fahrenheit451:301

A few days ago, POTUS Trump announced the withdrawal of the US forces ( The figure quoted was 2,000 personnel) currently illegally stationed in Syria.

This caused immediate consternation and hyperbolic over reaction from the Washington Beltway NeoCon establishment and their symbiotic liberal foreign interventionist partners aka the Democrats. DefSec Mattis resigned in the wake of the Commander-in-Chief’s welcome and somewhat unduly delayed strategic decision.

The western -backed ( funded,trained,equipped and armed ) disparate terrorist gangs ranging from AlQaeda to ISIS/Daesh have proven several veritable hornets’ nests too much for the meddling US and its equally delusional and inept NATO satrapies to deal with let alone forge any worthwhile conclusion from.

The Syria domiciled Kurds are the patsy in the middle getting lined up for another historically royal shafting from their supposed foreign friends and allies.Composing the bulk of the SDF fighting forces,the Kurdish fighters have done the proverbial ” heavy lifting ” on the ground in extirpating ISIS territorially.

Their undoubted and welcome efficacy and success in this matter has, from a Realpolitik perspective pushed Erdogan’s nose out of joint and thus led him to hurl the Turkish army into Syrian territory largely in a ethnic cleansing of all land along Turkey’s borders.

Apart from Russia ,Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah who have all been invited by the sovereign legitimate government of Syria to assist them in its fight primarily against ISIS, all other military ” state actors ” -The US,UK,France,Germany,Canada and especially the genocidal,slavering warmongering dogs of Turkey are all there in contravention of International Law.They are committing war crimes.

Still, having one less drunken,boorish,knuckle-dragging thug to deal with at an illegal rave is welcome.

Thank you President Trump.

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Contemporary politics is so exciting right now ; Gilets Jaunes are setting the agenda in France; Germany has a burgeoning populist movement/Party in the AfD . Italy has an activist Coalition government  Lega /M5S that's seemingly prepared to mix it with the EU over national budget and debt issues. And so on and so forth.

Belgium has a minority government that's falling apart,as governments invariably do in Belgium, Hungary and Poland are both somewhat at loggerheads with the overbearing and tyrannical EU over domestic laws and the exercise of sovereignty.

And in the UK? Theresa May -former Anglican Tea Lady of the Year - has "won" a vote of confidence among her own party's parliamentary representatives by 200  to 117.Which resolved let alone solved absolutely nothing regarding the on going post-modern performance installation art work known as Brexit.

The 19th Century FPTP,single member constituency form of parliamentary representation ossified into the straitjacket of two major political parties-both historically in decline-merely exacerbates the hiatus of political legitimacy and democratic governance within the UK.

As Marxist-Leninists might say, were they still in the Realpolitik business and of some conceivable relevance ,the requisite necessary preconditions favourable to the advance of revolutionary politics has been attained ( or very nearly so ).

There is a nascent #YellowVestsUK that might,though I personally doubt it, take on the scope of and have the impact of the French #GiletsJaunes. There hasn't been a genuine extra-parliamentary mass political movement in the UK of any heft since the Chartists back in the 1840s.

 Too badly led for far too many decades by regressive,blinkered Lefts of many shades,extra-parliamentary protest has too often been neutered and rendered inert by those very forces that were supposedly aiming for a revolutionary overthrow.It has fallen to the non-Left aka the Right to provide any potential bedrock on which alternate structures can be built.

Still,all in all the tsunami;tidal wave upon tidal wave,is picking up intensity and it doesn't take a weatherman to tell you once the weather changes.

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In May 2017 ,avowed "modernising" technocrat, fanatical devotee of alrger European Union and admirer of Tony Blair -Macron became President of France after defeating Marine LePen in the run off 66-34%. And 19 months later his Presidency has reached its apogee.

Herewith the following gleaned verbatim, from The Spectator on December 3 , the first part of a a scintillating article from Brendan O'Neill;

" At last, a people’s revolt against the tyranny of environmentalism. Paris is burning. Not since 1968 has there been such heat and fury in the streets.Thousands of ‘gilets jaunes’ stormed the capital at the weekend to rage against Emmanuel Macron and his treatment of them with aloof, technocratic disdain. And yet leftists in Britain and the US have been largely silent, or at least antsy, about this people’s revolt. The same people who got so excited about the staid, static Occupy movement a few years ago — which couldn’t even been arsed to march, never mind riot — seem struck dumb by the sight of tens of thousands of French people taking to the barricades against Macronism.

It isn’t hard to see why. It’s because this revolt is as much against their political orthodoxies as it is against Macron’s out-of-touch and monarchical style. Most strikingly this is a people’s rebellion against the onerous consequences of climate-change policy, against the politics of environmentalism and its tendency to punish the little people for daring to live relatively modern, fossil-fuelled lives. This is new. This is unprecedented. We are witnessing perhaps the first mass uprising against eco-elitism and we should welcome it with open arms to the broader populist revolt that has been sweeping Europe for a few years now.

The ‘gilet jaunes’ — or yellow-vests, after the hi-vis vests they wear — are in rebellion against Macron’s hikes in fuel tax. As part of his and the EU’s commitment to cutting carbon emissions, Macron is punishing the drivers of diesel vehicles in particular, raising the tax by 7.6 cents for every litre of diesel fuel. This will badly hit the pockets of those in rural France, who need to drive, and who can’t just hop on buses as deluded Macronists living in one of the fancy arrondissements of Paris have suggested they should. These people on the periphery of French society — truck drivers, provincial plumbers, builders, deliverymen, teachers, parents — have rocked up to the centre of French society in their tens of thousands three times in recent weeks, their message the same every time: ‘Enough is enough. Stop making our lives harder.’

It is a perfect snapshot of the most important divide in 21st-century Europe: that between a blinkered elite and ordinary people who’ve had as much bossing about, tax rises, paternalism and disdain as they can take. So from his presidential palace in Paris, Macron decrees that the little people of the nation must pay a kind of penance for the eco-crime of driving diesel-fuelled cars, like a modern-day Marie Antoinette deciding with a wave of the hand what is good for the plebs. It’s little wonder that the graffiti left behind following the latest uprising in Paris at the weekend compared Macron to Louis XVI and demanded that he resign.

 

This leaderless, diverse revolt, packed with all sorts of people, including both leftists and right-wingers, is important for many reasons. First because it beautifully, fatally shatters the delusional faith that certain Europhiles and piners for the maintenance of the status quo have placed in Macron since his election in May 2017.

And the second reason this revolt is important is because it suggests that no modern orthodoxy is safe from the populist fightback. Not even the environmentalist one.

For years we have lived in a climate of ‘You can’t say that’. You can’t criticise mass immigration — that’s xenophobia. You can’t oppose the EU — that’s Europhobia. You can’t raise concerns about radical Islam — that’s Islamophobia. You can’t agitate against climate-change policy — that’s climate-change denialism, on a par with Holocaust denialism, and anyone who dares to bristle against eco-orthodoxy deserves to be cast out of polite society. And yet now, in this populist moment, people are daring to say precisely these unsayable things. They’re standing up to the EU. They’re demanding that immigration become a democratic concern rather than something worked out for us by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. And now they’re even grating against the hitherto unquestionable religious-style diktat that we must all drive less, shop less and do less in order to ‘save the planet’. "

And there you have it.

The anti -metropolitan PC multicultural elitist tidal wave across the Continent continues and is swelling by the day.

Fraser Myers writing in Spiked  concluded his article on the Gilets Jaunes thus:-

" But there is a deeper disconnect, too. Across the West, the left has struggled to know how to respond to the populist uprisings of recent years. There is a tendency on the left to denounce any shock to the status quo as driven by reactionary forces. The revolting masses are often written off as fascists.
That the yellow vests – a mass, largely working-class movement, defying the government and standing up for its interests – makes many on the left, at best, wary and, at worst, scornful is a damning indictment indeed. "

Both O'Neill and Myers analyses accord fully with my own views.

My only regret is that I'm not in a realistic position to simply pop over the Channel and taste some of the very live action for myself.

But at least Paris is burning once more and we'll always have Paris.

" Gilets Jaunes Avant! "

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New Foreword: It has always struck me as monumentally hypocritical of the PC multiculturalist/globalist metropolitan elites to insist on advocating unrestriced freedom of movement , ie. mass immigration on the basis that we as a Country have an ageing population and the economy requires far more many tax-paying workers than we have at present or are likely to have any time soon to ameliorate what the elites tell us is a demographic timebomb.
The very same ideologically driven metropolitan ruling elites who brought in the Abortion Act 1968 whichhas wiped out countless millions of what would otherwise have been our fellow indigenous UK citizens.
It's worth bearing in mind that:-Of our fellow 7 million pre-birth humans exterminated with state approval since 1968;the cohort so dealt with between 1968 and 78 would by now in the ordinary course of life have become grandparents by now.Those so heinously dealt with between 1979 and 98 would by now be parents of their own children.

( The following originally appeared as fahrenheit451:280 on August 28 this year )

Since the British parliament legalised Abortion in 1968,there have to date been around 7,000,000 abortions carried out in the UK. That approximates to an annual average of around 150,000 per annum or around 3,000 every single week over the last 50 years.
The ballpark figure of 7 million surpasses the number of murders carried out by The German Third Reich in its extermination camps during the years 1939-45 in what became known after the War as the Holocaust.
Such is the monumental scale of what is being carried out in the guise of a regular,routine medicalised procedure that Society at large has become oblivious to just what a monstrous amoral depravity abortion really is.
Women's reproductive  "Rights" and a woman's  "Right" to choose to control her own fertility have all been effectively used as quasi-moral precepts by the proponents of abortion to facilitate the widespread acceptance of the fundamental concept that it's okay and normal and acceptable to systematically exterminate pre-birth humans at the putative mother';s personal whim and insousiance.
On May 26 2018,the Ireland held an advisory referendum on a proposed amendment to Article 8 of the constitution that in effect protects the life of the unborn child. The public vote to give the Dublin legislature the necessary permission and approval to repeal Article 8 and as a consequence legalise abortion was approved 66% to 34% on a 64% turn out. which by common reckoning means that 57% or thereabouts of Ireland's registered electorate did NOT give their active assent to the amendment;then again its always about who votes;not voting never counts.
That in itself is a lesson for all those who refuse to participate  in the democratic political discourse and elections.Your absence helps the other side to win.
And so it goes.Not that all battles are lost quite as decisively as the one in Ireland or even lost at all.
The Senate in Argentina recently vetoed their legislature's procedural attempt to enact their own national advisory referendum on legalising abortion that copied the template of the pro-abortionists' Repeal The 8th campaign in Ireland.
In the United States there is growing disquiet over President Trump's Supreme Court nominee who might, once approved, be in a position to pave the way for an eventual rollback on their own 1968 annus horribilis Roe v.Wade that abomination contemporaneous with our own 1968 Abortion Act.
Any person professing to be a Christian who is indifferent to or fails to oppose, let alone support in any way whatsoever, Abortion, is an apostate and heretic and must be excommunicated.

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On December 11th, the House of Commons - 650 itinerant Westminster careerist bench-warmers get to vote on what is being characterised as " The Deal " ; the interim arrangements for transitioning the UK out of the EU.

The Grand Guignol of a Pantomime that has been " Brexit " is drawing on its last breaths ,the sham of Leaving the EU is itself drawing to a close.

The faux- protagonists of Remain and Leave are coming to the end of their carefully prepared playscript ,all utterly facile,flimsy caricatures that calling them men of straw would imbue them with the unearned deference of regarding any of them with even being remotely human let alone plausible in anything they ever did  or said.

Theresa May, is however idiosyncratically providing the bemused,baffled and befuddled Electorate with her own farewell Cadenza. A whistle-stop tour across the country to galvanise public opinion onto her side ahead of the HoC vote.

History shall view the name of Theresa May as merely providing the dot above the letter " i " in the word shit.A name that annotates the darkest and most egregious betrayal of the British People and the once inviolable sovereignty of our Nation.

The metropolitan elites and their lackeys of the political class have carried out an act of such heinous treason that it will live on in the annals of infamy forever.

After this,the Deluge.

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( Originally posted on July 20 2016 as And So It Goes..#786  on WordPress )

Please note  the original footnote...Theresa May's hijacking of the Tories' electoral strategy with her precipitous and as it turned out calamitous calling of an early general election was a surprise as still unknown at the time of the original post...

Nearly 4 weeks after EU Referendum Day, the forces of Reaction & Remain continue to seek more ways to stymie and/or annul the decision of the UK Electorate to vote to leave the EU ( aka Brexit ). Petitions,demonstrations, legal actions,organised online forums, academics and prelates, commentators on every specialism - finance, foreign relations, international trade, have been brought to bear against the carrying out of the decision to leave the EU. Where does this heinous misbehaviour stem from, who are the main culprits? The facts are that Tory MPs were split roughly 50-50 on the issue, whereas Labour MPs were 90-10 for Remain.And given the enormous pro-Leave votes in a huge number of nominally Labour " seats ", it was #LabourInForBritain who were by some considerable distance wide of the mark. Not only were they not singing from the same hymn-sheet as their " traditional voters ", LabourInForBritain weren't even standing in the same pews in the same church as their core voters. And that is a good thing, irrespective of any other partisan ideological considerations, if indeed it can  still be argued that there are any of any merit left. Once upon a time matters such as Treason and Sedition meant something, the words and what they signified resonated with awe and gravitas. A fortnight or so ago, a pop-up campaign - The 48% - organised a protest rally in London.One of their keynote speakers, Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy actually preached Sedition and sought to incite the crowd against our lawful government and its acceptance of the EU referendum result. The metropolitan domiciled, self-referencing bien pensant with their faux-bourgeois manners and social affectations and faddish prejudices have been around for a very long time indeed. And it is something of a meta-historical phenomenon that they choose precisely this juncture in the overarching historical narrative to once again display and articulate in an unrestrained, undiplomatic fashion their utter contempt, loathing and hatred of the majority within British society.
Here's what I emailed to my local newspaper the other day, perhaps it'll get published, perhaps not.
Clearly our current MP for Wakefield has lost confidence in the electorate on whom she is dependent. It seems that our current MP is far from " chuffed " with the democratic and binding decision of the electorate. That's a pity because in over 40 years of community and Trades Union activism I have never witnessed such a mendacious and fundamentally dishonest campaign than that waged by the Remain block during The EU Referendum. Bear in mind that ‪#‎LabourInForBritain‬ provided Remain's pivotal,leading role with some 200 Labour MPs declaring for Remain. It is not the electorate that has to explain itself to its elected representatives,but rather it behoves those such as Mary Creagh to make an unreserved and unconditional apology to the Electorate.
Will any MP who supported and canvassed for Remain actually apologise? probably not. Will Brexit be declared null and void? probably not.

FOOTNOTE :- There is a General Election scheduled for May 2020, once invoked by the PM via Royal prerogative, Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty envisages a timeframe of 2 years for all subsequent negotiations. This government will not go into an election with that unresolved.

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There's not a great deal worth blogging about at present, in fact there hasn't been for quite some time.The two predominant topics that have motivated my output have broadly speaking been the conflict in Syria -which ineluctably is going the way of the Syrian government and its all important allies. The other topic that has occupied most of my political intellect is Brexit- and that is now all but dead and buried.

Of course there are nuanced and polemical arguments to be debated about the conduct of the various belligerent parties in Syria just as there are with the various belligerent parties in the brexit battle.But by and large all the likeliest possibilities and developments have been aired and analysed. Nothing more can be usefully added.

" Various and diverse democratic national and regional elections throughout the Continent of Europe still manage to stimulate and most are eagerly awaited as they are de-facto plebiscites on further Euro-intergration.

Back on June 28 2016, I posted this blog on the fantastic EU referendum result.

Last Thursday 23rd of June’s  witnessed  the great exercise of the inalienable historic rights and incontestable prerogative of the Sovereign British Electorate.
That  many elected members of parliament -( themselves only in office solely by that very same Sovereign exercise of the Electorate’s prerogative ) had the actual temerity,nay brass-necked insolence and insubordination to even cast the very merest shadow of doubt and contentious conjecture at the Victorious outcome for LEAVE is breathtaking in its audacity.
This is the very stuff of outright Sedition, tantamount to Treason against Lawful Authority,that Lawful Authority itself is predicated upon and is wholly dependent for its legitimacy and acceptance on the expression of Sovereign Will of the Electorate.
Equally culpable of outrageously partisan class-based and hubristic demagoguery are the Press, the Commentariat,Financiers,Artists and Academics of every discipline who by and large caricatured the 52% who voted LEAVE as mainly thick,uneducated,racist,small-minded northerners.
Naturally most of this insidious ideological invective was orchestrated,weaponised and delivered via the some 200 #LabourIn MPs. Who were left bemused on Friday 24th.June as to why ” their ” core voters – 9 million and falling,  didn’t do what they had been advised most fervently to do and vote REMAIN.
History belongs to the Masses. The Sovereignty of the British electorate cannot be countermanded. Thank God. "

It is against those principles that the behaviour and actions of the entire Remain campaign continue to be judged.

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Wishing only to sledgehammer the point home and channelling  Monty Python's " Dead Parrot "sketch without too much restraint. Brexit is dead.It is no more,it is an ex-brexit.
The metropolitan ruling elites never fell out with each other over the 2016 EURef result.The swarms of Tory fruitflies so faux- vehemently protesting their undying patriotism were no more committed to enacting the British electorate's sovereign decision of 23 June 2016 than their equally scabrous counterparts. It was  " all lies and jsets " and we heard what we wanted to hear and disregarded the blindingly ineluctable obvious.
The EU funded antidemocratic seditionists pretending to be  grassroots #PeoplesVote knew all this from the off. they are now simply being plain and obnoxiously boorish in parading their venal bombastic triumph over the British people.
Once your enemy is dead and buried having a drunken party to celebrate lacks taste and genuine class.
So, a few days ago it was variously reported that " more than 60 " and " more than 70 " business leaders had written to Theresa May demanding a second referendum. these 60 or was it 70 signed the letter as emanating from " Business for a People's Vote " an off shoot of the EU funded  and wholly bogus #PeoplesVote.
and then,just when you'd thought that their impudence and effrontery couldn't get any worse,get this,1,500 lawyers purporting to be " Lawyers for a People's Vote " aka EU funded City shysters on their extended lunch hour have signed a letter to the Anglican Tea Lady of The Year aka Theresa May,demanding an EURef re-run so as the stupid people might not vote incorrectly a second time as they did first.
Who was that said that History repeats itself,first as a tragedy then as a comedy.Or was that too much of a rhetorical question.

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A Lamentation Upon Brexit & How We Were All Betrayed

 

( With apologies to Simon & Garfunkel )

 

I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest....

And he carries the reminders

Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains...

 

 

The European Union already in its previous guises ( EEC, EC ) had only one aim;to take down the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.And along it with all our Historic legacy,culture and society.

 

The globalist/multiculturalist PC metropolitan elites hijacked,( were allowed to hijack?) the EURef Leave Campaign which was necessary in order for them to ensure that the EU achieved that goal.

 

Bear that in mind when you come over all fuzzy and want to start trusting them again sometime in the future.

Not that we have one any longer.

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To quote that haunting line,one of many,from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon  ,there's nothing more to say.

There really isn't and Peter Hitchens has said what needed saying on brexit  better,more succinctly and incisively than just about any journalist /commentator anywhere.

So, gleaned from his Mail on Sunday  blog of 20 October 2018 :-

"  Negotiation is a test of strength. And Britain is far weaker than the giant German empire that is the EU.

Sooner or later, if we truly want to get out of that empire, we are going to have to grasp this. Poor, hopeless Theresa May hasn’t a chance, not least because she has never really wanted to leave. So she flounders between wild fake militancy, adopted to protect her right flank, and pathetic weakness – her actual position.

But I have even less time for the posturing braggarts, on all sides of the question, who now pretend that their positions are so pure and wonderful that they cannot give an inch. The Europhiles are ghastly, especially their dangerous call for a second referendum.

But worst of all are those who demand a total, pure exit from the EU, even if it means a catastrophic walkout with nothing agreed.

As I sometimes point out, I don’t recall seeing most of these heroes around when I was one of the few voices calling for British independence in the long years before 2016.

Back then, most of these born-again, all-or-nothing fanatics, in politics and the media, were keen allies of Mr Cameron, perhaps the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had.

Remember how he derided anyone who objected to the loss of national independence as silly old fools ‘banging on’, or as ‘fruitcakes’. Well, it seems, they are all fruitcakes now. Though their obsessions are strange.

I wanted to get out of the EU, and still do, because I believe continental law and forms of government will eventually destroy English law and our unique free Parliament.

I couldn’t give a farthing for the freedom to import chlorine-washed chicken from the USA, or fling our markets open wide to Asia. In fact, I rather fear it. I do not think that, by leaving the EU, we will suddenly export more. Why would that happen? Our goods are not especially cheap and we make little that the world actually wants. I think we will import more.

What I want to do is rip up our allegiance to the European Arrest Warrant, a grave breach of our ancient liberties which everyone seems to have completely forgotten about. I want to get rid of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, now our real Supreme Court. And I want to stop rubber-stamping European Commission directives and pretending they are our own laws. And I would also like to shake free of the crazy policy of pushing the EU eastwards into Ukraine and the Caucasus.

If Brussels and Washington really want a war with Russia, then let them have one. But Britain has no interest at all in reviving this grubby, aggressive conflict, which has already convulsed Europe twice in one century.

These aims can be achieved by doing what I have now been urging for months – the Norway Option. This needs no permission from Brussels. It formally takes us out of the EU, so fulfilling the referendum vote. It would make the Irish border as relaxed as the current frontier between Norway and Sweden, which is pretty relaxed. It frees us from three-quarters of EU interference in our laws and life.

It keeps us in the European Economic Area, so there is no risk to the economy. It frees us from the EU’s damaging Common Agricultural Policy and from the daylight robbery of the Common Fisheries Policy. It hugely cuts our contributions to Brussels.

But, thanks to strident, inflexible groups of MPs whose main concern is their future careers, it has barely been considered.

I can’t stop them. But if they manage to lead us into chaos and an economic crash, then I shall at least try to make sure that their selfish folly is not forgotten.  "

Yeah and Amen.

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It's only a couple of blog posts or so ago that I opined that no-one really gives a shit about investigative journalists.

That was in the wake of the news of Marinova's murder in Bulgaria.She was the third investigative journalists murdered in a EU member state in the past 12 months. Galizia in Malta and Kuciak in Slovakia being the other two martyred for the truth and public accountability.

But  " news " corporate MSM news has now moved on to Khashoggi. A sworn opponent of the ruling Saudi Royal family and of its quasi-medieval politics and practices. A writer and polemicist in exile in the USA and habitue of the Washington Post he popped into the Saudi embassy in Ankara to sort out some bureaucratic paperwork. He was consequently tortured,murdered,cut up into pieces and buried.

Even in Erdogan's Turkey,where some 250 professional Turkish journalists are languishing in prison,this act of barbaric impunity was more than one step way too far to shrug off or excuse.And the proverbial merde hit the international diplomatic fan in spectacular fashion.

Khashoggi is now flavour of the month as far as martyred journalists go.

Which is kind of odd since in theory the murder of investigative journalists ought to be treated equally,except we all know that they're not.

Realpolitik and the ranking of nations plays its ineluctable part in determining just how much concern and consternation surrounds any death of any journalist.How do the murders of Marinova,Kuciak and Galizia stack up against that of Khashoggi's ?

Here's something gleaned from Balkan Insight ,3 September '18 :-

" After Bulgaria funnelled 90 million euros from the EU into restoration projects that critics have slated, conservationists dread the results of the next spending spree – and the expected tourist boom has yet to materialise.

Ana Blagova BIRN“It’s weeping – a weeping fortress,” conservation architect Stella Duleva told BIRN, describing the white substance leaking from the newly-restored walls of the 4^th-century Roman fort of Trayanovi Vrata in Bulgaria.

“It had survived 16 centuries, and now it’s been ruined by 2 million euros,” she added.

Sitting atop a mountain pass between ancient Thrace and Macedonia, the fort is one of 120 heritage sites that Bulgaria’s government chose to restore as tourist attractions between 2011 and 2015, using its own money and nearly 90 million euros from the EU’s Regional Development Fund, ERDF.

Conservationists warn that much of the “restoration” work has damaged rather than preserved centuries-old landmarks, without attracting the hoped-for tourism boom. Even one of the scheme’s cheerleaders has suggested that funds have been misused.

Now another tranche of European funding, known in Bulgaria as “Operational programme ‘Regions in Growth’”, is due to become available this year. Under it, at least 100 million euros will be allocated to develop more tourist attractions.

The EU and Bulgarian authorities have conceded to BIRN that lessons need to be learned from the earlier programme, but are still backing the latest spending spree. "


Viktoria Marinova had been busily uncovering widespread fraud and corruption involving EU funding in Bulgaria when she was murdered,apparently by a psychopathic lowlife with a record who was speedily apprehended by the authorities in Germany within a matter of days following Marinova's murder.How convenient.

Kuciak ( along with his girlfriend ) were executed by Mafia hit-men in Slovakia and Galizia was car-bombed in Malta.All of them inextricably linked to various and diverse widespread,institutionalised corruption and fraud within the various member states and between EU member states and the EU bureaucracy itself.

All those prominent political leaders who have spoken out about Khashoggi and demanded to ascertain the  " truth ",all had been previously eerily quiet on Marinova,Kuciak and Galizia.

And so it goes...

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The following appeared on Belfast Telegraph Digital :-

October 15 2018

DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said that Brexit has turned into a " battle for the Union itself ", with the EU and UK government no closer to agreeing a withdrawal deal.

 So,here we are at the precipice.It's worth recounting briefly which intricate labyrinth of steps we've traversed in order to find ourselves at this singularly existential juncture.

 It's okay,you can skip the next bit since in retrospect it seems highly implausible that such a portmanteau of eventualities could occur or are ever likely to occur in such a fashion ever again.

Tories decide to add a commitment to holding an " In-Out" referendum on EU membership to their manifesto for GE2015. They do it,in what their leadership assumes is a countervailing and pre-emptive manouevre to stop further votes being lost to UKIP.

Against the odds,Cameron leads his Party to an outright victory with a 20-odd seats overall majority.

Parliament approves with virtually no dissenting votes against that a binding In-Out referendum will be held on June 23 2016.

As polling booths closed on June 22,leading bookmakers were quoting that the Remain campaign is 9 to 1 on, to win.In lay man's terms that means in order to win £1 you'd have to place a bet of £9.That's the racingiest certainty of all time.

Except that the bookies' and the metropolitan elites' and political establishment's favourite came in second.

2 years of unabated Sturm und drang ensued.

During which time Cameron & Osborne jumped ship asap after the Leave victory and Theresa May - Anglican Tea Lady of the Year became Tory leader and with it PM after having campaigned for Remain.
By 2017 she'd become more confused than usual and in a prolonged fit of political hubris called for and engineered a General election which the opposition parties generously helped her to do.A 20-odd seats overall majority got blown out of the water,but as still the largest party, the Tories cut a deal with the DUP to allow them to govern.So instead of gaining a surer grip on the brexit negotiations with a larger Tory overall majority who she could command at will, May the supreme anti-strategist ended up with no majority and her premiership and dreams of grandeur on life support with the switch firmly in the grasp of a fiercely pro-brexit DUP.

And so on and so forth up to the present day.

Brexit itself remains firmly on course to be utterly,callously and brutally betrayed by the nation's political class.Something like 80% of the itinerant Westminster benchwarmers were for Remain and were always highly unlikely to expedite matters in such a manner as to assuage the expectations that a Vote for Leave unleashed.

As for the contrived hysteria and virtue signalling over the Irish border and all the quasi-theological cant over a backstop and the Good Friday Agreement,blah,blah,blah remember this; the ratbag Fenian regime residing in Dublin has to have its national budget approved by a committee of the German Bundestag before it,the ragbag regime in Dublin is even allowed to spend any of its own pocket money.

Treachery ,hypocrisy and otiose cant are the political class' tools of the trade.And the sooner the tumbrils come to cart them all off,the better.

And so it goes...

fahrenheit451:289

Truth is most people probably don't a give a shit about investigative journalists.Or what happens to them or doesn't happen to them.Perhaps the only time when some random spark ignites the public's interest in investigative journalism is when a scandal is uncovered and wrong doing is exposed to the bright daylight of public scrutiny.

Not all journalists are investigators but it goes with the profession's territory.Born to snoop,to pry,to ask the really awkward questions,to dig, to get their goddamn head blown off if they dig too deep and wind up annoying the wrong people at the wrong moment.

But when all the sums get added up at the close of business,not too many give a damn one way or the other;unless and until,of course events start to impinge too often and bodies start to pile up in plain sight of the civilians who would,if they could choose,rather not know,rather not confront the mire and the blood of Realpolitik as it gets played in real time with real consequences.

Political parties and their activists and partisan commentators who keep up the volume pumped up on any and all matters and all kinds of issues ,for some reason have fallen silent on the recent spate of journalist murders.

The most recent one,just a few days ago in Bulgaria was that of local investigative journalist Viktoria Marinova,who was the authorities say was raped and murdered.She had been looking into fraud and corruption linked to EU contracts. Back in February of this year, in Slovakia, it had been the turn of Jan Kuciak who together with his girlfriend were found shot dead.Apparently Jan Kuciak had dug deep and found links between elements of the Italian Mafia and government officials.

A year ago,in October 2017 Caruana Galizia, a well known and widely respected investigative journalist in Malta died in a car bomb attack.She too had been collecting evidence on EU related fraud and corrupt local politicians.

Both in Slovakia and Malta widespread public protest demonstrations have taken place with politicians and Police officials alike in both countries being placed under intense popular pressure and scrutiny and in some cases have resigned from office.

The common thread of the awarding of EU funded contracts,bureaucratic shenanigans,the involvement of local and national political figures etc.etc. are no mere coincidence.

Fraud,corruption,,nepotism and the involvement of Mafia gangsters in the misappropriation of billions of euroes makes for a very large political cesspit.One that the European Union is wholly incapable of even beginning to deal with.

fahrenheit451:288

There comes a point, and in any event we are in fact way,way past it, where reiterating the same arguments,exposing the same facts,re-heating the same revelations that had once initially shocked us just becomes tedious.

It is axiomatic that within the European Union the further east and south east that you go,the greater the increase in fraud and corruption there is in any given member state. However, even before the annexation,sorry accession, in 2004 and 2007 of the virtual entirety of the economically moribund and socially sclerotic former post-1945 communist states - institutionalised fraud and corruption abounded in stalwart EU member states such as Portugal,Spain,Greece and Italy.

The litany of antiquated,clapped out rustbelt national economies includes those of the former baltic Soviet republics - Estonia,Latvia,Lithuania, parts of the Yugoslav federation -Croatia ,Slovenia alongside Poland,Hungary,Czechia,Slovakia,Romania and Bulgaria.

Many of these never came close to passing all the absurd and ultimately unenforcible standards of governance and financial probity insisted upon by the EU as necessary preconditions to being admitted into full EU membership.

The online euobserver carried a brilliant piece on October 5 2018 highlighting just how unfathomable the murky depths of fraud and corruption still are and that essentially the EU itself is wholly incapable of even beginning to address in any effective and cogent manner.
Herewith an extract.

By PETER TEFFER

BRUSSELS, 5. OCT, 08:48

The leader of Romania's Social Democrat party maintains he is innocent.
But, according to Romania's National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA), Liviu Dragnea created an organised criminal group and defrauded EU structural funds.

Romania's fraudbusters had help in their case from the Brussels-based European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf).
"Olaf conducted thorough investigations that we hope will have a strong deterrent effect," said the office's then acting director-general Nicholas Ilett in November 2017, when the accusation of the DNA was announced.

Whether that deterrent effect will occur remains to be seen.
If proven, the Dragnea case - which is still ongoing - would only be one of many examples of the EU's regional support fund being hit by fraud last year.
"Fraud involving EU structural funds remained at the core of Olaf's investigative work in 2017," the office said in its annual report.

By the end of last year, 73 of Olaf's 362 ongoing investigations were specifically on structural funds – making it the largest category four years in a row.
Other annual reports, by the European Commission, also indicate that cohesion funds are a significant target for criminals. Why is that?

Part of it has to do with the fact that regional support simply makes up a large share of the EU budget, Ilett told EUobserver in June, when he was still acting director-general of Olaf.
Some correlation between amount of spending and level of fraud is to be expected. "Of course it is more complex than that. It's also inherent in the nature of the spending," he said.

"There is a system of shared management and that also can constitute a risk. Because there are more people involved in the decision-making process and you can have decisions taken quite locally, where there may sometimes be a risk of a lack of control, and a risk of patronage, nepotism, corruption at the local level," noted Ilett.

Mihaly Fazekas, researcher at Cambridge University, agreed, and pointed to the large amount of discretion given to local and regional authorities in distributing the EU funds.
"If you have a corrupt elite, discretion is good," the researcher told EUobserver. "If you have a friend who happens to build stadiums, you will build a stadium even if the village has no football club which is in the first league or no one watches football."

Paradox

Fazekas is more of an expert on corruption than on fraud, but the two issues are closely related.
He noted that the plethora of administrative requirements for recipients of EU funds have an adverse affect. "While bureaucratic controls try to decrease corruption, inadvertently they make market entry harder – reduce the number of bidders, hence make corruption more likely," said Fazekas.

How much money is actually being defrauded from the annual EU budget for cohesion policy – and whether the problem is increasing – is hard to determine, according to Olaf's Ilett. "It's very difficult to measure over time. It's one of the things we know that we don't know," he noted.

The commission's Protection of the European Union's financial interests reports, or Pif reports, give some indication.
The report on 2017 said that EU member states reported a total of €320m of cohesion policy and fisheries funding as fraudulent irregularities. The 2016 figure was €237m, also for cohesion policy and fisheries combined. In 2015, when cohesion policy was still counted separately, member states reported €477m in fraudulent irregularities.
But Olaf's Ilett said the figures needed to be interpreted cautiously because there is no harmonised approach.
"The trouble with the PIF report figures is that it contains what the member states have declared, and within that there is a category of what they think is fraudulent," he said.

And there you have it - the Anti Fraud office don't know how much has gone missing  or how much is still going missing,where its going missing let alone who might be responsible for it going missing.

We need to get out of this insane asylum asap by way of the door marked Brexit;don't you think?

fahrenheit451:287

There's something vitally important taking place in England today.Only I can't remember what it is or where it's being held or even what it's supposed to be about that makes it seem so terribly important to some people.

And that ladies and gentlemen is a concise a report on the proceedings of the Conservative Party Conference 2018 in Birmingham as it is possible render.

Oh. go on then, herewith some further musings on this sad and tragic event.

Had the insufferably patronising,self-entitlement flaneurs of the Tory hierarchy that came out in support of Leave, even at least half-heartedly put together as broad a based political coalition for Leave leadership team, then quite possibly we might all be many miles down the road from Stalag Luft IV by now instead of arguing about who should go first through the escape tunnel's exit and into the forest which the tunnel fell fifty feet short of due to planning miscalculations.

The EU's funded #PeoplesVote aka #OpenBritain aka #LabourIn ( aka the Labour Party all wings & factions ) has already seemingly persuaded half the inmates of Stalag Luft IV , that they should stay put and renegotiate the terms and conditions of their imprisonment with the prison camp's administration.

The Conservative Party, au contraire has no place for such brazen expressions of antidemocratic,unconstitutional sedition.They're already fully booked.

The only reassuring augury to manifest itself is that which clearly indicates the approaching final doom of the entire misbegotten and otiose enterprise still calling itself Conservative. It's no more that than Labour is anything anymore to do with labour.

In that sense Brexit has succeeded admirably; it's ostensible purpose may have suffered a seemingly substantive set back and even have been defeated.

But its true purpose has delivered the torpedoes into the respective engine rooms of the two antiquated rustbuckets of Conservative and Labour with unerring and implacable deadly accuracy.

fahrenheit451:286

In an excellent article  New Statesman published 19 September Jonathan Rutherford examines the decline of the Labour Party.

This gleaned from his introduction:-

" The future of British politics will be about the nation state of England, the union of our four nations, and their democratic and economic renewal. It will be about the renascence of the everyday life of work and family. Yet the problem for the left is its domination by an older political generation that lost faith in the idea of the nation, is sceptical about the future of work and doesn’t seem to believe in the family.
Throughout its history, the Labour Party has embodied the paradox of being both radical and conservative, and so it has played a vital role both in maintaining the traditions of the country and shaping its modernity. These dispositions are not party political. They are qualities of mind and character that are woven into the fabric of our English culture. In the words of John Stuart Mill, one demands the uprooting of existing institutions and creeds; the other demands that they be made a reality. One presses new ideas to their utmost consequences; the other reasserts the best meaning and purposes of the old. England’s paradoxical nature is embedded in our constitutional settlement. "

Well,thanks for that Jonathan.As you can see from social media and MSM ,it's all gone spectacularly tits up,again.

#labconf2018 was so brim full of otiose cant and vacuous platitudes, plans that will never be implemented and policies that will never see light of day,it's difficult to discern what is truly important.Though on this occasion, the in-roads made by the EU funded #PeoplesVote campaign is clearly the most insidious of all the aspiring ne'er do wells.

Keir Starmer ,metropolitan elitist shyster extraordinaire,went off piste in his Peoples Vote speech in the conference main hall to stake his claim to the Labour leadership,whose throne many feel might become vacant sooner rather than later.

Fellow metropolitan MP David Lammy,norf landan paranoid conspiracy theorist nonpareil, also staked his claim to the forthcoming leadership vacancy during an address outside at a Peoples Vote outdoor meeting where Tottenham's finest out-hyperbolised Starmer.

Yet another metropolitan MP,Chuka Umunna ,who is a person of "Collar " is also in the Peoples Vote triumvirate of putative next demagogue to lead Labour contest.

Len McCluskey ,UNITE union general secretary who on a 12% membership turnout to elect the union's next general secretary garnered  less than 50% on a 3 way split ballot. The point with Len is that he told  shyster Keir Starmer off for going off piste and saying that the option to Remain in the EU will be on the referendum ballot should Labour get into power and seek to reverse Brexit.

Which underscores, even for the lame of mind and dull of wit the scale of the imbroglio Labour have ineluctably been drawn into.

Virtually all Trades Union leaderships had committed their respective memberships to supporting Remain in the 2016 EURef and to providing the door step canvassing cannon fodder that is the mainstay and lifeblood of all MPs parliamentary sinecures.

It largely didn't work out that way in practice on the ground.Some 70% of  parliamentary constituencies with Labour MPs voted Leave. Which totally buggered everything up for the smug,condescending,PC metropolitan elitist political class.

So another conference ends for one moribund,no longer fit for purpose major parliamentary party and another one,the Conservatives is about to begin.

They both need to implode existentially and sooner rather than later. They are both historic corpses the malodorous stench of which will only get worse the longer they remain unburied.

Their gravediggers are getting impatient.

fahrenheit451:285

Well, that went rather well,don't you think?

The much heralded EU leaders' " Informal " summit  held in Salzburg, Austria ( September 19-21 ) achieved its all too obvious objectives with a noticeable degree of continental diplomatic savoir-faire.

No lesser historic personages such as Metternich and Talleyrand would have been all too duly impressed by the inimitable aplomb with which Merkel, Tusk and Macron accomplished their traducing of Theresa May.

Quite how on earth ( and evidently not as its even remotely likely to be in heaven ) the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland ended up with, Theresa May - the Anglican Tea Lady of the Year - as its supreme representative at such gatherings will remain a mystery until such time as a putative future historian can fathom it all out.

The unadorned " facts " are that some 80% of our current itinerant Westminster benchwarmers are for Remain including a solid majority within the governing party not least of whom is Prime Minister.

It is beyond naivety to imagine or expect that a committed Remainer would somehow by some act of thaumaturgy alter their own personal ideological commitment let alone successfully take charge and lead, against pre-existing impossible odds, a political process that would actualise the public's vote  to Leave the EU.

All the rest is persiflage.Included under that heading would be the quasi-pious remonstrating by the Anglican Tea Lady of the Year about the lack of respect shown toward her and the UK by the EU leaders during and after the Salzburg Summit.

Turning up with a dog's breakfast ( one that even the mangiest hungriest mongrel would turn their nose up at ) of a proposal hastily labelled  " The Chequers' Plan " was simply never going to work. Except perhaps in the barren imagination of a genteel country parsonage make-believe alternate reality that constitutes Theresa May's intellect and political nous.

If Thatcher was effectively nothing more than a political pygmy standing on the shoulders of giants, then all that May ( and indeed the entirety of the present generation of politicians ) is a dwarf stood on the shoulders of pygmies.

To all intents and purposes,and here is the ultimate irony for all those with intense ideological commitments to savour, the 48% have won. And the EU funded seditionist metropolitan rabble that are #PeoplesVote campaigning earnestly to overturn Brexit don't even know it.

Schadenfreude all round it is then!!

fahrenheit451:284

Very occasionally another commentator hidden among the swamps and jungle of the MSM and on-line media will put together a succinct exposition of a complex and pressing issue.

Which is great for me as I then don't have to spend any time whatsoever re-inventing the wheel.

Whilst the two major UK indigenous tribal parties continue their brutal exchanges of epithets and hyperbole which threatens to boil over into possibly something being done about it at some point in the not too distant future if at all; Syria remains the escalator of serious big power rivalry that is inexorably moving toward the end game and a resolution one way or the other.
And neither of them offers hope to a world watching helplessly on from the sidelines.
The city and province of Idlib is said to be the final redoubt of anything in the order of 10,000 head-chopping islamic terrorists ( ISIS/Daesh,Al Qaeda and all the theological factions in between .)
The governments of Russia and Turkey with Iran and last in the queue Syria attempting a grand compromise and Realpolitik interim solution from the Metternich/Talleyrand playbook on how to do grown up international diplomacy.
Herewith gleaned from IRIN -The inside story on emergencies-website this enlightening piece on just who the heck is who and why they're trying to kill everyone else in Idlib,Syria.

Aron Lund

( Freelance journalist and analyst specialising on Syria, and regular IRIN contributor )

As the Syrian government prepares for an offensive on the rebel-held province of Idlib, rebel factions are divided in their loyalties and outlooks. Here’s a look at who would be fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in what could become the last major battle of Syria’s war.
While Turkey controls the rebels in nearby Afrin and al-Bab, the landscape in Idlib is more complex. Two major factions dominate – the National Liberation Front and Tahrir al-Sham – and they differ on their positioning towards Ankara.
Turkey’s favourite is the NLF, which is led by Fadlallah al-Hajji, a Muslim Brotherhood ally. The NLF includes Turkey-friendly Islamists like Ahrar al-Sham, the Noureddine al-Zengi Brigades, Failaq al-Sham, Jaish al-Ahrar, and groups that fought under the Free Syrian Army banner, like the Victory Army and the 2nd Coastal Division.
Big but brittle, the NLF is held together by Turkish sponsorship and shared enemies: al-Assad’s government, Syrian Kurdish groups, and hardline jihadists.
The NLF’s main rival in Idlib is Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist group that controls the provincial capital, the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, and other key areas in Idlib.

Led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani, Tahrir al-Sham grew out of what used to be the Nusra Front, Syria’s official al-Qaeda franchise. It is classified as a terrorist group by the UN as well as by the United States, Turkey, and many other nations. Moscow and Damascus typically point to the group’s presence when launching new military offensives.
Tahrir al-Sham has a murky relationship to Turkey. Al-Golani appears to engage pragmatically with Turkish intelligence but refuses to fully submit to Ankara’s diktat.
To his dismay, Turkey keeps pushing for control over the entire Idlib insurgency. Turkish officers tell rebels the only way to appease Russia and keep al-Assad out of Idlib is for Tahrir al-Sham to dissolve and let its members join the NLF.
Some Tahrir al-Sham members seem to agree. Syrian analysts, including Ahmed Aba-Zeid, a well-connected Syrian researcher who supports the non-jihadist opposition, told IRIN that Turkey now dominates one wing of the group.
Al-Golani is also under pressure from jihadist hardliners who portray him as a Turkish tool and a sellout.
“Al-Qaeda leaders in Syria tend to see Tahrir al-Sham, and Abu Mohammed al-Golani in particular, as unprincipled and treacherous,” Cole Bunzel, a research fellow in Islamic Law and Civilisation at Yale University, told IRIN. Bunzel said hardliners view Tahrir al-Sham as “having disobeyed the al-Qaeda emir [leader] in breaking off from the organisation, and since then persecuting al-Qaeda members in Syria.”
Some of al-Golani’s jihadist critics, many of whom are Jordanians and Palestinians, have gathered in a pro-al-Qaeda splinter faction known as Hurras al-Deen. The group is small, but its religious criticism stings and adds to al-Golani’s challenges. He must now simultaneously fend off further defections to Hurras al-Deen and prevent his other flank from being peeled off by Turkey, whose “good cop” attitude is backed up by the threat of a regime offensive.
A Tahrir al-Sham official again rejected calls for the group’s dissolution on 28 August, but added that it seeks “a salutary solution in the liberated north that spares our people the expected aggression.” Behind the scenes, the group appears to be negotiating with Turkey, while Turkey negotiates with Russia.
In Aba-Zeid’s view, how Tahrir al-Sham evolves in the future will depend on Ankara and Moscow.
“If Turkey reaches an understanding with Russia to let Turkey handle the jihadist file in Idlib, one can expect to see Tahrir al-Sham split” between members who join the Turkey-backed block and hardliners who draw closer to Hurras al-Deen, he said.

Minor factions and Chinese jihadists

Complicating the picture in Idlib are several second-tier rebel factions.
On the jihadist side, Hurras al-Deen is accompanied by a number of small foreign-led factions close to Tahrir al-Sham, including the Chechens of Junoud al-Sham. The so-called Islamic State also operates clandestine cells in the area, hunted by both the NLF and Tahrir al-Sham.
Jaish al-Ezzah, a Free Syrian Army-flagged faction based near Hama, has not joined the Turkish-backed NLF like many of its former comrades. Some see the group as a covert Tahrir al-Sham ally, while others say their base is simply too far from Turkey for joining the alliance to make sense, so they are surviving by ducking out of intra-rebel rivalries.
In the western part of the enclave, Jisr al-Shughour has emerged as a stronghold of the Turkestan Islamic Party, TIP, a group of Uyghur Chinese jihadists. The TIP’s presence in this strategic area (it’s near the border with Turkey and government-controlled Latakia) plus its links with both Tahrir al-Sham and Turkey could give this group a pivotal role in any upcoming battle.
TIP has worked closely with Syria’s jihadist factions in the past, but also seems well acquainted with Turkish intelligence. After staying out of intra-rebel clashes for years, the group shed its neutrality policy this spring to help Tahrir al-Sham beat back a surprise attack by Turkey-backed Islamists.
Aba-Zeid, who follows intra-rebel conflicts in Idlib closely, said TIP helped swing that battle in al-Golani’s favour. But, he still believes that “Turkey’s influence on TIP remains greater than the influence of their alliance” with Tahrir al-Sham.
If all of this sounds complicated, it is. But to the Syrian government, Idlib’s rebels are all terrorists pure and simple – and the Idlib fighters themselves also see al-Assad as their primary enemy, transcending factional divides. Aba-Zeid insisted that if Russia green-lights a Syrian government offensive on Idlib, no matter how the various groups view Turkey or each other, they would all “prioritise repelling the attack”.
Mustafa Sejari, a leader in the Ankara-backed Moutassem Brigade, agreed. “This is the last fortress of the Syrian opposition and preserving it is everyone’s obligation,” he said.

fahrenheit451:283

September 12 2018 is the last day of the Trades Union Congress annual conference. Its social media hashtag has been #TUC150 .

Imagine one of the creatures in Jurassic Park wearing a happy birthday hat.

The TUC's greatest historic strength in past decades and its greatest weakness these last 40 years, is its symbiotic relationship with the Labour Party - what once was only supposed to have been the organised labour movement's parliamentary wing.

And so it goes. Parties and movements and the ideas that they are founded on to promote and which motivate them must all at some stage come to falter ,fail and die out.The late 19th century born idea of Social democracy /parliamentary Socialism is the latest case in point.

But long after the actual material circumstances conducive to a particular political ideology's growth and development have evolved and become increasingly less favourable to that particular ideology,the proponents of it continue their sterile endeavour of essentially continuing to march ( and dragoon everyone else to march along with them ) in the entirely wrong historic direction.

And once Class politics is abandoned and the distinctive Class oriented parties and movements enter instead the murky quagmires of identity and gender politics,then truly their cause is lost.

That the headline speaker at #TUC150 is the Archbishop of Canterbury,sums up the predicament of the movement succinctly.

That the other day, Congress actually approved a motion in support of Gender-self indentification as a policy priority,underscores the TUC's predicament.

The TUC's timely death as with that of the Labour Party and equally so the Conservative Party's ought to resonate across all echelons of the  British polity irrespective of any level of political awareness.

The moment ,TUC General secretary O'Grady announced that the TUC would add its " might " to the #PeoplesVote campaign for a second referendum of the UK's continued EU membership, is the moment the TUC -all it ever did and all that it is ever likely to do- passed irrevocably into the annals of history;its death notice failing to be recorded in the obituary columns.

fahrenheit451:282

The track record of the United States and its NATO satrapies' foreign military and political adventurism is as follows:-
Yugoslavia ,failed. Iraq (twice) failed.Afghanistan,failed.Libya,failed.Syria..failed.

Mad-dog Erdogan's imperialistic hubris and mismanaged economic policies have left Turkey facing the perfect storm of impending fiscal implosion and recession. Aircraft and bombs and boots on the ground in neighbouring Syria costs money,lots of it and in US Dollars, of which the Treasury in Ankara has less of with each passing day.

Idlib is the last redoubt of what remains of both ISIS and AlQaeda forces on the ground in Syria.The mutually antagonistic islamic terrorist organisations continue to knife each in other in the back with unrestrained alacrity and commendable homicidal fervour. Like rats tied up in a sack,it would be expedient and best all round just to leave then to go at it;the outcome being far fewer rats to deal with and in much poorer shape once you open the sack.

Many thousands  of "rats" have already scarpered,shaving off their pietistic facial bum-fluff and donning the burqa and niqab to give a semblance of femininity as they scuttle back ( with our own domestic security services standing idly by ) to the immigrant,unassimilated ghettoes of Brussels,Paris,Berlin,London and many other safe houses in dozens of major cities all across Europe.

The United States ( and to a lesser extent its major NATO bootlickers ) has been skilfully politically cozened by two diametrically opposed Religious regimes in the region- Israel and Saudi Arabia into conducting  a badly flawed and strategically inept campaign in Syria that has left the Syrian government and its allies within striking distance of a final victory on the battlefield.

The sideshows to the main event - western backed and orchestrated regime change in Syria - such as the Turkish campaign of ethnic cleansing of Kurdish populated ares bordering Turkey and the opportunity for localised revanchism among various tribes against other tribes ( pro and anti-Assad according to how the wind blows )  has only added to the incoherence and fragility of any putative outcome let alone meaningful resolution of the Syrian imbroglio as a whole.

The UK ,France and Germany ( with interlocking disputes and instability afflicting their own backyards ) are first among the shroud-wavers and virtue signallers raising the all too familiar cry of " humanitarian catastrophe " whilst the slavering bloodthirsty Vultures ,Israel and Saudi Arabia continue circling the carrion they hope to be feasting on.

Syria,Russia and Iran meanwhile have a job to finish.

fahrenheit451:281

One more  "wrong" move in the Syrian imbroglio,another miscalculation by the US and the world is gone to hell in a handcart.

The democratic will of the British electorate as expressed in the Vote to Leave the EU is facing an existential crisis that could hurl the UK into unimaginable political and social turmoil should the EU-funded,metropolitan elitist led anti- brexit forces prevail as it seems that they might.

Neither of these pressing issues of our contemporary Age are what currently occupy the Corporate MSM and social media space in general.

No,its all about the Labour Party.The interminable internal,fratricidal,internecine faction squabbling and mutual venal posturing that is Labour.

It is axiomatic that all political parties and social movements throughout recorded history have, at some stage, broken apart,collapsed and faded away into the collective memory hole never to be revived or heard from again.

ALL parties and movements have their time in the sun,attain their apogee or at least succeed in moving the general movement of historical forces onto another plane whether for the general good or ill.

We shan't for example be hearing from the Anti-Corn Law League anytime soon again.Nor the Levellers or Whigs or Jacobins or Bolsheviks.

And sooner much rather than later the present day Labour and Conservative parties will be irrevocably broken apart by the massive contradictions, and irreconcilable ideological tensions and paradoxes that are part of their respective and distinctive institutional DNA.

There are no exceptions.The iron laws of History cannot be negotiated with nor amended let alone circumvented by human will.

The more acute the perceived crisis or series of mutually reinforcing crises within a political party the more voluble and extreme the expressions of antagonism between the contending factions.

Everyone is a traitor,renegade,rebel,maverick,heretic,saboteur.It depends solely on who has the whip hand at any particular time. Nothing whatsoever to do with some indefinable.innate quality of pseudo- morality or being on the side of progress or enlightenment or justice or righteousness.There ain't any.Ever.

Corbyn,Momentum,Blairites,Thisites and thoseites,Frank Field.Margaret Hodge.Everybody lies,everybody is a coward.History couldn't give a damn.

As for me,sufficient unto the day the Schadenfreude thereof.

fahrenheit451:280

Since the British parliament legalised Abortion in 1968,there have to date been around 7,000,000 abortions carried out in the UK. That approximates to an annual average of around 150,000 per annum or around 3,000 every single week over the last 50 years.

The ballpark figure of 7 million surpasses the number of murders carried out by The German Third Reich in its extermination camps during the years 1939-45 in what became known after the War as the Holocaust.

Such is the monumental scale of what is being carried out in the guise of a regular,routine medicalised procedure that Society at large has become oblivious to just what a monstrous amoral depravity abortion really is.

Women's reproductive  "Rights" and a woman's  "Right" to choose to control her own fertility have all been effectively used as quasi-moral precepts by the proponents of abortion to facilitate the widespread acceptance of the fundamental concept that it's okay and normal and acceptable to systematically exterminate pre-birth humans at the putative mother';s personal whim and insousiance.

On May 26 2018,the Ireland held an advisory referendum on a proposed amendment to Article 8 of the constitution that in effect protects the life of the unborn child. The public vote to give the Dublin legislature the necessary permission and approval to repeal Article 8 and as a consequence legalise abortion was approved 66% to 34% on a 64% turn out. which by common reckoning means that 57% or thereabouts of Ireland's registered electorate did NOT give their active assent to the amendment;then again its always about who votes;not voting never counts.

That in itself is a lesson for all those who refuse to participate  in the democratic political discourse and elections.Your absence helps the other side to win.

And so it goes.Not that all battles are lost quite as decisively as the one in Ireland or even lost at all.

The Senate in Argentina recently vetoed their legislature's procedural attempt to enact their own national advisory referendum on legalising abortion that copied the template of the pro-abortionists' Repeal The 8th campaign in Ireland.

In the United States there is growing disquiet over President Trump's Supreme Court nominee who might, once approved, be in a position to pave the way for an eventual rollback on their own 1968 annus horribilis Roe v.Wade that abomination contemporaneous with our own 1968 Abortion Act.

Any person professing to be a Christian who is indifferent to or fails to oppose, let alone support in any way whatsoever, Abortion, is an apostate and heretic and must be excommunicated.

Postscript:

Of our fellow 7 million prebirth humans exterminated with state approval since 1968;the cohort so dealt with between 1968 and 78 would by now in the ordinary course of life have become grandparents by now.Those so heinously dealt with between 1988 and 98 would by now be parents of their own children.Of course all those children and grandchildren have been erased from God's plan by acts of premeditated murder.

fahrenheit451:279

August 25 2018 and the #PeoplesVote aka Remain Campaign is still hard at it as this gleaned from google search results shows:-

Imports of Danish sperm left at risk | News | The Times

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/.../imports-of-danish-sperm-left-at-risk-in-event-of-no-deal-...

1 day ago - Couples hoping to conceive through artificial insemination could face delays obtaining donated sperm if Britain leaves the European Union ..

 

So there you have it.

Added to the shortages of cheap manual and semi-skilled as well as skilled and professional workers of all kinds and a food shortage and hold ups at Customs and ( as the Head of Amazon Europe foresees matters ),civil unrest within weeks of the UK departing the EU- a point repeated by Labour's Barry Gardiner :- there will now also be now a shortage of imported sperm without which expensive NHS funded IVF treatment would have to be cut back.

 

A day on from the sperm scare and the EU funded anti -brexit campaign organisation, Scientists4EU are doubling down on the vast amounts of EU funding for scientific research the scientists active in the EU funded group itself will personally miss out on in future years.

 

This is paranoid delusions as policy from the PeoplesVote aka Remain aka Labour aka Open Britain.

 

Quite what else there is for the metropolitan elitist controlled forces of Remain to exploit as a potential source of anxiety,fear and morbid uncertainty in their efforts to sow general doubt and confusion is very much subject to speculation.

 

No doubt they'll come up with something even more bizarrely implausible than the importation of sperm.

 

fahrenheit451:278

In the wake of the 23rd June 2016 Referendum, a plethora, nay a veritable deluge of polls were commissioned,conducted and published by the two opposing camps each seeking some tangible empirical corroboration to underpin and give a superficial gravitas to their respective and ineluctably irreconcilable ideological standpoints.

The Remain campaign proved, by the proverbial country mile,to be the ones lacking any pretence at dispassionate analyses and academic rigour. Simply because the facts didn't match let alone broadly approximate to their prejudices of it all being down to elderly,badly educated,economically marginalised ,xenophobic,northern, insular little england, stupid racists;which incidentally is what #PeoplesVote aka #OpenBritain #Labour and Petainist Conservatives et al still unabashedly maintain as the raison d'etre for what they see as being responsible for the historic debacle of june 23 2016.

It is all bollox and hyperbole of course,but that has never proven to be a hindrance or an appreciable impediment to the ideological kamikaze mission of Remain.

So in their seemingly endless boredomfest, yawnathon these past 2 years,two whole years,they have resorted to novelty and sensationalism. Some planned, others not :one notable exception being the unplanned assassination of one of their shrillest harridan warmongering MPs. Which the Labour Party appartchiks in charge of Remain grotesquely weaponised even that appalling tragedy in the vain belief that it would damage the Leave campaign to whom they sought to attribute moral culpability for the murder!

The latest addition to the Remain cast list for their inglorious Petomainfest is self-styled millionaire capitalist Julian Dunkerton. He's given £ 1 million of his own money to #PeoplesVote aka #OpenBritain aka #LabourIn to be used for..wait for it... YouGov another cabal of EU funded Labour shills to conduct polling around the agitation for a 2nd referendum which they're not calling a referendum.

Obviously the first referendum doesn't count,didn't count because of all the lies told,information withheld and anyway the question asked was the wrong one etc.etc. and next time they'll be a multiple choice questionnaire on the ballot paper; the only difficulty for PeoplesVote is in figuring out the precise,legalistic,sub-claused,nuanced array of choices and their complex grammatical structures that on balance will get the majority to in effect annul the decision they made on June 23 2016.

And insufferable metropolitan PC cultural elitist twats such as Julian are paying for it all...

Is anyone of sound mind and body even going to bother paying EU shills like him any attention whatsoever?

fahrenheit451:277

Public political discourse in Great Britain continues its ineluctable descent into the mire of Identity and gender politics.

The quasi-philosophical fakery and faux-moral charlatanism of Political Correctness and its multiculturalism symbiote have metastasized to a dangerously unsustainable degree in the democratic.pluralist body politic.

This from Sky News Breaking  ontwitter... 17 August 2018.

" Dame Margaret Hodge has told Sky News she felt the same fear her father would have felt when he was fleeing Nazi Germany when she found out Labour had opened disciplinary proceedings against her "

Hodge represents forces engaged in a fratricidal pyrrhic internal Labour war against Corbyn that is predicated on the  currently fashionable trope of  " Anti-semitism ".
The Kafka-esque malady that has struck at the heart of the increasingly moribund Labour Party and has been destabilising what once would have been the credible alternative to  an equally largely dysfunctional and self-absorbed Conservative party in government but incapable of governing.

This fevered Labour party nonsense comes amid the hugely contrived outrage and scandal surrounding Boris Johnson's recently misquoted and misinterpreted remarks on the burka that the metropolitan PC elites have used to exacerbate a much wider and divisive ongoing polemic around Brexit.

All of which contributes to and drives a structural collapse in both Tory and Labour parties which are a necessary precondition for the emerging and evolving Reformation of British politics to succeed.

Schadenfeude all round then?

fahrenheit451:276

Erdogan,that erstwhile ravening Turkish warmonger looks as though he's about to hit the existential jackpot in Syria.

From funding,harbouring and arming ISIS/Daesh as well as Al Qaeda affiliates, and his subsequent de-facto annexation of sovereign Syrian territory through to building walls,watchtowers and entire military supply bases and depots inside Syria and deploying a commensurate invading Army,Erdogan has doubled down like the chronic high risk gambler and demagogic chancer that he is.

And its all begun dropping apart in spectacular fashion.All his so-called NATO friends are deserting him and his allies have set a trap underneath him. The Turkish military haven't somehow heroically liberated their ethnic kinfolk from the clutches,as they see it,of Assad,but have been sucked ever deeper into a bottomless quagmire with no prospect of withdrawal.

Credit in fair measure,for helping to bring out these dramatic changes in the circumstances on the ground in Syria must go to President Trump's administration for its forthright dealings in matters of trade and commerce with the perceived abuses perpetrated by a number of its major trading competitors. Amongst the many nations targeted by these harsher tariffs is the export to the US of Turkish steel and aluminum.

The US has also gotten itself into an intra-NATO row over the sale of aircraft and missile systems to Turkey or rather the withholding of such deals at this present moment in time.

Neither of which has improved Erdogan's innately obstreperous demeanour.

And to cap it all the value of the Turkish Lira has depreciated catastrophically vis a vis the US Dollar on international markets.At the start of 2018,it was trrading at 3.76 Lira to the US Dollar by the start of August the rate had increased to 5.49 to the dollar.National economies cannot withstand 50% depreciations of their currencies against the Dollar.

Technically currency depreciations would be great for exports,but in Turkey's case domestic inflation,massive economic displacement and increased unemployment all begin to add up to Erdogan cutting nobody else's throat but his own in Syria.

Afrin, Idlib, Manbij: the entire paranoid scenario vis a vis the Kurds and their militia groups costs Turkey more in fuel and munitions and all the other logistics that have to be paid for in US Dollars.Which in turn have to be borrowed on International money markets against the sale of Turkish government bonds that in turn become increasingly junk as the screws tighten.

Ain't Capitalism wonderful ?  Schadenfreude is trading well these days.

fahrenheit451:275

From the C.A.B. website.

What are hate incidents?

The police and Crown Prosecution Service have agreed a common definition of hate incidents.
They say something is a hate incident if the victim or anyone else think it was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on one of the following things:

• disability
• race
• religion
• transgender identity
• sexual orientation.

This means that if you believe something is a hate incident it should be recorded as such by the person you are reporting it to. All police forces record hate incidents based on these five personal characteristics.
Anyone can be the victim of a hate incident. For example, you may have been targeted because someone thought you were gay even though you’re not, or because you have a disabled child.

The key passage in the aforegoing Kafka-esque explanation is, "  something is a hate incident if the victim or anyone else think it was ".
This signals a reversion to the jurisprudence of 1789 Revolutionary France,where guilt was established by denunciation.
All this is by way of necessary prologue to the matter at hand.The issue of the day,the scandal as it unfolds.

A few days ago in  the  Daily Telegraph , Boris Johnson critiqued,in his inimitable journalistic style,the wearing of the burqa. The MSM as much as the hordes on social media have transformed this otherwise fairly obscure debating point into a national politicised cause celebre. 

Hence the preamble: Johnson's  remarks were reported to the Met.Police Commissioner Cressida Dick and after ordering a preliminary investigation into the complaint,found no basis for proceeding further.His sartorial critique had not infringed any of the precepts of the hate incident protocols- a necessary precondition for something heading into actual hate crime territory.

All of which has merely added fuel to the raging fire of spite and vindictiveness surrounding the hapless BoJo. Senior Conservative Party figures -invariably of the Remain faction-have called for internal disciplinary measures,even expulsion to be considered; EU Marshal Petain Prize Winner Theresa May went so far as to call upon her former Foreign Secretary to apologise for the hurt that his remarks had caused.

Which of course is utter and total bollox.

We now are witness to the ludicrous spectacle of atheist pro- islamic terrorism Trotskyite non entities SWP in league with the usual PC metropolitan Labour cultural elitists in a contrived Thought Police pantomime. Who would've have thought it?

Clearly the ineluctable rise and burgeoning successes of Populism- from Brexit and Trump to germany's AfD, and governments in Austria Hungary and Italy etc. have unnerved the heretofore unchallenged and unchallengable metropolitan globalist multiculti ruling elites across the West.

Hence the witch-hunt against BoJo,hence increasing intolerance,censorship and repression.

Times have once again become that little bit more interesting.

fahrenheit451:274

A couple of weeks or so ago, members of the Manchester University Students Union Executive ordered the painting over of a Rudyard Kipling poem in their building that had been put there as part of some recent very expensive renovations.

Their official rationale for this impromptu act of philistinism was that Kipling represented white patriarchy and racism.Or something along those lines.

Welcome to the alternate cosmic reality that is:- Virtue signalling,socialjustice warriors,safe-spaces,no-platforming; in other words the full unmitigated gamut of contemporary western identity / gender politics intruding into cultural and artistic expression.

Poetry was mainstream,controversial and exciting. And so it proved to be again a few days ago,when a largely unknown,unremarkable american poet-manque was thrust into the glaring headlines of social media when one of his poems got published.

I was going to recapitulate at length and had fully intended to do so,but occasionally,very rarely indeed someone says all I was going to on the matter at hand.

Here's the New York Post  from 2 august 2018.- " The PC police are ruining poetry "

A mediocre poet wrote a mediocre poem. The Nation decided to publish it.
In a normal world, criticism of the poem, and of the poet, would center on the quality — or lack thereof — of the work. But we don’t live in a normal world anymore.
Anders Carlson-Wee’s 14-line poem “How-To” is not much more than a collection of indiscriminate ramblings. Percy Shelley, he is not. But neither was it offensive.
Apparently, the Twittersphere disagreed. And in the wake of criticism, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, the Nation’s poetry editors, penned an apology that was longer, and significantly more disappointing, than the original poem. They claimed to have made “a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem,” and insisted they were “sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem.”
The poem reads as Carlson-Wee’s top tips to the homeless on how to secure donations. He advises those who live hard lives to say they are even harder: “if you got hiv,” Carlson-Wee writes, “say aids.” “If you’re a girl, say you’re pregnant,” and so on.
That the editors chose to capitulate to the loud voices of an ever-growing mob is bad enough. That they chose not to stand by a person and a poem they decided to publish is even worse. But what’s most disturbing is this: “Some of our readers have asked what we were thinking. When we read the poem we took it as a profane, over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization. We can no longer read the poem in that way.”
What the editors have effectively announced to the public is that they, people who presumably have some training or background in the study of poetry, cannot stand by their interpretation of a poem once they have had their eyes opened to the critiques of an activist mob.
Spend five minutes in a high-school poetry class, and you’ll learn that great — and even mediocre — poetry is layered. That multiplicity of meaning and of interpretation is precisely the point. But now there’s only one way of looking at things. Write a poem that someone, somewhere will interpret as offensive, and the hordes will descend.
The left has been silencing voices it disagrees with for a long time. First, it was the far right. Then it was centrists. Now it’s anyone — even a good soldier of the left — who dares to once open their mouths and contradict the illiberal zeitgeist. Not even comedians get a pass.
For a while, it seemed that this determination to control speech would limit itself to the political sphere. But there’s no denying that it has fixed its aim at art.
The editors had a perfect opportunity to stand by the poem, and the poet, and say that criticism or letters to the editor were one thing, but that they would not be cowed into issuing any sort of apology for daring to publish art that offended some people.
But they failed — and the poet, Carlson-Wee, failed as well. He pinned his own apology on his Twitter account, writing that he “intended for this poem to address the invisibility of homelessness,” but that it clearly “doesn’t work.” He went on to apologize for “treading anywhere close to blackface,” which is apparently what we now call it when people write from the perspective of others.
Carlson-Wee called the fact that he did not “foresee this reading of the poem and the harm it could cause . . . humbling and eye-opening.” He’s now “reevaluating what it means to make art in this world from a place of privilege.”
Poets have often gone against the grain and earned their share of criticism. During his lifetime, and in the immediate aftermath of his death, much was made of the unconventional life choices that Percy Shelley had made. His critics were preoccupied by his philandering and his unapologetic atheism, qualities that were not as tolerated or smiled upon as they are today.
In one of his greatest essays, he mused: “I have found my language misunderstood like one in a distant and savage land.”
We are living in savage times. If only our artists would stand up and say so.
Daniella Greenbaum is a writer living in New York.

Amen.