What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

Why is Ben Wallace in today's Telegraph, saying that "Iran must be hit back twice as hard", as a response to its 'attack' on Israel?

Last time I looked Ben Wallace was no longer defence secretary. He quit the job in order to be 'closer to his family' (or whichever bollocks excuse he decided to trot out to conceal the fact that most likely he'd received a much richer offer from elsewhere). Why the fuck does he keep popping up to say that we have to pump up our arms production, or increase the size of our army, or bring back national conscription, or prepare for war? Wouldn't it be better if he'd said this stuff while he was still doing the fucking job!

Of course, he'd probably not be in a position to enjoy the gratitude of the military-industrial complex (that knows the meaning of the word) if he was still in situ, so that might be something to do with it.

And as for those shouting for us to proscribe the Iranian Revolutionary Guard - seemingly they have forgotten how we relied on Iranian forces to deal with Daesh in Syria and Iraq. Fairweather friends at best, it seems that we are. Now Iran are being painted as the single most devilish nation this side of Jupiter.

Can I make a small suggestion to our governing class? Don't you think it's time you stopped messing about in other countries affairs, concerning yourselves with what other countries are doing, when you have fucked things up so badly in this country? I think it behoves you to concentrate on sorting our own mess out, without sticking your Pinocchio noses into other people's affairs.

And how is it that we were able to assist in a near perfect air defence of Israel the other night, when five days before our media was telling us that military chiefs were saying that we couldn't even defend ourselves against attack? Get your stories straight guys! Either we're the best thing since sliced bread, or we couldn't punch our way out of a paper bag. Which is it? Small suggestion. Maybe some of those planes buzzing around Israel on Saturday night should be brought back to defend this country, if things are so bad here? Because Putin's still about to march across Europe and occupy London isn't he? Or have you forgotten that?



(As an aside, it seems that Ukraine's Vlodomir Zelensky is less than pleased with the US/UK role in the defensive shield thrown over Israel. He's said that if the same protection had been afforded to Ukraine as has to Israel, half the country would not lie in smoking ruins as we speak. Fair play to the man. He isn't wrong. )

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Tory MPs are marshalling themselves in preparation to rebel against the Sunak driven bill to phase out smoking in the UK over the next couple of decades. The minimum age for purchasing cigarettes will increase yearly from four years time, effectively meaning that today's fourteen year olds will never be able to legally purchase cigarettes or tobacco.

Aside from the nonsense of trying, as a shopkeeper, to enforce such a muddled program (imagine the day when a thirty-five year old cannot buy the products, but a thirty-six year old can - and this changes every year) it just won't achieve the effects that proponents say it will. There may be a brief respite for the health service as smoking related conditions fall away for a few years, but ultimately the same people will turn up in hospital with the same conditions, just a decade or two later. People won't stop dying just because they stop smoking, no matter how much Chief Medical Officer Chris Whittey (he of the turtle-eyed stare from back in the Covid days) would like us to believe they will.

It's an unusual thing for me to find myself in agreement with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and fifty Tory MPs, but miracles never cease. No wonder Sunak and his lot want to get rid of the State Pension; they can hardly afford it now, never mind with everyone reaching the age of 90 before they croak.

[peter]

Does it ever occur to you that we might not be the good guys?

I once worked very briefly, alongside a man who'd served in the army during second Gulf War, during which time he proudly told me, he'd spent his days "killing towel-heads."

This guy was a grunt, but it would be a mistake to believe that this kind of attitude was restricted to the lower ranks. Far from it. The dehumanisation of 'the enemy' is standard practice in the armed forces because if it wasn't, you'd never get men to kill each other. In fact, the viewing of the other side as mere flotsam probably comes from the higher ranks, fostered as a means of making the men under their command more ferocious in battle.

The attitude will be shared very much by the likes of Ben Wallace, an ex service man himself, and he will not be alone in being utterly convinced that the Iranians are this malevolent evil that he describes them as. And hawks such as him exist in all areas of our governments, on both sides of the Atlantic. To such people everyone is either a friend or an enemy, and the extension of power, its reach is really important.

I'm beginning to wonder if Israel does not view the idea of its being the dominant regional power, in a Middle East much reduced by extensive regional war, as a prospect greatly to be wished for. And perhaps our hawks in the West can see the possibilities as well.

After all, having the effective control of all of that oil, determining where it goes and where it doesn't, with Israel present in the middle of it ensuring a complicit presence there, on the spot at all times......

Doesn't sound bad, does it?

And especially given the situation with Russia and China and all of those pesky Southern countries lining up together; holding the reins of the Middle East oil doesn't seem such a bad idea does it?

And take Russia. Every time they mention it on the news or in the House, they might as well hiss like they used to for pantomime villains in the music hall days, such is the way they present it. But what do I know about Russia, about how it treats its people and stuff. I know that Vladimir Putin is a leader who's won an election - which is more than can be said for Rishi, or indeed the leaders of any of our devolved governments. As for the rest of it - the stuff they pump out on the television etc - how do I know what's true and what isn't? I've been listening to what I know is lies coming out of the same media for years - how should I now place trust in what I'm told about Russia, China, or anywhere else come to that?

But I know that there are thirty thousand plus dead people piled up in Gaza on the back of our support of Israel, and that a damn good number of them are children. This much does seem to be true. And I know a further 2 plus million are on the brink of famine for no other reason than as a collective punishment for a people because they had the temerity not to be happy about being held as effective prisoners for seventy years. And I k know that much of Gaza lies in ruins, unfit for human habitation for likely many years to come. All with our clear knowledge and support as it was perpetrated.

So I ask again, has it ever occurred to you that we might not be the good guys?

[Avatar]

I never assumed we were. But then again...your enemy is never evil in his own eyes.

Everybody thinks they're the good guys. And from somebodies perspective, nobody is.

--A

[Orlion]

In an ideal world, a looot of world leaders would be rotting in the Hague right now.

[peter]

The papers are all crowing over themselves this morning, sucking their own dicks because a judge has found in favour of some Cruella da Ville lookalike headmistress who has banned kids from having self organised prayer sessions in her school, where some two-thirds of the pupils are of the Muslim faith.

This headmistress has already made quite a name for herself by her strict disciplinary methods, which in fairness, do seem to produce good educational results. She's banned mobile phones, talking in corridors, gathering in groups bigger than four, and when some kids started organising prayer sessions as part of their obligatory five daily sessions, banned these as well.

Today her strict, arms folded visage is presented in semi-profile on the front of a number of papers, as a judge finds in her favour in a case trying to overturn her ban by deeming it unlawful, brought by one of the students.

Needless to say, our Muslim hating press are cock-a-hoop. "Victory for the bravest headteacher in England", says the Mail, while the Express has it as a "Victory for all school as prayer ritual ban is backed."

I may be wrong here but the lady looks to be of Indian origins to me, and with the surname Birbalsingh I'm thinking that it might be a possibility that she is a Hindu - not a faith traditionally very friendly to its Muslim counterpart. But of course it would be wrong to suggest that this had anything to do with her antipathy towards her pupils organising themselves into performing an activity so malignant and antisocial as saying their prayers. As it happens, and no doubt by coincidence, Suella Braverman is also in some way connected to this school - it's possibly in her constituency, or she's on the board of governors or something - and similarly this Indian ex Home Secretary's hatred of the boat people has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that she is Hindu (or was brought up in a family with Hindu roots) and they are mainly Muslim.

In a piece of comic commentary that is almost surreal in the level of knuckle-headedness it reveals (given the situation it refers to) our 'Minister for Common Sense' (I kid you not) tweeted "Hallelujah - Praise the Lord.......From time to time we all struggle to understand the decisions made in our courts. Thankfully this one is a victory for common sense."

I mean...wtf?

I don't believe she can be so stupid as to have missed the inappropriate nature of celebrating that members of one faith had been prevented from praising the Lord, by praising the name of that very same Lord in the name of another faith (presumably her own). She can't have, can she? In which case we can only assume her words are said in a sense of vindictive spite. A vicious little poke at the Muslim community, who are bound already to be feeling victimised by this outrageous decision on the part of the judge. And this from a Minister of the Crown, whose job it is to promote intercommunal harmony as part of her broader duties as an officer of the State.

Forgive me for saying, but this fucked up country that I'm living in has me wanting to weep at times - and at ever increasing frequency.

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I don't think there's one of us who wouldn't like to see smoking dissappear from the list of activities we pursue as adults - but by choice rather than by proscription.

But in the UK it looks as if we are going to take the latter route - and by a cack-handed piece of legislation that will see the age of legal purchase of cigarettes and tobacco rise year on year, such that no-one currently under the age of fourteen will ever be able to purchase such items legally.

Aside from the difficulties it poses for people on the front line of tobacco sales, the shop assistants etc who will be expected to enforce the law (under threat of penalty if they make a mistake in their calculations), it poses another situation.

Can it really be okay to have people - all adults in law - subject to different laws, purely on the basis of their age? That what one adult man can legally do, is forbidden to a man born one day later? This seems plain nonsense to me - and pretty dangerous nonsense as well. It's a foundation stone of the rule of law that it applies equally to all. Yes, certain age based considerations apply, for protective purposes in respect of some decisions that non-adults cannot be expected to make unsupervised - but this is of a different order. It applies an arbitrary division in law not based on such considerations, but purely as a technical aspect of policy implementation.

No doubt the Sunak administration has settled on the age of fourteen as being those below which, smoking will be forever forbidden (in terms of purchasing), because they deem that most kids below this age will not be smokers already, and will not be too concerned by the idea that they will never be able to buy cigarettes - and possibly they are right.

But in this country, much rests on precedent, and you mess with it at your peril. Thus I say that once this precedent of the law applying equally to all is broken, what other more questionable areas could it be applied to? The current situation of age related proscriptions have been carefully thought out and are by necessity very limited. I'm not comfortable with that changing too much, and therefore believe that if smoking is to be ended by law rather than by education and choice, then it should be by blanket ban introduced to apply to all at once, rather than this incremental approach that has been landed on. But the big word here is 'if'. And I'm not sure, as a man that believes in freedom of choice, that this 'if' is really a path that we should be going down.

[Avatar]

And we all know how well making the purchase of something illegal works in curbing it...

--A

[SoulBiter]

Cigarettes have been illegal to buy for anyone under a certain age for decades here in the US, along with alcohol and porn. I suspect it keeps some people from doing certain things but it certainly doesn't stop everyone. Of course the internet made porn readily available for anyone that knows how to type into a search box.

[Savor Dam]

Ah, but decades ago, the illegality of selling tobacco to minors was easily defeated by any enterprising youth with pocket change; just feed a few coins to one of the ubiquitous vending machines and pull the little handle.

[peter]

All true, but we are talking a complete ban here. Just staggered in its implementation. If you are fourteen today, as things stand you'd be able to but tobacco products in four years time on your 18th birthday. Under the new legislation by the time you reach 18, the minimum age of purchase will be 19. But when you get to 19 it will have moved to 20. And so on, such that you'll never reach the age where you can legally make the purchase. Meanwhile, your friend who was born a day before you, will be able to purchase cigarettes on his 18th birthday, as we all have been up to this point, and will continue to be able to do so for the rest of his ( maybe foreshortened) life.

This seems ridiculous to me, but hey - I'm just a dull witted prole.

I think we'll create a huge new income stream for organised crime, force millions of people into dealing with unsavoury types who,unbeknown to them will be feeding money back up to the nastiest people in our society, who will sit at the top of this pyramid of distribution and feed billions of pounds into their Cayman Island bank accounts.

And the police? Well, I suppose it'll give them another opportunity to concentrate on the 'real criminals' - that is the ordinary Joe in the street who suddenly finds himself on the wrong side of the law in his habbits by arbitrary decisions made way above his head. Never mind the guys who exist in a swill of minor crimes - stuff like human trafficking and sex exploitation, armed robbery and financial frauds involving billions. No. Easier to concentrate on illegal sales of tobacco and underage 40 year old smokers. Good prosecution rates to be had there with far less hassle and danger.

And freedom to make what choices you want? Forget that, because Nanny knows best. We've long given up on any silly ideas about freedom here. You just do what you're told and be thankful that you will be able to be at the side of your dying loved one - because there's thousands here that couldn't be, on the grounds of 'the greater good'.

This is being sold as Sunak's legacy the thing he'll be remembered for. But surely he's already got a legacy - the one he built when he destroyed this country on the back of giving away billions of pounds of treasury money during the Covid crisis? That's going to effect the future of this country for decades ahead, probably much longer than he'll be remembered for trying to stop the scourge of smoking (and from which more people will suffer early death than would from the latter anyway).

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You'd have to be optimistic almost to the point of willful blindness not to see that things in the Middle East are at a very parlous point.

Netenyahu is refusing all council towards restraint in Israel's response to the Sunday missile attack, saying that he is going to enact a reprisal - in what form he does not yet say - come hell or high water. Iran for its part has said that even the slightest attack on itself will be responded with by full force, the like of which will put the Sunday sortie into the shade.

Certainly an amount of bluster on both sides, but both Netanyahu and Khamenei are hide bound to the hawks sitting on their shoulders and under such circumstances the possibility of this thing escalating into truly epic proportions is frighteningly obvious.

It would be nieve to think that Iran used anything other than minimal force on its Sunday attack - old cheap drones costing a few thousand pounds, repulsed by Israel and its Western allies at an estimated cost running into the billions. Those sites it truly wanted to hit were hit - the military ones - with more sophisticated missiles, and for the rest, huge amounts of intelligence was gathered regarding Israeli air defences at minimal cost and without stirring Israel into an immediate war response. Domestic hawks were satisfied and full scale war was averted. No wonder they say that they achieved exactly what they wanted from the attack: so they did.

And despite all of the back slapping of Israel and the Americans (and UK) about how well the defence went, some of the missiles got through. Now scale up this attack to not 300 missiles, but tens of thousands, in waves, over three or four days, and multiply up the destruction. Such an attack is well within Iranian capabilities and no air defence system, no matter how good, is 100 percent effective. Suddenly the dick-sucking starts to look a bit premature.

And Iran is not alone. Its ties with Russia run deep. There is no way the Kremlin is going to sit back and watch Iran defeated by Israel and the West without coming to its aid. And at this point we start looking at the Chinese as well. Because they won't stand aside and watch Russia be annihilated.

So if Israel is as good as its word, and hits Iran, and Iran responds, then it's decision time for us. Do we cut Israel adrift in order to stop an essentially global war developing - or do we put our concerns behind us and pitch in? This will be the big question in Netenyahu's mind this morning - and it's one that our leaderships need to wrestle with as well. Alistair Heath in the Telegraph is clearly not optimistic. "The World is on the Brink of Nuclear War", reads the leader to his article.

Maybe. Maybe not. I'm fatalistic myself. If we're stupid enough to wipe ourselves off the future map of this world, then that's probably proof enough that we were never up to speed for the job. The job of being the 'brightest young things around' that is. Not so bright after all. But either way I'll suck it up. I've been fortunate enough to experience some of the best that life has to offer and nothing is ever going to change that. You can't take it away - it's written in the history book of the past and there it stays. As to the future, fuck it. It can look after itself.

[peter]

Just to start off on a bright note, reports are coming in of an Israeli strike on the Iranian city of Isfahan as I post. Reports are sketchy, but have come to the BBC website via its "partner station" CBS News. If the words of Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei are anything to go by, this could be the final tipping point, the push that sends the whole region into spiralling all-out war. Iran certainly doesn't/didn't want this, Biden didn't and possibly even Netenyahu didn't (though I'm much less sure about that) - but these ongoing tit for tat digs at each other were always ultimately going to lead to full scale war, and here, it looks, as though we might be.

Just have to wait and see.

Anyway - I have a distant family member who suffers, amongst other things, from ADHD. She's on medication for it, but recently has been unable to easily source her prescription, because of a general shortage in the supply her own and related type drugs.

A recent report quoted yesterday's Guardian says that in the last 12 months the number of drugs listed as on the NHS 'watch list' as being at risk of falling into supply issues has significantly increased, and sits now at over 100. This is around double that which pertained prior to our leaving the EU. It would be misleading to say that these shortages were down to Brexit alone, but indisputably this has had its effect. (This can be seen in a comparison with the greater size of our list compared to those of our EU neighbours.) Pharmacists and clinicians are warning that the situation is becoming increasingly severe to the point where lives are being put at risk (epilepsy drugs are also effected quite badly), and if my own family member's experience is anything to go by, I absolutely believe this.

As an aside, I'd point out that when this very situation was predicted during the referendum debate (on our leaving the EU, prior to the vote being taken), the possibility was scoffed at and labelled as 'project fear' by the Leave campaign. Suddenly they are all silent now, though I have no doubt that if questioned on the situation, would fall back on the old, "It's the EU's way of punishing us for leaving" excuse. But that one's been wheeled out so many times now that the tread is getting a bit thin. As I say, it ain't all Brexit, but that sure isn't helping.

But more to the point, we have a serious situation here that is being reported in the media, studied in reports and commented on by professionals in the field, and which I've seen in my personal circle of acquaintances - and the government's position is that it isn't happening. "Nothing to see here," they say. "No problems with drug supplies - none whatsoever!" This is a plain and simple lie, impossible to present as anything else, but the government has no problem in saying it. So far have we come from the point where our leaderships could be held to account for their words, that they can baldly lie in the face of incontrovertible facts to the opposite, with no fear of repercussions.

The Conservative governments who have led us to this place (on ground most ably prepared by Tony Blair's New Labour), have much to answer for. They have done their job 'not wisely, but too well'. Because the place they have put us in is so screwed up, so beyond the pale of sorting out by ordinary measures, that one can't think that the situation will never change, but for some tremendous upheaval. God pray I'm wrong, but I just don't see any way back to business as usual for this country, that doesn't involve the passage through some huge and terrible societal convulsion. The powers that be will not release the hold they have established on the national wealth, the degradation of the people will become ever more sorely felt by more and more people, to the point where even their mobile phones are televisions will no longer serve to distract them. And the hitherto quiescent anger of the people will slough off its dormancy and arise with terrible consequences for all.

And what then? Will the government turn the police and the army against its own people? Will they force a suppression, lock people into their homes once more, only to release them out into some further 'new normal' - a normal which includes a population held in servitude, dancing to the attendance of masters sitting in high castles way above their heads? Or will there be a French Revolution style of seizure of the state by the populace? A bloodletting born of hatred and anger against any and all perceived to have been in any way involved in their suffering? An outpouring of frenzied anger which has to be released before calmer heads can re-emerge, before reason can once again prevail?

I have no idea. Like you, to me the above scenarios seem like the stuff of black fantasy; nonsense ramblings which could no more come to pass than pigs might fly, or lead might turn into gold. Or perhaps that we might acquiesce to being held in our homes while our loved ones died alone in their hospital beds? No. I have no idea - and I hope I never do. But I've read a bit of history. I've read about what happens when a people become pushed down into pressurised states that make a bottle of champagne analogy seem somewhat out of kilter. And it's never good. We've got so used to our 'British Exceptionalism', the peculiar longevity of our political system, that we forget such things can happen. But you keep driving a people down, keep abusing their intelligence and telling them that black is white when they can see otherwise, and sooner or later something is going to give.

I have such fear that our politicians and elites, in their complacency and self serving blindness, have brought us to a place from which there is no going back, but only forward through the maelstrom, and if so, God help us all.

[peter]

Death of a beloved parent, marital breakdown, imminent homelessness, financial difficulties, a child addicted to drugs.

These are all the ups and downs of life and you should just get over them.

So says Doctor Sunak who has near a billion pounds in the bank and has never had to struggle for anything for a single day of his life.

In fact he's so sure of this that he's considering taking away the right of doctors to write sick-notes for people suffering from mental illness (sick-notes now actually called fit-notes, if you didn't know), and delegating the decision as to whether a person is too ill to work or not to a 'professional' who has more time (apparently) to decide if the individual is a work shy malingerer, a pallid valetudinarian, or is really in the throes of a debilitating episode, brought on by an overwhelming of their mental health, resulting from the intense pressure that modern day existence in Conservative Britain can exact from one.

So sure is he that all of the country's woes can be laid at the door of these work shy scroungers, these lily-livered wallflowers, that he considers that he knows better than them about how they should deal with their problems. Man up! Get out there with a "can-do" attitude and power through them! No longer should it be, according to our unqualified PM, a decision taken between doctor and patient, but instead it should be removed from the doctor's hands and placed into a, perhaps less gullible, individual: one with an eye to the benefits bill. This is the Sunak prescription for setting the country to rights. Whip all of the sick people, people laid low by the pandemic fall-out, the worry of meeting their daily commitments against a backdrop of falling income and rising prices, back to work.

Nice one Rishi. That'll go down well with the Telegraph readership won't it.

[peter]

I'll hand it to Israel, it was a damn fine trick to de-escalate the situation with Iran by committing an act of escalation.

Odd logic, but this de-escalatory escalation (oxymoron, the credit for which must go to James O'brien, who made this observation yesterday) has achieved the seemingly impossible, by allowing Israel to have responded to the Sunday attack while at the same time not provoking the ferocious response from Iran that the Supreme Leader had threatened. Iran in fact, were insouciant to the point of indifference to the attack - no doubt deliberately so, to avoid the needing to explain to the people why they are not responding (as the Leader had claimed they would) with full fury, to the "slightest response" by the Israelis. Truth is,as we know, they want a full scale war with Israel about as much as turkeys want Christmas - with exceptions within the hawkish elements of the polity of course.

But the people of Israel seem to be pretty unimpressed. They clearly wanted (if the interviews I saw on the news last night were anything to go by) a much more robust response. "You don't stop an enemy with limp little responses like this," complained one man, "You have to hit hard."

There is an element of truth in this to be certain, but from a wider perspective it has been a success. It has seemingly let the Iranians know that they too can reach their lands, inflict damage should they so desire, but hasn't rattled any cans to the point of demanding a further response.

But in some ways it signals a real problem for Israel, because they have by necessity always depended upon escalatory dominance. The knowledge their enemies had, that whatever they did in attack on Israel, Israel would always come back harder with a yet bigger response. It is this fear that up until yesterday has never been questioned. Never before has Israel not followed this policy. And it has served them well. In a completely hostile neighbourhood, surrounded by enemies, it has preserved their integrity as a nation, by being a policy of which any potential attacker will have to be cognisant. Israel must be regarded with fear, or it is nothing. And suddenly this is changed. For the first time, Israel has been hit and not responded with twice the force. In the interests of not instigating a full scale war (presumably for fear that the US might not back them up in the event), Netenyahu has broken the golden rule. And many in Israel feel that he might live to rue the day.

But aside from this, today things do look better. After this essentially tit for tat display exchange, like unto Papua New Guinean tribesmen shaking their spears and arses at each other across a jungle clearing in the dawn, the tribes seem to have returned to their respective villages without an actual fight. Joe Biden will not be feeling very pleased with Israel. He'd essentially told them not to respond and they'd not really done so, but had (like a naughty schoolboy facing an opponent across the playground)'flicked the V's' at the Iranians nevertheless, in defiance of 'teacher Biden's' instructions. This is beginning to make Biden look weak. And Netenyahu. And neither can afford this. Both are in precarious domestic circumstances politically, and can't afford to give their opponents ammunition to use against them.

But for the moment the immediate crisis seems to have abated. Which is not by any means say that it's over. Because while our attentions have been fixed on Iran, the situation in the West Bank and across the border with the Lebanon is worsening. Settler violence is spiralling as the emboldened illegal settlers (whose only justification for taking the Palestinian lands they occupy is that "God wills it") run amok, their anger fuelled by the killing of a 14 year old shepherd boy who's body was discovered after he went missing while out on the hills tending his flock. Bands of brigands burn Palestinian villages and drive the occupants away from their lands, aware that neither their government nor the IDF soldiers supposedly there to maintain order, will lift a finger to stop them.

And exchanges across the border with Lebanon get more ferocious by the day. Dug in with a degree of oderedness completely equal to that of Zelensky's Ukrainians facing the Russians, Iranian backed Hezbollah forces, well equipped and trained, prepare for war that they too, know is coming. This proxy war across the northern border of Israel is in all but name, a war with Iran that is already in progress. Briefly it looked as if it were about to turn hot between the countries proper. It didn't - but only a fool would think that this thing is over. As Churchill once said, it's not the end, or even the beginning of the end. Just possibly the end of the beginning.

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Just wanted to thank the BBC News editorial team, who on last night's 6pm bulletin, decided that the release of Taylor Swift's new album was more newsworthy than Rishi Sunak's cutting benefits to sufferers of anxiety and depression, removing the rights of doctors to provide them with sick-notes to exempt them from work for the duration of their illness. I couldn't agree more that the news is no place for reporting on the decisions of government, which are rar better left to those who actually carry out such things.

This is exactly the kind of editorial decision making we need in this country - focusing on the important matters such as celebrity gossip and pop music releases and leaving the important business of governance to those who understand it best.. Top work guys! Give that team a bonus!

[peter]

From today's Sunday Times.

Briton in court over 'benefiting Russia'

A Briton is in court charged with offences under the National Security Act with offences intended to benefit Russia. The person was arrested on April 10th and charged on Friday as a result of an investigation by Scotland Yard's counterterrorism comand. Due to the ongoing police investigation judge Daniel Stornberg put reporting restrictions in place to prevent identification of the individual and the full details of their crimes {sic}.

Leaving aside the grammatical construction of this last sentence, which would see a sixteen year old GCSE student fail their English exam with flying colours ( ), are we given to understand here, that a person can be hauled into court in this supposedly 'free country' while the investigation into their suspected misdemeanours is ongoing, and with neither their identity nor the crimes of which they are accused being laid before the public? What - on the grounds that this is terror related?

I'll grant you, I can see circumstances under which such restrictions might be necessary - perhaps the police are sufficiently sure of one or more crimes having been committed, to bring charges on these offences, but are still investigating other possible offences. Perhaps for security reasons, they might want this individual held and for the Russians not to be able to identify him/her, so they are forced to bring charges early in order to obtain a securing order.

But 'benefiting the Russians'? Is there even such a crime? "You stand before the court charged with benefiting the Russians." Forgive me - but doesn't this sound a bit...loose....., a bit vague, to you? I mean, as charges go, can't we expect them to be a bit more substantive, a bit tighter in their remit. This could, as it stands, cover sending a box of chocolates to the receptionist in the hotel you stayed in, putting a few roubles in a 'blind-box' in a charity shop. The Times recognise as much with the next sentence, which reads,

David Colthorne of the Crown Prosecution Service said, "They clearly face serious offences.

Surely, they 'clearly face being charged with serious offences," - does no-one bother with grammar any more; that's a top lawyer and the entire editorial team of the Sunday Times in one piffling article. But again - let that go, because it isn't the point. The point is, relating to the charges, serious or otherwise, we don't know, do we? We can't tell whether this person has been hacking into the strategic military planning department computers or rodgering a top general for secrets to pass to the Kremlin, or whether they've been gathering information on the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, civilian and military, who have been reportedly killed in this war, but details of which are apparently being hidden from the Ukrainian people and the rest of us as well. Or putting money in that blind-box.

So "clearly face serious offences" doesn't actually mean much here does it. Except that, in other words, "If we want to pick you up and hold you, we're going to do it. Yes we have habeus corpus and all of that, but see how easily we wriggle around it." Well, it's national security isn't it? Benefiting the Russians and all that? Up with that we will not put!

I don't know, but it seems that there was a time in this country when 'benefiting the Russians' and a judicial silencing order would not have cut it for a person to be held incommunicado, national security or otherwise. Maybe it's always been that way, but I just seem to remember that at one time it wasn't. That the whole purpose of the court, of having to present a person before it if they were to be held, was to safeguard the person. To make sure that we could see what our administration, our police, were up to. That no person could be held unless for above a very limited period of time, without being presented to the court, so that the court could verify that they were okay. And that this was why the court - the judiciary who administer the law - is separate from the police who execute it. So that charges like 'wearing a loud shirt in a built up area' are not validated. Or benefiting the Russians.

So if we're still a free country, and we still have some semblance of belief that it is the people who are the important thing in this country, then let's do a bit better than this shall we? Let's not have people held beyond the view of public scrutiny, and the very important safeguarding laws made a mockery of by make-believe charges put forward as sufficient cause for withholding freedoms to an individual, or information to the public.

I say again. Let's do better.

(Edit: This is one of those posts that I have doubts about - it happens more regularly than you might imagine. I absolutely concede that there are times that for security reasons, it is necessary for information to be withheld from the public, and maybe this is indeed one of those times. I suppose that we just have to accept the judge's decision on this - that is after all what he is there for, to judge. But I suppose I'm just a little bit uneasy about designating people or indeed whole countries as our 'enemies'.

I mean, is Russia really our enemy? On what grounds? Because our politicians say it is so? Is it because they are promoting/prosecuting their own interests over ours? I see no evidence that they actually want to invade us, damage us in furtherance of their own benefit. Surely they benefit from free and peaceful trade between our two nations as much as we do? I'd love to be able to believe that our politicians and elites have nothing but our, the people's interests at heart, when they make such calls, but I just can't bring myself to do so. I could certainly accept that it is in their, the politicians et al, particular interest to maintain their hegemonic grip (alongside the Americans, needless to say) on economic power in the world, but in our, the peoples? I'm sorry, but I think the time for that particular nieve belief is long passed. So no - I don't buy that the Russians are our enemies just on the say-so of our leaders, our media. It's going to take more than that. They have long ago convinced me that what is uppermost in most of their minds is their own interests, and I'm a long way away from believing that they coincide very much with mine. Call me a cynic if you like, but there it is. I don't trust them much more than I trust Putin - and that's about as far as I can throw an elephant by the tail. And so when I read stories like this I'm immediately suspicious. And if they don't like it, well, they only have themselves to blame. )

[peter]

So Congress has passed the decision to approve the 61 billion military aid package to Ukraine, with much back slapping and congratulations all round.

The Russian response came almost immediately in the acidic comment that it seemed like the US was determined that Ukraine should fight on until every Ukrainian soldier was dead, and it seems that there might be some truth in this.

Because there is no way that this conflict can be won without more boots on the ground on the Ukrainian side, and they simply don't have them. The money will, as all acknowledge, at best prop up the Ukrainian defence for a period of time whilst desperate moves are made to turn the worsening situation around.

Reports of small groups of soldiers surrendering, 100 to 200 at a time are out there (not on legacy media, but on other internet news platforms that have proven pretty reliable to date), lured over to the Russian lines by promises of being able to save themselves, survive the "meat grinder" as Russian UN representative Dmitry Polyanskiy has described it, and be transported to Russian internment camps where their wounded will be treated, and they can wait out the war before returning home to some kind of normal life. Given the hell they have been living through it would be a tempting offer for anyone at this stage of the war. The dire manpower shortages has caused Zelensky to recind the promise of a 36 month period of service followed by demob back into civilian life, and for troops who have been serving on the front line continuously for months this has been a bitter blow. Reports of serious discontent and even refusal to fight have been made, in particular of the far-right battalions less affiliated into the army proper, who take the view (extreme nationalist and fervent patriots that they are) that there is no milage in throwing their lives away in a war that is all but lost already.

Imagine yourself having been working for months without a day off, and then being told that the endpoint you had envisioned is being taken away from you. And under the stress of the front line with the constant spectre of death hanging over your shoulder. Should it be wondered at, that their resolve, unshakable up to this point and a credit to them, is finally breaking down. And especially in the face of an inevitable ending in negotiated settlement, once their embattled leadership and fairweather allies the Americans finally tire of the whole thing.

Even in the mainstream media the acknowledgement that this money is just a sticking plaster is being made: that all it does is to stave off immediate defeat and buy Zelensky time to get his act together. It will have stung to have heard the Ukrainian President asking in interview, why it was that Israel was being aided with planes and air support in its recent spat with Iran, while Ukraine was being left to soak it up without so much as a plane taking to the sky in its defence (and Israel not a Nato member and not fighting a Nato backed war). This will have sent shivers down spines in Washington, with the idea that Zelensky might actually start talking to the Russians without American say-so, and suddenly the support package is freed up. Coincidence? I doubt it. But the fact remains. Estimates suggest this money, the bulk of which remains in the USA going to US arms manufacturers (no such thing as a bad war there), will stave off defeat for around 12 to 18 months. By this time Zelensky will have had to mobilise whatever portion of his population remains suitable, and train them for active service.

But there are yet other unknowns. Because exactly how much military hardware is actually available, right here and now - sitting on the shelf waiting to go as it were - is very questionable. Some experts say that there simply isn't enough armaments available to supply Ukraine in the immediate present, and still leave the US capacity enough to defend itself. These missiles and air defence systems are not simply sitting around waiting to be picked up like boxes of cornflakes on a supermarket shelf. If this is true, then the effect of this slow release will certainly help Ukraine, but only to prolong the existing situation and not in any game changing way. And the manpower issue will always remain in back of it, threatening to pull the whole edifice down at any point.

And if it does happen - if the morale and willpower at the severely embattled front does suffer a serious and catastrophic collapse (which the Russian propoganda contacts directly to these soldiers will be trying to bring about, with their seemingly genuine suggestions that there is no reason for these guys to be fighting each other {nb - some of the Ukrainian front line troop companies are composed entirely of Russian speakers} - then if this collapse occurs, it could be game-over very quickly.

In which case it will be off to the negotiating table for a compromise to be agreed on that will be in essential, all but indistinguishable from the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015. And ten years of fighting and hundreds of thousands of shed lives will have all been for nothing.

[peter]

When was it that the United Kingdom became such a nasty place?

Last night, following a demonstration by Rishi Sunak of the in effect, almost unlimited power of a UK prime minister holding a decent parliamentary majority, Parliament finally passed the law allowing migrants to be shipped by the plane-load to Rwanda, from whence they will never be allowed to return.

Like a school headmaster lecturing recalcitrant pupils, he stood on a lectern yesterday and told them, like it or not they were going to remain in session last night - all night if necessary - until the bill proclaiming Rwanda as a safe destination was passed and ready to go onto the statute books.

The bill had been held up for months due to opposition from the Labour bench and the Lords, but now following Sunak's bout of foot-stamping the planes could possibly be in the air within 8 to 12 weeks. The detention centers for processing the deportees are ready said Sunak, the candidate selection process had come up with a list of names, the planes and airports were waiting and the deportation staff trained and ready. All that was needed was the parliamentary passage of the Rwanda Bill and the job was as good as done. Planes, he said, would take off on a rolling basis, shipping out the unwanted immigrants by the truck-load.

Sunak is desperate for something to stamp his authority as Conservative leader with, and this is ideal gimmick to use in order to do so. He's doing disastrously in the polls with only months go before the election - like 25 points behind disastrously - and he desperately needs something to raise the Conservative game (and his own game as leader) if they are not to face electoral oblivion in the months to come. Okay, for sure he isn't going to be around to be involved in it - he'll be long away in California by then - but that doesn't mean that he wants to go down in history as the Prime Minister who oversaw the breakup of the longest surviving political party in the world. And this could happen if the Tories loose as badly as predicted. I mean, that ain't the historical legacy any politician would want, choose how well-heeled they are as they walk away from the train wreck, and especially not one as vain as Sunak. So he's desperate for these planes to get off, hoping against hope that the small fillip it would give to the Tories come voting time would be just sufficient to prevent their defeat from morphing into their destruction.

And as for the unfortunates that will be selected to go on these planes - fuck 'em! They shouldn't have chosen to come here illegally (forget the fact that there was no legal route for them to come by, the Tories having closed them all down).

The beautiful 'designer houses' that Suella Braverman proudly showed off when she visited Rwanda to inspect preparations for the arrival of the deportees have all been sold to their new (Rwandan) owners - it's debatable whether they were ever actually meant to be used for the immigrants, or whether it was just a scamming exercise for the UK public to be fed with. Now we are told instead that 'Hope Hostel' lies ready and waiting, empty and echoing, for the first arrivals from the UK. Here's a brief description as given on the BBC News website.

"I got a tour of the eerily empty hostel in the capital Kigali, from the manager Ismael Bakina. Its bedrooms are laid out with care, furnished with details like prayer rugs and toiletries. Gardeners trim the hedges of the lushly green grounds that boast a football pitch and a basketball court, while cooks and cleaners busy themselves in a surreal performance of their duties. There is also a tent with rows of chairs ready to process the migrants applications for asylum in Rwanda (my italics). If they don't qualify they'll still be qualified for residency permits. Or they could try to go on to another country - but not back to Britain. "

Hope Hostel. It has a certain ring to it. Hope. That sounds good - and it will need to be. These poor sods have already fled some of the worst conditions on the face of the earth, made gruelling treks across whole continents, braved lethal crossings in dinghies to arrive in the UK, and immediately been slapped into detention and treated like scum. Now they are being shipped out to the tender care of the Rwandan government (which my predictive text for some reason thought that the next word I'd want would be genocide, following the name of that country) where no doubt Hope Hostel will prove to be a little haven of refuge for these unluckiest of our human brothers (and why do I assume that all of the deportees will be men - I don't know but I'll put a bet on it). It's just a shame that the word 'hostel' hasn't quite got the.....best, shall we say....connotations in our society. Hostels are places where bad things happen. Places where people with nothing to loose ply their trades. If you don't believe me, watch a few of the torture-porn franchise that goes under that name. They didn't choose it for no reason. Bad shit happens in hostels, clipped hedges notwithstanding.

But speak to Rwandan officials and it's all good in the hood. The new citizens of Rwanda will be able toget jobs, add positive skills to the economy, make new lives for themselves and bring new cultural influences and benefits to existing Rwandan society (makes you wonder why we don't want 'em), so it's all good.

But not all the Rwandans spoken to by the BBC agree. "Why are these people coming here?" one asked. "There's no work for people already here, let alone more coming in." Many of the people the BBC spoke to were not prepared to be identified, indicative of an underlying fear in the country, of going against the government line (or so said the writer).

Some were more outspoken again. "These people have fled suppression and poverty, war and dictatorships. What are they going to find different here?", one asked. Well, time will tell on this score but if the twelve dead people lying in graves following a protest made by earlier immigrants are anything to go by, this might be closer to the truth than we'd like. Freedom to complain in Rwanda - over minor stuff like human rights and not having enough food etc - is not something that the state seems overly keen on. They have a tendency to answer it with truncheons. And bullets. And if past events are to be considered, being in a minority group can be a dangerous place to be in Rwanda. They have sharp medicines for dealing with such problems when their dander is up.

But fuck it! What the fuck does Sunak care about any of that! As long as those planes take off, as long as he gets that on his CV before the next election, he couldn't give a toss. The immigrants can look after themselves once they're on Rwandan soil and if the country turns out not to be the safe haven that his bill actually legislates it to be (and have you ever heard anything more ridiculous than legislating a country to be safe) then hey - who cares anyway. Certainly not Sunak, or Braverman, or any of the other oh so caring individuals that have cooked up this tawdry scheme.

There was a time when we didn't do this kind of thing. A time when if you made it to these shores, then fair-play, well done and we'll give you a decent hearing. But not now. Now we have hate-filled Suella deVille and Rishi near billionaire Sunak, who will never, not in a million years of existence, ever require the safety net simple common humanity that in a time passed, would have been shown to these people.

So again I ask, when did we become such a nasty country, and can we please change back.

[peter]

The PM is to raise defence spending and put the arms industry on a war footing. He's also guaranteeing 3 billion in aid every year to Ukraine, "for as long as required."

Let's just look at some of his earlier decisions.

He championed Brexit. Brexit that investment banking company Goldman Sachs (who,incidentally, he used to work for) calculate has cost the UK five percent GDP. The Brexit he Sunak, still claims to have been a good idea (essentially rejecting the very analysis of the people whose analysis he used to rely on, when he was making investment decisions for the company).

He gave 600 billion pounds of the treasury money to the already richest people in the country during the pandemic, and ran our borrowing up to its highest ever level to boot. Saddling our economy with a ball and chain which will weigh us down for decades to come and ensure that money desperately needed to fund collapsing public services is instead paid out in interest servicing that debt. The national debt currently sits at 2.5 trillion pounds - the equivalent of about 38,000 pounds for each and every person in the country.

James O'brien said yesterday on his LBC radio show that it won't be until the Labour Party is in power that the right leaning press will lay out the true scale of the devastation that the Conservatives have wrought on this country; not until they have someone else (being of course Kier Stamer's Labour) to blame, no matter how presumptuously. International relations expert John Mearsheimer, when referring to the UK in an answer he gave on YouTube, said almost off-handedly, "Oh, Britain is a country in terrible condition," as though we were really out of the game altogether. He's right of course. We are. And no small thanks to Sunak.

The pundits on the left agree that we're in a shocking mess. The pundits on the right say the same. The academic community across the world agree, and so do the financial analysts of the market. But Sunak and his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt disagree. For them it's all looking just fine and dandy, and those sunlit uplands are just around the corner.

And these are the guys who are deciding that we should increase defence spending (not spending on stripped to the bone public services or helping impoverished children of which we have millions mark you, but defence spending) and put our arms industry onto a war footing.

"When all else fails, they take us to war," as American trend forecaster Gerald Celente said earlier in the week. I don't know about that, but I'm damn sure that investors in the armaments industry will be rubbing their hands together and reaching for their laptops this morning as I post. It's an ill wind, as they say, that blows nobody any good. No need to tell that to the soldiers on the front lines in Ukraine as they contemplate their futures, now guaranteed by the additional monies suddenly pouring in, to remain mired in the death-holes they currently occupy - they already know it.

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

International concern as mass graves containing the bodies of hundreds of victims are unearthed outside two hospitals in Gaza. Reports that some of the bodies were tied and gagged not confirmed as yet, but coming from UN observers, there's at least a possibility that they might be accurate.

Easy of course, for pro Israeli news outlets to sow doubts by saying that the reports are unconfirmed, but in fairness I think that this time it's probably true (that no verification is as yet, available). But hog-tied or otherwise, the unearthing of mass graves is never going to be a good sign. We know that these bodies had to be buried in difficult conditions, and with rapidity due to the heat and possibility for disease etc, and it's only to be expected that the soldiery now having left, the Palestinians would try to excavate and give proper respect to their fallen neighbours. So this kind of story was bound to come out. But the true horror of the Israeli response is highlighted by the 'finds', and lends weight that in no place other than the most bigoted and narrow of hate-filled minds, could the response to the October 7th attack be considered proportionate.

-----0-----

Listened to a radio presenter the other day, telling of how a particular footballer's wife had become convinced her husband was having an illicit fling with a glamour model, and had taken to following her around in an attempt to see if her fears were justified. A rare case one could say, said the presenter, of the WAG tailing the dog!

[peter]

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said that he's going to increase defence spending to 2.5 percent of GDP, and he's going to do it without resorting to borrowing.

He's going instead, he says, to cut 75,000 jobs from the civil service.

On the back of this bit of news, the BBC on their website have an article, "Jeremy Hunt defends civil service job cuts to increase defence spending.

Let's just unpick all this a bit.

Leaving aside whether this would be a good idea (remember, Hunt is unlikely to be around to actually carry this policy out if polls on the next general election result are anything to go by) the first thing to note is that he's not actually talking about defence (well - our defence) anyway. He's talking about increasing the money we give to Ukraine which he includes in the figures spent on defence. That way, he can comply with our commitments to Nato vis-a-vis our percentage of GDP spent on defence (2 percent minimum, if I have it right) and satisfy our promises to Ukraine at the same time.

Now I'd question whether this is money spent on defence in the common understanding of the word by most people, and I'd also question whether prolonging the war in Ukraine is actually in our defensive interests at all anyway. Seems to me that increasing the liklihood of a war with Russia, of eventual armageddon, could be seen as decreasing our security, rather than increasing it. I'd think a rapid change of tactics to negotiation rather than armed conflict would be better for all concerned and would be a better defensive strategy than throwing good money after bad in Ukraine.

And I don't buy that Russia is a threat to us (and not just because Putin says he isn't a threat to us). At what point does Putin have advantages from bringing about a full scale war with Nato, which advancement into a Nato member country would surely do. Never mind if he could even do it. The Russians have a far better understanding of the costs of large scale war than we do. They bore the overwhelming cost of the last one, and a good deal of the one before that. The idea that they're up for round 3 is a nonsense, and Hunt knows it.

But turning to this article this morning, I thought, "Let's just see what he has to say in justification of this latest policy." Remember, every civil service job lost is a person not working to sort out the backlog in passport applications, in driving licence applications, in the million and one roles that civil servants play in oiling the wheels of the state. Wheels that if you hadn't noticed, are currently screaming out in their dryness and inability to overcome the frictional burdens being placed upon them.

So in the article he began by saying that allowing Russia to succeed (succeed in what objective he didn't actually say, but let that go) would inevitably cost far more in the long run than cutting public services. He then outlined our defence commitments to Nato, the money we were spending on Ukraine, said that the increased spending would be a turning point in the war......

Yes, yes, but what about your justification for cutting civil service jobs to increase this (not) defence spending? I read on.

"I'm here (he was in Poland meeting with Donald Tusk and the Jean Stoltenburgh at the time of giving his interview to the BBC) to give a lead to the rest of Europe to step up and meet their defence commitments," he continued. "I'm here because we want to restore peace in Europe and make sure Putin does not win his evil war of aggression."

Yes, but what about the justification the title promised?

""If we stop Putin doing what he is doing, in the end it will cost all of us a lot less."

Yes -you said that already.

And so it went on. There was, needless to say, no justification other than this loose statement of reduced costs in the future if we stop Putin from succeeding - I still don't understand from succeeding in what, what will cost us much less in the future? There was some rambling stuff about efficiency increases in the civil service, but we all know this isn't happening. Not just because you strip out 70.000 jobs. This will act to reduce efficiency, not increase it. If public services are bowing under the burdens they have placed on them already (in no small part due to pandemic induced backlogs) then cutting staff is hardly going to help them improve the situation. It's bullshit and Hunt knows it.

But at what point did I ever expect it not to be? I've not been doing this for as long as I have, not to know by now that nothing will ever be what it purports to be. Not in BBC articles, not in politicians explanations, not on press front pages or in television interviews. We are so far down some strange surreal road now, that the Soviet politicians of old would be standing in the aisles and applauding. The arts of illusion and legerdermain have been honed to the point where the whole nation can be hoodwinked, day in and day out, with false stories and shameless misdirections.

Don't believe me? Then read on and be disabused.

-----0-----

Last weekend, the press went into a frenzy of calls for the Commisioner of the Met to resign, because a policeman had purportedly told a Jewish guy at the weekend's pro-Palestinian march in London, that he couldn't cross the road because he looked "too Jewish."

The story, with accompanying pictures, had been covered on the previous evenings news broadcasts (on Saturday night) and now the media were in a howling frenzy, along with the anti-antisemitism groups, for the Police Commisioner to resign over such blatantly antisemitic behaviour in his force.

The story ran for a day or two, and gradually some additional facts began to emerge.

I'd say, the event I'd watched on the news on the Saturday night had looked a trifle staged to me; I'd said to my wife that it looked like the guy was being deliberately provocative to me, attempting to provoke trouble with the peaceful pro-Palestinian marchers, in which previously I'd seen (in weeks gone by) a significant Jewish presence. (Quick shout out to these courageous individuals who risking being ostracised by their own community for speaking out against the treatment of the Palestinian people being meeted out in Israel-Palestine.)

He was presented in the reports as a normal guy, wanting to cross the street in which the protesters happened to be marching, apparently (he said) on his way home from prayers and looking to simply go his rightful way. A police officer is seen standing in front of him, and is heard to say something along the lines that he looked openly Jewish. The remark was made in passing, in the context of a wider suggestion, that the individual was deliberately trying to stoke up anger or violence, from the peaceful marchers whose path he was intent on crossing.

The fallout from the story was immediate and condemnatory of the officer and the Commisioner, whose resignation was widely called for. An example of rife and institutional antisemitism in the police and wider community, it was said. Politicians lined up to condemn the officers behaviour and even Rishi Sunak said he was gravely concerned by what he had witnessed. I, for my part, was far less than convinced that this guy was all he claimed to be. The whole thing had just felt a bit contrived, and the officer had seemed in my opinion, to just be trying to keep the peace.

Thus I was not overly suprised when the news came out that this guy was not quite just an ordinary passer by, on his way home from the synagogue.

It turns out - a fact that appeared in no reports on either Sky or BBC News on the Saturday night - that the guy was the Chief Executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a pressure group active in the UK that has some pretty controversial views itself which I choose not to elaborate on. Called Gideon Falter, the fellow had, contrary to the reports that he was just a regular guy on his way home from his Saturday devotions, in fact been tailing the protest and had previously tried to provoke a similar reaction on two or three different points along the march route. Unsuccessfully up until the point caught on film, he had tried to bring about the very situation that was now being splashed across the media as evidence of institutional antisemitism in our society. Somewhat embarrassingly, though not reported in either the television or media coverage the following day, not fifty feet from the spot where Falter was at last getting the right (ie filmable) response from an unsuspecting officer, there were a group of four Holocaust survivors (well - one actually, and three children thereof) actually protesting with the marchers and holding placards clearly stating their Jewishness.

And as if this is not enough, we are not finished yet.

Because if you happened to be a bit more eagle eyed than the average viewer, you might on the Saturday night coverage, have noticed some rather large looking fellows in the background behind Falter. Wearing dark sunglasses and suits and looking suspiciously like - well - doormen from a nightclub. Or even close protection officers from, say, an official government or organisation providing such services? Five of them in fact, discreetly placed at a distance, but occasionally slipping into camera shot. Difficult to know who this hired muscle were, what they were there for, but hey - it's a free world. But oddly, when the President of Israel Isaac Herzog visited the UK recently, it seems that one of the same guys might have been seen, by chance, in the people around him as well.

Oh well, coincidence I suppose, but it makes you wonder.

And just so that we understand fully where we are, a media monitoring site which looks at such reports and which the guys at Novara Media cited, said that of the 900 plus reports that were made pertaining to this purportedly antisemitic incident at the protest, only one mentioned the position that Falter holds within the Campaign Against Antisemitism organisation.

[peter]

Not a few of us will have experienced a surge of irritation, when following an interminable wait on the telephone while a machine tells you that "your call is appreciated" (it it, bollocks!), it turns out that the nearest person can get to speak to in your bank (branch, little over 2 miles from your front door) is in Mumbai - an individual who despite being perfectly lovely in all other areas no doubt, you don't feel has any real connection to your world in rural England or backwoods America.

Well, if a snippet in today's FT is to be believed, all that is about to change.

Because, such is the pace that AI is advancing at, they reckon by the end of this year, nearly the entire call-centre industry in India could be replaced by the tech.

So if you were irritated by the sound of that Indian or Latin American voice on the phone, just imagine how you're going to feel when the voice on the other end isn't even human? You can't even shout at it, because it is impervious to abuse. It reads your voice tone, your words, your very mind, as it speaks to you, and knows exactly which buttons to press to elicit any response from you it chooses. You might have called in - but it controlls the call.....and it's long decided what the outcome is going to be, before you've even got your initial question out into the open. It knows your details, your status, your life and your world, down to the colour of your underwear and what brand of toilet tissue you use. It's got you pegged, and can manipulate you to wherever it wants to by using subtle behavioural prompts that you don't even know exist.

Just thought I'd say.

In the same little section of the front page, there's also a leader to an inside article which tels of a pledge by the defence ministers of both Poland and Lithuania to repatriate "draft dodgers" from their countries - individuals of service age who have fled there to try to avoid being called up and sent to the meat grinder which is the Ukrainian front line. And who can blame them for being reluctant to head to the war. Under manned and under provisioned, their life expectancy in this harsh environment can be measured in weeks, not years, and no small number will wonder what exactly for? Ending up as cannon fodder on the back of Zelensky's drams of Ukrainian nationalism wouldn't be my idea of fun either.

This short note shows two things:stuff we've actually known about for a long time but don't always remember. This war is by no means as universally popular in Ukraine as is presented on our news screens. People have seen their country being reduced to rubble before their eyes and they wonder towards what end? So Zelensky and his mob can continue to rinse the country as opposed to Putin and his doing the same. (Nice of the American and UK tax payers to send a portion of our hard earned for the same cause, by the way. A goodly portion will finish up in a Cayman Island numbered account, tucked away for the rainy day that will, by my reckoning, come sooner rather than later in Zelensky's case - but that's okay....we've got loads to spare.) So it's hardly any wonder they send their youth away from the call up, before they loose them to a pointless war in which many have no belief.

Secondly, it shows how desperate the Zelensky government is for that manpower. It's been shedding soldiers at an unprecedented rate, and the recently released figures of forty thousand dead are widely believed to be a gross underplay of the real figures, which could run into the hundreds of thousands. It'll not be long before our own government starts looking at exactly who came across to the UK when we threw our doors open to Ukrainian war refugees (remember - open up your home and take in a fleeing Ukrainian and all that).

And these stories about Ukrainian soldiers surrendering to the Russians. Tales that there might be serious repercussions in the form of the midnight knock on the door of the families of such surrendering soldiers - a cause to give a man second thoughts before taking the night stroll across to the Russian lines with a white flag and a hope of surviving this thing until the end. Reports, just reports. You won't hear them on the BBC or CBS - you have to dig a bit deeper than that, but not too deep.

And now news that America has quietly been sending long range missiles into the country. Certainly Zelensky was desperate for such weaponry, in order to hit the Russians from a distance rather than sacrificing soldiery in close proximity attacks, but you'd have to be living in cloud cuckoo land to believe that it'll do anything other than prolong things as they are. And the longer it goes on, the more Ukraine and Russian soldiers die. But as the man said in Moscow, that doesn't seem to be a concern to us. As long as it's Ukrainian and Russian soldiers dying and not ours, the war can be fought - must be fought - to the absolute bitter end. It looked for a moment as though the Ukrainians were about to collapse, and suddenly there's money flowing in, agreements to repatriate draft dodgers, long range missiles. So just you keep fighting boys! And if another 100,000, 200,000 of you die, then sorry about that - but we're not going to talk about ending this until there's no other choice. In other words, when you're all dead and it looks like we'd have to start sending in soldiers.

And that's not going to happen.

[peter]

Good news that the King seems to be on the mend, but rather stifling in terms of keeping abreast of events going on in the world. It's largely sucked the oxygen out of any other coverage today, as pundits attempt to outdo each other with their hagiographies. Good from the point of view of securing your place on a future honours list, or a plum job at court, but pretty dull fodder for anyone who likes their news a bit less parochial.

We learn that the King and Queen will be visiting a cancer centre, that she has been "his rock", that the Japanese Emporer and his wife will still be coming for tea at the Palace (as they do) and that the King has been badgering the arse off his doctors to get back to 'work', having found his two months of enforced rest while receiving his treatment (still ongoing) pretty boring. Never mind old chap. I expect you'll be off to Balmoral for a few months before long - isn't that where you royals retreat to in the summer. Nice for you; for the imperial stags that fall into the sights of your guns, not so much.

We've not been hearing so much from the lass who's cancer is, I'd guess, the more significant one for a while. And that is a cause for concern. While I'm not hugely invested into the royal thing (but probably fall more into the pro than anti camp, nevertheless), I recognise that underneath it all we're talking about people here. People who suffer, and are afraid, and love and feel joy, just the same as the rest of us, and on this basis empathise with them wholly. Charles may be a curmudgeonly old stick, and the girl, well, more a pretty media distraction than anything else, but still, they're people deserving of compassion and care, the same as everybody else, and on this basis they have both my best wishes and prayers.

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Interesting to read that the London Stock Exchange is feeling the squeeze as more and more companies desert it for more sunnier climes in New York and Tokyo etc. Add that to the business that is flooding away from our shores to the continent (what was it - an electric car manufacturer this week, or some such) and the benefits of Brexit are, we can see, truly beginning to kick in. GDP down 5 percent and falling, new import regulations about to be implemented at the end of the month that will cause yet another round of food inflation, and foreign investment flat-linining.

In fact every company in the country is feeling the knock on effects of our crazy decision - the biggest act of self-harm perpetrated by any country in the history of....well, just history - excepting that of the luxury goods sector. For some reason companies specialising in high end luxury goods have been enjoying a boom that started during the pandemic, and has only now begun to level off. The FT reports that three of the biggest such companies, Hermes, LVMH and Kering have seen unrivalled growth in the period, which oddly, seems to track almost exactly over the period when the then Chancellor, a certain Rishi Sunak, was handing out 600 billion pounds of the Tresury's money (ie our money) to the already richest individuals in the country. It's an ill wind and all that.

And as to its levelling off - well, there's only so many high brand watches one can fit in the cupboard, so many bugatti veyron's one can park in the garage, isn't? And after this itch is scratched to the point of bleeding, what then? Only one thing left really - property. So expect to see property prices rising, rising, rising, as the rich look for assets to plough all of that wealth into. But as for your kids, they can forget it. They won't ever be on the earnings level where they can afford to pay both the rents to live in these properties (because there's a limit, even to the number of houses that the wealthy can live in) and save enough for the deposits to actually buy one of their own.

And as for you: you won't be helping them, because you'll just be trying to work out if you have enough money to buy a bag of carrots.

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This thing on the American campuses could get nasty.

One politician - the deputy speaker or someone, at the end of his visit to Colombia where he had been inspecting the peace camp, said that the National Guard should be called in. Last time that happened, four students died on the Kent State campus in a hail of bullets and truncheon blows. Netenyahu, clearly rattled by the spreading movement across the University establishment, compared the sit-in's to what had happened in 1930's Germany, trading once again on the Holocaust history to justify his actions Gaza.

The protests are, like the marches in London, being portrayed as hotbed's of antisemitism, where,from the pictures I saw on Novara Media, nothing could be further from the truth. The Jewish community was well represented in the sit-in pictured, and passover bread was being shared amongst the people, Muslim, Jew and Christian alike, in a communal sitting that one lecturer described as being truly a beautiful thing to see. Needless to say, these pictures don't fit the official narrative and so you won't get to see them.

So who do you believe? The right wing media? Netenyahu, Suella Braverman and GB News? Or the guys at Novara, the university lecturers and the pictures of Jewish people themselves, participating in a collective shout against an injustice which goes against everything that the genocide legislation drawn up in response to the Holocaust was intended combat?

There's one YouTube video that seems to me to help. It's put up by the guys at Double Down News, and is entitled A Holocaust Survivors Powerful Message to the Gaza Protesters. In it, an old Jewish guy who has been attending the London protests since day one, sends a message to the students on the American campuses. Stay with it, he implores them. Don't be fooled by the claims of antisemitism and threats against Jews that are being conjured up as propoganda to defeat you. The guy went on to condemn the use of the Holocaust to justify the actions of the Zionist project in Israel, and the conflation of antisemitism with antizionism, which were he said, two completely different things. This was a clear message from a man who absolutely understands, that choose whatever has been done to the Jewish people over the course of their tragic history, it cannot be resolved by what is currently being done to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

[peter]

Like many really significant news stories, the following one has slipped in under the radar, making neither the front pages nor the television news bulletins and causing hardly a ripple.

But, if Professor Nikku Madhusudhan of Cambridge University is to be believed, he might be on the verge of being able to confirm the presence of life on a distant exoplanet.

The planet in question is 120 light years away, and what has excited the scientists working in his team is a combination of two things.

Firstly, the presence of CO2 and methane in the planetary atmosphere is indicative of the presence of water oceans on the planetary surface, and secondly, a compound called dimethyl sulphide (DMS),only ever produced by living organisms, has been detected.

Professor Madhusudhan, in interview on LBC radio, stressed that the results were "not robust" as yet, and subject to confirmation, but on the strength of them, the James Webb telescope had been turned towards the planet (named K2-18b after the sun, K2-18 which it was in orbit around) and the images/data obtained therefrom was beginning as he spoke.

Diffident and very professional in his presentation, the scientist was however clearly excited by his discovery, and confessed that he had had a number of sleepless nights on the back of it. He said that DMS on earth was present in our atmosphere chiefly due to production by marine microorganisms, and this would be the expected source of the compound on K2-18b, if its presence could be confirmed. Pressed on the liklihood of this being our first confirmation of the presence of life on another planet, he put the chances at 50-50. He acknowledged that this was a pretty high prediction, given the multiple false starts that science has seen previously in this area, but said that he felt it was justified. He didn't believe that there would be an "Eureka!" moment in the confirmation of his prediction, but that the evidence would come in slowly and build to a statistically significant positive result in the months ahead. Always he stressed the need for caution, but was himself clearly optimistic.

This is exactly the kind of confirmation of extraterrestrial life that I'd like to see, and I suppose that was always the most likely form in which it would come. How much safer than the 'first contact' scenario with a lifeform hugely in advance of ourselves it is! And it will have profound implications for our society if it is proven to be true. It's not intelligence, sentience, or anything like it - but it's life! Religiously minded people will have to come to terms with the idea that life on the Earth is not an exclusive creation. That God has tinkered around with it elsewhere in the universe. Like it or not, confirmation would be a demotion of our status as sitting below the angels, but above the rest of creation (if you could still believe that kind of foolishness). Maybe in short order, we'd have to accept that the liklihood of sentient beings of equal or greater consciousness than ourselves was virtually inescapable: that on the ladder of creation, we might in fact figure pretty low. If nothing else, it would prove that the initiation of life on earth was not a singular event, that it could occur elsewhere under the correct circumstances as well. And if twice, then infinitely. Surely?

Anyway, given what we're currently up to as a species, it seems to me that the discovery couldn't come a moment too soon. There is some comfort in the thought that if we are rushing headlong into disaster, oblivion, that a billion, billion, B Teams are limbering up in the changing rooms, waiting for their own chance to make the jump to sentience. A jump which some scientists feel that no life can ever get far beyond. Was it mathematician Paul Dirac who asked the million dollar question, if there is intelligent life in the universe, where is it? The depressing answer of some of his colleagues is that an undiscovered law exists, that says any life form reaching a certain level of technological advancement achieves the means to destroy itself long before it achieves the wisdom not to do so, and by an immutable law never broken, proceeds to do exactly that. If this confirmation of life elsewhere is found, then the idea of our being consigned to the dustbin of history as an also-ran is no longer so significant. We'd just be relegated to the level of a failed experiment, not more or less important than a thousand other failed experiments before us. Perhaps data of value is extracted ,even from the failures?

But either way, the news is cause for hope of a kind, and hope has been in rather short supply these past months and years.

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(Don't read on if you like the optimism of the above story, and want to continue your day in such fine emotional fettle.)

I said to my wife that I hoped any life discovered anywhere else in the universe was more intelligent than we are. She replied that as it was likely a single celled microorganism with no brain - it couldn't fail to be. I have to concur. The quality of our decision makers has been abysmal of late, and it was almost inevitable that they'd sooner or later manoeuvre themselves into a place from whence there is no reversal, no back-peddling, to take us away from the brink of widescale war.

I saw ex British diplomat Alastair Crooke talking on a podcast yesterday and he said a few things of interest.

Firstly he observed that the suggestion of the Iranian government, that the small and ineffectual 'response' to the 300 missiles it sent to Israel, might not have actually been the work of the Israeli state at all, might be more credible than one would suspect. He observed that the drones used (those four propellored things that you see in film-clips etc) would not have had sufficient range to have flown from Israel to Iran, and most likely had originated from just beyond the borders or even from within Iran itself.

He speculated that the USA had effectively told Israel that it would deal with the response to the 300 missile attack, and that they, Israel, were to do nothing. It did this in order to strictly limit the fallout from the response, which Iran had said previously that if it came, would be met with overwhelming force, and the fear that Israel would not exercise the restraint necessary to prevent the fall into all-out war. Crooke said that the CIA operate with mujahadeen soldiers trained in Albania, that it surreptitiously places near Iranian borders and indeed, within the country itself. (Iran is a country the size of Western Europe, with a population equal to that of the UK. It's to all intentions virtually uninhabited by our standards.) These units, he speculated, had carried out the very limited response, with fairly easily seen evidence that it had not come from Israel and plausible deniability in terms of American involvement.

If this is the case it was cleverly done by the Americans, but the costs to Israel could be extreme. The fear of Israel that it has relied upon to keep the wolves from its door is being eroded, said Crooke. They are looking at a newly organised Iran - an Iran that shifts the dominance of the Middle East away from the Saudi (ie Sunni) occupancy, and towards a Persian-Iranian one (Shia) not seen since the early twentieth century. Israel has cause to fear this, and will, he feared, do everything in its power to draw the USA into conflict with Iran, in order to neutralise this threat and re-establish its supremacy.

But the foolishness of our Western approach is not so much in the Middle East, says Crooke, as in our portrayal of the Russians. We have spent so much time demonising them to our own populations, that we are effectively closing all doors to negotiation. If they are as bad as the Nazis, if Putin truly is the rebirth of Adolf Hitler as is portrayed; if the Russian war machine is indeed poised to march into Poland and thence across Europe in conquest after conquest - then at what point are we ever going to settle this by negotiated peace? How would our leaderships explain it to their peoples? They are, says, Crooke, by their rhetoric, creating a situation where total war is an unavoidable certainty. He feared that we may already be beyond this point.

And alas, his pessimism is shared by international relations expert John Mearsheimer. His feelings were that the West had proven itself so unreliable a partner in any deals that it had completely lost the trust of the Russian administration. Going back to our broken promise that there would be no Nato eastward expansion, to the unkept agreements of the Minsk Accords, we had proven untrustworthy in our dealings and the Russians, he says, have had enough. Ukraine is effectively lost and the Russians, were they even to come to the negotiating table, would do so only under the understanding that they would continue to fight and would hold onto all territories that they had won up to that point. This is the win which our leaderships have said cannot be allowed to happen, and so again the stage is set for an almost inevitable head to head.

So all in all, things do not look good. We're going to have to be much better diplomats than we have proven to be to date, in order to de-escalate this one, to put it back into its box. Meanwhile, some stupid idiots on both sides of the Atlantic are still looking at the balance sheets, rubbing their hands together at the prospect of all those juicy profits. They really don't get that those balance sheets are about to be more useful as paper to wipe your arse on, than as indicators of your personal good fortune. Watch the series Fallout on the TV numb-nuts! This is where you are fucking headed!

For fucks sake. Someone get over to that K2-18b and bring some of those microorganisms back here. We need some level headed DMS based thinking here to replace the flatulent methane based stuff coming out of our leaderships!