What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

Don't imagine that Boris Johnson will be best pleased to be reading about the potential success of Emmanuel Marron's peace initiative in respect of the ongoing tensions between Russia and the Ukraine. Johnson, you will remember, missed an important telephone call with Putin, instead having to concentrate on saving his own political bacon and giving the French leader the opportunity to step in and take the initiative in getting the dispute sorted.

It wasn't actually all that difficult - the Minsk II agreement that the deal Macron is negotiating centers around has been signed and accepted by both parties since (I believe) the last crisis when Russia took control of the Crimea - all Macron had to do was to get the two countries lined up to implement it. But the point is that this could have been a UK success in terms of international diplomacy, but Johnson fluffed it. Because of his distraction over his own internal Party problems (and party with a small p, one could say), he wasn't there when it mattered, and we pay the cost in terms of lost international prestige, which our neighbour scoops up instead.

But at least Johnson can take consolation from the fact that for the time-being at least, his domestic problems seem to be receding. The papers have for the most part gone quiet on the Downing Street party scandal and are concentrating instead on the mini-reshuffle that the PM has carried out, in which members of the Government who have been seen as less than one hundred percent on-side over the scandal and the subsequent need to rally round the beleaguered PM. The most pertinent of these shifts has been that of Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has been moved from being Leader of the House to the position of Minister for trying to convince the people that brexit is not a complete fucking pig's ear (or pretty much anyway). Rees-Mogg was the one who recently said that perhaps the Covid regulations were a bit over enthusiastic, when defending the Downing Street parties - not an argument that the PM would have wanted to hear - and there was also something else that he said that was less than supportive of Johnson (I forget what exactly), that will have been noted. It has been observed that it is a measure of Johnson's weakness that all he has been able to do is move people sideways rather than sacking them altogether.

In respect of the position that Rees-Mogg has been moved to, it is a bit of a poisoned chalice. The ex Leader of the House - an arch brexiteer back in the day and leader of the highly influential ERG - has famously said that the benefits of brexit will take half a century to manifest fully, but he's been given the job of proving that they are with us already (as opposed to the stinking pile of ordure that it appears to be). That such a position as Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency exists at all is telling of itself. If the thing was any good its benefits would be visibly manifest and would do so of their own volition, without the need for such a position. But anyway, Rees-Mogg has been given this rotten chestnut to see if he can deliver a masterclass of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

As to the second half of the job - the Government efficiency bit - good luck with that Jacob, you're going to need it!

[peter]

One of the scientists commenting on Boris Johnson's decision to end all Covid restrictions in the UK one month earlier than planned said, "Well, it's possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons."

We all know why Johnson is making this decision now, at this point. He is desperately trying to shore up support on the right of his Party who broadly favour such a move, in the face of the partygate scandal which threatens to unseat him.

It has been announced in the papers today that the police are to send out formal statement questionnaire documents to 50 party attendees, Johnson most likely included. Once having received the returned documents they will be issuing fixed penalty fines where they are not satisfied with the reasons given for being at the events they are investigating. The PM's office have let it be known that even if he is slapped with such a fine, he will not be resigning, though he will declare that he has been subject to the punishment publicly.

To be honest, I'm not really interested in this. What interests me is that now, in the final days of this dark period, who is going to answer for what has been done to us? It is my belief that those responsible for the wrecking of our futures as individuals, our collective future as a nation, will walk away scott free and cushioned from the consequences of what they have done, while the cost of their disproportionate responses will be born in increasing proportion by those least able to afford them. Those who sat in the middle, who championed the restrictions, the discredited lockdowns and punitive measures exacted on people desperate to see loved ones in their final hours, those people will fight against having to go back to their offices and the return of life to 'normal' because the truth is they were happier in the restricted world anyway.

This is how it will be. The sham will continue because to admit the truth - that they have destroyed our futures, our economies, our societies over nothing, to no end, is simply too huge an admission to make, either to the public at large or even within their own thoughts, to themselves. This will be the elephant in the room that no-one will talk about as the costs accumulate, as the lost quality life hours multiply in logarithmic degree over and above anything that the virus could have caused, as we stagger and lurch towards the economic meltdown that you'd have to be dead from the neck up not to realise is coming. No wonder they need a war!

Already the scientific studies are coming out that show that the lockdown policy was singularly unsuccessful in saving lives - something like 0.02 percent at best according to the recently published study by the John-Hopkins University - while simultaneously devastating the very ability of the economies upon which they were levied to fund policies that would have actually made a difference, been truly effective. But rest assured, the Imperial College's and the Chris Whitey's of this world are never going to acknowledge this. They will take the plaudits, the laurels that will be heaped upon them with open arms, will bank the profits of a 'job well done' and dissapear off to enjoy the fruits of their misguided labours while we at the bottom pick up the tab.

Well shame on them! They may get away with it - they will - but they needn't think that there are not those of us out herewho will always know what they have done. They may think that it's "Tommy this, and Tommy that, and anything you please", but Tommy's not a total fool - you bet that Tommy see's!

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At the Brit awards a day or two ago, pop singer Adele won most of the awards in the newly 'gender neutral' categories that the organisers have come up with, presumably in order to convince us of their forward thinking approach. She, while giving the obligatory nod to "understanding why they have done it", proclaimed her pride in being a woman, her love of being a woman. Good on her.

What interested me however was that the BBC, having reported the results on their evening news bulletin, immediately followed up by saying that in the ceremony overall (now gender free as noted), three times as many awards had been given to women as to men. Now don't get me wrong, but doesn't the reporting of that fact fly exactly in the face of what the ceremony organizers are trying to achieve - a gender neutral view of such award giving events, where the sex of the recipients is neither here nor there? Trust the BBC to not see the failure of the logic in this. It's a shame there isn't an award for shooting yourself in the foot - they'd carry it off every year without fail.

[peter]

My God it's frightening!

I've just watched the press conference following the meeting between Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in which the discussion centered around the current standoff between the West and Russia over Russian intentions as per the Ukraine, and whether they will stage an invasion into that country.

That the meeting was not a success would be an understatement. Both Truss and Lavrov had the look of people who had been asked to smell something nasty, and the Russian compared it to a conversation in which the dumb attempted to impart information to the deaf. He had, he said, attempted to explain the Russian position to Truss, but she clearly could not, or would not hear what he had to say.

Truss for her part had the look of one who has drained the bitter cup, and repeated her boss's words pretty verbatim, that any incursion of Russian forces into the Ukraine would result in a bloody and bitter struggle from which none would emerge the winner. She was, she said, determined to pursue a diplomatic solution, but it would be dependent upon Russian understanding that any hostile action on its part could not be tolerated. She was not, she said, deaf to the comments of her counterpart.

This is all pretty standard stuff, and for all Boris Johnson's attempts to swing attention away from his domestic issues by bigging up the danger of the situation, the Truss meeting was really just one in a series of such that will be held in the next few days, buying time as it were for the behind the scenes diplomatic initiatives to come to fruition.

All things being equal, if the Russians carry out their ten day exercises with their Belorussian allies and then withdraw at least some of the troops and equipment they have sitting in close proximity to the Ukrainian border, then tensions should subside at least sufficiently for the diplomatic solution to emerge.

No - what's frightening to me is that in a situation as delicate as this, the best we can put forward in pursuit of a peaceful settlement are Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Now that really is scarry!

[peter]

So that's it. Now we know what we already knew to be the case (most of us at least) - that brexit is a frikkin' disaster - thanks to a report by the cross-party Commons public accounts committee that tells us that the only detectable consequences to date are increased costs, paperwork and border delays.

Johnson, desperate to find something good to say about it, has appointed Victorian toff and prominent Leave campaigner Jacob Rees-Mogg to a newly invented ministership, that of Minister for brexit opportunities and Government efficiency. In both cases it's about the only place where you could stick the buffoon with a chance of stoppering his gaff prone mouth up, since when it comes down to it, in neither place is there any.

Rees-Mogg's first idea (he's been told by the PM to come up with 1000 places where EU bureaucracy can be slashed and good things can be done as a result of leaving the union) is to ask for the advice of that august body of intellectual fire-power, the Sun readership - the very people that took his advice on the leaving or staying matter in the first place.

Johnson and Moggy have come up with an idea for releasing equity held in the City of London for investment in infrastructure projects, which seems on the face of it a common sense proposal, but with the downside that most of the regulations that will be swept away in order to make this possible were in place with the specific purpose of protecting people's investments and pension/insurance contributions. It'll all be fine of course until one or other of the major London investment companies screws it up and goes bust - and then the reason for all those pesky rules and regulations will suddenly become apparent.

But anyway, back to the Commons public accounts committee report; yes you fucked up, sold the country a pup, swept to power on a raft of lies and misdirections, and now the truth is out there for all to see (as if it ever wasn't).

Nice one Jacob. Nice one Boris. But don't worry - neither of you will carry the cost of your actions...... it'll be the rest of us that will suffer while your class rides it out and wrings whatever dregs of wealth are left in our dishcloth of a country out.


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This morning's papers all feature pictures of a deflated looking Dick on their front pages, she of the metropolitan police force who has been forced to resign (hours after saying she wouldn't) by the slimy mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

The wrinkled and chastened Dick, you will remember, was the one who saw fit not to investigate the Downing Street parties for months (while the evidence of their happening was coming out), but as soon as the in house Sue Gray report that could have finished Johnson off was due to be released, suddenly changed her mind and decided to do so, meaning the report could not be released.

Undoubtedly Khan will have had this in mind when he put the screws on the met commissioner, but let's face it, she hardly needed this piece of chicanery to justify her having to go. She has been involved in just about every fouled up decision taken, every cover-up, every failure of the force to root out the endemic culture of racism, sexism, corruption that pervades its every aspect, from start to finish. Khan, in pointing this out, has spoken no more than the truth, even if his reasons for doing so are less than straightforward on the matter.

But what will it mean in respect of the police investigation into the Downing Street parties? By all accounts Dick's departure has come out of the blue for the home secretary, and it will be the kind of surprise that they don't like. The timing is bad to say the least, but one assumes that the investigation will go ahead as planned (who knows - perhaps Dick knew it was going to be a whitewash and jumped ship before she was in the firing line to soak up the press fury that she knows will result). If on the other hand, the investigation does its job and applies the law evenly to those at the top, just as it has so liberally to those at the bottom - then in that case all hell is going to break loose. Ministers could be falling like ten-pins.

Dick's departure is just another little twist in the ongoing soap opera of partygate, and we'll just have to wait to see what it's consequences will be.

[Avatar]

You had some fun with that one huh? I feel you could have fitted a few more in though.

--A

[peter]

I had a few in mind Av..... shriveled Dick shrinking under public scrutiny and the like..... but decided that enough was enough.

I'm thinking that they will keep her in situ long enough to execute the whitewash and then allow her to run for the hills shortly thereafter. Johnson is going to get away with this, no question. There'll be tantrums in the media, but he doesn't give a crap about that. And all this Russian invasion stuff is a nice dead-cat distraction...... unless there really are those stupid enough (on both sides) that are prepared to see this dangerous game descend into actual conflict (for whatever reason, economic or whatever).


-----------------------------Pipeline to Power------------------

I've been thinking recently about the 'conduit' that runs so effectively from our elite public schools, via the Oxbridge university system, to the corridors of power in Westminster. This pipeline to power has been in situ for decades - centuries even - and though it gets the odd rattle around, is as effective today as it always was. It manages, year on year to churn out the kind of entitled individuals like the ones that currently populate our front-benches - people who's intrinsic belief is that the rules don't apply to them (as evidenced so manifestly by the partygate scandal, and the very reason that it will never be allowed to be properly brought to light, lest the sheer scale of the contempt for the rules, for the likes of you and me, held at the top of our society bring the whole establishment down). It is a pervading ethos resultant of which we can never progress as a nation - a ball-and-chain that forever holds our country back, ensures that our polity, via the true wielders of power behind it, never moves forward out of the Victorian age, moves forward into a time where our best interest can be decided by the actual people who live it. If you want to see how things really are, the film White Mischief will give you an idea.

Sure, we hear all of the stuff about the liberal left getting their grips on our society, but in truth it's all bullshit. Behind the scenes, the same power structure persists - the same age-old money dominates the levers of power, allowing here and there the appearance of progress, but only of the most illusory kind and at the edges of its realm: a chameleon's coat of shifting political colours that always obeys the same old adage - it doesn't matter who you vote for, the Government always wins. Once in the Bullingdon, always in the Bullingdon.

Or as Mark Twain so succinctly put it - if voting was ever going to change anything, they wouldn't let you do it.

There is, and will only ever be one way to break this system of entrenched power and entitlement - a root and branch reform of our education system. The closing down of the public schools, the establishment of a truly egalitarian grammar school type system where academic merit alone allows access to our best universities, where irrespective of background, the best of our talent can be nurtured and fed into the positions where they can effect the real changes we need to carry us forward. Only this could ever stand a chance of breaking the stranglehold that the established powers currently hold over our nation. Until the left is prepared to grasp this nettle, to make the changes at the very beginning of this insidious chain of power, nothing will ever change. We would all benefit from this in the long run, rich and poor alike, but I'm not holding my breath on it ever happening.

[peter]

From what our media is putting out at the moment it would seem that the West is adamant it is going to talk itself into a new war with Russia, come whatever the consequences might be.

Today's Telegraph says that Putin is "claiming" that we are arming Russia's enemies in the region (we are aren't we) and that Russia is planning to sage a false flag operation as early as Wednesday so that it can blame the outbreak of hostilities on Ukrainian/Western forces and thereby get his pretext to invade the Ukraine.

Perhaps it's just that my trust in my/our Governments in the West has had such a battering over the last years - the brexit years followed by the Covid and Johnson era - wher truth and straight dealing from the powers that be has been so thin on the ground, that I simply cannot anymore take what they say without questioning it. We have been lied to, manipulated, fed propoganda and bullshit, to such a degree over the last three or four years that I simply do not anymore trust a single word they say. What, I continually ask myself is the actual play going on here?

Is (I think to myself) the whole thing some kind of Western conspiracy to whip up a frenzy of 'war fear' in us? To what end would such a thing be done - there is no Covid regulations to batter us into taking against our better judgement, in this case. What purpose would it serve? Perhaps our leaders have their reasons (each of them different) for wanting to whip up a panic. Certainly in the case of Johnson, he needs this distraction away from his domestic issues, which are serious enough to be existentially threatening to his administration. But that wouldn't explain why the rest of the Western world seems so well on board with the same game. I don't know - perhaps Biden has his own reasons for needing such a distraction?

Could it be that our collective economies are so fucked - and they are, make no mistake - that only a full scale war with Russia and China can reset the world compass (they think) in their favour? Neil Oliver made the analogy the other day of our money being like orange juice concentrate. We put it in a cup and top it up with water. Then, he said, pour it into a swimming pool and fill that up. This is what, since 2008 and hugely more so latterly, we have been doing with quantitive easing. The reality is that there is no money left - it's all water now, any value that it ever had is gone, diluted away to non-existence by the actions of our Governments. As the guy said, if you could create money just by printing it, Zimbabwe would be the richest country in the world. Perhaps our leaders know that the most almighty resetting of the Western economies in the light of this is an absolute certainty in the very near future - a resetting that takes us down to the level of say, Germany at the end of the second world war or the aforementioned Zimbabwe - and the only plan they can come up with to reignite our fortunes, to stop the collapse of the West altogether is to get our economies onto a war footing. And if a few million soldiers have to die in order to achieve this, to protect our position at the top of the tree, then so be it.

Or maybe it's because of the Covid fuck up (I somehow can't get myself to believe that Covid won't be in there somewhere, having had it stuffed down my throat and shoved up my arse continuously for the last two years). Maybe they need to get us out of the Covid-fear mode that their propoganda instilled into all of us, and this is the only way to do it. Spin us a different fear to act in the manner of those electric things they place on the chests of people who have had heart attacks - to bash us out of one fear and into another. What's the worst that can happen - they actually do precipitate a war with Russia (and China - don't think that they are going to miss the opportunity to put the West down once and for all) in which case the economies get the boost they need anyway (every cloud has a silver lining). Or maybe they are simply afraid that without something to take our collective minds off it, that we might start asking the questions about what they have actually done to our lives, our futures, our savings and freedoms, with their outrageously disproportionate response to the Covid threat. That they have fucked us all, long term, with what they have done; that the West is finished as a mover in the world, and now as a result, is the time of the East, of Africa, of India. Perhaps only something on the scale of the threat of world war will, they think, distract us away from asking these questions.

Because, let's face it, why the fuck would Russia invade the Ukraine? It could not hold the country without massive, massive cost both in terms of money and human life. It would bring down the wrath of the Western world (where all of Putin's money for when he eventually gets deposed, is salted away) and quite possibly precipitate a war from which Russia could only emerge a ruined and spent force (and that's the good scenario).

Certainly he wants to look strong in front of his own people, so he will play the macho man right up to the very edge in order to impress them: but invade the Ukraine? He'd be nuts. We have been soaking up the ex Soviet countries into NATO and the EU ever since the fall of the USSR, and given the Western proclivities toward sweeping up the Central European Plain and straight toward Moscow (we've done it what, five times in recent world history) he is justified in feeling nervous. We've been arming his enemies, stoking up resistance to Moscow in every country that borders Russia for the last decade, and the Ukraine is the only one left that is not in some way tied into the West in a way that threatens Russian influence in the world. And now we are encouraging them to join NATO to complete our ring of steel around Russia and we wonder why they are building up troops on their borders, staging exercises to demonstrate their preparedness to meet any aggression. Sure Putin is a devious character, absolutely capable of doing all kinds of bad shit - but we can get down and dirty too, and I bet we have our own file of questionable acts of which we would have to answer to in any celestial court considering the matter.

So given all of this, I simply cannot help but take all of the media coverage that is being forced on us (much of it repetition of the same story - Russia are set to invade, Russia are set to invade, Russia are set to invade - day after day) with a pinch of salt.

I haven't got the foggiest what is actually going on here (if you don't know that already from the post itself), but I'm absolutely sure it is not what we are being told, or that underlying the media onslaught, there are twists and manipulations going on from our own administrations, that serve concealed ends, ends very different from the pompous high-moralled tone that we are being presented with. Boris Johnson and Jo Biden, protectors of the little guys, servants of the freedom loving democracies........ Forgive me if I don't swallow that bullshit flavoured pill!

[I'm Murrin]

Russia is hoping the fear of an invasion will force the NATO countries to agree to some of what they want, and if not, they're hoping they can grab and hold the already separatist regions of Ukraine the same way they grabbed Crimea. I expect they're betting on no one wanting to get into a war with them, so they'll get to pull it off.

[peter]

Agreed, Putin is the centre of attention - just where he wants to be. And as one commentator said earlier this week, the only time that the West pays any attention at all to Russia is when they are being the bad boy of the class. Putin is playing to his domestic audience (just as all the other leaders are). He wants to demonstrate to his people that he's the strong man who gets results. He won't allow himself (and the West must be careful not to portray him as such) to be seen at home, to be the looser in this situation. He must come away being able to say to his people, "Look, I pushed them into a corner and they gave me concessions." If the West does not contrive (without conceding anything from the Ukraine) to allow him this, he could do something silly rather than loose face in front of his people.

This is what makes this situation dangerous: that the situation could spin out of control by virtue of each side playing to the home audience, and a scenario developing by accident that makes conflict inevitable.

[peter]

Saw a thing on YouTube the other day where Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries was being questioned by a select committee in the House of Commons about twitter posts of an abusive and threatening nature she had sent to radio presenter James O'Brien, and texts directed towards his employers saying that he was mentally unstable and should be sacked. In her defence she said that the posts she had made were in response to posts made by O'Brien himself, which had gone on for an extended period before she had returned fire as it were.

Be this as it may - and the chairman of the committee was less than convinced, making the point that he had seen no such posts from O'Brien's corner - I was disposed to thinking, is this what our political class and the commentariat around them have come to: exchanging vitriolic texts on twitter - being as beastly as they can to each other in less than 27 syllables or letters or something, like a couple of schoolyard children. The Star and Sun newspapers have been fixated for a number of weeks about the ongoing court case between the wives of two soccer players that has arisen over just such an online Twitter spat, and it is no surprise to me that our political classes are no better than these painted shop-dummies when it comes to displaying their inner childishness. What the fuck are they even doing on this designed for children social media forum, a place where you wouldn't find a reasoned, well thought out political argument in a month of cold Sundays, a place where ten points should be knocked off your IQ for even opening an account on it. Get the fuck off it Nadine and James! Get back into your offices and studios and do some work on sorting out the fucked up situation your kind has landed us in, instead of spending your time puce-faced trading insults with eachother about the size of your respective genitals or whatever.


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So much of the situation on the Russian Ukrainian border is being spun by our politicians for the home audience, aided by a media that won't even touch a story unless it can be delivered while running around the room waving their arms and tearing their hair in panic (because this shit sells, while sober assessment is left on the shelves by our dumb-fuck society), that it is almost impossible to get thoughtful analysis on the subject untainted by underlying motive. Boris Johnson is for his part so very desperate that our media remain focused on the forthcoming......"War!" ( ) ....... rather than what he and his reprobate team have been up to, that he will (like Putin himself) play this right to the very edge, use the situation to make us believe that we need him now - we really need him now - to save us all from dying in a conflagration of conflict that will sweep Europe off the map.

And Liz Truss - current Foreign Secretary and (she hopes) Prime Minister in waiting when Johnson eventually gets thrown out on his ear - Liz Truss is preening around doing Margret Thatcher style photo ops, fur hats in red square, tank hats in tanks and the like, selling her image to the old school Tories who apparently suck up that fodder like schoolboys do grubby third-hand copies of Men-Only. What the fuck is wrong with these people. Can't they see that if they just get on and start doing their jobs properly, running the country as it should be (not perhaps as I should like it - but at least in a way that would satisfy their own voting core) then there wouldn't be any need for such histrionic diversions, such political manoeuvrings. Instead they insist on playing fast and loose with the positions of trust they occupy, always looking for the 'main chance' to either feather their nests or secure their positions on the greasy pole (or even advance up it, whatever the cost. It has truly reached a point where nothing that is presented for the public consumption can be taken at face value: where even the smallest announcement or comment, photo op or public appearance, must be analysed for its underlying motivation, for the 'nudge'it is trying to give. This is no way to be going on, really no way at all.


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Finally, a work tale: When I started working in the shop, my assistant manager, it soon became apparent, was a curmudgeonly type of bloke - a similar age to me actually - but who had an aging mother in her nineties who lived locally. He was not an easy man to like, argumentative in nature and rarely ever pleasant to be with, but this (to me) was always softened when I made him tea, by his mug, which read "To The Best Mum In The World". He must, I thought, have a soft spot somewhere inside him, to be having a mug like this for his brew.

This was until Sunday night when, clearing out some space in the back store for incoming items, I came across a box with fifty of the mugs - a product we had obviously had previously for sale in the shop and which had utterly failed to sell.

[peter]

Oh man, you had to see that to believe it!

I can only imagine the amount of teeth gnashing and horns of a dilemma stuff that must have gone on in the BBC News department before they led with their main story of the evening news; an exclusive interview with Novak Djokovic - the first he has given since being ejected from Australia for not being double vaccinated, prior to his intended competing in the Australian Open tennis tournament.

There they were, in possession of the biggest solo scoop that they had secured in heaven knows how long, and the man they are interviewing gives a completely different argument to the narrative that they have been spinning almost non-stop for the past eighteen months.

Asked by the interviewer why he hadn't had the Covid vaccination (he has not had a single dose, let alone the three that the rest of us have mostly had) Djokovic said that as an athlete he was very careful about what he ate, drank and took in the form of medicines as a matter of course. He had, he said, on careful consideration, decided that the Covid vaccination was not for him, but stressed that the decision was his alone and should not be seen as indicative of his in any sense being an 'anti-vaccer'.

The interviewer seemed to struggle with this idea, but asked the man if he would have one if not doing so meant he would not be able to play in the forthcoming French Open? "No", replied Djokovic.

"Wimbledon?" Again the answer was no.

"What about if not having one denies you the chance of being recognised as the single greatest tennis player of all time - will you have one then?"

"No."

End of interview.

Now having run this clearly difficult take on a subject that they have waxed strongly in favour of for so long, they simply had to try to follow up by undermining his position, and duly wheeled out one of their health correspondents to begin the job.

"Djokovic says having studied the data, he's decided against having the vaccine," said the commentator, "but of course there is ample data out there showing the efficacy of the vaccines. The manufacturing companies are unequivocal in saying that no safety protocols have been missed out, even given the speed with which the products have been developed."

This is of course untrue. In the timeframe for development, it simply wouldn't have been possible for any longer term side-effects to reveal themselves, and the very next interviewee, a scientist (from an interview done some weeks ago - I recognised the footage - but not declared as such) then, by accident actually made that very point. He said:-

"We know far more now about the effects of the vaccines than we did when they were first introduced and can be absolutely sure of their safety, without doubt."

So in effect he was saying that the vaccines were introduced for mass rollout before all of the potential adverse reactions to them were fully known.

Then to cap off the whole thing, they had Health Secretary Sajid Javid (also in a piece of undeclared stock footage) saying, "So Novak Djokovic thinks it's okay for him to break the rules when all of the people who pay to come to see him have to obey them. The people who make him the millions he earns?"

Well, that is exactly not what Djokovic said. He said it was a matter of personal choice - a personal choice that he was prepared to stand by even to the cost of being denied the chance to earn the title of the world's best tennis player, an aim that he must have trained his whole life with the dream of achieving. Would that Mr Javid had ever been prepared to make such a sacrifice (yes, I know he resigned as chancellor on a point of principle, but it didn't take long for him to slither back in did it. I doubt that Djokovic will have that luxury.)

So there you have it. The BBC ran their story, but had to double down on their narrative of 'our opinion right - everybody else's wrong' even if it meant manipulating and using old footage to make a cobbled up piece in order to get their scoop out. Nothing ever changes, but it was interesting to see them wriggle!

[peter]

False flag operations my arse!

Just why, I mean why, would Putin invade the Ukraine? To what end? Perhaps he wants to get bogged down in another Afghanistan - because this is exactly what it would be (only worse). No. It must be that he wants to get hauled over the coals in the United Nations, have crippling economic sanctions levelled on Russia that would deliver the death blow to economy, already screwed, that would finally finish it, and his premiership, off.

No, I have it: Russia must need more territory. It mustn't be content with already being the largest country in the world, covering one eighth of the world's inhabitable land-mass that it can barely hold together as it is.

I mean, c'mon...... What the frick is Russia going to do invading the Ukraine as Biden and Johnson keep telling us, over and over and over, that they are about to do.

And the 'false flag' operations that they say, "are beginning - they're beginning don't you know" - well these shelling incidences have been going on on a sporadic basis for months (if not years) across the Russian sepratist - Ukrainian front line, and what we see now, as in yesterday's hit on the kindergarten which left three people injured, are nothing different.

No. Our own leaders are, for their own reasons, trying to talk this up beyond its Russian intended purpose. Maybe it's because they have become so addicted to the use of fear as a means of population control that, in the wake of the fizzling out Covid pandemic they have to create another bogeyman in order to tighten the panic screws once more. Certainly in Johnson's case (as I've said before) he is desperate to keep attention away from his own failings as a leader which, before the Russian situation, dominated the UK headlines on a daily basis to the point of threatening to topple him as leader. Does Biden have equally pressing reasons to keep the American people similarly diverted? I don't know.

But how far are these people going to take this game. Putin is himself buying into it: he's happier than he has been for years, bang center stage on the world platform with all eyes on him. He's lapping up the domestic kudos the situation is bringing him; he's the strong man who is going to 'make Russia great again' and the Russian people love it. Like an East European Trump, he's soaking up the attention and will play this dangerous game right up to the edge, just as will Biden and Johnson. Trouble is that if they miscalculate, if they get it wrong and topple off the wire they are walking on, there is no safety net for the millions of people that could potentially die if things (as they have a habit of doing in wars) take a turn for themselves, in directions that are not foreseeable from our current vantage point.

How did we get from the heady days of the fall of the USSR to this debacle. We in the West have much to answer for in the way we have squandered the greatest opportunity for world advancement for a century in the days after the fall of communism. We promised the newly unshackled Russia at that point that we would do nothing to increase NATO/EU presence and control in the region surrounding Russia's borders - and then promptly broke that promise. We encroached our influence year by year into the old Warsaw Pact countries, pulling them inexorably in under our reach and in the Ukraine, worked tirelessly to turn this previously neutral country into one that sat firmly on our side of the divide. We, with covert encouragement (if not more) saw promoted the overthrow of the existing order in the so called 'maiden revolution' of 2014. And now when Russia has the temerity to complain about our actions, we accuse them of being the warmongers, and present ourselves as the promoters of freedom and democracy the world over. In truth it has been a case of, "you can join whose ever side you want - as long as it is ours."

We love to present ourselves as the good guys in world affairs but the truth is far more nuanced. As in any hegemony, the USA has made the running to the point where, since the end of WW2 the prosecution of wars has been illegal with serious international consequences if you do so. That is, unless you happen to be the USA itself at which point it becomes fine. Russia is certainly not in a position to do so without facing these severe penalties and it knows it: but it does require that the West take notice of it, acknowledge its presence on the world stage and give it some consideration, instead of the constant sidelining and cold shouldering that it has received to date. It has a right to be heard and the sooner we in the West learn this the easier things in the world will become.

[peter]

Most of the papers today are fixated on the battering dished out by Storm Eunice to the trees, houses and constructions across the UK yesterday.

But I have spotted a story, given just a small paragraph or two on the front of the Telegraph, that I think, should be plastered across every paper on the stands.

I'll quote it in full:

Hospitals to Keep Limit on Number of Visitors.

Patients face limits on visitors in every hospital trust in England, with restrictions set to continue even once the country moves to living with Covid. More than a quarter of NHS trusts have suspended routine hospital visits completely, and in some cases relatives are being prevented from seeing non-Covid patients for weeks at a time. It comes as Boris Johnson is set to announce next week that all Covid regulations, including self-isolation, will be abolished.

Now I don't know about you, but I find that absolutely horrifying. Of course hospitals should be a regulated environment - you can't have people wandering willy-nilly around them as if they were the local park - but the idea that trusts can slap bans on visitation rights for extended periods without having to obtain special emergency authorisation to do so is appalling.

Aside from the purely ethical considerations of this, visitation rights ensure a degree of oversight into what is going on with each individual patient on a personal level that would be impossible to achieve by any other means. Many and often it is the case that a family member picks up that "auntie has no water in her jug" or "father seems to be in some discomfort today", where the busy hospital workers have not picked up on these things. Besides this, it is absolutely the case that information gleaned by family members that the patient might be reticent about passing on to strangers, no matter how professional they might be, will be of critical importance in numbers of cases, when the diagnosticians are forming their conclusions.

But even if such practical considerations were not pertinent to the case, the ethical ones would suffice to justify our outrage at such a situation. People have the right to see their family members. In prisons, in schools, in shelters and in rehabilitation clinics. And especially - most especially - in hospitals. How often will it only be the regular visits of family members that keeps up the spirits of the patient such that they can survive their ordeal. And the visits are of critical importance to the wellbeing of the family as well. They are deprived of the company of a loved one, and feel the loss as keenly as if living with an amputated limb.

No. This situation is outrageous and must be nipped in the bud with all alacrity. These trusts are not demigods that can make such decisions with impunity and have them upheld with the stroke of a pen. They get above themselves. They have taken on the cloak of authoritarianism that has been lent them in the last two years and find it fits them too well! Time for these petty Hitlers to be put back in their box.

[Cord Hurn]

Aside from the purely ethical considerations of this, visitation rights ensure a degree of oversight into what is going on with each individual patient on a personal level that would be impossible to achieve by any other means. Many and often it is the case that a family member picks up that "auntie has no water in her jug" or "father seems to be in some discomfort today", where the busy hospital workers have not picked up on these things. Besides this, it is absolutely the case that information gleaned by family members that the patient might be reticent about passing on to strangers, no matter how professional they might be, will be of critical importance in numbers of cases, when the diagnosticians are forming their conclusions.

But even if such practical considerations were not pertinent to the case, the ethical ones would suffice to justify our outrage at such a situation. People have the right to see their family members. In prisons, in schools, in shelters and in rehabilitation clinics. And especially - most especially - in hospitals. How often will it only be the regular visits of family members that keeps up the spirits of the patient such that they can survive their ordeal. And the visits are of critical importance to the wellbeing of the family as well. They are deprived of the company of a loved one, and feel the loss as keenly as if living with an amputated limb.

Strongly agree. The suspending for weeks at a time right of family members to see their hospitalized loved ones is appalling, for all the reasons you gave! Well said, peter.

[peter]

There is a saying that the difference between a patriot and a nationalist is that a patriot loves their country while a nationalist hates every country other than their own.

It makes one want to be a patriot (I guess) and on this basis I started to consider whether I qualify.

Well, first define your country: it isn't as easy as you might think. What exactly is 'your country'? It has to be more than the soil, the trees and the physical land. Within the idea of country has to be borders - what is and what is not 'your country'. The people of a country are not separate from the country either - so we now have borders, land and people. Then you have to add the particular polity which pertains: the way your country 'feels', its ethos as a nation. Its relationship to you on a deep level, friendly, remote, the place where you actually 'live' (in the deeper meaning of the word) or merely exist. I guess if the latter is the case, you will feel less of a bond. And then there's the 'culture' in the broader sense. Less unified now that at earlier points of my life, it still exists however, and still pervades the 'feel' of our lives as we go about our business from day to day.

So on the basis of all of these things, I have to decide whether or not I love my country?

Well - it's complicated.

In terms of the terrain the answer is an unequivocal yes. I've traveled the world, seen virtually all the various kinds of landscape, some magnificently grand, some with a majestic aridity to them - but nothing, nothing matches with the countryside of England at its best - the rolling green hills, the pastures and meadows and woodlands. The citys with their spires and town centres

My relationship with the people is more complex. We are not an intelligent nation as a whole. The people are uncultured, for the most part pretty badly educated and prone to shallow thinking. Given the choice, I wouldn't let most of them anywhere near a ballot box until they had demonstrated at least enough nous about what they were doing to justify the privilege (which probably say's more about me than it does them). But there is a depth to them, something buried deep, that is strong. Is it in our island heritage? Our long history uninterrupted by invasion, our deep and connected roots to each other? Infuriating as I often find my countrymen, would I choose to put them aside and move elsewhere to be surrounded by people of a different type? Probably not.

And then there's the polity, and of course this is where it all starts to go wrong. We are, in the UK, led from day one of our lives to believe that the way we do things is the best. We think of ourselves as highly democratic, few people ever realising that democracy in the UK was never really embraced as it was in other nations; that our polity pays lip-service to it at best and that the long established power structures accepted it, but only in the form that suited their own particular system as it already stood, and thus was created the odd amalgam of emancipation and servility that is described as 'British exceptionalism'.

And no, I do not like it. I don't like the fast-track to power that exists between our top public schools (via the elitist Oxbridge system) to the corridors of power in Westminster. I do not like it that there exists a country within a country, called the City of London, where the true power of this nation resides in shadowy offices and closed membership clubs, where the deals and decisions that really effect our lives are made. Where unelected individuals tug on webs of influence that lead straight into the heart of Government, and that the tricks they pull affect the lives of millions of people the length and breadth of the country without their ever even being aware of it.

I don't like that our establishment, the product of hundreds of years of history, can utilize this ersatz democracy to ensure that, while appearing to tinker round the edges, to give a little here, a pinch there, it's power runs continuously, generation to generation - ensuring that the country can be run as almost a business for their exclusive benefit, that the people can be 'farmed' for wealth in the manner of a herd of Friesian cows. No, I don't like this one bit.

I don't like that we will see our country move back into levels of depravation that have not been experienced in a hundred years - that the spectres of crime and social ill that are the bastard children of poverty and ignorance will flourish again, and that the ruling elite and their establishment cronies will watch this, unaffected from the sidelines, and do nothing of substance to alleviate it, because at what point does the farmer suffer (I mean truly suffer) alongside his animals when times get tough?

But this is my country and yes, I suppose, when the chips are down, I do love it. It exasperates me, infuriates me and drives me to distraction - and yes, there are aspects of it that I would change. But like that rusty old pair of shears in the garden shed, we don't always sit easily side by side, we're cranky and often pulling in different directions - but woe betide any who would think to come between us!

[Avatar]

Your nationality being something that is decided (mostly) by random chance and without one having any say therein, I've never had much truck with either patriotism or nationalism.

I mean, I like my country, but that's largely in spite of many of the things about it, rather than because of them.

--A

[peter]

I was born in Cornwall, to parents one of whom was Scottish, the other English. Am I Cornish, Scottish, English? All of them? None of them? A mongrel (I like this idea best).

What of a man born in Bradford of Pakistani parents, both of which were born in Pakistan: is he English, or can he progress no further than being British? Is being English somehow reserved only for those who are white and of parentage that for generations have been born in England? Saying his Pakistani origins go back on both sides to individuals who left that country three or four generations ago - can he still not be English, or does he now qualify?

These are the rabbit holes you end up going down when you try to nail down these nebulous concepts of race and nationality, and thus I prefer to avoid them. But it does no good to deny the importance that people place on such things - witness the current problems in the Ukraine, where some twenty percent of the people consider themselves to be ethnically Russian (I think that this is the figure - it's a hell of a lot anyway).

And yes, I agree; once deciding you "love" your country, then what problems do you then open up for yourself in respect of how you see what the politicians will do with it? Take brexit; was there not an element of patriotism tied into the leave vote? Did those who voted to leave 'love their country' more than those who voted for what would only have been (as time passed) a diminishment of its independent status (if the history of our membership to the point at which we had the (second) referendum vote had been anything to go by).

As an aside, interestingly, on the brexit question, in the last day or two arch-leaver Sir Ian Duncan-Smith has said that if the Government fails to very quickly seize the opportunity that our leaving the EU presents, then it will be squandered for ever. Is this an attempt to shift blame from a man who had much to say about the said opportunities, and now realises that they ain't quite what he thought they were? Always useful to set up a scapegoat in case things don't go quite to plan.

Anyway, where was I - oh yes. The nationality thing. Yes. Perhaps Av has it: a scaling back of my love of country to a more (damning with faint praise) liking of it might be the order of the day. Food for thought there Peter (and given the speed with which said love was swept away anyway, it couldn't have been that deep in the first place could it? But I still do love the physical place itself - I defy any country in the world to usurp my love on that score.

--------0-------

Just a quick comment on the Johnson announced plans to scrap the self isolation rules and to go back to a situation of self-responsibility when it comes to 'living with Covid' (his much vaunted plan for distracting.......no sorry, for laying out our post-covid future). Of course I welcome anything that lifts the regulations and attempts to return us to something like a normal existence - but this of course is just a facsimile of what we had prior to the pandemic. Nothing is the same, nor will it ever be. The emergency - and supposedly temporary - powers that the Government took that allowed them such largesse when it came to interference in our lives, remain stubbornly in place. I, and millions like me, could never take the risk of booking anything but the most inexpensive and localised of foreign holiday - the two hundred quid sort of stuff in the Costa Blanca that I would not go on if you paid me. The adventure stuff to places that actually interest me are (for what I can see) forever closed to me: I simply couldn't afford the risk of being refused entry on testing, or not being able to secure insurance that covers every possibility of something changing, or going wrong.

People are different - half of them still walk around with grubby masks hanging from their lower face. Fear, instilled by Government behavioural nudge units, does not that easily dissapear: it is going to take more than Boris Johnson spouting "regain your confidence" over and over to achieve this.

No. We are far from being 'back to normal', so let's not insult each other by pretending that we are. At least one person in the House yesterday seemed to grasp the stupidity of what we have done to ourselves. Sir Graham Brady (he of the chairmanship of the 1922 committee) asked whether in the light of the numerous studies that are now showing the inefficacy of lockdowns as a means of controlling viral spread, could we be assured that these would be taken into account when considering how future variants or pandemic responses are planned for. I wouldn't bank on it Sir Graham - shutting the people in their houses at necessity now and again, is a damn useful thing to be able to do. Don't expect them to give up this little trick if they don't have to.

[peter]

Let's be clear.

Russia hasn't invaded the Ukraine. If it had we'd be seeing huge movements of soldiers and artillery crossing the Ukrainian border on our screens, with solid resistance being put up by the Ukrainian forces that are concentrated in the area.

Boris Johnson spoke the other day of one hundred and thirty thousand Russian troops amassed on the Ukrainian border (or is it one hundred and fifty thousand, or even one hundred and ninety thousand - all these figures have been used in various reports we are hearing from our media) with deployments in other regions prepared to make a "pincer like movement" to encircle Kiev at any time.

This is palpably not what we are seeing. What has happened is that Vladimir Putin has given a speech in which he has formally recognised the independence of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as autonomous states. He may or may not have moved some troops into these regions as 'peace-keeping' forces (reports on this differ depending on what paper you are reading), but irrespective of this, his announcement has been greeted by the West as an act of aggression, sufficient enough to justify the imposition of limited sanctions against the Russian regime (or more specifically, individuals within the regime who's assets may be targeted).

Nevertheless, this is being presented in the media as the start of the Russian invasion proper - a justification of all of the Western rhetoric in respect of Russian intentions in the past few weeks.

Certainly, Putin has put a cat amongst the pigeons: the act is clearly not conciliatory given the current climate, but it still stops short of the actual invasion of the Ukraine and allows him to look like the driver of events in the region in front of his home audience. It is problematic for the West in that we have already made it clear that we have no intentions of putting boots on the ground, even in the case of the full scale invasion that we have been predicting (which begs the question as to what purpose offering membership of the Ukraine to NATO would achieve anyway) and to be fair, Putin has a point.

In his version of events, the Ukraine is a country only by virtue of its creation in the communist era, so, if as they want, the Ukrainian leadership wants to move beyond that era, it has then to accept this and allow autonomy to the regions that are not historically theirs, and have majority people's of Russian ethnicity. This is in reality no more than we are happy to accord to the Protestant people's of Northern Ireland - we support them in their desire to be part of the UK, but are enraged when the same accreditation is suggested for the Russian people living in the (self proclaimed) aforementioned 'republics'.

This situation could and should have been avoided by the the Minsk 2 agreement, signed in 2015 as fighting raged in the Donbas region of the Ukraine, but because of western unhappiness at the demands for representation (which it was felt, gave pro-russian voices too much weighting), the agreement was never put into operation, so here we are.

It is possible that all of this will result in what no-one wants, open and full scale hostilities between Russia and the Ukraine (or even God forbid, NATO forces in the region), and if it does so I reserve the right to immediately take the side of the West, in a manner that my posts on the subject might not suggest that I would do. This is perfectly acceptable in the case of the outbreak of hostilities in which one's own country is one of the combatants - but up and until this point I reserve the equal right to say things as I see them, trying to take a historical perspective that is by far from being made clear in our media coverage.

[peter]

In the interests of fairness, I have to say I saw a YouTube posting yesterday that undermined my argument that Russia has no plans to invade the Ukraine (at a bigger level than the small scale troop support that we have seen to date).

How correct this information is, I can't say, but TLDR News, who produced the vid, are generally pretty good and precise with their assesment. They pointed out to the setting up of field hospitals and forward positioned helicopter refueling depots (neither of which has been seen up to this point), together with the evacuation of civilians from the disputed Donbas region, as indicative of Russian intentions to mount a larger incursion.

This makes sense, and Putin has certainly laid the groundwork for such an invasion, by his declaration that the Ukraine is not a historically existent entity (as per its claimed borders) and that the Donbas has a rightful claim to independent status which Russia recognizes.

Perhaps he does intend (in the face of a belief of western unreadiness to take any military steps to prevent this) to mount a more substantial incursion in order to drive out the Ukraine state forces from the region and (presumably) leave it in the hands of the Russian sepratist forces who are currently fighting a war of attrition against the said regular army.

But (and this tactic was always on the cards) this is as far as he would go. He would be clinically insane to attempt the full scale takeover of the whole country. The Russian people have little appetite for a war on this scale, it would be bloody and protracted in the nth degree, and would serve no purpose except to turn Russia into a pariah state on the world stage.

Like it or not, Russia must still function as part of the larger world, and although they have made adjustments to their economy in the last few years that to some extent cushion them from dependence on Western interaction (movement of currency away from dollars, increasing gold reserves, development of markets outside of the western sphere of influence etc) they are still in with the West to a degree that any sanctions laid against it have the power to bite deep indeed. Germany's halting of approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (temporarily) will be a blow to the Russian economy just as a starter, and while the small level of sanctions we in the UK have instigated will of themselves be little problem, we do have the capacity to make things much worse if we choose. (This of itself is problematic for Johnson however, because the conservative party is in so deep with Russian backers and donations, that he will ill want to disrupt this flow of cash into the coffers. Also the golden rule for the Tories - you do not fuck with the City of London - is one they would not happily see broken - even to bring Vladimir Putin to book. The power behind the Tories sits deeply ensconced in said City, and the repercussions of such an intervention would strike deep into the Tory heart.)

But this aside, there is no advantage to Russia going the whole hog in terms of Ukrainian invasion, but every advantage to Putin on the domestic front if he can show a restoration of Russian influence in the region of the Donbas. With limited and quickly reversed Western punishment (the public have short memories, and what happens once their attention is turned away is something else), he may well consider that a limited excursion into the Donbas is worth the risk.

In terms of the Western repercussions, we will huff and we will puff, but we won't blow the house down. Our response will be as Macbeth's poor player - full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.

[peter]

Yesterday afternoon, before I went off to work, I caught a brief glimpse of the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs making a statement to the UN General Assembly on the "situation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine".

I put those last words in inverted commas because they are a direct quote from the said Ministry webpage in which the text of Dmyitrio Kubela's statement is given in full. I'm not sure that in the current situation as it stood would have exactly constituted an occupation - but let that go; Ukraine has every reason to present its case in as stark a manner as it can, and preaching as Mr Kubela was, to an audience of the converted (and from his own nation's partisan position as it were) it is hardly surprising that he/they would choose such language.

But to return, the coverage of Mr Kubela's speech was given live as it happened on the BBC news channel, and his words came across with the gravitas and significance that they deserved. The United Nations is exactly the forum where such complaints occuring at a national level should be heard, and of course, if possible, be settled.

This being the case, would it not have been politic for the Russian side of this worsening situation to have been presented at the same General Assembly meeting, or is this not how the United Nations functions? Are decisions made after only the one side of any argument are presented; I don't remember the Iraqi government being called to speak before the ill-fated (for that nation at least) invasion was sanctioned (following the infamous presentation by General Sir Colin Powell in which he showed us the non-existent weapons of mass destruction) in 2003.

Is this how things are done then? Is the United Nations a true representative body of all of the nations of earth, in which all, large and small, may be equally and fairly heard - or is it merely a sounding board for decisions that have already been made, and made always in the way that American opinion would have them be made.

It looks now as if full-scale conflict in the Donbas is unavoidable. Putin will be a lucky man if he can contain it to this region alone, and even if he does it is likely to be a bloody and protracted affair. Reports from the region yesterday as well as from the Russian camps set up to receive fleeing civilians from the region were interesting to see. In the BBC coverage the people of the region seemed without exception pleased with the Russian intervention on (what they see as) their behalf (one woman said she had been praying for this since the inception of the Ukrainian state), while the response within Kiev itself was more muted. People in the non russian speaking capital are used to war in the Donbas - it's been going on for eight years - but were beginning to take on board that the current situation might be different. Some of the casual sanguinuity of the past days seemed to have deserted them and there was a distinctly nervous aspect to their replies.

I have not read up on what Putin has said this morning yet, but it would seem that he has decided to up the anti and increase Russian presence in the region in support of the sepratist troops. He has warned against interference in this (presumably to tell the Ukrainian Government to let Russia end the long term dispute in favour of the sepratist movement or face the consequences. The West will certainly not like this, but if he gets away with it, any consequences in terms of economic sanctions and whatever, will likely be more than offset against the gains he will make in his popularity ratings at home (until the sanctions begin to bite).

The West for all the blow-hard rhetoric at the United Nations will essentially do nothing. The 'war' will progress as Putin wants; Ukraine proper will put up token resistance and then retreat to shouting, and in ten years or less the sanctions will be lifted, because the West needs Russian gas etc as much as Russia needs the West. And Putin will have his victory. NATO influence in the region will have been pushed back, the Donbas will run with a Government compliant to Russian wishes, and a new status quo will be established, much as it was after the Russian take over of the Crimea.

Or something else altogether will happen, because I've been wrong so many times on this thread that it hurts. I must love the pain!



(Edit: One thing, if diplomacy has failed in this, then it has failed because we have neglected to offer Putin an 'off-ramp' (a way out that doesn't require him to loose face in respect of his home audience. If we have presented all of his options in terms of Western win equals Russian loose, then he would never capitulate and back down. Putin is a man who likes options to choose from, not one who has a decided course to stick with from the outset. We needed to present him with an outcome that he could take back to his people and say "Look - I won!" (while at the same time doing nothing to compromise Ukrainian sovereignty in the Donbas. If the situation now descends into war, then it is this failing on our part that will have led to it.)