Kiev itself disappears; and that may happen.

There is something of the absurd about a tiny and unwarlike country such as the Netherlands fomenting war so assiduously.

Late music

[Russian special forces operatives deploy over a snowy Russia]