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 And so it goes...this is my final blog of 2019.

A year of consistent achievement,innovation and progress seen on my many fronts -some personal,some of wider significance.And at the centre of them all,Wakefield. Google #WakeyLit19 ,checkout all 3 of the articles published by Wakefield Express , go to the #WakeyLit19 facebook page. As a pioneering project on its first test run, it succeeded in proving that its underlying ethos and theory works.

Mary Creagh back in May 2019 however wanted nothing to with it.This from her email to me :-

"I must admit I felt some surprise when I received your email, given you have made several negative comments about me on Twitter and Facebook. I attach a couple of these but, as we know, there are many more.

I hope you understand my apprehension about your request following your comments on social media. Using language like ‘traitor’ ‘shill’ and ‘paranoid delusions’ to attack me on a personal level makes it difficult for us to work together constructively.

I am therefore unable to accept your invitation to be Patron of your project."

Politics.

In December ,after 14 long years as Labour MP ,the leading Labour EU supporting Remoaner was defeated by the Tories' last minute replacement candidate and for the first time since 1932,the parliamentary constituency of Wakefield elected a Conservative MP.

"Traitor" "shill" and "paranoid delusions". Confirmed.

Clinical,disinterested,unbiased observations on objective psychological and political phenomena are never personal.
Around 66% of Wakefield's electorate had voted Leave in the EURef 2016,of whom Creagh and other leading Labour Remain MPs said variously at times were- thick,uneducated,stupid,racist xenophobic,insular,little englanders.

Now we know who's on the right side of History and whose analysis and insights accord with reality.

Her party political acolytes had long since prostituted and devalued the once impeccable stature of the Black Horse Poets - of whom Creagh had been appointed as Patron back in 2008- by relocating the group's base to the sectarian,party political shithole venue aka The Red Shed.

Their subsequent official ideologically motivated boycott of  the proceedings of #WakeyLit19-in the wake of Creagh's idiotic email came as no surprise.

Vacuous sloganising and faux-moralising about world and national political events and personalities - in lieu of writing and developing Poetry-has long since been de rigeur for Performance Poet/Spoken word artists/poets across the UK.

What an epitaph to mediocrity.   

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This should be my final blog posting for 2019.

If nothing else the year brought to mind the time worn adage,attributed to Karl Marx, that History repeats itself,first as a tragedy then as a farce.

2019 is drawing to a close with the US House of Representatives voting to have President Trump Impeached.The so-called impeachment trial will take place in the US Senate,who it seems from a party partisan perspective will in effect nullify the charges which the Democrat party controlled House of Representatives have passed against POTUS.

The Democratic Party's insidious Long War to overturn the 2016 Presidential election result enters what are,its final stages.

The malevolent,anti-populist campaign that sought unceasingly to slander,defame,denounce and vilify Trump's upset victory over the odds-on favourite,globalist,deep state warmonger champion Hilary Clinton has now gone on for so long that the constitutional electoral cycle is now prepping for the 2020 Presidential election.

This particularly American Grand Farce had (has?) its mirror image here in the UK,where our domestic equivalent of the globalist deep state aka the metropolitan ruling elite aka the establishment had similarly conducted an EU financed campaign of slander,defamation,denunciation and vilification of the 2016 EU Referendum Result and all those whose Voted to Leave upset the elites' apple cart.

The Tory electoral triumph- with an overall Commons majority of 80 seats, led by a barnstroming PM Boris Johnson has finally drawn a line under the do we-don't we actually carry out the mandate for Brexit. Yes we bloody well do.

The UK's farce unlike the one across "The Pond",doesn't end in an impeachment or trial of any kind,but rather in a brutally divisive internecine Labour leadership contest of all whose putative candidates helped spearhead the EU funded,seditionist,metropolitan elitist run Remain campaign.

Oh,and on a more personal note, another one of the driving forces behind the Remoaners ,Mary Creagh's 14 year long occupation of the Wakefield parliamentary constituency as Labour's resident deluded haridan,ended in well earned ignominy losing the seat to the Tories who last held it in ...1932.


SCHADENFREUDE!!!

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Well,that's one great big effing surprise if there ever was one!!

A 70+ seats overall majority and Labour's worst result since 1935.

Considering that my own best guesses were centred around a small Tory majority or essentially a hung parliament - you can never be too pessimistic when it comes to Election outcomes ;after all where would the overwhelming joy & mood of celebration be in the wake of a really great and unexpected triumph if  you had confidently predicted precisely that beforehand ? exactly; relief is part of joy,the thrill of the ride.

There was also the added bonus,the doubleplusgood  frisson of Schadenfruede  :-

#GeneralElection2019 #Wakefield #MaryCreagh It's carnage time at the twitter coliseum Steve McQueen announces "14 Years A Constituent" -follow-up to "12 Years A Slave".in which the ordinary folk of #Wakefield are liberated from their patronising metropolitan Labour Remoaner slave -vote owner #MaryCreagh in #GeneralElection2019 pic.twitter.com/AeB0EzzwrB

This is now the third time in succession that the EU / Soros funded seditionists of the metropolitan elitist run  Remain campaign have been beaten.

And Labour joins pretty much all of the rest of their comradely sister Socialist parties from all across the continent of Europe in the coffin with the final nail getting hammered in.

Schadenfreude indeed!!

Goodnight and Hail Brexit ,Hail Victory!!

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#YellowRose #NotinMyName  are the latest hashtags -the flotsam and jetsam of Soros' deep pockets to fan the flames of a EU orchestrated make-believe persecution complex about the supposed fate or otherwise of EU citizens working and sojourning within the borders of the UK.

 

For those who genuinely haven’t the foggiest notion as to how the world came to have such a thing as an ” EU citizen “,it maybe worth noting how this quasi-legal abortion came into existence. Via the 1992 Maastricht treaty as it happens. Which is :-

 

The Maastricht Treaty (formally, the Treaty on European Union or TEU) undertaken to integrate Europe was signed on 7 February 1992 by the members of the European Community in Maastricht, Netherlands.[1] On 9–10 December 1991, the same city hosted the European Council which drafted the treaty.[2] Upon its entry into force on 1 November 1993 during the Delors Commission,[3] it created the European Union and led to the creation of the single European currency, the euro. The Maastricht Treaty has been amended by the treaties of Amsterdam, Nice andLisbon.

 

A referendum was expected to take place in the United Kingdom in 2006 to decide whether the country should ratify the proposed Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. However, following the rejection of the Constitution by similar referendums in France in May 2005 and the Netherlands in June 2005, the UK vote was postponed indefinitely.

The question was rendered moot when the constitution was superseded by the Treaty of Lisbon, which Parliament ratified in 2008 without holding a referendum.

 

 

And here we are,the bogus #The3Million aka #PeoplesVote aka EU funded seditionists spearheaded by Labour  actually sabotaged Brexit and in effect won!

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Yes indeed, things can go from bad to worse and from fraught situations to terribly fraught situations in the twinkling of an eye.

With just over a week to go of the General Election 2019 aka GE2019, NATO held their Leaders'summit in London,the occasion also marked the organisation's 70th. anniversary of coming into existence.

Supposedly predicated on the axiom of one for all and all for one,the truth is it hasn't been doing a terribly good job at even maintaining some sort of superficial yet agreeable pretence that the rule of law or some such ludicrous notion actually operates within NATO.

The US and Turkey's machiavellian machinations in the Syria imbroglio is the prime case in point.France's President Macron reiterated with the typical verbal elan oft ascribed to his countrymen,that NATO must be brain dead and that what Turkey was doing in Syria vis a vis the Kurds was not acceptable.
US President Trump on the contrary demurred in his customary,erm,style.
A tisket,a tasket NATO's heads all in a basket.Member betraying member by failing to appraise them of some strategic ledgerdemain?

Well how about NATO member Turkey invading and conquering the northern part of Cyprus in 1974?The UN member island state remains partitioned to this day.The British forces garrison at the time was made to look on in stunned disbelief and diplomatic abasement before the Turkish military's coup-de-main.

Moving forward in 1982 and when NATO member state Great Britain was attacked by Argentina of all countries,the organisation's Three Musketeers-esque cri-de-coeur was hastily ignored as everyone looked elsewhere hoping to avoid making diplomatic eye contact with the British.

The French,in revenge no doubt for the British sinking the French fleet at Mers el KIber in 1940, addressed the Argentinian aggression in the Falklands,by promptly supplying the Argies' airforce with the exocet missiles they needed to sink British ships.

And then in 1983,there were the Yanks storming into the tiny Caribbean island nation state of Grenada - a member of the British Commonwealth ,without informing beforehand the bemused Thatcher government in London at the time.

And so on and so forth.

Then there's NATO's ignominy in Yugoslavia and its various component republics,Iraq (twice),Afghanistan,Libya and Syria.But they call them successes and in any case the burgeoning 29 nation state member alliance has more more pressing matters to worry over at this moment,when Trump called Trudeau two-faced on the record.

Terrorism,Russia and the emerging threat of China are vying for top spot in NATO's contrived moral panic list.

In conclusion,with the wannabe great Ottoman Sultan Erdogan getting effective carte-blanche to do whatever in Syria,one can only conclude that by NATO's own historic criteria,rules and policies -NATO itself is a terrorist organisation.

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Thankfully this is the fifth and final blog post of mine in November on the topic of the General Election .

It really is turning out to be as ineluctably otiose as I'd predicted and feared that it might be.
Amongst the most prominent of hashtags on twitter this morning for example are :- #bbcimpartiality and #labourlies. And that about sums up the state of play in this more than usually cantankerous campaign.

GE 2019 is managing to be even more intellectually indolent than the voters' accustomed expectations of yawning vacuity and cant from all the parties.

No policy statement ,issue of genuine public concern or aspiration for the future has escaped being drowned in the deluge of partisan hyperbole and misdirected drivel, the speakers of which were hoping to make sound something akin to statesman-like rhetoric of great import.Which of course none of it is.

It's way past time that the entire process underwent a Bonfire of the Shibboleths.

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Three weeks to go. Three very long weeks to go until Polling Day in GE2019.

And the strain is already showing amongst all the putative contenders for Office.

Being both dis-interested and un-interested in the final outcome,I have at least avoided the very worst of the symptoms of persiflage fatigue.

And persiflage is as good as it gets in respect of any utterances vaguely resembling well thought out,committed ideological and philosophical points of principle that define the character and motivation of any of the aforementioned putative contenders for Office.

A televised " Leaders Debate " live and unscripted,epitomises more than any other micro- electioneering phenomenon the utterly vacuous and worthless nature of the entire entire electoral process itself.

Brexit , emotional blackmail about the NHS , the fatuous climate emergency etc etc. are merely the irrational ramblings of a political class whose actual power and influence have long since been effectively usurped by the ruling metropolitan domiciled elites.

Superficially, as to the result hitting the headlines on the morning of December 13 ;I'll stick with - a) A very slender overall Tory majority , b) Labour the largest party but way short of a majority or c) Neither a or b.

In the meantime I'll be working on my Schadenfreude.

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Herewith gleaned from UKPublicSpending.co.uk   The facts such as they are - empirical data.

Government Spending: the Details

About 79 percent of public spending comes from the central government; About 21 percent is spent by local authorities.

The central government is budgeted to spend £667.7 billion in FY 2020. Pension programs, including the state pension and civil service pensions, will cost about £161.1 billion; health care and the NHS will cost £143 billion; defence, including the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, will cost about £50.3 billion. Welfare, or Social Security, costs for the central government will come in at £71.4 billion, and central government education expenditures are budgeted at £44.6 billion. Interest on the national debt is estimated at £51.7 billion.

We estimate local authorities will spend about £179.9 billion in FY 2020. The biggest expenditure is £54.8 billion for welfare. Then comes £47.2 billion for local authority education, and £15.4 billion for protection: police and fire. Local authorities will spend £9.5 billion on transport, and about £50 billion on all other programs.

As the #GE2019 winds its weary way through November , the major parties are assembling,as they are wont to do ,their various versions of what amount of public spending ought or does or might or might not be accorded to the National Health Service.

And, of course ,the Labour Party ( all wings ) their Trades Union satrapies and all the  non-parliamentary "Left" are pitching their narrative,as usual in that it is only they and they alone who "care" are "compassionate" and exemplary humanitarians who look after the sick,the dying etc.

And short of a violent,bloody Bolshevik revolution ; no.there never ever will be sufficient monies to finance their Disney-fantasy version of a health service or anything else for that matter.

And of course they're the ones who make it part of their catechism never to raise the query as to where all this overwhelming additional demand and pressure on the NHS arises from in the first place.

Or on our education system or GP waiting lists or on the inadequate housing stock or the relative downward pressure on wages and worsening shortage of full time jobs.

They don't know about all of those either.

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December 12 2019 :Polling Day seems to be a very long way off.And no doubt even as the days recede,they will actually get longer in the imagination.

Boredom and disinterest work that way. It's still only November 9th and the imaginary cheque-book is getting some unprecedented hammer from Labour on 1,000 new " Sure Start " centres - the ones the war-mongering Blairite Regime introduced and the Anti-Labour Coalition of 2010 basically shut down. And not to be outdone the  former conservative Tories and the  former liberal LibDems have also been ripping it up in the fantasy-capitalist prosperity stakes.More doctors,Nurses,infrastructure,blah,blah blah..

Oh, and the Greens aka The Green party (aka the political wing of the Vegan Taliban aka Extinction rebellion eco-millenarian cultists) have come up with a Trillion pound ten year project to take the UK back to the feckin Stone Age by systematically cleansing these islands of all industry.The Greens aim to raise 90% of the science-fiction epic funding through borrowing on the global money markets.

What the lentil-chewers omitted from their prospectus was the blindingly obvious - govts. raise money by selling interest rate Bonds to other govts -the ones with spare cash.Which means China.Who do not and will never support,agree to or otherwise allow their great nation & peoples to be suckered into the existential lunacy of eco-millenarian hysteria.It's what we call irony -Beijing being asked by a Green and no no doubt in time to come a Labour and Lib Dem regime to finance the annihilation of Great Britain and make a profit from it.

December 12 really is a looong way off.

Footnote:

And meanwhile here in the 66% Leave Voting ,parliamentary Labour marginal seat of Wakefield. The Blairite,let's bomb-Syria, incumbent is accusing her Tory opponent of some kind of unsubstantiated,hypothetical thought crime.This gleaned from her twitter a/c from which,by the way I'm blocked.

Mary Creagh Retweeted

Mary Creagh‏Verified account @MaryCreaghMP 14h14 hours ago

More

EXCLUSIVE Wakefield’s Tory candidate 'under review' over Facebook posts | talkRADIO There’s no place for racism in Wakefield.

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What is the difference between uninterested and disinterested?

"Disinterested" and "uninterested" have different meanings, but people are starting to confuse them. Grammar Girl has a trick for getting them right. An uninterested person is bored, unconcerned, or indifferent; a disinterested person is impartial, unbiased, or has no stake in the outcome.

 

Clearly therefore, I'm at one and the same time un-interested in the forthcoming General Election and dis-interested as to the eventual outcome of that election.

Once all the smart,sophisticated,considered,astute insights and observations from the Chief Priests of the MSM Commentariat have been aired and all the usual leading spokesdroids of the major parties have articulated their parties' propaganda ; the British Electorate will make its decisions pretty much as it always does and has done in that very short period of our History that has afforded our nation the luxury of representative parliamentary democracy based on universal adult suffrage.

 

All the whys and wherefores, ifs ,buts and maybes will get run into the ground just as they always are run into the ground through over-emphases ,hyperbole and otiose cant from all the contending parties and factions still masquerading as parties.

 

The archaic formulations of "Left" and "Right" have in actuality been rendered historically redundant by and during the Brexit question.The difficulty is that none of the major parties formally acknowledge the topography of the renewed political landscape and they all adamantly refuse to address the newly aligned populist sentiments,concerns and imperatives with a lexicon fit for purpose. We're in an rapidly evolving dynamic digital political discourse being conducted and expressed in an analogue frame of reference.

 

There ought to be for example, a broad rational consensus that every vote should carry equal weight and yet the UK's constitutional mechanism remains entombed by and subject to FPTP - first past the post where not all votes have equal value.

 

And as for the pre-eminent farrago of our times, to wit Brexit aka Leave the EU,the established parliamentary forces have been debating the possibility of actually implementing the result of the EURef 2016 for three and a half years. 

 

Disinterested as I am, the probabilities,in my cursory view of the outcome of GE2019 will be in a limited spectrum ranging from 1) A small overall Tory majority, 2) A minority Tory govt with DUP support, 3) A minority Labour govt with SNP /Plaid support or 4) Something completely different and unforeseen.

 

Oh,and Schadenfreude all round.

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Oh boy...

British Prime Minister Johnson reneged conclusively on his earlier solemn promise to actually die in a ditch if his government couldn't deliver Brexit on October 31st and that he wouldn't go back to EU to ask for an extension.

The EU have helpfully referred to their grand gesture as  a " flextension " and it is valid until January 31st. 2020, which of course is way past the original deadline of October 31.

We are now all hostages being held in a parliamentary purgatory where every conceivable ideological schism is surfacing in all the major parties and there are schisms within schisms.

In the round of course, the Remain campaign succeeded ages ago in effectively torpedoing Brexit.

The waves of Waitrose /Ocado home delivery loyalists and their pithily adorned placards with slogans had sod all to do with the effectiveness of the EU funded, largely Labour Party directed, seditionist enterprise that so remorselessly undermined and heinously traduced what had been the electorally triumphant Leave campaign and all those who voted Leave on June 23  2016.

What began as a farce has evolved into an ever greater farce.Public political discourse has been utterly debased and the very operation of our constitutional parliamentary system have been laid waste.

In those two aspects, the Remoaner zealots and their controlling Masters must feel that they've succeeded beyond their own wildest imaginings.

To be perfectly frank ,earnest and above board on the topic of " General Election or no General Election "...

I simply couldn't care less.

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BBC News Online reported :-

Turkey and Russia have agreed what they say is a "historic" deal aimed at keeping Kurdish forces away from Syria's border with Turkey.

It comes during a pause in Turkey's offensive to drive Kurdish forces out, creating a "safe zone" in the area. Under the deal, Syrian and Russian forces will immediately oversee a withdrawal of Kurdish forces. There is no word from the Kurdish fighters, whom Turkey regards as terrorists. The deal sets out plans for joint Turkish-Russian patrols along the border next week. The agreement was announced after six hours of talks on Tuesday between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian host, Vladimir Putin, in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

And so it goes..

At last it appears the international Law -breaking USA and its western satrapies have satiated their vicarious bellicose cravings and it's left up to the grown-ups in the international diplomatic arena to assume the providential role of katechon and enforce the restoration of a sense of order and stability in what had up to only days previously been the most virulent and potentially cataclysmic of all regional imbroglios to have erupted in the Middle East.

Having systematically and cynically violated every heretofore accepted and recognised norm of international law on the conduct of armed hostilities, the US,UK,France,Germany and Canada achieved absolutely nothing of any effect or value by their wantonly irrational and manifestly dangerous behaviour of arming and funding Al Qaeda in its myriad forms  as well a ISIS and the various bandit formations constituting the Kurdish insurgency.

Israel and Iran, those two equally otiose, mentally disturbed dwarves of irrational arcane religiosity have also been put back into their proper historic context of virtual irrelevance. What kind of imbecile wants a faux- armageddon ?

The British House of Commons certainly was one of "them" that did when it debated,but providentially failed to approve, the bombing of Syria and in particular President Assad's forces as well as some tokenism around hitting ISIS- though their main target was always what they condescendingly referred to as the Damascus Regime's forces.

Let's not forget that the same assembly of 650 cretins has proven itself,over 4 long years, utterly incapable of voting in favour of exiting a continental tyranny of which the UK is but one of 28 vassals.

That aside, the deluded US liberal interventionist Clintonites and their conservative neocon war hawks have also both been equally frustrated in carrying out their own dystopian vision of wiping another heretofore stable and reasonably prosperous nationalist arab state off of the Middle eastern map.

Oh, and the disparate, far from heterogenous Kurds who were given carte blanche  by the illegal US invaders to create a mythical Kurdish statelet on the borders with Turkey ; they too are being put back in their box and back in the cupboard that's already teeming with lots of other skeletons.

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Here's what The Evening Standard online trumpeted :- In the style of a Waitrose shopper's guide on how to go about  fomenting sedition.

Brexit march London: Saturday People's Vote protest route, map, times and more

Thousands of protestors are set to march through London this weekend to demand the public is given a final say on Brexit.

Saturday's Final Say rally is expected to draw huge crowds of people to the capital calling for a vote on any EU withdrawal deal. The march will take place nearly a fortnight before the UK is due to leave the EU on October 31, and at the end of a crunch week for Brexit negotiations.

Organised by the People's Vote campaign, Together for the Final Say is the fourth march calling for a final referendum on any Brexit deal to be put to the people.

 

Here's everything we know about Saturday's demonstration.

When is the march taking place?

Campaigners are being told to meet at on Saturday October 19, at 12pm, with the march itself setting off at around 12.20pm. The head of the march is expected to reach Parliament Square at about 2pm, followed by a speakers' rally lasting 90 minutes. Not only is the date 12 days before the October 31 Brexit deadline, it is also the same date specified in the Benn Act as the deadline for a parliamentary Brexit deal vote.

The law, passed by MPs in September, compels Mr Johnson to request a three-month delay to Article 50 if Parliament has not voted to back a deal by this day.

And this weekend, an emergency Saturday sitting of Parliament could also go ahead for the first time since the Falklands War, meaning protestors could be gathered outside the Commons as MPs attempt to pass a Brexit deal inside. ************************************************************************************************************************************** What the last three and a half years of EU funded antidemocratic sabotage and legalistic shenanigans has done ,besides bollox up all other parliamentary business and the heretofore generally accepted norms of UK constitutional praxis, is utterly eviscerate a sense of what used to constitute Realpolitik. 

 

What we have in its place, is a intellect-free routine of pseudo-moralistic posturing and exchanges of mutually incomprehensible grievances that are dressed up as if they were in fact hard political choices to be resolved in the white heat of firmly delineated ideological standpoints.

 

Out going EU Grand Panjandrum ,Juncker stated explicitly that there is no need for the British parliament to vote down this "Deal" and force the PM to seek yet another extension because the EU in total as a unified whole want this and accept this as " The Deal " which requires no further negotiations and therefore no requirement for a request for an extension.

 

Game over.The so-called Benn Act isn't worth the paper it is written or rather the back of the envelope it was scrawled on in the dim light of the treasonable cabal's cellar. This is Congress of Vienna stuff ; proper grown up this is a how the world will work from now on addition to the playbook of established European Grand politics.

 

But not according to the self-defeating dimwits of Labour ( all wings and sections thereof ),the LibDems,SNP and now from the other side of the Leave/Remain dichotomy the DUP and the Brexit Party.

Piss off the lot of you, please.The Circus is over and the clowns have taken off their make up.There will be no curtain call.

 

The massed ranks of Waitrositas are in town at the same time as their younger off-spring in the guise of yet another hostile foreign power funded protest , Extinction Rebellion are maintaining their irksome deranged presence with the full assistance of the Home Office,The Mayor and the massed ranks of the overtime payment grasping Met Plod.

 

And so it goes...  

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It's easy, often too easy to get caught up in the hyperbole and strident faux-rhetoric that accompanies what passes for war these days.

Routine, indiscriminate usage of emotive language and graphic imagery, in the end do not enhance a particular narrative, they overwhelm it.

The US / EUNATO engineered regional imbroglio emanating from what is still left of the sovereign,independent nation state of Syria underlines the old adage about chickens coming home to roost.

The ruling metropolitan elites sojourning in their western ivory towers do in fact have a low tolerance for when things get, shall we say, a tad more squeamish than they had anticipated let alone planned for.

They always invariably make the same miscalculation ,they always invariably end up shoving their collective heads up their own asses and hope that their specious pseudo-moralistic pronouncements and irritatingly middle class superficial hand wringing shows concern for the orphans,widows,the aged .etc. who are ineluctably maimed and butchered and eviscerated and become an endless stream of online content for the on-going pornographic installation art exhibition that is a world run by the failing ruling elites.

A Century on from the imposition by the triumphant Allies of the Sykes -Picot delineation of the defeated Ottoman Empire's vassal territories have a lot to answer for.Slicing and dicing previously coherent contiguous ethno-linguistic entities into a myriad of contradictory and confusing irrational new entities remains the very epitome of Western imperialist stupidity.

The insane / absurdist revival of Ottoman delusions of grandeur by Erdogan and his coterie of oligarchs and gangsters in the guise of a modern, developing Turkey,are a tragedy of immense historic importance that is hastening inexorably toward their self-created and realised demise.Sooner rather than later.Whether they cleanse all of Syria's north east of terrorist Kurds or not and if the buffer zone and relocation of 2 million Syrian war refugees eventuates or not.

The following gleaned from, Focus Economics tell you what you need to know about Turkey.

Turkey Economic Outlook

October 1, 2019

The economy shrank again in Q2, although less severely than in the first. A slump in fixed investment and a fall in private consumption, amid elevated unemployment, inflation and currency weakness, led the contraction. For its part, the external sector’s performance improved, although this was only largely due to weak domestic demand. Turning to the third quarter, the economy is expected to have shrunk once more: Industrial production fell again in July, although it did so at the softest pace in nearly a year. Moreover, August’s manufacturing PMI remained in contractionary territory, suggesting that the sector is not yet out of the woods. Similarly, retail sales contracted again in July, while private sector credit growth was negligible in the same month. More positively, the Central Bank’s second large rate cut in September ought to boost credit growth and support economic activity.

Turkey Economic Growth

The economy is expected to recover towards the end of this year and into next year on the back of looser monetary policy and a supportive base effect. However, geopolitical tensions and currency volatility remain downside risks, while still high unemployment is likely to weigh on household consumption. FocusEconomics Consensus Forecast panelists expect the economy to shrink 0.8% in 2019. Next year, however, our panel projects economic growth of 2.2%, which is down 0.1 percentage points from last month’s forecast.

Turkey Economy Data

	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
Population (million)	76.7	77.7	78.7	79.8	80.8
GDP per capita (USD)	12,386	12,026	10,898	10,805	10,542
GDP (USD bn)	950	934	858	862	852

During the same period, the official exchange rate of the Turkish Lira to the USD rose from 2.15 to 1 to 3.79 to 1.
A national economy in recession paying practically double for its fuel & energy imports  (all denominated globally in USD) ,let alone all the other stuff Turkey itself uses but doesn't manufacture domestically.Tanks,Guns,Aircraft,Munitions of all kinds.

Turkey is probably in a more economically parlous state at the start of this Syrian misadventure than Japan was back in 1941 when it attacked Pearl Harbour.

Now, go figure.

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Sudetenland 2.0

Turkish President Erdogan has given the rest of the international community notice of his intention to order a full scale military incursion into North-eastern Syria in order to establish a buffer-zone contiguous with the Turkish border.

US forces currently in that area are due to vacate it leaving their erstwhile SDF /Kurdish allies on their own to face the imminent Turkish invasion.

Military invasions of countries with which the invaders are not at war is in breach of international law.Not that International Law counts for very much in the current derangement paradigm in which the world finds itself.

The very presence of US,UK,French,German,Australian ,Canadian and Turkish forces inside Syria is itself in breach of all diplomatic conventions, rules and international laws.
The much referenced Westphalian system whereby nations respect each others sovereignty and territorial integrity has long been a convenient diplomatic fiction for almost as long as The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 itself has been in existence. That particular treaty brought to a close what  future historians would refer to as The Thirty Years War on the continent of Europe. Its foundational principles just so much existential pie in the sky.

The anti-Trump driven rhetoric over the US withdrawal from the region about to be invaded by Turkey is about as specious as it gets in Washington DC. The Kurds, everyone who hates President Trump says, have been thrown under the proverbial bus and that they'll be subjected genocide by the invading Turks.Even if it were remotely akin to the truth, frankly my dear, we shouldn't give a damn.

The really big and imminently globally catastrophic imbroglio in that region is no longer Syria ,it's the Yemen.Of course the two are intertwined at a strategic level, involving most of the same state actors in both theatres such as Saudi Arabia (your friendly neighbourhood financiers of Islamist terrorism) ,Iran ,the US and of course Israel who basically want to instigate their own arcane scriptural Armageddon asap.

And you thought Brexit was a sh**show.

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October 31 draws ineluctably closer and with it the prospect of, " Brexit " actually happening.

The monumental rearguard action undertaken by the Remain campaign to sabotage ,delay ,impede and ultimately eviscerate Brexit as the legitimate democratic expression of the UK electorate in the EURef 2016 - has been to all intents and purposes successful!

There is, of course a price to pay for all their shenanigans and in all likelihood it will be a very heavy one.

Without recourse to muskets and halberds or judicial auto-da-fes , this country has gone through and to a large extent well into future will continue going through a significant period of historical political sea change on par with The Tudor Reformation of the 1530s and 40s as well as The English Civil War(s) of a Century later.

And in spite of the socio-economic driven ideological schisms that have affected all major parliamentary parties over the issue of  " Brexit ", to a greater degree these Parties have carried on with their various , parochial petty concerns with an astounding insouciance.Quite simply, contrary to all the alarms and noises generated, not one of them has been riven irredeemably apart.

The antiquated First Past The Post electoral system has in effect acted as the dead man's handle in keeping the parliamentary edifice from simply keeling over and crashing off the track.

The meteorite has hit and this time the Dinosaurs have refused to die. Just as the hoped for massive gains in the Reformation ended up over historic time pretty marginal at best and the dreams of the Levellers and other Puritan radicals during the Civil War never bore the harvests of the fruit of their endeavours, so with the UK's exit from the European Union.

Then again, the Stoic axiom that nothing worthwhile can ever be achieved without pain and sacrifice has yet to dawn on the EU /Soros funded seditionist shills who masqueraded under so many disguises ending up as Peoples Vote.

The 80% or so of MPs who backed Remain , the metropolitan cultural elitists,academics, luvvies and City shysters ,those who since June 2016 denounced and villified their compatriots as xenophobic,little englander racist thugs ,cretins and morons who voted the way they did for Brexit because they were too stupid,ill advised and under educated to fail to understand that voting Remain was the only sensible thing to do with one's own emancipated right to vote by secret ballot.

Having obviously achieved something worthwhile , Remoaners, great and small can now look forward to a future of pain and sacrifice.

 Schadenfreude!

fahrenheit451:345

And this is the  " Downside " to the proceedings of #WakeyLit19 aka the putative, ersatz  Wakefield Literature Festival 2019 conceived, planned ,organised and curated by Destiny Poets  ( www.destinypoets.co.uk ).
Even more than a decade ago ,when I visited schools on a fairly regular basis to do my poetry masterclass workshops, a common complaint from the teaching staff was that "creativity" was getting squeezed out of the curriculum and that pupils weren't simply getting opportunities such as my rather modest poetry workshop sessions to explore and enjoy culture.
June / July with the school year drawing down to a close and all the exams out of the way ,was always the optimum point in the calendar to approach schools with the lure of poetry workshops.
I had some reasonably confident expectations that some local inner city schools would jump at the chance of, (a) free poetry workshops and (b) the chance to showcase their star pupils and their school as part of a wider City lit fest.
It would also create some major strategic P.R. media  momentum for the #WakeyLit19 launch later on in September having prepared, at least to some worthwhile degree a wider name recognition and interest in a lit,fest especially linked to promoting local schools and the works of pupils. Win ,win,right?
Here's what actually happened.The idea never left the drawing board.

Not acknowledging receipt of initial,original email correspondence seems to be acceptable, common professional business practice. 

 

I had personally phoned the admin office at each of the seven schools to ascertain that I had the correct email address and contact details for the school and the headteacher.

 

On June 3, I sent the email ,the gist of which contained the  following: 

 

" As Founder of Destiny Poets and Editorial Administrator of http://www.destinypoets.co.uk we can promote your school and your pupils' creativity and work as an integral part of #WakeyLit19 on our established social media platforms to a discerning global online audience.
If you would like to take up our unconditional invitation to participate and be part of the new exciting #WakeyLit19, we can provide,at no charge,two poetry workshop sessions plus all the additional necessary professional technical guidance and assistance to help you post and promote your pupils' work in a fitting and positive manner that promotes not only your school's reputation but that of our city too.
I am available to make preliminary visits to your school and discuss the practicalities of this offer at whichever time and date is most convenient to you."

 

Seven separate headteachers at seven separate local schools within the city of Wakefield were sent this email , none of them even deigned to acknowledge that they had received it and would get back to me in due course- as you might expect from any professional business or individual to do as a matter of common courtesy and good business practice.

 

One week later, I phoned round all the schools and had to re-acquaint the admin staff with the gist of my original email and the date on which I had sent it,They all in turn said they had passed on that email to their Headteacher. They all gave the same basic answer that the reason it hadn't been acknowledged let alone replied to was that the Headteacher would have replied had they been interested in the offer! 

 

I asked how could I possibly judge if they were interested or not,if they didn't acknowledge having read my original email?

All the admin staff suggested I re-send the original email and that they would make sure that the Headteacher would get to see the email.

This I did on June 11- 8 days after my initial offer.

Once again,none of the Headteachers responded in any fashion,let alone with a simple courteous acknowledgement of receipt.

 

So, there you have it ; the response of seven inner city schools charged with the academic welfare of thousands of pupils to the magnanimous offer of  -

Would you like to take up our unconditional invitation to participate and be part of the new exciting #WakeyLit19, we can provide,at no charge,two poetry workshop sessions plus all the additional necessary professional technical guidance and assistance to help you post and promote your pupils' work in a fitting and positive manner that promotes not only your school's reputation but that of our city too...etc etc.

 

is.......Go shove it,we're not talking to you.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Part 2 of  the " Downside" also involves unprofessional, discourteous numpties seemingly incapable of responding to perfectly straightforward questions. In this case a Midlands -based group of performance poets who within the space of a few days went from - "we can bring our show to Wakefield", to " we can't work with you because of your politics".

Mike Took has still yet to enlighten me as to what he thinks my politics are and why he had to withdraw his offer to me because of what he thinks my politics are.

Herewith gleaned from fb Messenger a somewhat desultory conversation.

 

Sounds fab Louis - sorry not to have replied yesterday - the show is only 1 hour long. Could you do 8-9pm?

Louis

No worries.You'll come on at 8.The gig will be suitably warmed up with an open mic session from 7.Feel free to post any relevant links you wish for your show on the #WakeyLit19 page.I'll edit the timetabled events accordingly in due course.

 

Brilliant! I am slammed this week with organising LeamPoFest next weekend but will get straight on this after that. Thanks Louis!

Louis

 

8 JUL 2019, 18:41

 

Hi Louis I am sorry but I am cancelling our involvement with your planned festival. I and my colleagues do not share your politics and, as #FourApocalypsePoets is ostensibly a political show it would clearly be a mis-placed event. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

8 JUL 2019, 20:57

Louis

Sorry to hear that.All I'm doing is putting together a basic week of daytime and evening events as a stop gap kind of week because the official lit fest isn't running. I reaally dont see what my "politics" has anything to do with anything re literature festivals.Its venues and gigs and performers.And I think your show would have been a great addition.Please do let me know where the dots join up.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Part 3 of the "Downside" ought really have been the preamble because it came really early on, so early it can be said that this idea never even made it on to the drawing board let alone any rough draft.

 

Mary Creagh MP turned down my invitation for her to be Official Patron of #WakeyLit19. 

 

" I am therefore unable to accept your invitation to be Patron of your project." was as much as can be shared without wading into some pretty deep waters.  Why her as Patron in the first place? well, checkout The Wakefield Poetry Picture Archive at www.destinypoets.co.uk

 

_________________________________________________________________________________And finally ,Part 4 of the  "Downside" ,which I include in this portmanteau of documented history of #WakeyLit19 simply to illustrate that the anti-Christian bigotry together with an ideological sectarian hatred directed at me kept rearing its ugly head even during #WakeyLit19 .

What had first seemed like a bit of an organisational tragedy before September had lapsed ineluctably into outright farce from this eejit on September 19th. Plastered all across social media.Nice.

I've excluded the slander and vilification preceding these comments.

 

William Anderson Gaskill Joe Williams Because Louis Kasatkin has contacts with the Wakefield Express and certain other organisations that I don't have, but today demonstrates that he cannot generate an event from the bottom, up, which is what I am trying to do. As regards, 2020, Louis Kasatkin is now another unknown quantity that I will have to deal with.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

So, onward to #WakeyLit2020 !!!

fahrenheit451:344

The explicit stated aim of #WakeyLit19 is to put locally based authors and poets at the centre of the litfest. And that the primary aim and purpose of a lit. fest bearing the name of the city,is to firstly promote wider public awareness of locally based authors and poets.

Unless someone,somewhere knows any different,clearly Wakefield -its elected representatives and relevant Council departments and officials ought to adopt a positive,pro-active strategy of an on-going,enhanced promotion of local authors and poets across its libraries ,schools and the city’s leading cultural venues.

This is the third of four blog posts on the topic of Wakefield LitFest. This one is  “The Upside” ,yet to come ,”The Downside” be warned names shall be named.There will be payback. 

The putative Wakefield Literature Festival aka Wakefield LitFest 2019 rebranded as #WakeyLit19 held its media launch on September 2nd. at Destiny Christian Church, with guest of honour, the Mayor Of Wakefield, Cllr. Charlie Keith.

The undoubted jewel in the crown of the week long, unfunded grassroots organised #WakeyLit19 was the series of Writers’ Showcases events hosted at the Mocca Moocho cafe  which featured a strong line-up of locally connected Authors from a broad range of literary genres:-

Joanne Brandon, Sarah Connell, Sue Featherstone, Dale Brendan Hyde, Barbara Phipps, Stephen Place and Neil White.

None of whom had ever been invited to take part in the now,moribund and defunct predecessor Wakefield Literature Festival.

#WakeyLit19 received practical support and expressions of solidarity from many well-wishers.And despite some relatively minor hiccups in the week,#WakeyLit19 most definitely “flew”, on schedule and to budget; which of course was £0.00.

fahrenheit451:343

It’s Monday 16th. September 2019 and #WakeyLit19 the ersatz  litfest is getting underway.

No funding, no charges ,no fees ,no tickets ,next to no admin. A radical, quasi-improvised grassroots alternative to absolutely no litfest whatsoever following the demise back in 2017 of what was the  ” official ” Wakefield Literature festival. The Merrie City’s version of the some 400 off – the  -shelf lookalike characterless litfest templates where only the geographically specific prefix is all that’s locally authentic and distinctive about them.

Being the UK’s 11th.largest city by population – @330k.- counts for diddly squat in Wakefield’s  case when it comes to the pecking order of venues queueing up to get their snouts in the trough of Publicly funded Arts Council monies.

That said, for every £8 per head of Arts Council funding that Greater London alone gets ; the entire rest of the UK gets £1 per head!!

Still, what can the city expect when you’ve had now more than a decade of indolence and indifference exhibited by elected political representatives toward advocating / campaigning for anything other than the prestige projects favoured by the local coterie of metropolitan cultural elitist toadies?

Back in March 29 ,2014 I posted the following in this here And So It Goes  Blog #452.

Here’s something I’ve WikiLeaked from my very own archives :- This validates my assertion,long held,that Wakefield would be better off being obliterated by a meteorite than what it has endured from its own City leaders over the years.

Public Correspondence : ARCHIVE MATERIAL : 18 / 04 / 2005 : Yorkshire Evening Post

New schools’ venture for city is well-versed

Updated on the18April 2005 10:44

Published 18/04/2005 09:21

By ALAN YORK

A NEW joint venture aimed at bringing poetry into schools across the Wakefield diocese was being launched today.

Poetry Wakefield is the idea of Cathedral poet-in-residence Louis Kasatkin, the Cathedral Poets and the Black Horse Poets, and is sponsored by Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency.

It takes the form of a quarterly booklet of poems and information about poetry and has won the full support of the Bishop of Wakefield, the Right Rev Stephen Platten, who has even written a verse which is included in the first issue. It goes:

There was a young man of Cleckheaton

Whose verses were not worth repeating

For first he would swear

Then fly into the air

With rhymes that were no’but expleting.

He said: “This is the sort of writing that Poetry Wakefield: City and Diocese will not encourage! But my doggerel limerick does draw attention to the need to encourage young poets in schools throughout the Diocese of Wakefield.

Encourage

“This, Louis Kastakin, the Cathedral Poets and others intend to encourage. Yorkshire Forward has given us financial support and so we hope to be given further support by other bodies too.

“The production of a quarterly periodical will allow us to bring together the poetic talents of West Yorkshire and to encourage others to write. Who knows – even I may improve my versing if I become a regular reader.”

The launch was being carried out at Treacy Hall at the Cathedral.

Mr Kastakin, who has been poet-in-residence at the Cathedral since 2001, said: “This is another very real and tangible step in awakening the sleeping giant of poetry within schools and the local community.”

The two poets’ groups have set a goal of establishing an annual ‘Gissing Prize for Schools’ named after Wakefield-born George Gissing, one of England’s leading 19th century writers.

He was born in 1857 in Wakefield city centre in Thompson’s Yard, off Westgate.

He died in 1904 having written 23 novels, one of which, A Life’s Morning, is set in a thinly-disguised Wakefield and was re-published in a limited edition by the Gissing Trust last yea r to mark the 100th anniversary of his death.

In his hey day, Gissing was a literary superstar and his work still attracts devoted attention from academics, writers and readers around the world.

Galleries

Letters supporting a bid by the poets for Arts Council funding have been sent by Bishop Platten, former Wakefield MP David Hinchliffe, Wakefield Local Education Authority and the Wakefield Diocesan Board of Education.

Local museums, galleries, libraries, the Cathedral and Ottakar’s bookstore will all stock the quarterly.

Addendum : and of course the funding ran out.

fahrenheit451:342

Just for the record.

There are around 400 so-called “Lit.Fests” staged annually throughout the UK. 400.That’s one per day and some to spare.

Apart from a very few well known internationally ranked events such as those staged at Cheltenham and Cardiff and Ilkley, most of the rest vary in popularity and standing.

Most of the 400 follow a general template that basically is off- the -shelf and with only the prefix of the geographic location to distinguish and differentiate one litfest from any other litfest.

Their programme of events, the Arts Council funding,the roster of invited named performers et al are pretty much bog standard.

Locally based authors and poets as a rule get the crumbs left over once the named names -the culturally elite privileged performers -have pocketed the bulk of the arts council funding which the Anonymous litfest had applied for.

And so once the central funding gets cut, once the metropolitan cultural elitist establishment cronies fail to schmooze with their old university pals ,the local organisers abandon their culturally misappropriated fiefdom as if it had suddenly contracted bubonic plague, and they leave it to die.

Which is just about what happened here in Wakefield. And what is Wakefield ? the historic Merrie City ,the 11th.largest city in the UK , a population of around 300k. that is numerically comparable to Salzburg,Austria for example and double in size to Bruges,Belgium.

Except, of course, everyone’s heard of Salzburg and Bruges. Which happen to be my favourite two cities.

Abandoned,dead and buried these last two years, 2017 and 18, I searched the internet for signs of anything that might’ve indicated some attempt to do something along the lines of a lit type fest and surprisingly found nothing; nada,zilch.

What do people call it when  something that was dead and buried is brought back to full life ? (No,they DO NOT call it  a frikkin zombie..wrong genre entirely)

checkout https://www.facebook.com/groups/WakefieldLiteratureFestival2019/

All the details, all the background , all the articles.

And this time we have a LitFest , a literature festival, conceived, organised and promoted by actual Writers and Poets who really do know what they’re doing.