The War Against Disinformation is Not What it Seems.

Andy Burnham made a speech a few days ago relating to Russia amongst other countries and it's ability to insert disinformation into social media and therefore influence public opinion and even influence elections.

But without any evidence. 

If Burnham wants to fight "fake news", he needs to tell us which is the fake news, so we can identify it analyse it and remove the source from our trusted information providers.

But instead Burnham proposes censorship and sanctions, possibly fines and jail time, no doubt. 

Instead of allowing us the freedom to assess information for ourselves, he wants to remove that from us and just tell us "this is the truth". 

I've never heard something more tyrannical come out of a Prime Minister's mouth before, except maybe Kier Starmer's. 

I've lived through the cold war, I well remember the "tractor stats" coming from the old Soviet Union, where they had to make everything bigger, better and more glorious than the West could ever manage. Amongst the folky music was the most egregious propaganda. Ridiculously obvious. Much like our Labour government.

The phrase "Tractors Stats" was coined because the Soviet Union used to produce endless list of how well they had done, including the numbers of Tractors they had produced. Impossible statistics. Radio Moscow used to pump them out nightly to those in the West that would listen. I was one of the listeners, because Short Wave Listening was my hobby.

The same applied to the vast amounts of grain the Soviet Union supposedly produced. 

In other words, they were statistics to be taken with a healthy scepticism.

When it came to News, again the Soviet Union made immensely unreasonable claims, but so did the West. The truth was somewhere in the middle and it was up to the listener to perceive where the truth was.

We're getting back to those days, but it's not an information war between the Soviet Union and Western Governments. It's actually an information war between Western governments and their own people. 

People are now seeing the actual truth being denied before their very eyes. 

Journalists arrested as terrorists on the left and the right of politics. 

Ordinary people being arrested and jailed for opinions. 

It's quite clear this is NOT about foreign actors influencing social media, or we would have had examples the government could show us.

This is about controlling the flow of information. And the government ensuring you only have access to their propaganda.

It is tyranny. 

The Diesel Dilemma

Trump is considering banning export of diesel refined in the U.S. and getting European countries to release their reserves of diesel, to keep the price down.

There's a BIG problem with that. 

Currently, Europe is in a proxy war with Russia. If Europe expends it's diesel reserves, that's reducing it's capability to run military vehicles. If the stocks are drawn down by any significant amount, Russia may consider it's worth a gamble to go the whole hog and go for all-out war with Europe, because Europe's ability to resist will be curtailed by the lack of fuel. 

Military tacticians know that logistics are critical: any shortages, even ever so slight, affect the ability the wage war fully. That hamstrings you and you lose. Napoleon and Hitler tried and failed due to lack of logistics.

Drawing down our reserves of Diesel significantly increases the risk of war with Russia.

Because Putin will seize upon a weakness and exploit it. It's like a new version of Red Storm Rising is being written.

Although, the U.S. supplied weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan and there was never talk of war between Russia and the U.S. back then. Mind you, back then, we had strong leadership. They knew how to play the political game.

Nowadays, we have weak leaders, political pygmies who cannot compete with a political operator like Putin. We have leaders that want safe spaces, that cannot stand criticism, that stand almost as tyrants, jailing people for not following their ideological political position.

Basically, we're fucked. 

Europe's leaders will bow to pressure, release Diesel reserves, Putin will see an opportunity and all hell will break loose.

This dear reader, is the problem with globalism. When everything runs right, it's fine. But it doesn't have the redundancy required to work on a national scale. 

Every country needs to define certain industries as strategic assets and of national security importance. 

Steel production, water, power generation, oil refineries, distribution pipelines for gas and aviation fuel, are amongst those industries that absolutely cannot be offshored and offered up to globalist interests. 

The lack of refineries in the UK and of course the cost of the energy to refine crude oil in the UK has completely fucked up the notion of strategic reserves and strategic industries. We are reliant on supplies from other countries, who are in turn influenced by the prices they can get in certain markets.

American diesel is being put in tankers and sold abroad because the petroleum companies can get more money for their diesel outside the U.S. 

It would take an executive order banning the export of diesel to stop them exporting it. And of course it doesn't guarantee that production of diesel will continue. The refineries and companies making the money may just stop, if they're not making enough profit, or stockpile the diesel and not release it, until such time as they are able to maximise profits.

Markets are good when they work fairly. But an out of control, unbalanced global market like we have at the moment that maximises profits above all other considerations is an evil and immoral animal. It will literally condemn us to hell if it is allowed to continue. 

We need political will and power to sort the issues out with globalism. We are moving towards a time when we will need to put limits on globalism. We need to define certain things as off-limits to globalists. That's not to say to socialise things and have governments running industries. But we need certain industries to have certain rules and regulations, not to curtail, but to nudge. To keep them honest and working for everyone.

Fuel production: in-house, in the UK, not reliant on fuel from the other side of the world.

Water, strict regulations on pollution and sewage release and large punitive fines in the form of taxes on dividends. So it pays the companies to re-invest and avoid controversy. Profits and especially Dividends are maximised by being good and keeping clean.

Steel: we need diversified production, plenty of different steels available produced here in the UK.

Aviation: we need diversified production inside the UK and limited reliance on production from outside the UK.

Distribution networks need to be resilient. Power, fuel, water. We need to be able to move either around the country easily and have the ability to divert around breakages in the network.

Critically, we need the political will to go ahead will the above at the expense of global corporate profits.

Channel Migrants: New Update.

Now the boats on the French side have gone dark. 

You could excuse the UK boats, given the political sensitive nature of the migrant crossings. You might want to avoid the public knowing where the boats are landing, or how many times they stop in the channel, so you can't count the dinghies.

But what incentive is there on the French side to go dark? Unless the British side has put pressure on the French to make the crossings harder to track.

Why?