The madness continues
The BBC, in the catchphrase of Private Eye, “getsmuchworse”.
I heard a BBC World Service interviewer, interviewing a Georgian lady about the Stalin-era sanatoria at Tsqaltubo, near Kutaisi, in former Soviet Georgia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsqaltubo
https://www.curiositymag.com/2018/08/24/georgia-soviet-spa-bathhouse-6-tskaltubo/
The item was quite interesting, but the absurd came in when the interviewee was asked who went there in Stalin’s day. The answer: Communist Party people, but also those who were considered to have been hard workers in their industry, such as mining. The BBC drone then referred to the miners as “the men and women miners”! Women miners?! To be fair to the BBC, there were a few in the Soviet Union at one time, but not many:
https://www.rbth.com/history/330385-soviet-women-workers-photos
At least the idiot did not make tick-box reference to LGBT etc stuff…
Sadly, it seems that the ornate Stalin-era sanatoria, i.e. spa hotels, have been allowed to decay; that does not take long in a subtropical climate.
Postscript
Bloody hell! Even as I finished the above paragraphs, the BBC World Service, which is now just another bad joke, struck again, with some idiot talking about Brexit and UK fishing rights, and referring to “fish sold by UK fishermen…and fisherwomen.” UK “fisherwomen”?! Ha ha! The BBC idiot only just remembered to add “and fisherwomen”, in order to make his sentence clearly “non-sexist”. This country is so screwed, it’s not true…
Meanwhile, the “political correctness” madness is being challenged
“[A] policeman told Harry that he was in trouble for retweeting a ‘transphobic’ limerick.” [Daily Mail].
This is not a reworked Fawlty Towers or Monty Python sketch. This actually happened!
“He was told that he was also being investigated for tweeting support for BBC Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray, who had been criticised by Oxford students after writing a newspaper article questioning whether transgender women are ‘real women’.” [Daily Mail]
“Harry was told in the conversation at Tesco that he had not broken the law but was guilty of a ‘non-crime’ hate incident. According to court papers, the constable explained to him: ‘Sometimes, a woman’s brain grows a man’s body in the womb and that is what transgender is.’” [Daily Mail]
“When Harry asked why the officer kept calling the person who had made the complaint a ‘victim’, when no crime had been established, he was told ‘that’s just how it works’.” [Daily Mail]
“Since the catch-all guidance was released, police forces have recorded at least 87,000 non-crime hate incidents — none of which break the law.” [Daily Mail]
The police drone actually said to the citizen now fighting back, “I need to check your thinking.” This is the police state emerging in plain sight.
I might add that I myself have been subjected to similar:
https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/when-i-was-a-victim-of-a-malicious-zionist-complaint/
…and not only in that 2017 incident. A year later, in 2018, a mentally-disturbed Jewess (on medication), apparently resident in Barnet, North London, actually prevailed upon her local (((occupied))) police to telephone me and try to intimidate me into altering completely lawful posts on the GAB platform (the Jewish lobby had already had me expelled from Twitter).
The policeman (a constable) actually had the cheek to send me through the post a purported (but legally-ineffective) notice warning me about “harassment” (despite the fact that I had never had any direct contact with the said Jewess!)… In fact, I myself was the real victim of harassment, by that woman and by a pack of other Jews, all connected with the “Campaign Against Antisemitism” fake charity. I actually had to write to the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police and to the Barnet Police Borough Commander! Even then the same policeman tried to continue for a short while!
This is how the “rule of law” decays: when the police become politicized, subject to backstairs pressure, biased etc (not to mention both ignorant of the law and over-estimating the scope of their own *lawful* powers…).
Radio 4
Just listened on BBC Radio 4 at 0545 to some poor lady, grieving for her father, and droning on endlessly (as it seemed). I felt sorry for her, but this was, imo, not good radio. Have some regard for the listeners, for God’s sake!
Voting intention
I am not sure whether it means much, 4+ years before any likely general election, but for whatever it is worth, Survation has come out with a new poll:
Nothing much there. Conservatives at top by default, because so far they have been cautious about doing anything. Labour still moribund, LibDems, at 10% rather higher than I would have thought (maybe Remain signallers), and Brexit Party on 3% (who are they, that 3%?!) alongside Greens.
“First day out of EU” music
More “anti-fascist” nonsense exposed
I saw the nonsense below on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/witchofpeace/status/1223580698558304256?s=20
What is the crazed “Witch of Peace” talking about now? As for the other one, with her Stars of David, she sounds completely off the wall…
John le Carre and Olof Palme (etc)
I just read this piece by John le Carre (David Cornwell) about Olof Palme and much else:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/01/john-le-carre-breaking-heart-brexit
John le Carre is a very fine writer in his chosen field and, unlike most “spy writers”, has a wide appreciation of world politics and events. Most writers of “spy fiction” have at best a cartoon view of the world. Ian Fleming. Alastair Maclean. Frederick Forsyth. Others. I regret that I missed out on a lecture that Le Carre/Cornwell gave in or about 1981 at the G.B.-U.S.S.R. Association in Grosvenor Place, London.
The G.B.-U.S.S.R. Association, to which I belonged at the time, was an entity founded in 1958 and funded mainly by the Foreign Office (later, Foreign and Commonwealth Office). It had its funding radically cut in the 1990s and was split into parts after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. It even sold its library (a few volumes from which I was able to buy, though I came late to the party, having been overseas). It had by then moved from its fine building at the rear of Buckingham Palace to a soulless office tower in Vauxhall. The FCO finally cut off funds from its successor-entities in 2002.
Le Carre’s lecture was, I was told, one of the best talks ever given at the Association.
Having said the above, merely being a fine writer does not bestow infallibility. I doubt that there has ever been a better travel writer than Jan Morris:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Morris
yet Morris is in some respects also very silly indeed, judging purely from the political point of view (e.g. Morris espousing faux Welsh nationalism on the strength of having been born half-Welsh and having resided for a number of decades in Wales).
I have to say that I am disappointed to see that Le Carre/Cornwell, in that Guardian transcript, said that he was a Remainer and a European, as if the EU equates to Europe. That oft-seen conflation. No. I myself am a European, a white Northern European, but have always, on balance, opposed the EU. I am ethnically and culturally European. That is what matters.
One apparent fact given by Le Carre/Cornwell in the Guardian transcript did, as people now say, “surprise but not shock” me: it seems that Olof Palme was once an “intern” at Swedish Intelligence. I did not know that. His Wikipedia entry does not mention it (neither does it mention Palme’s quite long-running secret affair with the American actress Shirley MacLaine; Wikipedia is likewise not infallible):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Palme
Shirley MacLaine’s own Wikipedia entry also omits mention of the affair:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_MacLaine#Personal_life
though she herself has talked about it on several occasions:
https://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/shirley-maclaines-leading-loves-im-over-all-that-excerpt/4
What I know about Swedish intelligence and security would scarcely fill the back of a postcard, but I see that their security service has its own jaunty website:
https://www.sakerhetspolisen.se/en/swedish-security-service.html
though it seems that external intelligence-gathering is mainly handled by a separate organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Military_Intelligence_and_Security_Service
and see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontoret_f%C3%B6r_s%C3%A4rskild_inh%C3%A4mtning
Olof Palme always struck me as rather sinister. His assassination was never publicly solved, though two separate suspects were arrested, one eventually emigrating to the USA and the other being convicted of the assassination, but released on appeal two years later.
The famed “liberalism” of Sweden is not always very liberal. I recall the Westminster MP, Leo Abse [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Abse] writing about visiting the Swedish spy Stig Wennerstrom [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stig_Wennerstr%C3%B6m_(colonel)] in prison in Sweden and finding him chained to the wall of a subterranean dungeon (Abse was a penal reformer).
Admittedly, Swedish prisons are not usually like that. The original Swedish-language Girl with the Dragon Tattoo lost me at one point, when the investigative journalist seems to be in some kind of hostel or inexpensive hotel reception; it took me another viewing to understand that that was a Swedish prison!
Collapse of smug, virtue-signalling party...
Click on the tweet above to read the responses, many of them hilarious.
Ian Robert Millard 