They’re both Islington men with marriages and multiple children with smart lawyers.
Both needed a war to make their mark on the world.
Tony Blair has refused to go into the House of Lords – do you think Boris Kemal Johnson will do any different?
Boris will need tips from Tony on how to pay for his kids.
But the thing that I’m most interested in at the moment is the link between the current UK Rwanda arrangement for processing refugees and the Tony Blair Institute’s work in Rwanda.
It is inconceivable that Blair and his foundation didn’t see and guide this policy.
They have been in Rwanda for years. I first noticed around 2014 because there were reports about it all over the papers.
Paul Kagame, the Rwandan dictator was fêted in UK papers for turning the country round. Similarly to the way MBS of Saudi is credited with modernising the Middle East kingdom.
But the problem is that Kagame took power following a genocide.
No wonder Starmer and Mandelson are keeping so quiet about the Rwanda policy.
The UK parliament operates under a grand coalition to the point where it is a one party state.
People have given up on democracy and politicians and would prefer to be run by unelected officials.
If it were any different we would have had a revolution about it already.
It doesn’t look like we’re going to either.
We accept this system, not because it’s the best but because we can’t think, argue, and listen to each other enough to actually come up with a better one.
Even Arsenal football club faced a backlash when it took money from Kagame for a Visit Rwanda advert on all its players’s shirts.
But the amnesia kicks in quick in this country and now Visit Rwanda has an altogether different connotation.
According to the BBC in 2011 Kagame threatened to kill Rwandans in the UK.
Bill Gates funds the Tony Blair foundation so it is inconceivable the two of them haven’t had this refugee policy planned for several years.
Whilst this may appear to be a depressing diatribe – it is only by sharing and remembering these stories that we can learn and shine a light on what is being done IN OUR NAME.
Milken, Gates, Kagame, Blair at the Milken Institute
God Bless You All – Seasons Greetings whatever your denomination or orientation!
Investigation: A scandal worse than thalidomide. Six babies a month are still being born after exposure to sodium valproate, a drug known for decades to cause disabilities in babies. Women are still not receiving warnings: https://t.co/pqdd8EUNBi#compensationforvalproate
The tragic figure who appears in Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress goes by the name of Moll Hackabout.
Is life in any way comparable for female journalists looking to make a name for themselves on Fleet Street today?
We all have to compromise to get ahead.
Pippa Crerar is fêted as some sort of swashbuckling political journalist today, but how did she get to run the Mirror’s politics section and what compromises has she had to endure?
The two high profile roles she had before the Mirror were at the Guardian and the Evening Standard.
Which means she worked for Sarah Sands and Evgeny Lebedev and promoted the Conservative Party because that is how the Standard operates.
The fact that she then went to the Guardian while it relentlessly accused Jeremy Corbyn of antisemitism tells you all you need to know about her politics.
Then there is the matter of her pieces for Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign. She did everything she could to make him look good. This was for a campaign that simply couldn’t have been more racist.
Here she is with Boris Johnson. He looks quite happy. She doesn’t look displeased. But of course one shouldn’t jump to conclusions. While she doesn’t look like she’s Boris’s property, there is still something a little off-putting about this picture.
It’s not as bad as this one, but Boris’s clutch looks still quite familiar and Pippa is hardly looking uncomfortable.
Here they are at work again. Cosy.
The Americans put out a film about the cops infiltrating the unions in the 1950s.
I’ve never been able to work out what James II who was deposed in 1688 is doing in Trafalgar Square.
According to Wikipedia the statue was commissioned in the 1680s and has been outside the National Gallery since 1947.
Some notes taken during a tube journey last week. I’d been reading about the Russian / Crimean Cannons at a park in Northumberland.
I remember once seeing a bunch of Chelsea fans turn on each other because there were no opposition fans around to start on.
It appears the hooligans that run the British state have been happy to take Russian money in the form of donations and other contributions to the British economy such as buying Chelsea football club. But suddenly the mood has changed and the hooligans are turning on each other.
This type of cannibalism may be normal in the animal kingdom and the Conservative Party but it’s rather an unedifying sight for those of us who prefer to sit on the sidelines.
Incidentally Lord Lebedev no longer has the word Siberia on his House of Lords entry. Perhaps it’s been taken down because of the Russia affiliation. For those of you who don’t believe that he was ever called Lord of Siberia look at the screenshot below from late 2020.
Here is the original announcement:
We’re supposed to have local elections in London in two weeks and I would imagine the Evening Standard has hardly mentioned them at all. That is what happens when your city’s paper is run by a son of a KGB billionaire Russian Lord.
In London democracy means nothing at a local level.
The Ukrainian Puppet President Zelenskyy clearly wants nothing more than to bring down Putin. But do the protestors at Ukraine solidarity marches ever stop to consider that it is the Russians who stopped the Ukrainians from falling to the Ottoman empire?
That’s right, if it weren’t for the Russians the Ukrainians would all currently be observing Ramadan.
I once read that when writing a miser one should remember to stress his generosity – sadly the client journalists in the UK are going super easy on Boris and their Media Oligarch bosses while building support for proxy wars between the Russian and Ukrainian people.
The media cartel and its Whitehall and Westminster contingent are once again exporting death to benefit their careers.
The fact that they were complicit in keeping the UK closed so that people could not see their dying loved ones while they all held raucous private parties tells you everything you need to know.
Russian soldiers killed 600 British soldiers at the battle of Balaclava – this was because the British leaders had miscalculated and sent their troops into a valley where they were surrounded.
What a way to behave.
Sir Charles Napier, whose statue is in Trafalgar Square, oversaw the British campaign with the French and the Ottomans against Russia in Crimea.
I’ve always thought of Aldous Huxley as a good guy. But I now see that his glorification as a champion of acid, Hindu culture, writer of Brave New World and teacher of George Orwell have softened me up to his output in ways that have caused me to be less critical than I ought.
I’ve never reflected on how his championing of acid overlaps with the way the American and British secret services used drugs to infiltrate and undermine activist movements.
As Joseph Heller said, “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
I’ve been thumbing through books on Dada and Surrealism and popped by the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition at Tate Modern again yesterday.
The Week of Happiness 1934 was a good year for Max Ernst.
The exhibit below did nothing for me on first glance – till a friend informed me that Joseph Cornell went around New York collecting everyday objects and found ways to make people feel differently about them.
Which still didn’t get me going.
But then I saw the caption.
Giuditta Pasta, to whom it is dedicated, was a Jewish Italian opera singer who was a very close friend of Vincenzo Bellini who composed Norma and Sonnambula.
My close friend, the late Helena Shenel, often told me that she was a reincarnation of Giuditta Pasta.
Helena found out about this while engaging in automatic writing – a surrealist spiritual activity.
Helena was writing as Bellini and interpreted the letter s/he produced as being addressed to herself – Giuditta Pasta.
Of course this is not the sort of thing one can talk about in rational polite circles – but I believe it to be true.
Seeing Sarah Siddons on Wednesday at Dulwich Picture Gallery also tells me that something surreal is in the air.
The moon was incredibly full last night as I walked home. I am grateful for all that is occuring in the universe.
Before frequenting the exhibition I had no idea how political surrealist movements of the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s were.
I now see them as comments on power, science and spirituality as well as satirical expressions about what does and does not comply with social norms.
We noticed Nina Simone in the Ted Joans video taken at the Algiers Music festival from 1969. She’s not in these pictures but she was there.
Obviously I thought of Sun Ra and particularly Space is the Place.
Lemm Sissay was with the XR crew outside. He is obviously a great man – but we didn’t stick around for his poems. I can’t stand XR. But as I embrace hypocrisy in all its forms I really should learn to go easier on them.
Nice to see the Gunpowder Conference Centre just off Fleet Street High Holborn, in case you are wondering how Britain makes its cash.
I didn’t take this photo of John Wilkes – credit for that has to go to a nameless friend.
Another one of yours truly. One of us is reputed to have been the ugliest man in England. Wilkes changed the way Parliament did business. He was a big transparency campaigner and womaniser who eventually switched sides and put down rioters while working for the Bank of England. One has to pay the bills.
I once got grief for referring to Andrew Bailey, current Governor of the Bank of England, as the biggest criminal in London.
I stick by that, but wonder if he too will have something erected in his name.
For services to the oligarchy.
It was good to see the statues of Fox and Bedford in Bloomsbury and Russell Square.
I recently picked up some books about London statues and read about those two in particular. Fox liked to gamble so on hearing he was to be married his father reputedly said that at least his son would go to bed once. Lucky girl.
When Bedford moaned about the farming subsidies a rival had been granted it was pointed out to him that nobody received nearly as much subsidy as himself. Given the immediate food shortages this country faces Bedford’s attitude is worth bearing in mind.
As the Duke of Westminster once said on being asked how he managed to get so wealthy in business, be sure one of your antecedents was on good terms with William the Conqueror.
But the fact that Police are also investigating Partygate and have fined James Slack, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak means we know that the ICO as well as the Police could have simply asked James Slack, and the Sun’s lawyers how they sourced the images.
I wouldn’t want to deter anyone from sharing this kind of information in the future, but it’s important for the public to know if the Sun paid for this information and how they got it.
Rupert Murdoch’s organisations have a lot of influence in the UK and obviously it would not be a good idea for anyone to argue with them.
But it’s important not to give everyone the impression that they are simply above the law.
That is what happened with Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, and Rishi Sunak and look where it’s got us.
James Slack’s cooling off period from leaving his post as a Government spin doctor had just ended on the day the Hancock “scoop” was published so it is obvious that he knows a lot about where the video footage was sourced.
Hancock had been Slack’s government colleague and they both worked together on imposing the lockdown regime and propaganda on the rest of us.
The Sun received a lot of money from the Government for platforming its Covid propaganda – the conflicts of interest once again are enormous.
How can we possibly learn anything as a society about how to avoid these kinds of problems in the future if the press, government, police and regulators conspire to selectively leak confidential information whenever it’s convenient and then when they don’t want to deal with the consequences simply cover it up?
I am not complaining about the hypocrisy and the corruption. I am a British citizen and I am happy to remain one. Hypocrisy and corruption are a key part of human nature. I don’t call for them to suddenly no longer exist. But neither should we be celebrating or rewarding corruption at every possible opportunity. Sadly we still do.
Corruption causes a lot of human suffering on the part of the the people who are lied to, maligned and stolen from, but also for the perpetrators who find themselves having to tell bigger lies and dig deeper holes.
We could see that with Matt Hancock, Cressida Dick and the heads of all the Government departments and regulatory bodies. They can’t tell the truth and their priority is covering it up. Of course they prefer to go after their rivals than protect the public from their friends.
None of this is shocking any more. The sheer number of cases and the lack of imagination in how they are covered up is overwhelming. Our prospects for remaining sane in the face of all this deception are approaching zero.
To steal from Ghandi, also a hypocritical & racist politician, what does it mean to be sane in an insane world?
The lies, the double standards, the false equivalences don’t suddenly disappear. They are the foundation of our society. But the daily gaslighting is no reason to give up. The machine, primarily purveyed through the media & other organizations is just a feeling. We can think differently. We can resist. I know that is not helpful or easy when you’re being subjected to the violence of austerity and coercive control. But essential nonetheless when considering how to resist the fascism of everyday existence.
Rwanda is being touted as the latest place refugees to the UK will be processed if they are caught crossing the Channel.
Meanwhile the Home Secretary apologises for not processing Ukrainian visas quickly enough.
Cue “western supremacist” columnists defending both policies – fully aware that it is one rule for one type of migrant and another for another.
And yet we remain quiet. On the sidelines. All of us. Expected to acquiesce. To back violence in Ukraine and everywhere else. To not think about Mode4, Aadhaar, or the way they will affect all of our lives.
We have movements like Extinction Rebellion who couldn’t care less about the war in Ukraine or the proposed processing of refugees in Rwanda. But who are happy to talk about Climate Refugees as they ask you to get arrested. Don’t get me wrong, I recognise we need to have conversations about waste and overconsumption. And definitely about human rights, supply chain transparency, and corporate responsibility. Maybe they’ll achieve some goals on these fronts – their way. Whatever that is.
Zanny Minton Beddoes is the editor of the Economist. A Bilderberg attender in other words. Believer in one world government. With the likes of her in charge. She has her loyalties. On eight minutes she refers to the global perception of double standards over the way “The West” invaded Iraq without UN backing and only accepted Syrian refugees begrudgingly. Despite acknowledging these facts she refuses to accept that they are valid reasons for opposing western supremacy. So there you have it. The friendly face of Western Supremacy. She is happy to say there is “some truth” to the criticism but that nonetheless we would be better off backing the west. “I’m an English classic liberal to my core” she says – nice way of saying dictatorial warmonger.
Things are not all bad in my world though. I’ve really enjoyed these two weeks I’ve been off work.
Yesterday a friend accompanied me to La Traviata at the Royal Opera House.
Our mate Russell has played the timpani there for years.
He gave us a quick tour !
I asked him if he had done soundtracks and he said that he’d done Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the big films with American film composer John Williams.
I can’t remember if this came onstage last night. I think it did. The set was something else.
For the WagnerRussell in his Tux
Earlier on we went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery where we bumped into Sarah Siddons by Joshua Reynolds. There were other Reynolds’s there, but nothing like Sarah, who I have a thing for. You might not see it but there are two figures hovering behind her in a sort of good cop bad cop manner. I’m thinking these are the spirits she channels when she acts. Was she the first person to make the idea of being a female actress respectable? I don’t know. She was certainly a big celeb.
La Traviata was unbelievable. I’ll be heading back to that building again. The Royal Opera House is fancy. We weren’t quite as dressed up as everyone else. Nor had we bought our tickets for £400 or marked them down as corporate hospitality. But they were within the bounds of affordability and something I would do again if I could. Hardly anything really happens. As in it’s not an action movie. But there are surprises and amazing things to look at. The story moves quite slowly. The scenes are quite long. But you go with it. And the music is sublime. Recommend, recommend, recommend.
I’ve been thinking of resurrecting the podcast. But it’s just me. No collaborators for now. I shouldn’t let that stop me. I’ll hide behind someone else’s writing at first. Such as Julian Huxley’s Tissue Culture King in which he first references the idea of the tin foil hat. And then bit by bit I’ll emerge with my own material. Bit nervous about what to do, but I must do something. It would be rude not to. Bye for now.
Today starts a couple of weeks off of work for Financial Eyes who has just completed a couple of months as a learner support assistant in the more autistic end of the education system.
The work is rewarding as Financial Eyes considers himself autistic and benefits from being in such an environment.
And the banter amongst the inmates is more profound and far sharper than what I saw in the City of London.
Either way, London Conversation is looking for contributors ( the team currently stands at one) & to output more blogs and recordings from now on.
Mining the Twitter Stream
When your leader makes Elmer Fudd look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and sound like Albert Einstein.
Politics is a dirty sport and Orban really has been on great terms with Modi, Trump, Johnson, Netanyahu, but he deserves his win as the Brussels and US offer is widely mistrusted by his electorate.
If Biden & Von Der Leyen were serious about winning power in Hungary they would learn from Orban how to more effectively bribe his people.
How else do you think Boris Johnson has been so successful in his permanent state of electioneering?
Instead they appear to allow their candidates to go in with the same old same old unphased by the fact that it permanently produces the same results.
Sir Keir Starmer takes advice from Lord Mandelson and therefore prefers hushing up abuse victims and pretending the problem will go away.
To be fair it works more than nine times out of ten – but not always.
They’re still victims of crime and as such should still have a case against all perpetrators and accomplices.
Will they be helped along by a mainstream and independent media whose agenda may be to only ever cover the matter quickly so as to effectively cover up and move on?
Good thread from French campaign group Attac highlighting the preferential treatment handed to French billionaire Bernard Arnault.
He owns media and luxury goods, avoids tax by registering everything in offshore tax havens and gets all the special treatment you’d expect of a billionaire.
Would be good if UK campaigners felt like highlighting what we know is happening over here.
Even if it just is for the benefit of UK social media.
The opening statement from Eduardo Galleano’s Open Veins of Latin America could certainly extend to Jaffna. All very nice for the Rajapaksas to have done deals with the Chinese to “end the war” et cetera but now that the bills have come in you have unhappy Tamils and Sinhalese suddenly all Sri Lankan and united against corruption.
Indian government looking profoundly uncomfortable with freedom of movement, freedom of speech, & freedom to practise Islam.
Q: What do you fear will happen next? @RanaAyyub: Uniform civil code; ‘azaan’ to be stopped in mosques; Friday prayers on a larger level (to be stopped); social sanctions against Muslim business at a level at which it is going to be normalised. https://t.co/xk0moVwBVQ
Is conversion therapy, like FGM, something that is not practised by 99% of Christians or Africans yet profoundly good at making the papers because it distracts from partygate, poverty, inflation?
In the time the government has dithered, eight countries have banned conversion therapy. @_BvdM looks at the numbers.
Wonder if the election was rigged in the ways most people would mean? ie that the vote was miscounted. Or do many anti-Orban critics perhaps unknowingly have their own organised crime globalist agenda in which precious few Hungarians have been allowed to prosper ?
Very sad to wake to news that Orban, the Putinist, homophobic, anti Semitic friend of Johnson, has managed to win his rigged election.
Joe Biden is telling the poorest Indians to help finance his son Hunter Biden’s old client Ukraine’s burgeoning debts. As a system of real time long term reparations it would rank alongside that Versailles agreement that Mr Wilson let everyone sign in 1919. Which John Maynard Keynes pointed out would lead to a new World War but then to a New World Order.
In London staying next to the most expensive apartment building in the world, where genocidal ex dictators drive their bulletproof cars into a private elevator and their mail goes through an X ray machine because many people want revenge! Can’t make an omelette…
If, as the final paragraph of the following Times article states, the direction of UK legislation on the marginal issue of gay conversion therapy is entirely dependant on the whims of an amoral PM, then what does that say about other issues that really matter such as whistleblower protection in the public & private workplace when calling out high risk, discriminatory, or criminal practice?
Downing Street itself now considers it normal to brief that double U turns on legislation can be caused by the Prime Minister’s “change of heart”.
What exactly are the occult forces at play whenever such a change of heart takes place?
Are we talking Carrie Johnson, Russian donors, the Garrick Club, Rupert Murdoch, the Mossad, the Vatican, Brussels, Saudi, China, Arcuri, CIA, “deep state”, Common Purpose, Illuminati, Skull & Bones, Bohemian Grove, Bill Gates, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Palantir, the World Economic Forum, Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, the City, Property lobby, the Masons, the Countryside Alliance, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, MI6, or Buckingham Palace?
These entities are themselves as conflicted as Kemal Johnson each riven with factions facing a multitude of directions.
Back to the serious issue of conversion therapy, it looks like the Government want to be able to retain the right to prevent children from changing their gender willy nilly.
Cue ambiguous trans flip floppery from transhumanist Kemal Johnson who just opened a speech to Tory donors ridiculing Starmer’s stance on trans issues.
The following four paragraphs are taken from the Huffington Post.
According to Politico, Speaking at London’s Park Plaza hotel, the prime minister began: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, or as Keir Starmer would put it, people who are assigned female or male at birth.”
This jibe at the leader of the opposition followed Starmer’s recent show of support for the trans community, as the Labour leader has repeatedly expressed his view that “trans women are women”.
A few hours later – at around 3am on Wednesday morning – Tory MP Jamie Wallis who went to the same dinner as the prime minister, shared a heartfelt post on Twitter explaining that he were trans “or to be more accurate, I want to be”.
In a subsequent post, Wallis explained that for the time being he will continue to use he/him pronouns, adding: “I remain the same person I was yesterday.”
Chris Eubank once said, in the vein of George Soros, “boxing is a dirty sport, and I am world champion.”
My old religious conservative jazz, maths, and boxing loving Israeli flatmate would often refer to Binyamin Netanyahu not as Bibi, as he is known in Israel, but as The Floyd Mayweather of Politics – for being somehow undefeated in 13 years.
I consider these points because of an article I just saw in the Times.
The piece focuses on apparent tensions between Chancellor Rishi Sunak and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
I liked this reply in the comments
The OBR was set up by then Chancellor George Osborne in 2010 to supposedly scrutinise and protect public finances.
Robert Chote headed up the OBR for many years.
The OBR was commonly referred to as the Treasury’s poodle for constantly signing off on the Chancellor’s spending plans thus approving the eugenics and genocide programmes perpetrated against the many of UK’s sick, working, and underemployed.
The effects of the privatisation of the NHS, cuts to the benefit system, mental health services, housing, the financing of local government, legal aid, the courts and the police have meant ending or destroying the lives of many many good people in this country.
Of course this kind of claim will be met with ridicule and labelled hysterical by the vast majority of those who have gained, are complicit, or who keep them there.
Either way, reports on the normalisation of revolving door nepotism and UK collusive corruption can be found in old blogposts on London Conversation which has been going on and off in this form for about six years now. Make of them what you will.
Some time ago we mentioned that Sir Robert, or Bob, Chote happens to be married to former leading civil servant Sharon White who moved from Government to head up broadcasting regulator Ofcom, from where she attended Bilderberg meetings as did George Osborne, Amber Rudd, and Andrew Adonis, and then onto the CEO rôle at John Lewis where she remains.
Osborne and Cameron were a well co-ordinated double act. I was never selected for their team but they were like Barcelona’s Xavi & Iniesta in their pomp. But their telepathic psychopathy on the coalition front bench fell apart when they won a majority in 2015. Osborne was apparently not best pleased with the way Cameron called the EU membership referendum.
A couple of weeks ago we learned that Evening Standard owner Lord Evgeny Lebedev attended the meeting at Michael Gove’s house in which Boris was persuaded to back Brexit.
Lebedev went on to hire George Osborne as Evening Standard editor.
Lebedev’s editor at the Independent Amol Rajan famously used the paper to back the Tories in 2015 which famously got them into power without having to do a coalition.
Lebedev had already promoted Nigel Farage by giving him a platform at the Evening Standard. He’s even interviewed Laurence Fox for the Mail on Sunday to help him run to be London Mayor.
Your father is ex KGB Wtf is that then if not a link. He's your link.
This is also a link 👇
Why was the Independent the ONLY BRITISH Newspaper to print a Kremlin spy chief's open Letter to Cameron full of anti Ukraine propaganda on downing of MH17?https://t.co/CYGUuGv5vB
— Cathy 🌻@Narcaware@social.snorklr.com (@NarcAware) March 30, 2022
In yesterday’s post we discussed how despite everything Starmer congratulated Lebedev on entering the Lords. Obviously Starmer’s proximity to Mandelson who attended Lebedev’s 2019 election party for Boris Johnson is a big part of this. Given what we know about Lebedev, could he look more like a crook? And could Starmer look more complicit with Johnson?
This is from my friend Roger Lewis. The rôle of the court Jew was precarious. Money was there to be made but you could be killed and replaced at any time.
You don’t really root for the main character, but definitely always want to know what happens next. An experimental and ambiguous but heartwarming film.
The image below taken from the Times says it all. Starmer congratulated Lebedev on being elevated to the Lords despite now referring to Lebedev’s appointment as a security risk.
Whoever designed it has done a great job, if only they could be commissioned to deploy their skills against the Times owner & political puppet master Rupert Murdoch.
The Times is edited by the ultra conservative John Witherow who is in his 70s and whose world view is shaped by where he was born and raised – apartheid South Africa.
Witherow edited the Sunday Times for many years and will have routinely relied on law breaking and the paying off of cops to get his scoops.
This has all been reported on by Nick Davies of the Guardian who broke the hacking scandal ten years ago.
For further context we should also remind ourselves that Starmer is advised by Lord Mandelson who was Blair’s ‘Prince of Darkness’, frequently colluded with international child sex trafficker and suspected spy Jeffrey Epstein – even after he received his sex trafficking convictions, and advised Russian Israeli Estonian oligarch, fraud convict, and heavily sanctioned friend of Putin – Oleg Deripaska.
There is clearly historic tension between Murdoch and Mandelson. Murdoch’s Sun once had a front page headline asking “Are we being run by a Gay Mafia?”
Private Eye magazine refer to Evgeny Lebedev as two beards .
This is naughty as it is a homophobic reference to Lebedev being unmarried.
Private Eye get away with it because the person who writes their Street of Shame media column, Adam McQueen, is also gay.
Mandelson attended the Lebedevs’s party along with Boris Johnson on the night Johnson won the last General Election by a landslide thanks to the BBC, Rupert Murdoch and Evgeny Lebedev.
In the interests of transparency, where are all the communications between Lebedev and Johnson and why should we wait for them?
A quick skim and scan of Steinmeier search engine results reminds me of the EU Brexit Withdrawal Agreement.
After the agreement the parties disputed what it meant and how therefore to go through with it.
I have zero background knowledge on the Russia Ukraine conflict but it looks to me as though that is why the elections never happened.
The UK withdrawal agreement also took forever to be agreed.
The wranglings led to the exit of Theresa May.
What was eventually agreed by Boris Johnson is about to be reneged on by his own Government – the one which actually drafted and signed it in the first place.
Zelensky appears to be acting in much the same way.
The Spectator podcast has been talking about the triggering of article 16.
I believe this means Britain withdrawing from the EU withdrawal agreement and the end of the Good Friday Agreement that currently keeps Northern Ireland and Ireland on good terms.
Which would mean trading with the EU without any mutually recognised trade standards and higher costs to export.
This would lead to increased tension on the UK EU Irish border as the EU would not want to allow unregulated goods like any American food to enter the EU through Northern Ireland.
The fact that none of these issues has been resolved means that the whole Ukraine thing is just a distraction.
Which means we are in no position to lecture.
How can we tell Russia to stick to agreements when the Ukraine itself has not?
And more importantly nor have we.
Things that once appeared unthinkable have become the new normal. It would be wise to bear that in mind when people say things that challenge the limits of our psychological beliefs.
Did the neo nazi shooter in New Zealand in 2018 previously visit Ukraine and wear an Azov symbol during the shootout?
March 15 marked three years since NZ's Christchurch massacre, when white supremacist Brenton Tarrant shot dead 51 Muslims at two mosques.
Back when it was OK to call Azov "a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization," NYT noted that Tarrant's flak jacket had an Azov symbol: pic.twitter.com/DuHeLmQiWw
Woohoo! Yes! Thats what I am talking about! 🤓 He is the 1 who bought up like half of Cleveland and let his “businesses” fall into disarray — https://t.co/gLtpPfW7yy
So Zelensky is Jewish, rode into power backed by the exiled Ukrainian Israeli Cypriot billionaire banker Ihor Kolomoyskyyi whose channel aired the TV show in which he became President – and now is in bed with the antisemitic Far Right.
Once Rivals, Now Friends: Ukraine’s Billionaires Stand With Zelensky As Russia Wages War https://t.co/1WzwyTRGc9
Harding can do some amazing work but appears to be under the influence of the UK intelligence agencies. His role in the incrimination of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks came out in the UK hearings and shows him up as an operative. This would not be so hard to take if he just admitted it. Maybe that will happen in a few years time. I believe Assange gets married in jail on Wednesday.
Farage, Russia, Brussels, Malta
The Farage staffer, the Russian embassy and a smear campaign against a Kremlin critic https://t.co/0zVibLGuVe
Daphne Caruana Galizi was eventually killed for messing with the wrong people. Her murder feels quite Jamal Kashoggi and David Kelly in that she was to some extent an insider who was exposing systemic wrongdoing. I understand she was from an established Maltese family. Perhaps her objections to rampant corruption in Malta were far harder for the targets of her ire to simply ignore.
From 2009 – Sharon, Kevin and the Socialists | Daphne Caruana Galizia https://t.co/Q0hAiM8Kac
I came across her when looking up Kevin and Sharon after seeing the reference in the Stephanie Kirchgaessner Guardian piece above. Stephanie, Luke, Carole and Peter Jukes are all very anti Julian Assange. Is that because they all more or less (Peter excepted) work for the Guardian and the Guardian is a tool of the state?
The Sunday Times has turned up the heat on Lord Evgeny Lebedev of Siberia and his father Alexander Lebedev lately – they fail to mention that the Evening Standard was bought off the Daily Mail owners the Rothermeres for a £1 in 2009. Or that former Sunday Times writer and Standard, Mail, Mail On Sunday and Tatler editor Geordie Greig organised the sale and co-owned the Standard with the Lebedevs for many years.
Last month, DMGT's national newspaper division, Associated Newspapers, sold its loss-making 50p evening newspaper for a "nominal sum" – thought to be £1 – to Evening Press, which took a 75.1% stake in a new company, Evening Standard Ltd.https://t.co/cQY5oBQXm1
So it is no wonder Lebedev and Murdoch were such chums. Both backed Boris and the Tories repeatedly and of course both backed Brexit. It was very clever the way Osborne was brought into the Standard. He had been spotted on Oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s yacht with Mandelson in 2008 and was photographed with Abramovich at Chelsea football games. All these characters are Zionists, Tories, and money launderers – with the last category being the most significant. Why wouldn’t they all get along?
But spats happen. And now Bill Browder, an other obvious bad actor, is leaping into action.
These are legal actions brought by wealthy individuals or corporations to stop activists and journalists telling the truth about wrongdoing. They’re designed to protect reputations. It’s funny to see Murdoch accusing Russians of engaging in SLAPPs. Few have done as much to prevent truth from circulating as Murdoch.
But of course now Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Justice Secretary Dominic Raab are championing Magnitsky laws and unexplained wealth orders to confiscate laundered money (selectively) and say they wish to prevent wealthy entities from using SLAPPs.
The hypocrisy would be staggering if it weren’t quite so reliable.
As mentioned yesterday it was disappointing to see Russell Brand talk about Saudi ownership of the Independent but not mention Lebedev. Such dots need to be joined and to go so close and just leave it feels worse than careless.
Geordie Greig was close to Ghislaine Maxwell and the New York Times has reported that MBS knew Jeffrey Epstein
So there you have it. State sponsored sex trafficking. Apparently Ukraine was a source of Epstein’s victims.
Things are now taken to another level by allowing thousands of Ukrainian refugees to cross borders towards the west – who will protect them?
The journos who have done the work to show how close MBS is to Lebedev and Lebedev is to Johnson show themselves to be compromised when they pick on the likes of Assange and Corbyn.
It’s just rivalry and retribution. But it also shows that they are closer to Clinton, Epstein, the intelligence agencies and the war machine than they make out.
The Guardian won prizes for its work with Snowden and Assange and now does nothing to exonerate them.
Some of the pressures facing some bloggers and journalists in news rooms are studied in All The News That’s Fit to Click – check it out.
All the News That’s Fit to Click is officially OUT and in the world! There are many anticlimactic moments in academia, but I can now say that holding your own book in your hands isn’t one of them. 1/x https://t.co/T8YU7RN1O5pic.twitter.com/Z84n71MYYP
You must do as I say because I’m important, popular, and your moral superior.
So UK and US messaging via their press organs seems to go.
Yesterday the craven Danny Finkelstein of the Times put out a column saying that Britain was right to cosy up to Russian oligarchs.
Alex Younger ex head of MI6 admitted that Britain was home to so many of them but that, despite reports that MI6 warned that Evgeny Lebedev, currently co-owner of the Evening Standard and Independent newspapers with the Saudi Royal family, was a security risk, he himself claimed to have had nothing to do with and no knowledge of the Lebedev case.
This is highly unlikely in my view and Younger, like David Cameron, will be mainly focused on feathering his nest.
Here’s the excerpt:
Excerpt of the tail end of the BBC Radio4 "Today" show interview with former head of MI6 Sir Alex Younger, in which the Lebedev question is raised. Broadcast 16 March 2022. pic.twitter.com/KtJ7awqhf1
— I.K. B o n z u m p f e r l (@indy_slug) March 17, 2022
Toxic sludge is good for you!
Unlike Radio 4 and Alex Younger, Russell Brand mentioned the fact that The Independent is co-owned by the Saudis. But Brand didn’t mention Lebedev. Strange.
I put up a comment on his YouTube thread last night and one this morning but both seem to have disappeared.
This is exactly the same as when I attempted to post references to Bill Gates on the Guardian blog ten years ago. Instant block.
So Brand suddenly feels as much of a gatekeeper as the rest. And that is normal. I saw the same thing happen to Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion. A smart guy who was arguably always a bit nuts that became a bit of a joke in the way he approached people. I would tell Roger he was a cross between Jesus and Charles Manson. From clickbait to jailbait etc see London Conversation passim
Tens of thousands of fans of Red Star Belgrade—Serbia's most popular soccer team—gave a pointed response to the supposedly anti-war west tonight as they held signs showing 20+ countries & the year of their overthrow/invasion by the US.
Meanwhile the Americans are telling China to do more to support America and Ukraine are telling Germany much the same thing.
Zelensky is blackmailing Germany into letting Ukraine enter the EU. It’s sounds like Israeli doublespeak to me and reminds me that first it was UK that blackmailed the EU and now it is the Ukraine.
All the while blaming Putin and China.
Bill Browder and Zelensky are the winners here. Hogging the limelight. Poor George Soros is yesterday’s man.
Meanwhile the supposed Russian domestic default is entirely artificial. The only reason their dollar bonds won’t be paid is because nobody will exchange them dollars, not because they aren’t solvent and willing to pay.
So it’s not capitalism that’s failing I’m afraid. Russia is happy to pay. It’s the intermediaries that have boycotted the debtor. Will they do the same to any African country that starts a war, thus effectively writing off their debts and underwriting the war? I think not.
Perverse incentives skew even the most logical of systems.
Very frustrating decision by the UKSC. But this isn't the end of the road. Once Westminster MC directs the case to the Home Secretary, the defence will have 4 weeks to submit arguments for her to reject extradition. Defence can also file appeals on grounds they originally lost on https://t.co/cc90wusLIM
The treatment of Julian #Assange never ceases to shock. Where is the condemnation from the #EU 'Liberals' who love freedom of speech and Democracy…? https://t.co/RR9SJ7ohQu
Wishing @StellaMoris1 & Julian good health and many years of love & togetherness. This is a faint ray of sunshine for #Assange, after he’s endured a decade of illegal confinement for exposing war crimes. Read the article : the banal cruelties continue https://t.co/ChXCZ9Ie6K
— Dr Deepa Govindarajan Driver (@deepa_driver) March 13, 2022
I agree that Putin should not be gagging the press.
But isn't this rich coming from the man who was in charge of the CPS when key emails relating to the Julian Assange case were destroyed? https://t.co/EpY7vam4DU
We've all had mates who turned out to be wrong 'uns. But Lord Mandelson's friendships with Geoffrey Robinson, the Hinduja brothers, Oleg Deripaska, Lord Lebedev *and* Jeffrey Epstein is at best an astonishing run of coincidences.
MI6 warned Boris Johnson that Lebedev was a national security threat so Johnson made Lebedev a Lord and Lebedev and George Osborne pretended the threat was Corbyn.
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
How else did disaster capitalist Roman Abramovich get rich so quickly in 90s Russia?
Favouritism happens in life. In families, at work, in hospitals, at school, in sport, in fashion, on the news, in music, in court, at the bank, on your phone, on the street and in politics.
Chelsea football club is subject to sanctions due to the war in Ukraine, but Saudi can attack Yemen with no consequences for its club Newcastle United.
At least some people are prepared to talk about it.
Will there be a minute's silence today before the Chelsea/Newcastle game for the 81 people beheaded in #SaudiArabia – A country that is already responsible for the worst Humanitarian Crisis on the planet in #Yemen ..? Or are the Saudis our boys…? https://t.co/q6UnN8rEDi
A horrible day at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea feeling the impact of sanctions, Saudi flags in the Newcastle end, Eddie Howe trying to stick to football https://t.co/ZYHjawkOBJ
I even read that Saudi were prepared to sell Newcastle for a loss just to be able to buy Chelsea now.
A Saudi source said that Turki Al-Sheikh, adviser to Saudi Crown Prince, is seeking to buy Chelsea through businessman Muhammad Al-Khuraiji as a front, and behind him a group of Saudi businessmen to form an alliance that cannot be linked to the Saudi government ( @ZaidBenjamin5 ) pic.twitter.com/MyAWQVMiOJ
Exclusive: Saudi Media, a private consortium, have made contact with Raine Group about buying Chelsea from Roman Abramovich. At least 10 bids in now and more are still coming: https://t.co/I4EbiciVwL#CFC
It looks like the Saudi Government has spent a lot of money on PR and is pretending an independent Saudi Media consortium is bidding for Chelsea.
In 2017 Crown Prince MBS arranged for many of his family members to be tortured under the Four Seasons Hotel in Riyadh. They were forced to hand over their international investments.
One international investment that the Saudis hold is a stake in the Independent, an online newspaper co-owned by Lebedev Holdings.
Jim Waterson of the Guardian has reported on this and very suspiciously so has BBC Today Programme man Amol Rajan, who I regard as as much of a security risk as Lord Evgeny Lebedev.
Given the revelations today about Boris Johnson's friendship with Evgeny Lebedev, it is important to revisit this thorough article about Amol Rajan, a member of Lebedev's inner circle who is also the BBC's Media Editor.
Will BBC finally now cover it? When we broke the above, @amolrajan was media correspondent. He was also close to Lebedev, his former boss. As former editor of the @independent, he'd had to publish his pro-Putin propaganda. 9/https://t.co/FD2hsOIUDR
Of course Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party is a big fan of Russian and Saudi cash and till recently also of Chinese money.
Looks like Boris will go to Saudi to see MBS after all. Amazing discipline here by The Times to not mention the Yemen war — 377,00 dead — and limit the issue to Khashoggi's killing pic.twitter.com/jl9Xtm1sEO
This country has no soul left. Sell one of the biggest clubs to the Saudis, let Americans do their jingoistic war shit in our capital city. If fucking MBS would pay £2bn, Boris would let him decapitate a journalist live in Spurs stadium. Price of everything, value of nothing. https://t.co/bZfZoDyu1O
I think it’s virtue signalling by a majority of the UK population in a way that is no different to what happened to large corporations straight after the murder of George Floyd in America in 2020.
Suddenly Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were saying that Black Lives Matter.
For some reason the Times thinks this is a good photo to publish. Who are these women? Do they really think Xi Jinping is going to take a break from torturing Uiygurs to reprimand MBS for killing Yemenis or Putin for killing white people? Is that how they think it works?
China were responsible for bringing an end to the Sri Lanka civil war by supplying the government with cash and weapons and telling them to end it.
Politics is a dirty sport. Grab the good times while you can.
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
How else did disaster capitalist Roman Abramovich get rich so quickly in 90s Russia?
Favouritism happens in life. In families, at work, in hospitals, at school, in sport, in fashion, on the news, in music, in court, at the bank, on your phone, on the street and in politics.
Chelsea football club is subject to sanctions due to the war in Ukraine, but Saudi can attack Yemen with no consequences for its club Newcastle United.
At least some people are prepared to talk about it.
Will there be a minute's silence today before the Chelsea/Newcastle game for the 81 people beheaded in #SaudiArabia – A country that is already responsible for the worst Humanitarian Crisis on the planet in #Yemen ..? Or are the Saudis our boys…? https://t.co/q6UnN8rEDi
A horrible day at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea feeling the impact of sanctions, Saudi flags in the Newcastle end, Eddie Howe trying to stick to football https://t.co/ZYHjawkOBJ
I even read that Saudi were prepared to sell Newcastle for a loss just to be able to buy Chelsea now.
A Saudi source said that Turki Al-Sheikh, adviser to Saudi Crown Prince, is seeking to buy Chelsea through businessman Muhammad Al-Khuraiji as a front, and behind him a group of Saudi businessmen to form an alliance that cannot be linked to the Saudi government ( @ZaidBenjamin5 ) pic.twitter.com/MyAWQVMiOJ
Exclusive: Saudi Media, a private consortium, have made contact with Raine Group about buying Chelsea from Roman Abramovich. At least 10 bids in now and more are still coming: https://t.co/I4EbiciVwL#CFC
It looks like the Saudi Government has spent a lot of money on PR and is pretending an independent Saudi Media consortium is bidding for Chelsea.
In 2017 Crown Prince MBS arranged for many of his family members to be tortured under the Four Seasons Hotel in Riyadh. They were forced to hand over their international investments.
One international investment that the Saudis hold is a stake in the Independent, an online newspaper co-owned by Lebedev Holdings.
Jim Waterson of the Guardian has reported on this and very suspiciously so has BBC Today Programme man Amol Rajan, who I regard as as much of a security risk as Lord Evgeny Lebedev.
Given the revelations today about Boris Johnson's friendship with Evgeny Lebedev, it is important to revisit this thorough article about Amol Rajan, a member of Lebedev's inner circle who is also the BBC's Media Editor.
Will BBC finally now cover it? When we broke the above, @amolrajan was media correspondent. He was also close to Lebedev, his former boss. As former editor of the @independent, he'd had to publish his pro-Putin propaganda. 9/https://t.co/FD2hsOIUDR
Of course Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party is a big fan of Russian and Saudi cash and till recently also of Chinese money.
Looks like Boris will go to Saudi to see MBS after all. Amazing discipline here by The Times to not mention the Yemen war — 377,00 dead — and limit the issue to Khashoggi's killing pic.twitter.com/jl9Xtm1sEO
This country has no soul left. Sell one of the biggest clubs to the Saudis, let Americans do their jingoistic war shit in our capital city. If fucking MBS would pay £2bn, Boris would let him decapitate a journalist live in Spurs stadium. Price of everything, value of nothing. https://t.co/bZfZoDyu1O
I think it’s virtue signalling by a majority of the UK population in a way that is no different to what happened to large corporations straight after the murder of George Floyd in America in 2020.
Suddenly Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were saying that Black Lives Matter.
For some reason the Times thinks this is a good photo to publish. Who are these women? Do they really think Xi Jinping is going to take a break from torturing Uiygurs to reprimand MBS for killing Yemenis or Putin for killing white people? Is that how they think it works?
China were responsible for bringing an end to the Sri Lanka civil war by supplying the government with cash and weapons and telling them to end it.
Politics is a dirty sport. Grab the good times while you can.
On the day of Brexit Lord Lebedev and Rupert Murdoch celebrated the result with Nigel Farage.
Of course Lebedev was not a Lord at the time but he and Rupert Murdoch gave Boris Johnson their full support and sure enough when elected Boris put Lebedev in the Lords.
But now things have changed. Murdoch’s Sunday Times is turning the screw on Lebedev and one has to wonder whether sudden sanctions could lead to a change of ownership at the Standard.
The Lebedev piece is co-written by former Evening Standard reporter and Sunday Times Media Editor Rosamund Unwin.
Few people appear to be using the word Magnitsky. This was the name of former American disaster capitalist Bill Browder’s accountant who died in Russia supposedly while reporting money laundering. Magnitsky laws are supposed to help governments recover money that has been laundered.
This is particularly relevant today as UK lawyers and Government are so keen on getting their hands on Russian dirty cash.
The current Russia Ukraine conflict appears to be happening purely to create opportunities for UK authorities to sell weapons and confiscate cash.
For a professional misdirector such as Gove every hole's a goal
So long as he puts some people off the scent he is in business
Hence his willingness to come out with anything, anytime
High Court says Metropolitan Police breached the rights of the organisers of a vigil for Sarah Everard. Imagine what would happen when the Tory Policing Bill has criminalized protests. Anyone defending civil rights would go to prison.https://t.co/zx3M3j4a0D
But it is not that long ago that Vladimir Putin spoke in English at an official dinner in which he was hosted and toasted by the Queen.
And not long before that that he was allowed to defend himself in front of Tony Blair over the atrocities Russia committed in Grozny, Chechnya.
But whereas back then Blair referred to political discussions, now the room for conversation has been closed down.
Under the Obama administration in particular USA decided that it was no longer interested in communicating with Russia and instead embarked on a massive destabilisation programme whose ultimate goal was to get rid of Putin.
That so many people have to die in Ukraine as a result of America’s ambitions is unfortunate, but inevitable given the pickle which America made for itself.
Many lives in many countries have been offered up over the years to protect British and American shareholders and the Western way of life.
But is beyond the comprehension of many television pundits that such violence should have been allowed to take place between such white countries.
They have to find ways of expressing their shock and communicate that this is indeed white on white crime but that no blame can be laid at the door of the White House.
Even though Joe Biden, the Obama administration and their political opponent the late Jon McCain were all complicit in riling up Russia, nepotistically profiting from Ukrainian energy firms, and showing support to anti-Russian Ukrainian Nazis.
But now all that is conveniently forgotten.
Like the last bit of self respect the two policeman traded in on detaining the masked woman with the blank placard.
Despite years of savage Conservative cuts to state funded education, UK Government spending remains somewhere in the region of £100 bn per year.
In other words an investment in producing a people prepared to swallow any number of polished turds.
In today’s Times client journalist Henry Zeffman is great as the frenemy hitman while stubborn Sir Keir Starmer finds himself once again cast in the role of the subhuman sociopathic Turd.
Is this a nod to the Commedia dell arte?
Wherever there is suffering, the multimillionaire virtue signalling attention seeking ambulance chasing human rights paedo lawyer – he is there.
In the following case from 20 years ago Keir Starmer actively promotes the interests of a man who was convicted of possessing and distributing pornographic pictures of children and only got a three year community rehabilitation order with a condition of treatment.
Starmer on the paedo payroll
It is a matter of fact that Starmer tried to block the BBC from showing his paedophile client’s face in its documentary series The Hunt for Britain’s Paedophiles.
Her Majesty’s Controlled Opposition Leader has used today’s interview as an opportunity to put out the sloppiest of messages about EU, UK, far left positions on the Ukrainian war, refugees, & pretty much complete silence on the role of Russian oligarchs in the City of London, the Conservative Party, Chelsea football club and the London property market.
Browder & Deripaska both disaster capitalists but paedo lawyer Sir Keir Starmer's adviser Peter Mandelson was in Deripaska's orbit of influence from 2000s when he was EU trade commissioner through to 2018 when he was forced to cut ties with his client due to US sanctions. https://t.co/WYdqq1rvWppic.twitter.com/1QPrraWdvh
Starmer, 59, who lives with his wife, Victoria, and two children in Kentish Town, north London, is willing to take in a refugee himself, saying: “If necessary [I would], as many people would . . . I think we’re a very welcoming nation.”
It’s not very convincing, is it? The London Borough of Camden, in which Starmer is located, has legally taken in more Afghani refugees than most local authorities and many are stuck in hotels.
There are also veterans who sleep rough every night and yet none of these people merit a mention.
Is Sir Keir now silent on EU, Murdoch, & Johnson’s hypocrisy because he is still being advised by that notorious beyond the pale adviser and friend of sanctioned oligarchs, war mongers, & paedophiles Peter Mandelson?
Starmer feebly called for an inquiry into Mandelson’s friend Lord Lebedev’s peerage but said nothing about him owning the Evening Standard, corruptly employing George Osborne, or being the son of a KGB London bureau disaster capitalist billionaire.
In another stitch up Starmer even granted the Standard an exclusive May 2020 interview as leader when George Osborne was still it’s editor.
Sir Keir sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn by backing a second referendum, allowing remain voters to feel deceived, and then dropping the policy as soon as he became leader.
The UK constantly changes its relationship with Israel, Russia, China, & USA – nothing strange about that.
Nor indeed that there is moral grandstanding questioning the desirability of collaborating with Russian oligarchy.
There is a whole field in financial services by the name of ESG whose role is to allow investors and do-gooders to pursue ethical outcomes by holding corporations that they own to account.
But Environmental, Social, & Governance matters are all subject to interpretation.
Ultimately language and words are often used to steer dirty money from and to the dirtiest places while pretending all the while to be holier than thou.
The fact that sanctions are being pushed against Russian oligarchs as never before means newer healthy questions are being asked about what is and isn’t ok in the fields of money and reputation laundering.
If it’s OK to go after Abramovich even after a London court decided that Putin didn’t instruct him to buy Chelsea then who else can be convicted of guilt by association?
Labour Leader Starmer and his former colleagues at both Doughty Street Chambers and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will have both represented and failed to convict countless paedophiles. Should their professional complicity and associations not be explored and publicly reflected upon?
Don’t the victims matter? We are not talking about victimless crime.
With respect to Russia and legal action it’s important to recognise that where money is involved all that we are witnessing is gangland retribution.
Blair operated his influence peddling firms in secrecy as did his wife and Mandelson. You can see from the link above that Pugachev was Belton’s main source in Putin’s People.
She released the book on Murdoch’s Harper Collins so the recent libel case won by Abramovich against Belton about whether she was right to state that Putin instructed him to buy Chelsea Football Club was actually a legal case between Abramovich and Murdoch.
Carol Cadwalladr in her crowd funded case against Arron Banks has been using Blair’s lawyer and brother in law of Alastair Campbell Gavin Millar.
London law firms, management accounting, banks, and audit companies have made a mint out of Russian business in both Russia and the UK.
Calculations have been made about how much they have to lose by staying in Russia and they have on the whole decided to leave.
Tony Blair was an advisor to “the Quartet” after leaving number 10. This means he has built his own empire on advising Putin.
Peter Mandelson who currently advises Labour Leader Keir Starmer was an advisor to Oleg Deripaska as late as 2018. Mandelson visited his friend Jeffrey Epstein several times even after his paedophilia conviction.
If you roll back the clock to 2003/4 the Chelsea boss was Claudio Ranieri, the UK PM was Tony Blair, and the US President was George W Bush.
The sketch in the local paper The Evening Standard on the day Abramovich took over at Stamford Bridge was as follows.
There is an image of a suited lady hearing: “Wealthy Russian buys Chelsea” on the radio. She looks a lot like Hillary and asks out loud: “What’s Bill gone and done now?”
In an age of patronage, nepotism, global sex trafficking, & international corruption, the Clintons have not shied away from getting involved.
Bill and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin oversaw the transfer of Russian state owned assets to Boris Yeltsin’s daughter’s associates now known as the Russian Mafia aka Putin’s People.
Robert went on to Chair the Council on Foreign Relations, an entity which counted Bill Clinton’s buddy Jeffrey Epstein among its members.
The following video is of one of Jeffrey Epstein’s other good friends Peter Mandelson being introduced by Epstein’s friend former Barclays boss and JP Morgan banker Jes Staley.
Staley recently resigned from Barclays due to an FCA report into his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that, for some reason has still not been released.
There are some great exhibits at the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition at the Tate Modern.
I was, in particular, struck by how political the messaging was.
And given how strongly the ongoing propaganda campaigns of the banking, media, and military sectors have been waged over the last few weeks I think it is even more critical than ever to respect the historical political, economic, and anthropological dimensions in socially revolutionary art.
These are all aspects I was blind to while growing up. In today’s previous post I refer to our limited perception of numbers. The way we depict rational numbers as being of more relevance and significance than irrational numbers is a clue to the way we lie to ourselves and to each other. This can only lead to predictable irrationality, as we are mass programmed to comply with false realities.
Cantor showed that some infinities are infinitely bigger than others.
We see the numbers that we do see at the expense of the numbers that we don’t.
There are far more weird numbers that we’ll never see than there are normal numbers that we will.
Apparently Kurt Gödel also works with this idea in his incompleteness theorem.
But first of all, in 1900 a man called David Hilbert who was known as a German but appears to have been born and raised in Prussia in an area that is now known as Russia.
According to the following video Hilbert corresponded or worked with Poincaré, Weierstrass, Church, Von Neumann among others.
Hilbert at some point gets interested in mathematics and starts thinking about recent controversies in mathematics and decides that mathematics needed to set down commonly agreed proofs for the field to be taken seriously.
This led to the announcing of the Hilbert’s 23 problems whose solutions were supposed to prove that mathematics is a complete science and which became pivotal in shaping modern mathematics.
Though the attempts to solve the 23 problems have led to lots of progress in the field of mathematics, the goal of proving that mathematics is a complete science will never be met. The existence of the 23 problems actually accelerated the disintegration of that idea because it led to Kurt Godel proving that there are more truths that are unprovable than there are truths that can be proven.
Nevertheless, this remains an interesting field. Though perhaps not for those who cannot abide uncertainty.
Good morning! It appears Monsieur le President Macron finally decided to run for re-election. He waited till the last possible minute. Everyone knew he’d run but by not announcing he made it look as though he was busy running the country, operating on the world stage, and let people contemplate what things would be like were one of the other candidates to be elected. Smart.
Meanwhile eight women have accused the ultra right wing candidate Éric Zemmour of inappropriate behaviour and sexual violence.
There appears to be a race to the bottom in South Korea where both candidates are accused of courting young mens’s votes by being more sexist than the other.
President Biden is reported as turning off the taps to Russian oil.
But Podemos is not so sure about sending arms to Ukraine.
All this talk of boycotts and supply chains doesn’t appear to stretch to asking Apple to stop using Uighyur slave labour in China.
On Monday afternoon Private Eye investigative reporter Richard Brooks did a presentation at a college in London in which he got pupils thinking about where their news comes from. Whether it is filtered by algorithms and which stories are not actually true. A mature student at the back took this picture.
Lindsey Barraclough author of the Long Lankin series did a wonderful presentation about witchcraft, life in the 1950s, and what it is like to be an author.
Meanwhile the usual propaganda shows no sign of relenting.
Fraud as a Service
The Banks pay a lot for advertising which keeps newspapers going and use lots of the same lawyers as the newspaper owners so very rarely is a bad word said about them. This story deserves more prominence but of course you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
And it looks like taxpayer money is subsidising the Prince Andrew settlement with the sex trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre. We aren’t allowed to know the details even though we’re paying for the settlement.
The thing about prepositions, pronouns and possessives as categories and the effect they have on second language learners is they provide such irrational disloyalty toward target language that they almost all have to be unlearned and reimagined if one is to really have any hope of getting anywhere.
As Mr Maynard Keynes said of President Woodrow Wilson in the Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) – while it may appear particularly easy to bamboozle an individual in the short term, the subsequent process of debamboozling them is an altogether more complicated undertaking.
And of course Jorge Luis Borges added that the Falklands conflict was like two bald men fighting over a comb.
Anyone can slip into bad habits.
When it comes to second language acquisition, and indeed all small print, it’s the unlearning and ability to reimagine, resculpt, relearn & improvise, that counts.
Would the flipside of CIA operatives learning Korean be that they be more open to brainwashing?
This weekend I watched three films at the cinema. Not bad going considering I hadn’t been to see a film since September and before that several years.
First it was Drive My Car, then Parallel Mothers, and finally Memoria.
I thoroughly enjoyed all of them and fairly shortly I’ll tell you why.
But I have to rush off to the day job so will simply say that I wish you an amazing day and that those of you who are in London may be interested in this.
I was told by a Falun Gong practitioner yesterday that Shen Yun is what China was like before communism.
Apparently the show is divine, if you are ready for it.
China apparently traffic Falun Gong practitioners’s organs as well as running Uiyghur sweat shops and cracking down on freedom campaigners in Hong Kong.
I’m more than aware that these terms and claims can be contested but prefer to use them sloppily than not at all.
Make up your minds for yourselves. I am not alone in thinking the West is copying China in many regards and that China was taught to unlearn many of its most excellent traditions by outsiders.
Thst opium was brought to China from India by Scots and apparently Shaolin (of which I approve) Buddhism came from South India too.
Silvia Federici is a Marxist feminist sociologist.
Her ideas are worth listening to whether you buy into them all or not.
Demographics, power structures, disease, wages, production, & capitalism all feature in these videos which are based on a book she wrote several years ago called Caliban and the Witch.
In the video below my friend Bev Skeggs introduces and links Silvia’s work from the 1970s on Wages and Housework with her more recent work on Witch Trials, Covid 19, and social reproduction.
I’m increasingly interested in the links between witch trials, ‘alzheimers’, ‘cognitive impairment’, land appropriation, mccarthyism, social media & real life deplatforming, and the evolution of political psychiatry.
If the US, globally, is just as much of a mafia state as Russia, then it would prioritise making money out of Ukraine rather than actually defending it.
And had Ukraine thrived as an independent nation and had more backing from the US, as Israel does, then surely it wouldn’t have to worry about being invaded by Russia.
So why is thebWestern press making out that Putin invading Ukraine is like Saddam invading Kuwait?
Kuwait was always going to be protected for its oil and Saddam lacked the military might necessary to take on the Americans.
But Russia has an army, weapons, and has already gone into Ukraine.
And America will not go to war with Russia over Ukraine – who benefits apart from arms firms?
How many US troops will be willingly sacrificed for Ukraine?
In recent years America has failed in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Somalia.
So what makes them think anyine believes they can pick a fight with Russia?
And why did America’s current President’s son Hunter Biden take money to be a director of a Ukrainian gas company?
America is weak state and has been for a while.
I don’t think they are in a position to start an occupation of Ukraine but maybe they will be stupid enough to try.
When a campaigning US politician was once told that all right thinking Americans would be voting for him he replied: “I’m afraid that’s not enough. I need a majority.”
Firstly that he welcomes the reduction of money in cryptocurrencies since last November.
Vitalik reckons too much money and focus on crypto markets led to heightened speculation and fraud.
Secondly he’ll be turning his own focus onto ensuring that ethereum systems and networks build capacity to properly serve new users when demand finally returns.
The transaction process can be expensive and complicated – any improvements will improve confidence and benefit the system as a whole.
In this short article Bloomberg emphasise the imminent benefits of being able to unlock your iPhone without taking your mask off
This technological development and the messaging around it tacitly play into the official narrative in several ways.
For Your Eyes Only
For those of us with concerns about civil liberties, it is clear that society’s journey toward digital banking and digital currencies will accompany rising levels of state control over individuals.
When the state wrongfully accuses innocent parties of crimes or infractions that they have not committed the punishments that will be meted out will be increasingly severe with consequences even more far reaching.
Algorithms will talk to each other without our consent and make life changing decisions about our lives based on dubious reasoning and information.
Though the consequences will be sudden, immediate & real, we will rarely get to know exactly who did what, when, where, how, or the various possible factors as to why.
Welcome to the surveillance state.
Pale Blue Eyes
What is truly amazing is the way technocratic private firms like Apple merge with the state to allow users to voluntarily submit and comply with an overall agenda of state control.
This submission is presented as a benefit.
This public relations and marketing operation allows the reward mechanism to be spun as a benefit because uou can now access your own data while complying with mask mandates while on the tube, at work, or in class.
So it’s technophiles who will be at the vanguard of digital security and covid mask wearing delirium. Clever.
They’ll be too busy playing with their toys and obeying big brother to notice nobody has any rights.
But it will be worth it because they’ll have their toys.
This website has referred to the Ionesco play Rhinoceros from the 50s.
In late 2020 it was stated that the vaccine was the ‘Rhinoceros’, the symbol of mimetism, when the crowd copies the crowd. Also known as the sheep effect.
Eyes on the Money
In financial markets risk managers are on the lookout for contagion. When investors start suddenly copying each other you see bubbles and crashes.
This time last week the Economist said markets were due for a correction & earlier this week lots of money duly moved off the stock exchanges.
Just as interest rate changes are said to take a year to eighteen months to fully work their way into the economy, signals in the financial press or social media can trigger immediate jumps or sell offs.
But I’m now more conviced the Rhinoceros is the smart phone, not the vaccine. While you can refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated, it’s much harder not to do real time business online.
As we move to a cashless society, everyone will be expected to pay by phone. Everything will be tracked.
Ultra wealthy corporations, individuals, and criminals will of course continue to operate their own finances in the shadows, in plain sight.
Here’s Looking at You, kid
The new Universal Control feature to allow one password to work across all a user’s Apple devices.
This all feels very Aadhaar. Social credit, social engineering & fin tech profiteering, masquerading as social welfare.
Of course this is accompanied by eugenics and if you don’t like it you are a tinfoil hat wearing backward facing nostalgic superstious witchcraft believing God bothering occultist. The deplatforming will happen on the basis you are anti vax, far right, domestic terrorist or not politically correct.
The powers that be have their own struggles of course. There is resistance and few people buy the papers or trust the government. So not all the messages go out as clean as our overlords would like. See what is happening among the 90% vaccinated truckers in Canada. They’ve had enough and are being supported by various sections of the public.
When megalomaniacal ‘liberals’ play hardball and accuse both Conservatives and the Left of being racist simply for opposing technocratic neo-feudalism they can expect trouble. This appears to be where we are.
When does hard-core fraud and continuous criminality get reduced to regulatory infraction and the mere cost of doing business?
When you’re laundering reputations, swinging elections, paying off courts, abusing staff, abusing customers, deplatforming instead of allowing free speech, profiteering, aiding the far right, doing last minute deals with victims, & generally operating for the CIA.
If this type of activity was prosecuted in America then why not also in the UK?
Could it be because Britain is just pretending to be concerned about violating users privacy and safety?
Because the government is obsessed with surveillance and is pushing for vaccine passes so it can get digital ID and central bank digital currencies?
It is well known that the UK Government doesn’t really care about prosecuting violence, sexual offences, or fraud. So why would it go after Facebook? It needs Mark Zuckerburg in order to keep winning elections.
The Conservative majority is enormous. It is inconceivable that this was achieved without full support granted by the Murdoch press, BBC, and social media firms.
Clegg is doing better than former PM David Cameron who left office before Clegg but wound up working for the now defunct and disgraced shadow finance entity Greensill Capital.
Clegg claimed to have been against Brexit but then went to work for an organisation that allowed Brexit campaigners to use all sorts of dubious online tactics to swing the election, particularly Cambridge Analytica.
Now Clegg will himself have a huge say over who gets elected throughout the world. As Kingmaker that puts him in as powerful a position as Rupert Murdoch.
As my friend Roger Lewis says, Bitcoin is just warming the bed for central bank digital currencies
Warren Buffett’s business partner says crypto should be banned but no mention is made of state backed currencies like Britcoin or the conversations and policy papers coming out of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS)
French left independent media operators Mediapart have a new film out in French cinemas tomorrow titled ‘Who killed public debate?” (translation mine)
As with the UK, only a few people own the French national papers, magazines, and TV stations.
But unlike in Britain, France is capable of hosting a televised discussion to talk about it.
The far right candidate Eric Zemmour is a product of the French media machine in the same way the Daily Express, Mail, Sun, Telegraph, BBC and LBC created Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and ‘Tommy Robinson’.
The big French media owners were recently forced to testify to a parliamentary committee on the highly concentrated state of media ownership in France.
Regardless of how lightly they took their obligations, the billionaire owners all at least turned up.
Why can’t the UK openly discuss media concentration and anti trust issues?
Has every independent group that you might have expected to push for such discussions been infiltrated spycops style?
Or is it a question of funding?
Could it be that Brits are too individualist to be able to come together to discuss the issues which really matter?
Maybe the UK political left is too riven with jealousy and status seeking to produce heavy hitting platforms that permit near real time political discussion?
The Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking and the Daniel Morgan Inquiry were supposed to look into the corruption of the press and the police.
Sadly both inquiries were stymied by the powers that be.
The light that was supposed to demonstrate how these amoral institutions operate was never allowed to shine.
You can tell from the tone that the hosts are under instruction to trash their rival.
At one point they even declare that as he gets far more hits than they do (Rogan’s is the world’s most popular English language podcast while the NYT’s Daily is second), Rogan shouldn’t be labelled independent compared to the NYT Daily which gets categorised as Mainstream Media ( MSM ) but gets only a fraction of the attention.
The hosts at least acknowledge how many people are involved in making their podcast and how few people make Rogan’s.
If you have a team of fact checkers, lawyers, PR people, scriptwriters, researchers, producers, and editors then of course what you produce will be slick, but will that guarantee that you won’t mislead the public or feel even slightly authentic?
Of course not.
With all those professionals involved you have to water things down to please your advertisers and the powers that be.
The sponsors.
How else could you afford that slickness?
Maybe there are viewers out there who are prepared to trade slickness for authenticity. For trust.
There are various independent media researchers and publishers in the UK.
I’ve been part of “the scene” at times.
Actually I suppose there are many UK scenes.
Some of us know each other.
And it’s true that campaigning journalism and pure campaigning often converge.
How else would genuine campaigns get coverage?
Certainly not automatically from MSM.
Turning the public need to be properly informed of things as they happen into a reliable digital information stream is not as easy as it sounds.
The Canary have done it, Byline have done it, Declassified and Novara have done it.
Each focuses on a different demographic and a different set of communicative and political principles.
Open Democracy have also been historically good. Though they have been highly professionalised to the point of doing joint investigations with the Sunday Times.
Joe.co.uk and Private Eye are also worthy of mention, but far higher up the food chain.
Though I rarely watch it, let’s not forget the excellent albeit right wing UK Column
We did some good work and collaborated with many campaigners, academics, researchers and other outlets, but we also argued over direction, funding and editorial control – I was pushed out, but the thing still going.
I didn’t feel embedding with Extinction Rebellion was a good idea. They did.
You can’t argue with the people who were pulling the strings.
A lot of other stuff went on but the investors and managers have their motives and nobody else, ie me or the community count.
I’m proud of the work I was involved in, what we achieved as a team, and what I learned.
But where is the energy now?
Where is the scene going?
Have lots of new people entered that I don’t know about?
Am I even conceptualising things in the right way?
Since covid the fracturing of left and right over civil liberties instead of economics has led to the rise of Telegram and other alternative platforms and, in a way, to further balkanisation of the alternative left.
Which means the need for better curation, aggregation, editorialising, and presentation is even greater than ever.
Not because the left needs to be policed or herded.
Au contraire.
Because it deserves to be heard in the same way the corporate fascist finance capital media is.
For the sake of balance, I must include the point of view that Joe Rogan is part of Peter Thiel’s epicentre of influence.
Barrett Brown pointed this out last week.
Peter Thiel’s Palantir is a far bigger part of the military surveillance puzzle than the also controversial NSO Pegasus firm and software.
Byline and the Good Law Project have done good work on the Palantir penetration of UK health departments and therefore its access to public money.
Just like NSO, Google, Microsoft, Apple, & Amazon, Palantir will be deeply embedded in the US UK Israel military and police methodologies.
I would have hoped for a wider crowd sourced collaborative ethos re: research into Palantir, but I guess when it comes to investigative journalism, especially when in the public interest, old habits die hard.
Egos exist, and so does blacklisting.
Masonic type in group outgroup behaviour trickles from the top all the way down to the bottom!
I’d love to say I’m above all that, but we live in communities, and groupthink doesn’t suddenly magic itself away.
It is better to take a crash course in collaborative networks & group dynamics before easily threatened networks pre-emptively deplatform you.
Maybe I’ve got off lightly. Be careful what you wish for.
To paraphrase Enoch Powell, whenever the Gods wish to destroy you, they start by driving you mad.
Some things might make you laugh. But what does that actually mean? That you are actually happy? Or that you are scared? And desperate not to suffer. That you love the government? That you hate what you’re asked to hate? And love what you’re told to love? Bread and circus. Just as Marxism refers to fickle capital looking for the greatest latest rate of return. So to do we laugh at the latest media constructed target of our manufactured sentiment. It’s not that we can’t feel emotion. It’s more that the emotions we feel are being dictated and directed by others. By spin doctors and propagandists. There is a huge psychoanalytical side to this. It is not without consequence. There are winners and losers. Should you choose to play the game, and it is hard not to, your feelings will harden and you will block out the empathy that you would normally generate towards other human beings. By the time you’re far enough down the line you will have little chance of connecting with the human being inside you. Radicalisation and activation of psychopathy starts young. In some senses it is done on purpose by the state, corporations, local government, the education system, all of which have been to some degree or other captured by the profit motive, the need to survive according to very particular doctrines & hierarchies of motivation. And that is now OK. It is happening no matter what. What does it mean to deprogramme? To divert oneself from the path that has been chosen for you and the rest of society? To do that, one needs to be awake. Not always an easy undertaking.
It starts off by saying that yes, age gaps in movies often involve a sixty something man and a teenage girl, but if you look in the right places you may find evidence that the tables are quietly turning.
The Licorice Pizza film is apparently about a 25 year old woman who has the hots for a fifteen year old guy.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, a film starring Emma Thompson is about a retired schoolteacher hiring a sex worker.
These films are offered as evidence of the cultural sea change happening in the film industry.
It’s five years since the Harvey Weinstein scandal took place. Weinstein himself is not referred to in the article. But the #MeToo movement is and so is Woody Allen.
Allen is referred to as a serial transgressor that has happily cast himself alongside women who are forty years younger than him.
There are quotes from actresses who say that they can’t get work once they’re forty.
The idea is, and I think there must be a lot of truth to it, that the big financing decisions about which films to make and consequently who to cast are made by 60 year old white men. This gets mentioned, but barely.
Despite it being 5 years since #MeToo, no mention was made of the relationship between Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein or Jeffey Epstein.
Steve Bannon interviewed Jeffrey Epstein for several hours in 2019. Few people are likely to have watched the full tapes. I don’t know if they are due for airing. I know Bannon has his own current legal problems.
Ghislaine Maxwell is trying to get a retrial and the man formerly known as Prince Andrew is trying to get trafficking victim Viginia Giuffre relabelled as a sex trafficker.
That’s just one part of the world that we live in.
The Observer feels soft on misogyny, racism and other forms of prejudice despite always making out that it isn’t. Must be awash with government influence and all that goes with it.
The delicate epidemiological and financial balance upon which many societies have come to rely – ie our capacity to fight off disease and to trade – has been something which, till recently, many of us have taken for granted.
But for some reason, all of a sudden, this ground to a halt.
Confidence is everything in a modern economy.
While it has been easy for the powers that be to bamboozle their citizens, it is the act of debamboozling that is proving more of a challenge.
I suspect that the sociology of science does not point to the idea that any single person or body, be that government, individual, or any other type of organisation, holds a monopoly on truth.
In the twentieth century Kurt Gödel demonstrated that there are far more true things than can possibly be demonstrated.
So why must we allow ourselves to be quite so retarded by the incessant stream of absurdities that we are subjected to by our deeply corrupt governments?
I live in Britain and so can only speak for here, but it looks like Europe, US, Canada and Australia have the same issues.
Which came first the Brexit or the Virus?
Did Governments’ poor reaction to the 2008 global financial crisis help them lose control of their populations?
Did that lead to the Brexit and Trump votes and increased populism throughout Europe’s former communist states as well as in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Germany?
Did these governments need a new distraction?
Was it discussed at Davos (see video from this year’s discussion below)?
On the whole I think the answer to these questions is: YES.
There’s been some resistance to the the global government agenda but the media has worked very hard to portray anyone with a dissenting view as a marginal figure which has led to the inevitable rebirth of the official narrative
Brexit, climate change, austerity, the global financial crisis, and covid, are examples of issues the West has encouraged its citizens to take seriously.
Far more so than other issues such as international and intra-national financial inequality perpetuated by the continued domination of a self anointed banking technocracy.
Statelessness and Denationalisation
Privatisation in the UK in 70s and 80s was occasionally labelled denationalisation. Taking state created and state backed utility companies like gas, phone, water, oil, electricity, and selling them off. This made investors and the City a lot of money but in many cases has led to worse service for consumers and higher bills.
You might think taking these firms away from the state amounts to taking the state out of these firms. But they still get subsidies and bailouts when they need them. While avoiding tax and paying dividends.
In just the same way some people who have lots of money – non-doms, non-domiciled residents – understandably don’t want to pay UK taxes and set up overseas to avoid paying taxes in the UK.
So you have non doms who don’t want to be British, the offshore tax havens which help them, the corporations which park their profits outside the UK, and finally stateless individuals who for some reason or another have found themselves without official nationality.
Just as Camp X Ray in Cuba also known as Guantanamo Bay is still open it is clear that that our governments like to push things off the balance sheet. Shove things off to where they can’t be seen. This culture of permanent denialism is unhealthy. It inevitably masks child abuse. And other unspeakable abuses. By perpetuating this culture our government and mainstream media become the very abuse that they choose to ignore.
When I think of Pippa Crerar of the Mirror or Jim Pickard of the FT who are self-styled non elites that happen to occupy prominent roles in our media, I think of good people who are doing bad things.
Their arms are obviously tied behind their backs in that they have to obey lawyers and likely government censors.
But they look away from the non Westminster abuse. The pillaging and corporate looting taking place in this country.
Wall to wall coverage of the savage austerity that has been artificially imposed on the country is not their priority.
They’ve covered some of the covid contracts but most of the other work that needs to be done has been ignored.
This is a disgrace.
The police won’t touch it, the press won’t touch it, the BBC ignore it, the public will never see it, it will never get to court.
This culture can only get worse if unchecked.
What I’m saying here is no great revelation. But it’s still true.
Hundreds stripped of British citizenship in last 15 years, study finds https://t.co/eKtTNYIJWK
We are inches away from being fully funded on our case against the Met for refusing to investigate Johnson – which is assuming increasing importance following William Wragg and Christian Wakeford's interventions.
My friend Roger Lewis has been researching the links between energy and money and the role of global government in facilitating a new energy based currency.
We chat quite frequently and occasionally upload videos of our discussions.
Andrew Bailey Governor of the Bank of England and Christine Lagarde of the European Central Bank have been in the press banging on about Russia and Ukraine and the effect of gas prices far more than they have for discussing inflation.
Of course this position assumes that we have to share the NATO stance on Russia.
Sweden and Finland are again being asked to join NATO and the current NATO head Jens Stoltenberg is trying to become Governor of Norway’s Central Bank.
I think this is a bit much on the military banking revolving door front.
The culture of Openly Highly Politicised Central Banks is still a new thing.
So galling as to merit zero mainstream discussion.
It’s taboo as main course served with large dollops of taboo on the side.
And then we have ex Goldman ex ECB head Draghi now pushing for mandatory vaccines as…unelected Italian PM.
Are you kidding me?
When it comes to world’s most ubiquiotous technocrat, Mario is top of the charts.
Is there any job he can’t be given?
The fact that he injected all that QE into the Euro which incidentally iatrogenically killed the patient got him referred to in the BRITISH PRESS as Super Mario.
I kid you not. We knew bad things would happen to that country the moment he became leader. I can’t imagine what he’s been up to in the name of further readying Italy for external investors.
You won’t be surprised to hear that Super Mario is in the race to become Italian President against … Silvio Berlusconi!
George Osborne applied to run the IMF while editing the Evening Standard but now merely advises on M&A while chairing the lootholdings at the British Musuem.
More visceral outrage in this country when a footballer joins Arsenal from Spurs than if a MP joins Labour from the Tories
My dear friend Roger over at Not The Grub Street Journal just sent me this video following the appearance of one of Professor Parkinson’s dust jackets in a recent blogpost.
Would Professor Parkinson be cancelled today or simply pre-emptively ignored?
Lots of necessary nuance to consider with regard to the interpretation of the meaning of equality through the ages.
The late David Graeber has a new book out called the Dawn of Everything.
In this interview from three years ago he told me about some of his ideas to do with Occupy, Equality, Kurdistan, & Patriarchy.
Looking back on the interviews he granted me, I think it’s important to point out that, despite his charm and gregariousness, David was not a pacifist.
The double standards coming out of the Times are nothing new. Its a government paper. That’s how it works. Priorities change. New agendas are set. Former friends are hung out to dry. Press rinse. Repeat.
Specialising in being an audience member, punter, citizen, consumer, subject, requires an ability to synthesise contradictions at all levels and live with them either quietly or without causing too much upset.
The best thing that can happen if you do or say anything about these inconsistencies is that you are ignored.
At least that way you can’t get into trouble. If you like putting your thoughts on record and no-one notices then you can carry on for as long as you like.
You won’t ever have to explain yourself and you’ll know you did your bit as best you could.
That is the dilemma I face. Write and not ‘get’ anything out of it or quit whilst I’m behind.
I’ve shared my writing on social media but even if the thing I’m pointing at is of some significance it is hard to see where my writing makes a difference.
It could be that an article contributes to the public consciousness in ways that shouldn’t be measured in terms of hits or shares.
The benefits of losing all hope of influencing debate are that you retain your privacy, and the fluidity of your identity.
Nobody will criticise you for changing position as new info comes in because nobody will notice.
And besides, you get to carry on secretly believing that in the background you’re the one who is really influencing the state of the nation – John Bull.
Or in my case, Ranjan Balakumaran.
The language used in the headline and blurb of this Times article about the Theranos scandal convictions is exactly what should be used when describing the UK Government and the pharmaceutical industry.
The government has used fake statistics and applied the full mainstream media and big tech propaganda machine to push the full vaccines, lockdown, track and trace, QE, and central bank digital currency agenda.
Not forgetting increased mimicking of Chinese social credit and Indian biometric ID card systems.
There have been countless victims and little justification other than propaganda.
It is clear that the majority of the population that have jobs, mortgages, families are wedded to the idea that the government is right about everything and that only the government can communicate on behalf of the scientific community.
It doesn’t appear to cross many people’s minds that there can be such a thing as debate about science and that there can be such a thing as personal choice in matters of individual health.
In other words in many ways we are already living in full blown communism.
The level of psychological intervention has gone beyond mere nudging and we are moving towards the complete normalisation of a health security state.
Where any deviation from the government line makes you a biosecurity threat and merits deplatforming more or less on terrorism charges.
The Borders Bill allows for your citizenship to be stripped if you’re deemed not to be acting in the interests of the country.
But who decides that sort of thing?
It is telling that Blair was given a knighthood this week.
He was into the draconian idea of ID cards and recently told the world that if you’re not vaccinated you’re an idiot. That is how politics works these days.
Blair can say that he is speaking for the majority.
And it is left to Nigel Farage, one of the few people to compete with Blair on the zero ethics front, to champion Novak Djokovic, the unvaccinated tennis player, who is locked up in an Australian detention centre in Melbourne, a city where 15,000 supposedly have covid and he isn’t one of them.
Djokovic is more likely to catch covid where he is than anywhere else.
Thankfully he is fit and healthy and says he has antibodies. It is amazing how vindictive people are against him. Is it cos he is Serb?
He is in a detention centre where someone has been there 9 years, since he was 15, and has committed no crimes he is simply a refugee.
This centre is like Guantanomo Bay camp X Ray in Cuba, set up by George W Bush, where people are held without charge and there is no real regulation.
Meanwhile Joe Biden, like Donald Trump, seeks to extradite Julian Assange for highlighting the war crimes committed during the time of Tony Blair and George W Bush.
Biden withdrew from Afghanistan but refuses to drop the charges against Assange.
There is a general election in Australia this year.
This, as well as NATO membership makes a difference. Serbia was illegally bombed by Clinton and Blair in 1999 and the UK has recently announced its anti China Indo Pacific tilt.
So don’t expect Boris Johnson to speak up for Djokovic.
Australian PM Scott Morrison is likely advised by Lynton Crosby who also advises Boris.
Australia has also been very aggressive toward China as it fears being trampled by its superpower neighbour to whom it sells lots of coal.
France was upset to be recently cut out of a major nuclear submarine deal with Australia but it seems to have recovered and is focusing on selling weapons elsewhere and conducting its own Bill Gates backed terror campaign on its own people.
Macron has an election coming up too. He doesn’t appear to have rivals but won’t fancy facing Marine LePen in the second round in May.
He says he wants to “emmerder” the unvaccinated which has been variously translated as ‘hassle’ and ‘piss off’ but I like to say ‘shit on’ or ‘throw shit at’.
The FT newspaper has backed Australia and France in their approach to making life difficult for the unvaccinated.
This at a time where decisions have to be made about whether 4th and 5th doses and boosters are justified and, if so, why are so many vaxxed individuals getting covid?
However much this all unravels the spinners are constantly invited onto the radio and television to stop us considering whether we should change course.
Our politicians and scientists are deferred to permanently by our TV presenters. Even when they are shown to be utterly corrupt on every level.
But the good thing is that we can see this more and more clearly.
I get good info sent to me from friends I’ve recently met and ones that I have known for years.
All are hardworking and just want to get on with their lives.
But when they see abuse more and more frequently they have to question if things really are going to be for the best.
I continue to think things will work out. But we need to be community minded.
Blast from the Past
This was Andrew Neil on Steve Baker from a few years ago. When he was good he was good.
To be ill has been regarded as an injustice for some time. A legal matter. But there are only physical and social laws. The physical laws are there because they cannot be broken. The social laws are there precisely because they can. If the UK government says they have run out of money to do something that is merely a sign that they don’t want to.
Before you accuse me…
You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your outlaws.
LBJ said he refused to send American boys to Asia to do the work that Asian boys should be doing themselves. That was before Mohammad Ali had his titles taken off him for refusing to fight in Vietnam. Elvis, like Prince Harry, donned the uniform. Asked if he’d killed anyone in Afghanistan Prince Harry referred to taking a life for a life. Made it sound like a video game. Kaepernick lost his career for pointing out that black lives matter. Jesse Owens said he still wasn’t allowed to eat in US restaurants when he won his Gold medals at the Berlin 1936 Olympics. This was after FDR had said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Djokovic, his nation, his fans, those who believe in individual sovereignty have been robbed of their personhood – dehumanised. All because the rest of the world has a pathological attraction to the unsustainable idea of monthly boosters – to permanently top up immunity simply to pay the rent. Because they think they know which side their bread is buttered. Guilt tripped into thinking it is for the common good. Guilt tripped by whom? By Bill Gates and his paedo mates. It’s all out there. Not hidden. But we’re too busy playing with our toys to fight back. Like the Trojan soldiers when the Greeks showed up that night in the wooden horse. Overcome by wine and slumber. It’s the telly what made me do it. Exchange one form of slavery for another.
If politics is the art of the possible, they’ve played a blinder. If you don’t stand up for something you’ll fall for anything. Atheists have a god complex. The worrier caste. Causing mass hysteria. But everything really is going to be all right.
The Times reports that the Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey is publishing a book titled “Can’t we just print more money?”, with images of flying pigs on the cover.
It also says that the Bank of England printed £895 billion pounds under what it termed Quantitative Easing
No mention is made of the Government’s furlough scheme which was used to keep companies and employees afloat during the government imposed lockdown.
Could furlough payments be termed Helicopter Money, designed, unlike the Bank of England’s version of QE, to go directly to citizens.
The problem with the £895 billion QE programme is that nobody really knows what happened to the money.
It probably just went to banks.
It certainly didn’t go to normal citizens who instead have been dealing with austerity.
We have seen on this blog already that Andrew Bailey is a criminal operator.
He covers up bank fraud daily.
These are not victimless crimes.
People kill themselves when they are robbed by banks who are desperate to shore up their balance sheets.
We just never hear about it in the right context because BBC business and financial journalists generally are not rewarded for covering fraud that has been committed by big banks.
Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert cover the implications of Central Bank QE, inflation, and the problems of an overcentralised financial system very well.
Professor Richard Werner, who coined the term QE, is another of the few commentators who makes perfect sense on these and other matters including central bank digital currencies as a surveillance tool and the over centralisation of Western banking systems. His interviews are essential viewing.
Here are some of the comments from below the line.
Boris Brejcha (Czech pronunciation: [ˈbrɛjxaː]; born November 26, 1981 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein) is a German DJ and record producer. He describes his music style as “High-Tech Minimal.”[1] He uses the venetian carnival mask as his signature look, being inspired by the Carnival in Rio, at the times when he was performing for the first time, in Brazil.[2] Since then, he has been performing at clubs around the world and at some of the biggest festivals such as Tomorrowland, Timewarp and Exit festival.[2] Boris and his friends Ann Clue and Deniz Bul founded the label “Fckng Serious” in 2015.[3] In August, 2019, he performed for the first time in Ibiza at Hï Ibiza club.[4]
Mask Based Learning
I heard Boris Brejcha for the first time on one of the antilockdown marches last year. There was no trouble and it was all very uplifting. The people there would be described as anti vaxxers today but we were all deeply unimpressed with global government’s attempts to impose martial law on a population that was mainly healthy. Something happened whereby the people with access to power chose to reinterpret the social contract and impose conditions en masse that you could only usually ever get away with on a small scale.
What is the moral of the story?
I believe the population at large were exposed to the kind of abuse that is only usually reserved for minorities.
But because it had been happening under the radar but more or less out in the open for so long it was felt it would be no big deal when the evil was scaled.
But it was a big deal.
The damage done to public trust has been enormous. And we were in an already sinking ship.
Oh well. These things happen. I won’t pretend it’s been easy for people. Death, lies, corruption. But it’s not new.
It’s just that we like to think it happens to other people.
That the state isn’t that bad.
Well the state is run by psychopaths. It has no feeling and nor generally do the people operating it. Not good ones anyway.
That doesn’t mean we should be down. Family, God / Spirituality, Community matter.
If you can’t believe in something bigger than you then you’re going to have problems.
If you feel all the power is yours, then you will go mad and abuse people including yourself.
We think we’re busy and rush around the city without ever really taking anything in.
School took us to see Hogarth’s works at Sir John Soane’s museum in Lincoln Inn Fields, London’s biggest square, in the legal district when I was 12 or 13.
Then years later an actor friend told me about Brecht’s Threepenny Opera based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.
Over the course of years it dawned on me that these pictures were about the debauchery of London’s street life.
And very little has changed.
But it was only when I asked for a copy of the Beggar’s Opera at my favourite bookshop in London that I was pointed to It Takes a Thief and informed that Gay based his opera on London’s former Chief Thief Taker Jonathan Wild.
I’m a slow learner but bit by bit the dots began to join.
If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings.
G.K. Chesterton on his mate George Bernard Shaw
This might appear a funny quote to pick for my argument that the virus at this stage appears far less scary than the vax.
But it wouldn’t have mattered what shape the virus took, they were always going to give us THE VAX.
Why else would they have bothered creating business schools?
You need a captive audience.
Hard Sell
The elevator pitch goes like this:
Take this or I’ll kill you now, worse still I’ll make everyone’s life you know miserable by stopping you from seeing your loved ones, travelling, going out, working, having a roof over your head, eating, thinking independent thoughts, or sleeping.
As Harvey Weinstein told his actresses and the entire movie industry, you don’t have to sleep with me but if you don’t then you won’t work.
We are that point in the cycle.
Toxic Nudge is Good for You
The engineering consent philosophy has taken stimulus reward and Pavlovian counter conditioning to a whole new level.
Remember when Facebook experimented with emotion by making their users depressed?
What an evil f*cking company! @sherylsandberg, did your users give you express written consent to conduct psychological experiments on them?
Wake up everyone. Dump this POS product right now.
Might these experiments have yielded behavioural insights?
Amusing Ourselves to Death
You know the uk behavioural insights team? Oliver Letwin championed them. Like CO2 emissions reductions certificate trading the schemes are mad but they gained traction in govt. Ultimately shaping the insane UK govt nudge policy designed to get us vaxxed forever because "science"
Letwin's wife was head of legal services at the department of health and social services and did a lot to privatise NHS. There was never much coverage of this. ie zero. Nepotism within and between UK govt, media, private sector is rife. No-one bats an eyelid.
After super-corruptly cleaning up with Greensill Cameron is back on telly pontificating on morals. Only in UK can brazen criminality and corruption be so openly rewarded.
She’s on good form with this tweet on social media discourse:
E.G. rather than impulsively rushing to trash an author you think is a covidiot in the comments or on twitter, and getting their defences up, leading to counter trashing & polarisation, what if there was a financial (maybe even crypto) mechanism that rewarded you not to do that.
Browder & Rupert Murdoch slug it out to trash George Osborne’s Russian Israeli oligarch mate Roman – gets confusing the way the goalposts keep moving.
Sajid Javid revoked Abramovich’s right to live in the UK in 2019.
Which is really saying something because Javid sold CDOs at uber criminal moral sewer Deutsche Bank.
For more on that check out NYT finance editor David Enrich’s book Dark Towers and follow Val Broeksnitt on Bikini Robot Army on Twitter.
Unlike Bill Browder when he lost the libel suit in the UK High Court for falsely accusing Major Pavel Karpov of a massive tax fraud and the death of Browder’s accountant Magnitsky, who died of pancreatitis after Browder let him rot. https://t.co/p41GsRK2sW
I never understood how the people who were most intellectual, born in Europe, and knew the most about top down EU corruption ended up being flag waving Remainers.
why shouldnt European doctors join the ranks of precarious labour, what's two years of COVID? pic.twitter.com/hMiGZdR7jm
.@Keir_Starmer & @AdamWagner1 collaborated on ECHR fake Antisemitism report after Wagner had already unthinkably defended disgraced the far right ex-Tory MP and known paedo Harvey Proctor.
The two countries will always have an interesting relationship.
Idi Amin approached Israel for help in the 70s but it never happened.
There was also the case of the Entebbe Raid in which a plane was hijacked and all Jewish passengers threatened with death.
The hijackers took the plane to Entebbe Airport in Uganda on the understanding that Idi Amin would be supportive. This ended badly for Uganda but Binyamin Netanyahu’s brother lost his life fighting with the Israeli armed forces.
Eventually Amin was overthrown and died in Saudi.
Current leader Museveni has run Uganda for 37 years. He has used the Internet to target and harass opposition rivals.
Uganda has used Chinese Huawei to target opposition leader Bobi Wine. Using facial recognition and by charging people to use social media.
Young people are more likely to vote for Bobi Wine
This is a tune featuring Bobi Wine.
Here's how a clandestine deal involving the son of Uganda's president triggered a chain of events that nearly destroyed NSO Group.https://t.co/cwtHGe6vCc
It’s not a proper Africa corruption story without Tony or Cherie.
Tony doesn’t just advise Rwanda, he has staff there running the country.
Cherie more or less defended Genocide
Cherie defended Rwanda’s spy chief around 2015 when he was arrested in London over the murder of a Spanish aid worker during the Rwandan genocide in the 90s.
Fascinating Tweet from US turned British former Hermitage Hedge Fund operator Bill Browder who became a billionaire in the Russian disaster capitalist world of the 1990s.
US Announces New Magnitsky Sanctions on 12 government officials from Uganda, China, Belarus, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Mexico for "gross violations of human rights" https://t.co/TK1AxZzluK
All the replies relate to another fascinating country Uganda.
Too many crimes against humanity @YoweriMuseveni, killing, torturing, poisoning, Abductions.The number of people museveni has killed is not known @CMI @SFC,please sanction all museveni generals pic.twitter.com/TsHu3xpNkR
The leader of Uganda Museveni has been in charge for 37 years.
Browder always goes on about his dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and says the Russian government murdered him.
But it turns out Magnitsky was actually an accountant and Browder really was convicted of looting in Russia.
The idea is that he was doing it for big banks like HSBC.
In a way this is what Idi Amin accused the Indian community of doing in Uganda.
Draining the country.
So its funny to see African Ugandans who object to looting clinging so strongly to the messages of someone who stands accused of doing it himself – Browder.
But Browder has convinced the Tory government and other governments to pass the Magnitsky act which makes it ok to confiscate suspicious money.
I don’t believe we are talking about unexplained wealth orders but maybe something very similar.
I would like to think that confiscated money goes back to its original owner.
Does that mean UK will now pay Iran the debt it has been asked for in return for Nazanin Ratcliffe?
Will the Chinese government now be receiving the truckloads of cash that goes “over the border” into HSBC accounts in Hong Kong?
This all seems highly unlikely.
But if you pay off the UK government then you can keep your transnational money. And if you don’t then maybe it can be stolen.
That sounds like the logic to me.
By the way this is some footage floating around of Browder – I don’t fully understand the implications but the direction is quite clear.
What, not enough evil Russians to false sanction and abuse their human rights this year?
The story below, from this site, from April has a link to the banned film about Bill Browder. It was pulled from film festivals and taken down from YouTube as part of the wider effort to whitewash Browder’s rep and bolster the UK US case against Russia.
I’m all for people confronting each other in non violent ways but telling blatant lies over and over again to your own people is probably not the best way of gaining trust.
When BOJO, Dominic Raab, Sajid Javid, Rishi Sunak, & Bill Browder so obviously engage in shenanigans all it does is make people have even less desire to engage with the system.
Is this part of Vladimir Putin’s plan to destabilise global institutions by generating confusion as referenced by Adam Curtis in his sections on PR man and Tupac fan Vladimir Surkov?
Who would have thought UK and US would end up making it so easy for him?
The UK Government and Bank of England can recognise Juan Guaido as head of Venezuela and give him access to $1billion plus worth of Gold because they conveniently consider him to be the unelected leader of Venezuela not the elected Nicolas Maduro.
Smacks of a constitutional divorce ruling where Mistress Guaido gets to keep the house.
Would Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher have done the same for Osama bin Laden when he took on the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s?
Oh no back then they didn’t have to – they had BCCI.
The message coming out of this clickbaity CNN report appears to be designed for the American Market.
Which is that Antisemitism is being classed as a conspiracy theory. But what makes a conspiracy theory or a conspiracy theorist?
Someone who questions an official narrative?
In healthy societies people will be allowed to speculate about what is going on, who is doing what, and who is doing whom.
That’s not just gossip, it’s a survival tool.
As a non American I cringed when I saw the ADL CEO claim that Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory and that there is simply no validity to what Donald Trump is quoted as saying. In the UK, until recently, Jewish influence in Parliament and at Number 10 was barely ever publicly discussed.
But bit by bit during the days of New Labour the Sunday Times in particular ran stories about Labour Donors and then, under Cameron, more stories about Tory Donors.
While in some ways lobbying might be thought of as one pound one vote the topic has always been a bit of a dirty secret and there is a lot more to it than that.
Look up Ian Greer Associates for a picture of what it was was like in the 80s and 90s.
One result of pulled punches on lobbying and corruption, particularly with regard to following it up and getting results when it has been proven, is billions of pounds of covid contracts to Ministers’ contacts which have led to precisely zero resignations.
Owen Paterson voluntarily resigned over House Of Commons procedures linked to his corrupt activities but not the corruption itself.
They say the cover up is worse than the crime, in Paterson’s case it was the cover up that was so badly bungled.
Back to the CNN video, the idea that Israel has no influence in Washington is laughable. Of course it does. AIPAC is alive and well in the US and I would be surprised if an equivalent organisation doesn’t sponsor, mentor, train or guide MPs advisers in the UK House of Commons. If you have expertise in running and winning political campaigns then you are indispensable in politics. It would be absurd to think of MPs turning down the chance to work with the most experienced political campaigners.
I will let you draw your own conclusions re: the rest of the conversation between the two CNN interlocutors.
But one last point.
If Donald Trump said a single true thing then he was not given credit for it. If he clumsily argued any point then he was not allowed to be interpreted loosely or favourably in any way.
If someone made any of the points he made less forcefully they would have been listened to with no drama.
By cancelling Trump and making an example of him simply for stating his opinions as well as some facts the people over at CNN and ADL are creating a moral hazard in which their conduct and views become acceptable and anyone who makes any points that they don’t like is labelled a conspiracy theorist.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging Jewish and Israeli power and that there are a range of views in any group of people.
Yes Trump is cringe but these guys are worse. Thanks for attending today’s sermon.
The digital pulpit is still in session, I give way to the chaps over at CNN.
Some extra bits and bobs re truth energy money behaviour
Remember when Macron talked big about how GDPR was a European middle ground between the unregulated Wild West US tech giants and the Chinese government backed behemoths?
With few backers more enthusiastic than The Economist.
But suddenly the mask has slipped
These white liberals (very definitely not all white) who were always up for military interventions against brown people now reveal their true colours.
Take Ann McElvoy, senior editor at the Economist.
''Somewhere between four and five million adults are unvaccinated — a risk to themselves when it comes to the heightened chance of ending up in hospital and more likely to pass on the virus'' #ESComment@annemcelvoyhttps://t.co/vkzqDXs8nj
This woman, who claims to be a Liberal, thinks it is OK to punish those who have chosen not to be vaccinated by forcing them to be vaccinated.
How can a flu virus from China that actually kills so few people suddenly be the thing that everyone is forced to vaccinate against?
Warmongers and health privatisers like McElvoy have to keep their eye on the ball.
And that means continuing with the agenda.
Transferring public money from the NHS into private hands.
Nothing has changed, she is doing what she has always done.
In this case it is encouraging the wealthy and the privileged to exterminate the marginalised and the poor.
I was on a zoom call with McElvoy once. She came off as a devastatingly inhumane individual whose sense of self importance blinded her to any valid problem solving thought processes.
But for pro war, racist, elitist, technocrats, she is probably not yet on the scale of a Klaus Schwab, Ursula von der Leyen, or Bill Gates.
Few things allow me to draw as much comfort as knowing I will always be on a different side to her.
Why do you think Chancellor Rishi Sunak was in California this week? Something to do with health privatisation?
And why has Google’s CEO Sundar Pinchai told its supposedly intelligent enlightened staff that they are all now subject to mandatory Vaccines?
In a book of old puns this week I saw that the entry next to mandate said male escort.
Pinchai wants to penetrate your flesh as well as your soul via your phone and your wallet.
But don’t forget Deep Mind which gave untold UK patient data to Google Health
These people are working on profiling and sequencing our genomic data. Which means they want to be able to target our nervous systems as well our minds, bank accounts and behaviour.
Be aware. Stay clean.
There is a Covid protest in London today.
I filmed a human rights protest outside one of the Zara fashion shops on Oxford Street last week. This was organised by Uyghur solidarity protestors. Zara is owned by Inditex a Spanish firm based in Coruña. They reported huge profits this week.
How much of its cotton is drawn from slave labour?
The EU supposedly imposed sanctions on China for exploiting Uyghurs but Inditex and Zara are Spanish businesses and still operate in Europe.
A town in France recently banned Zara from building an extension to their shop because of the Uygur exploitation but didn’t ban them from trading.
Life in a consumer society will inevitably involve many moral compromises. Whether to take the vaccine, support slave labour, animal cruelty, pay below the minimum wage or destroy the environment. We are often simultaneously doing several of these.
But it is only by not hiding from the reality of our complicity that we can find ways of rejecting slavery and living genuinely healthier lives.
On the radio this morning Benedict Cumberbatch was talking about being in the new Spiderman film, and the biopic of artist Louis Wain
Mr Cumberbatch said Marvel Comics are like the new Shakespeare, that audiences crave good characters and good story above explosions and special effects.
He pointed out that Louis Wain liked to anthropomorphize cats – before himself anthropomorphizing covid by saying the virus doesn’t care about cinema release dates – naughty.
The interviewer asked Benedict about getting into character to play play Dominic Cummings. But sadly they missed an opportunity to talk about another character he famously played, Julian Assange
Julian lost his case against the US government on Friday. He is fighting extradition to the US. He is guilty of running WikiLeaks which exposed multiple US war crimes.
The spineless BBC has done little to provide balanced reporting on the case. It is far too busy providing the government with the cover it needs to bring in a new domestic vaccine passport system which will further open the door to central bank digital currencies and full on government surveillance of all we do in our daily lives.
It is ironic that as Elon Musk and Boris Johnson are having more children and using the government to enrich a small number of big time capitalists, that those who wish to report on the government’s total lack of meaningful transparency and pathological hatred of citizens’s rights and privacy like WikiLeaks and Assange are being attacked and having their lives destroyed just because the US and UK are unable to play fair.
Of course the CIA agent who killed a British teenager by driving on the wrong side of the road is going to avoid facing criminal prosecution in the UK and will instead beam in via video link.
And Prince Andrew is happily not co-operating with US police and criminal justice system
The police are only handing one in ten reported rapes to the crime prosecution service (CPS) and even then the victims that eventually do get to court feel let down by the insensitive nature of CPS.
Does the police think nine out of ten women and girls who allege rape are simply lying?
Or is it the CPS that is itself not structured to give women a fair chance of getting justice?
Meanwhile the UK military is denying those who have been raped in the military the chance of a hearing before a civilian court.
The conviction rate in military courts is even lower than in the already hostile UK civilian ones.
On top of all that, today Dominic Raab went on the radio to push for his reforms to the justice system. He wants to dismantle the human rights act in order to more easily deport foreign offenders.
There is little media scrutiny of the legal system which produces miscarriages daily. For Raab to use an already defunded dysfunctional system to spuriously deport people is entirely coheres with his psychopathic arc.
He even had a go at one of his Tory colleagues who compared the introduction of vaccine passports to Nazi Germany. There will likely be some sort of Tory rebellion tonight but it won’t achieve anything because the opposition party will likely back the government.
Raab likes to get upset about any mention of the Holocaust but of course has no empathy for the 90% women whose rape allegations are rejected or the people he very likely is so keen on wrongfully deporting.
He quietly claims victim status as he seeks to pull UK out of the Convention on Human Rights and allows ongoing torture of Julian Assange who has only ever published true stories about what is done by Governments with public money and in the public’s name.
Apparently the track below has a Stephen Sondheim influence from South Pacific or West Side Story.
Mr Sondheim just passed away and was a huge influence on Sam Mendes who ran the Donmar Theatre in London before becoming a renowned film director. Mendes and Nick Clegg were both in Footlights at Cambridge. Clegg went on to work for suspicious Leon Brittan before becoming deputy PM and now off at Facebook.
Mendes did a lot of work with Blair, Alastair Campbell and Kevin Spacey. I assume he will have therefore been considered for some work for the Clintons.
I always felt American Beauty was a Democrat movie.
I wonder if Weinstein was involved.
And if Sam is in Ghislaine’s black book.
Reports from her trial claim the book will remain sealed. But it is already in the public domain.
Check the sounds of the kid who speaks at the end of the tune. Apparently the Nice’s album was named after a fake food critic. I love the way the kid says Inevitable!
Of course I referred him to my life-changing YouTube channel.
For some reason he employed terminology such as woke, antifa and BLM in reference to groups to which he hoped I don’t belong.
As I was sporting my new gamer headset and beautiful brown skin, I was looking even more spiffingly boss, woke, dapper, and antifa than the norm.
Upon telling Sean such terminology made him sound retarded, he wasn’t bothered one omicron.
I then boldly announced that the Irish government’s sole political philosophy is to take whatever medicine is prescribed to remain on the EU pimps and hos invite list.
Sean confirmed that in Brussels the “paddies” are expected to do as they’re told.
He also told me about a sacred hill / shrine outside Dublin that has been there for at least a thousand years.
The government decided to build a motorway on it a few years back but had to change plans due to protests.
Apparently a call will have come in telling them to expect bombs.
Not for me to approve threats of violence.
Especially when they’re from front groups for the English state.
Piers to Peers
Suddenly Piers Corbyn showed up.
Made an entrance like an situationist.
Being the consumate opportunist I am Sean was informed of my intention to film Piers.
Make up your mind for yourself what Piers was saying.
When it comes to politics, as with boxing, I’m with Chris Eubank.
It is a dirty sport, and I’m the world champion.
Piers is more well known now than at any moment in his public life, and once again he is winning the political argument.
The left right political terminology is a throwback to the horseshoe shaped architecture of the French Senate.
Where the extreme right can be found right next to the extreme left.
So there.
No Sheikhs were hurt in the making of this blog post.
If only the same could be said for the damaged vaxxed.
This event is happening this Thursday
Sands Films studio has invited Miriam Margolyes, Mark Thomas,Dr Bob Gill & others,to read poems about the NHS written by nurses, doctors & other NHS staff inspired by the anthology These Are the Hands. Tickets free @sandsfilmscinehttps://t.co/g0XS5pacqTpic.twitter.com/npoIUwvRDi
Dr Bob Gill is a national hero and his videos about the NHS have done more to communicate the politics and economics of this country than the rest of the media combined.
Bob smashes it in this interview just before Covid. We are due for a re-evaluation of where we were and where we ought to be.
