Morning music
Chernobyl area wildlife
Britain, where nuts are treated as serious protesters
This is what Britain has become; it has descended into a place where any nut with a hammer and a narrow view of history can destroy a statue, a painting, a mural, or some other artwork, while the politically-correct and hugely-ignorant police stand around doing nothing, and as other ignorant persons applaud the vandalism online or otherwise.
As for the nut himself in this case, some cigarette-smoking “chav” type, he apparently shouted out to passers-by, including women, who were telling him to stop vandalizing, that they were “paedos”. What can one say?
Eric Gill [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gill] certainly was perverse, but so have been many other artists of note. Gill’s art is not 100% to my taste either, but that does not necessarily mean that it can just be destroyed by the first idiot that turns up with a hammer and a contrived grievance.
Society is built on order. There are worrying signs in the UK that disorder is slowly taking over, and I am not talking only about idiots vandalizing statues or artworks.
Upcoming Southend West by-election
It is not worthwhile blogging about the upcoming Southend West by-election in any great detail, because the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties are boycotting the event out of “respect” for the assassinated MP whose death triggered the by-election. That means that, as with the by-election at Batley and Spen held some years ago after the Jo Cox assassination, the voters of Southend will be denied the array of choice (however false) that they would usually have.
Not even Green Party and Reform UK (the latest Farage vehicle) will be standing candidates.
Wikipedia has opened a page about the by-election, which is set down for 3 February 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Southend_West_by-election.
As can be seen on Wikipedia, a number of minor candidates are standing. Two of at least passing interest are Steve Laws (UKIP), well-known for his reportage tweeting about the continuing cross-Channel migration-invasion, and Jayda Fransen (standing as Independent, but formerly a member of two or three parties).
I have blogged about Jayda Fransen in the past: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2020/09/11/diary-blog-11-september-2020-including-a-few-notes-about-jayda-fransen-and-her-new-british-freedom-party/.
Southend West has been held by the Conservative Party since its creation in 1950, the Con vote peaking the following year at 69.1%.
The MP elected in 1950, 1951 and 1955 was the very wealthy Anglo-American, Henry “Chips” Channon, famous for his indiscreet diaries [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Channon]. His rather mediocre son, Paul Channon, “inherited” the seat and was elected in a by-election in 1959, holding the seat thereafter until 1992, when David Amess was elected on a vote-share of 38.8% (LibDems second on 33.1%). In every subsequent election, Amess’s vote never dipped below 46%.
In 2019, Amess was elected with a solid 59.2% of the vote (Labour second on 28.1%; LibDems third with 11.4%).
In the by-election, The Conservative Party candidate, one Anna Firth, a barrister and Sevenoaks District Council councillor [https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-firth-095271202/], has tried to reach the House of Commons on two previous occasions. Looks like it will be “third time lucky” for her.
I could not see Anna Firth’s name on the chambers’ website for the set with which Ms. Firth is supposedly connected (Hailsham Chambers), so it looks as though she is no longer there. The Daily Mail and Linked-In also mention her as CEO of an “e-learning” organization (some kind of taxpayer-funded “social enterprise”, it appears), so maybe she is no longer in active practice at the Bar at all: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10299379/Conservatives-select-candidate-Southend-West-election.html.
There is minor interest around this by-election, in seeing firstly what vote-share Ms. Firth will get, in the absence of any real competition; also, as to the number of protest votes going to UKIP’s Steve Laws and to Jayda Fransen. Steve Laws may do better than Ms. Fransen; we shall see.
[Update, 12 January 2023: Well, Anna Firth, the Conservative candidate [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Firth], won easily, as expected. In the absence of any serious opposition, her vote-share was 86.1%, almost up to a North Korean level. The turnout was a pathetic 24%. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Southend_West_by-election#Results].
Tweets seen
Stupid idiotic puppet.
Exactly what I was thinking yesterday when I saw the monkeyhouse on TV, and then Boris-idiot exiting to his car, in the open air, black muzzle-mask in place.
What goes around comes around..
She has a point. I agree with her. The very few MPs I have met in my life have mostly been pretty stupid; in fact they have all been.
Parliament, like the NHS, the Bar, the Church, Oxford and Cambridge universities (in fact, most universities), the trade unions, and much else in Britain, is running on empty.
Someone in public life who seems not to be a complete idiot. There must be some mistake…
It has taken the msm about 20 years to catch up with me, or to where I was.
Latest opinion polling
I recently blogged that “Boris” would not survive beyond the summer of 2022. Looks like I should have written “Spring”…
https://twitter.com/harrytlambert/status/1481659810781220868?s=20
Exactly. The same phenomenon, or a similar one, seen from 2017 to 2019 continues: many voters with nowhere to go, as shown in the graphic below.
If only there were a credible social-national party. It might have been able to really launch in the past two years of a headless Government and an equally-clueless Labour-label “Opposition”.
Late afternoon music
The German Reich and the Soviet Union fought and died, the Reich quickly in 1945, the Soviet Union slowly over decades. It was a fated and fateful encounter. There is today no reason, good or otherwise, for Europe, including Eastern Europe, to exhaust itself in terror and bloodshed.
Very picturesque, even if the music (by Shostakovitch) added for the amateur YouTube video is anachronistic (I think that the film itself is from the famous 1960s War and Peace).
I prefer the (Khatchaturian) music in the video below:
A concert in Dresden in 2011, 76 years after the devastating Allied air attack. How resilient human beings can be.
On this day a year ago
Cartoon seen
Obviously meant to be Boris-idiot and Andrew Windsor. Conceptually very good, but as caricature not so good; I would not have recognized them.
Late tweets
It would be a fatal error to imagine that that could not happen. All serious wargames since 1960 that postulated use of tactical nuclear weapons have ended up with strategic nuclear weapons being used.
What would that mean in the UK? First, sudden and deadly Spetsnaz attacks by lethal special forces units on ground targets in this country— early-warning stations, ports, air bases, transport infrastructure, Internet infrastructure, and on heads of state and government. Then nuclear attacks on the same, if still in one piece.
Russia is about 72x the area of the UK. Nuclear attacks on Russia by NATO (mainly USA) would cause undreamt-of destruction, but Russia would survive, and rebuild, even if it took a hundred years. Were the UK to be attacked with nuclear weapons, almost all of the country would be flattened. Britain might not survive in any recognizable form.
The whole idea of Britain joining the Americans in war with Russia is mad. Why do it? So that Jew oligarchs can continue to exploit Ukraine? So that Ukraine, which prior to 1991 was never an independent state, can keep its present borders, which contain —especially in the East— large numbers of Russians and pro-Russians? So that the New World Order can expand its power?
Britain, disastrously, went to war in 1914 and then in 1939, both times for no good reason. Not again, I hope.
Steve Laws is standing in the Southend West by-election on 3 February 2022. I would normally not recommend a vote for UKIP, but in the absence of any real social-national candidate, Laws deserves at least a protest vote, if anyone there is going to vote at all.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 