Kneecapping the Alternative Influence Network: The Sargon Patreon Debacle.

When Data & Society came out with the report on the Alternative Influence Network, I wrote a post on it here on my blog.

I did say that now it had been identified as a thing, the AIN will be targeted.

One of my most prescient comments was the following paragraph:

"To say for instance that someone two or three links away from Sargon are tainted by white male supremacy (even the vloggers who are not white, nor male) is a pretty paranoid viepoint. Under normal circumstances it would be ignored and more than likely ridiculed. But because it esposes the leftist media viewpoint that someone has to be to blame for the loss of control of alternative media, leftist corporations will pick this report up, swallow it as gospel and use it to shadow-ban or completely ban these vloggers, even if they have not proffered a far-right viewpoint."

Exactly that has come to pass. Someone in power has taken that report as Gospel and is now attempting to disrupt the Alternative Influence Network, be it real or fiction. If you look at the diagram D&S put on their report, Sargon is a huge blob in the centre of the network. By taking him out I believe the powers that be (whoever is putting pressure on Patreon) are attempting to disrupt a significant proportion of the AIN. If it doesn't work, they will move on to the other significant sites in the network.

Anyone on that diagram is at risk of deplatforming. I suspect that anyone with a block on that diagram close to the size of Sargon's will be next in line.

This is not about what Sargon said way back, it's not about him sitting in the front row of a debate. This is entirely political.

This is the new Battleground for the 2020 American presidential elections. Someone somewhere in a position of high power and influence in the financial system blames the influence of the AIN for Trump winning the election. They are out to radically disrupt that network by any and all means.

It may even be they want to own the media narrative and think the AIN is too big for it's boots. Don't forget that a TV station in Serbia was bombed and people killed so that those in power in the West could own the media narrative. They will go to ANY lengths.

They are using financial transactions and the loss of them as a way to kneecap the AIN in order to stifle it's alternative media message. They don't care who they take down as collateral damage. Gab, SubscribeStar, they do not care. Other platforms that provide services to the currently identified AIN will be targeted over the coming months, mark my words.

Brexit: What was wrong with Canada ++?

It occurred to me today whilst basking in Australian summer sun to ask the question: what was wrong with David Davies' negotiated settlement that Ollie Robbins and Theresa May had to come up with the Chequers proposal independently of the DExEU?

Nobody I know has asked that question. If Canada ++ had been negotiated with the EU negotiators, then the EU must have been happy with it?

So why did the team at No.10 replace it? And why was even Chequers further watered down during later talks, apparently without the oversight of Dominic Raab?

Why are the media not asking these important questions? Instead it seems the latest deal is the only one on the table. The deal that locks us into the EU machine indefinitely.

If Canada +++ was on the table before, why is there this insistence that the Ollie Robbins deal is the only one?

All I can assume is that was the plan all along, to make sure we cannot exit the EU ever.

It's nothing less than a coup by the political elite. It's the denial of the democratic will of the people of the UK.

It should not stand.

As a postscript it's interesting to note the reaction of people here in Australia to Brexit. They see our exit from the EU as an opportunity to renew old ties, to right the wrong the Heath government did to the Commonwealth. They see a post-Brexit Britain as an accessible market no longer fenced off by excessive EU tariffs.

It's Your Problem Theresa.

So, the PM went back to the EU requesting concessions and... just like David Cameron before the referendum came back with nothing.

The  ONLY option now for the UK Parliament is to reject the deal.

Then either of two things happen; either the EU come back to the negotiating table and start negotiating in good faith and start making reasonable concessions, or they lose our £39bn contribution and they lose easy access to the UK market.

Let's put the ball back in their court and show we are not supine walkovers.

'Tis but a scratch...

We'll, the result is in... She's wounded, but not mortally.. It seems employing most of your MPs in some form of office earning extra cash has swung the day.

So she limps on regardless.

The thing is, thanks to her "deal" the thing she is supposed to hate, an exit without a deal is ironically, more likely.

With rumours of  Nigel Farage launching a new party on Monday, the pro-Brexit vote will become forever fractured.

This was our only chance and we have been totally screwed by the elites in Europe and the UK.

Back to authoritarian rule it looks like.

Begone, vile Woman!

Currrently watching events in the UK from the other side of the world, so no real blogging because it's not easy on a phone.

Hopefully May will be gone and a leaver put in place.

However, I doubt very much that this will happen. Theresa appears to have the numbers to carry on. What happens afterwards is anyones guess.

I expect a catastrophic clusterfuck would ensue.

Many voices are now talking about revoking article 50 and betraying the referendum result in the hope the public won't go all dayglow yellow.

We'll see.

Standards in Public Life, Management and the Post-Truth Era. Establishment

Okay, so I left off the last post in 1989.

Common Purpose had been established, Sky News had started and we'd had the Hillsborough disaster and the instantaneaous covering up of the truth of that event.

Another significant event in 1989 that would kick off the post truth era is the imposition of the Community Charge in Scotland. Better known as the Poll Tax.

This and the Poll Tax riots in London the following year would trigger the demise of Margaret Thatcher. Whether she went a bit moonbat and beleived her own hype, whatever; by the beginning of the Nineties her style of government had sunk into caricature.

So also in 1990 we gained a new Prime Minister: John Major.

Almost the reluctant PM, he set about making the UK a better place for people. In his first parliamentary speech as PM he stated an intention to abolish the Poll Tax and eventually in 1992 it was replaced with the Council Tax.

John Major was a well-meaning and relatively honest man. He tried on a number of occasions to try and make the country and politics a better place.

In 1991 he launched the Citizen's Charter, an initiative to make public services better. Like the proverb about the road to good intentions, the charter eventually morphed into the box-ticking target-fixated regime we have now which denigrates the indivudal experience and hoovers up vast amount of resources supplying administration of those tick-boxes.

He also set up the Committee on Standards in Public Life in 1994 chaired initially by Lord Nolan. This was instituted in response to high profile acounts of impropriety or sleaze in politics and public services. This was back when journalists did investigate such things and it was a given that anyone in the public eye or on the public payroll was open for scrutiny. 

Very ironically, as the committee tends to highlight misdeeds and wrongdoing, so truth moves and shifts. The old adage about if you tell a lie it may as well be a big one gains political traction. White becomes the new black in an effort to divert attention.

In 1992 Labour had finally elected a leader; John Smith. He set about doing a proper job of rooting out the extreme left from the party. A job that Neil Kinnock had done so inefectively during his tenure as leader.

So here we have the early 1990s and the stage for the demise of truth.

Primarily the instigator for this is the First Gulf War in 1990-91. Of all events during the 1990s, this is the main thing. All others are preipheral and enabling, but the first Gulf War is when the media starts to turn from investigation to capitulation.

It was the First Gulf War where journalists traded access for freedom, limelight for censorship. The pressure to deliver fresh news for the greedy outlets forced journalists to compromise their principles. This is where investigative journalism more or less died and jingoism, acceptance of media censorship and propagandic reporting became the norm.

The journalistic trade couldn't revert back to the old ways after this, the establishment had learned to barter and trade the truth.

I find it ironic that as I'm writing this series of articles that George HW Bush has died. The instigator of the gung-ho! beginning of the post-truth era.

Back in the UK, John Smith is rooting out the far left of the party, at that time known as "The Millitant Tendency" (which appears to have now reappeared in the Corbyn era as Momentum), unfortunately John had a heart attack and paved the way for Tony Blair. Probably the most post-truth Prime Minister we've ever had.

Around the same time, the Americans got Bill Clinton as their President. Someone who was fast and loose with the truth as the Monica Lewinsky affair showed.

On both sides of the Atlantic truth was on very rocky ground. It was being undermined and subverted to promote a myriad of different issues.

During the Nineties we had the Balkan Conflict, the squabble over the remains of the old Yugoslavia. The Western world did a good job of covering their covert manipulations of this area until it blew up in spectacular fashion and started to cause media attention.

The truth was a victim in this conflict, with the Western media happily investigating atrocities by the "bad guys" of the conflict (the Serbs, "Black Hatted" by the West) but completely missing atrocities perpetrated by the people on "our" side.

In 1997 the BBC join the 24 hour News business. Very quickly they saw the other 24 hour news outlets and how they didn't just report "dry" news. There was always a narrative, a story, a victim, a villain and a hero. News was not simply news.

We even saw the bombing of the Serbian TV station in 1999 during that conflict, the casualties in that action declared acceptable because it removed a communications hub and a propaganda machine for the Serbian side. In that one action you can see the West's determination to own the narrative and exclude all others. By force if necessary. It also ushers in what happens to the truth and how it is reported in the following decades.

The problems in the Ukraine the manipulation of the truth around the political shennannigans, the riots and the eventual annexation of Crimea virtually 15 years after the Serbian TV station got hit shows that the West have not stopped playing the game - in fact they ramp it up to dangerous levels.

Both American and UK governments made their forays into either ignoring the truth, dsiclaiming the truth, subverting the truth or telling little white lies (which are after all, untruths).

Some of this can be explained by the fallout from the Committeee on Public standards and the push to raise standards in public life, public services, the media and other important organisations.

There is a push during the Nineties to homogenise standards for managers and leaders in the public and private sectors. One organisation offering training across all spheres is Common Purpose.  It identifies leaders and trains them to produce a homogenised, unified leadership. It's catchphrase is "Leading Beyond Authority" but you could just as well say they train people to do anything else but the job they are employed to do, loading leaders up with the idea of extended networks, diversity (at all costs) and other workload-increasing objectives. It's my personal recollection you could see it through the Nineties with the rise of so-called "management-speak": the phrases and platitudes that defined a drone. "lessons Learned" meant the organisation had failed spectacularly, no-one would be fired and the organisation would continue as normal.

In the Nineties we had the Satanic Abuse Scandals, which were poorly investigated and produced little real evidence other than anecdotes. That child abuse was occurring at that time I have no doubt, but the Satanic element clouded the issue and enabled those in power and the media to label complainants crackpots. Decades later, the systematic mis-handling of issues of abuse will come to the fore again, this time by gangs of Muslim men. It's instances like this that start to expose the Common Purpose training that began back then and has now infiltrated every form of public service. In the early Nineties from my personal experience it's limited to local councils and local public service providers. By the late Nineties it has started to infiltrate central government alongside the Blair government.

The things that started happening then continues to happen today with the media and those in positions of authority: obfuscation, denial, manipulation of the truth to outright lies and even harassment, villification and in cases incarceration of those making accusations of abuse.

Then we get to the naugties and boy, do we enter the post-truth era in a big way.

Standards in Public Life, Management and the Post-Truth Era. Genesis

Over on Orphans of Liberty I posted the following comment in response to a post about the post truth era and when it started. I apologise, as this is going to be long as it attempts to define the decade that brought us to where we are today. In fact it will be a series of blog posts in order to avoid this being a cure for insomnia.

"I think it really started in John Major’s time (although the Hillsborough disaster with its official truth conflicting with the actual truth may have been a very early indication of the control of truth and media mentality). When managament-speak changed to include words and phrases like “stakeholder” and “going forward” is really an indication of the corporate and media changes. John Major’s government commissioned the Nolan report into standards in corporate life, which strangely seems to have been a catalyst when the standards really started to slip. The control of risk morphed into the control of everything including the truth.
By the time Tony Blair got into No.10 the mentality has perfused into the Civil Service although it was probably a willing victim. It was the start of the time of arse-covereing, risk-averse, truth manipulation. Tony Blair’s government just pushed the boundaries of what they could get away with. Successive governments have pushed further from then on. The rise of 24Hr news feeds has also promoted news as drama: to hold onto viewers, everyone is a victim, the left wear white hats and the right wear black hats, the truth is what the media say it is and what makes good drama. The news is tabloid in nature: Trump is Satan, Brexit is wrong, UKIP are far right, Corbyn is a cuddly old duffer, Theresa May is incompetent, Boris Johnson is a Clown… so it goes on.
Not so coincidentally, the organisation Common Purpose started in 1989 with the stated aim of targetting leaders and emerging leaders and training them. Also not so coincidentally during this time the weaponisation of diversity emerged and the homogenisation of management across public services and the private sector"

It was a bit long for a response and it brought up some interesting ideas on how governance has changed since the Eighties and the reasons for it.

I'm not sure how I should go about this, so do excuse me if I ramble.

Anyway, let me explain. Back in the Nineties I was on the cusp of management (in fact I did become a manager in 2000, but being just on the oputside looking in, I could see some pretty dramatic changes going on in management culture all the way through the Nineties and it's only now I can sort of rationalise the changes, explain how they came about and explain where we are with the post-truth era we find ourselves in.

So, let's go back to 1989. A seminal year where a number things happened that would shape the coming decade.

So, in no particular order, here's what happened in 1989:

Sky News launches.
The Common Purpose Organisation is formed.
The Hillsborough Disaster happens.

Taking the Hillsborough disaster first. It's the first instance I can find where an official narrative directly conflicts with both anecdotal news and also the video footage that was captured inside the football ground. The official line was that the disaster was caused by hooligans. But the video footage showed no riots, no violence. Only fans climbing the fence at the front of the stands in order to avoid the crush that the Police had caused.
The offical narrative was fixed that evening by the Police and officials that the people dying on the pitch were the very people to blame. It was not the truth and as we know now, it took decades for the truth to come out that the Police were to blame.

You have to bear in mind that the "official" narrative was not questioned by reporters despite having the evidence in front of their eyes. The truth was not the official "truth".

Now to Common Purpose. Most readers will already know I have am sceptical about this organisation, it's aims, it's training and the people it targets. But it's aim is "Leading Beyond Authority", which seems innocuous enough. From impirical evidence their aims are not to teach leaders how to lead, but instead lumber them with baggage that incumbers them from doing the actual job they are employed to do.

The rise of Common Purpose and a certain management ethos has gone hand-in-glove with the failure of senior managers to to their jobs. In my mind it is no coincidence that over the decade senior management has been encumbered with things like diversity and equality to the exclusion of their original job spec. Now, decades later you can spot a Common Purpose type by the vaccuous meaningless phrases they use, the sheer inability to do their job without serious help and the slavish adherence to an agenda set by others. They are not true leaders.

Finally, the thing that happened in 1989 is Sky news is launched. A 24-hour news feed initially with no competition. However the number of Sky subscribers in the UK caused Sky to have significant influence over UK news. Other news providers started to copy it's style over the Nineties and in 1997 the BBC launched their own 24-hour news service. The problem with 24-hour news is the very nature of news: it's sporadic and you have busy days and lean days. The problem the 24-hour news providers have is how do you keep viewers watching while you are repeating the same news over and over again until the next new story pops up.

The answer is to not supply the news as a dry, truthful thing, but to make news into drama in order to hook viwers and keep them. "Truth" is not necessarily the primary response. Drama, escalation, suspense, etc. are the new News narratives.

So for instance everybody in a new story becomes a victim, to add drama to a story. Reporting Politics is pretty dull. The same names come up again and again unless governments change or ministers change. So very early the 240-hour news services took a leaf out of the book of satire: Politicians became good guys and bad guys: heroes and villains. Sky News has tended to modify it's political hero/villain narrative in line with it's owner's views, whereas the BBC have a basic Left: good/Right:bad narrative in play.

Aside to all of this, Margaret Thatcher had been in power for a decade and there was seemingly no way to remove the Tories from power. Labour, the official opposition had had a series of extremely far left leaders in the early Eighties after the Callagahan government was ousted by the Tories. First Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock. Both innefective leaders during the Eighties and hamstrung by the far left in the Labour party.

The supremacy of money, the "greed is good" mentality and the rise of the Stockmarkets and the City of London as the prime engine of GDP in the UK (and therefore political influence), the demise of manufacturing were all well in place by the end of the Eighties.

So, that's setting out the stall for the genesis of the post-truth era, back in 1989.

In my next post I'll try and explain how during the early Nineties this all started to affect management, public services, politics, society and life in general.

Old-Fashioned Tribalism: Public Opinion of Political Parties.

It seems to me there is a great disconnect with what people think UK political parties stand for (based on historical predjudices) and what they actually stand for today.

For instance the Tories are thought of by the public as Toffs, for the rich: a low-tax, low-spending party. A party of less government, commercial freedom and commerce.

It couldn't be further from the current truth. For instance the Tories are presiding over a period where the tax take is at it's highest in history. Spending has increased while the Tories have been in office despite austerity.

Rather than helping commerce, the Tories have increased Business rates.

The Tories are stifling freedom by allowing HMRC to persue spurious IR35 claims, going far and above the original remit of the IR35 rules. It's now so bad it's stifling self-employment. Anyone that is thinking about working for an employment agency on a self-employed basis has to be very careful not to be caught out by IR35 rules. Hardly the swashbuckling commercial freedom the Tories are reknown for.

The current Tory government are not Tories of old. they are Blairites: Red Tories that push a Socialist agenda rather than tradiational conservative policies.

The same goes for labour: they are no longer for the working man. Instead, after the Blair years they were for the big global corporations.  The Blairite agenda has now passed to the Tories.

Instead Labour are now run buy middle-class trots: paople who beleive that reviving far left ideas will somehow gain us a Socialist Utopia. A bit like Venezuela. Aparrently by borrowing an infinite amount of money (that somehow doesn't have to be paid back with interest), Labour can cure all the ills of UK.

With an infinite amount of money the NHS can be saved. Yeah right, only if you sort out the incompetence and the massive amount of money going to lawyers over negligence claims.

I just wish the veil would be lifted and the population of the UK can see what I see: a disunited UK, a labour party that doesn't not fight for the working guy, Tories that do not fight for small businesses, political parties that do not promote the UK population but instead put immigrants on a pedestal, that somehow self-employment has become a dirty word and that everyone needs to be classed as PAYE unless you're a big corporation that can negotiate a deal on tax (like tax is negotiable for the rest of us...).

Brace for War.

I'm not kidding: there is quite firm talk in Parliament regarding completely ignoring the referendum result, cencelling article 50 and remaining in the EU.

I really am not kidding. There are talks and conversations in train at the moment as to how such a thing can occur and how it is handled and put to the population.

Of course stauch remainers will rejoice at such news. But those remainers that value democracy will at the very least feel uneasy about such a spectacular refusal to acknowledge the democratic will of the people.

Those 17.4 million people that voted will feel royally cheated. Disenfranchised and disconnected form the parties in power. The Brexit campaign brought out the most vehement discussions and an MP (Jo Cox) was killed (whether that was ever anything to do with Brexit remains the domain of the guy that killed her).

That should be a salient warning to MPs of any persuasion that going against the majority will of the people can only come to no good.

Hopefully UKIP can channel that hatred for the mainstream political parties if Brexit is killed off by the elites of government. Because if they can't, if they are sidelined, ignored by the media and cannot voice the anger and frustration of the 17.4 million people in a constructive manner, it will only lead to one thing; the expression of that anger in violence.

If it does come to pass that Brexit is cancelled, then UKIP needs to start a campaign to remove every sitting MP from every future seat. In fact it should be a very real threat posed by Gerard Batten now.

UKIP would contest every by-election on a swap draining ticket. The MPs in seats need to fear the majority.

When it comes to a general election UKIP should stand on a manifesto promising the immediate full withdrawl of the UK from the EU and immediate implementation of the referendum result. No pussy-footing around: the week after the election UKIP goes to Brussels and gives them notice that we are quitting. That we would like to negotiate how trade happens after we close the border, but with our timescales and on terms beneficial to the UK.

The timescale set should be the life of a Parliament, so 5 years. 1 year to negotiate, 1 year to transition and then exit. Three years to negotiate trade deals with other countries and to formulate new geopolitical alignments. Then by the following election it should be all done and we should be free and should have an ongoing free trade ethos with the rest of the globe. Then we'll see if UKIP get re-elected.

Otherwise the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.

Prioities...

There's a bit of fluff in the News that Nigel Farage has criticised the current leader of UKIP Gerard Batten for appointing Tommy Robinson as an advisor on Muslim Rape gangs and Prison Issues.

Now firstly, Tommy is most eminently qualified on those matters having spent more than a decade shouting from the rooftops about grooming gangs. He has also been put in prison both legally and illegally by the UK justice system. So he knows a bit about that too.

Now, I agree with Gerard that Tommy is probably the most qualified person to advise on these matters, I don't agree with Nigel that we should not discuss these matters at all. Muslim integration will be a major topic in the near future. No-one is talking now, it needs to be debated.

Where I have issue with Gerard is the timing. This news and Tommy's appointment should really have happened after the 29th of March. Gerard could have done any number of deals with Tommy quietly, sworn all parties to secrecy, whatever. But the week of the release of the transition/withdrawl agreement is not the time.

So in my books both have made errors in this respect. Nigel for stating categorically that the issue of Muslim multiculturalism is off the table and Gerard for the timing.

Nigel needs to spend a bit more time with the working class and get away from London a bit more and talk to his grass-roots UKIP supporters and Gerard needs to be a bit more politically savvy.

As it is, I hope the news doesn't distract UKIP from the job of setting politicians straight on the terms of Theresa may's so-called "deal". Capitulation is a better word. Or if you need a phrase how's about  "Minimum Legal Definition of Brexit".

It's quite clear that the referendum question framed in general terms "Should the UK remain a member of the EU or leave the EU" gave a lot of room for weaselly legal interpretation.

During the debate before the referendum we were told that leaving the EU also included leaving the customs union, single market, free movement of people and the primacy of the ECJ.

What UKIP need to be stating categorically is that the withdrawl agreement is NOT what we were told what voting to leave would entail. We voted to leave based what we had been told prior to the referendum including the government's £9m leafletting campaign.

UKIP need to be banging this home on every media outlet they can get on, not squabbling about taking someone as an advisor. That's the priority over the next few months.

The Transition Agreement; a Massive Betrayal.

Well as more comes out of the 500-odd pages of the transition agreement, the more evidence comes out of the complete lack of "negotiation" that has been going on over the past two years.

We have no unilateral exit option (so no article 50 equivalent), we have signed over rights to our fishing grounds, Spain gets control of Gibraltar's airport, locked into the customs union and single market without representation in the EU, continuing primacy of the ECJ, parity on tariffs, compliance on standards, payment of £39Bn for no concessions, the list goes on.

The agreement is not Brexit. It  is a small step away for EU representation but all the other baggage remains. It's the smallest step the government could do towards leaving. It is not leaving because the majority of EU rules, regulations, laws, justice, etc. remain in place.

Basically it satisfies the smallest legal definition of leaving the EU organisations, but it does not remove the UK from the influence of the EU. Very fucking weaselly.

In fact the only thing we remove outselves from is the ability to have any influence within the EU. Remember the phrase "be careful what you wish for"? Thise deal represents that in spades.

It's as if the Government, Parlaiment and the Civil Service said "Oh you want to leave the EU eh? Well fuck you, we'll make it as difficult, as hard and possible and give you as little as we can get away with.

Rather than negotiate from the position of "fully out" and then get the EU to concede points in order for them to trade with us, the government and civil service teams have started from a "fully in" position and then conceded on every point in an attempt to stay as "in" as possible.

The best analogy I can think of is if an adult asked a child to move away from a plug socket and they moved a centimetre further away, but didn't move across the room just to spite the adult.

It just isn't a full exit from the EU.

It's not what I voted for.

And I just wonder, what concessions to leavers would the government have made had the vote been 52/48 in favour of remaining. Yep, fuck all. So why are remainers getting so many concessions in this deal?

The Elite are such sore losers...

Maybe the Brexiteer majority need to give the elite child a big fucking slap, top show them who is calling the shots. Let them get away with this and you can kiss democracy goodbye for ever.

How do you give them a slap? Don't vote for their representatives in Parliament. Vote someone else in. Anyone else, whether it's someone from UKIP, an independent, just anyone as long as it is not a current sitting MP.

Brexit Betrayal March

There is a "Brexit Betrayal" march in London on the 9th of December. I urge anyone that is disgusted with the non-Brexit agreement that Theresa May has come up with to attend.

Unfortunately I fly out to Dubai the day before, so I'll miss it.

But if you understand that the agreement presented to Parliament is not in any way shape or form the Exit from the EU, the customs unit and single market we were promised, then get to London for the March.

Lets put the Remain side to shame.and get numbers marching through London that show in no uncertain terms that we do not agree with the betrayal of the Brexit vote that this agreement signifies.

What The Fuck... This Brexit Business gets Weirder and weirder Dominic Raab Interview

Okay, just watch this video of the Dominic Raab interview on the BBCs Andrew Marr programme.

Questions instantly come to mind:

Of the changes to the transition agreement:

How can the changes be made to the Transition agreement without his knowledge?

Who has the authority to go above the minister in charge?

Who are they working for?

Who authorised and signed off on the changes?

What political mandate do they have? i.e. are they an elected official or unelected?


Of his support for Theresa May:

Why the Fuck Would he?

What has She got over this cabal of spineless pricks in the Conservative Party?

EU Land Grab

I think I mentioned this before a while back, but the "Issue" of Ireland being promoted by the EU is nothing more than a land grab.

They've tried it in the East with Ukraine (and rightly pissed off the Russians) and now they are trying it on with Northern Ireland.

Basically it's attached to Southern Ireland, so they want it and it's citizens to be under EU control. Any excuse to keep land along with the added advantage of giving the British a bloody nose.

Well, fuck 'em. Let's have a hard no-deal Brexit. Let's make it a bloody difficult for them to ship goods to us as possible.

And that's the thing: on TV debates, it's always about OUR trading with the EU, but never about THEIR trading with us. They trade more with us than we do with them.

Currently they have tyhe upper hand and the agreement favours the EU. That's if we accept it. But no-one in their right mind would accept such a poor deal for the UK. If we reject it, the EU would suffer more than us and to be honest because they have pushed such a punitive deal on us, they deserve to lose out.  The EU technocrats are crowing that this is the deal, there is no re-negotiation. They forget the resolve of the British.

So lets reject the deal and force them back to the table.

I've already emailed my MP (Alan Mak, Conservative, remainer) requesting that he reject the deal.

The EU, Suicidal Steamroller?

So... way back when (it seems decades ago now) Divid Cameron went to the EU in an attempt to avoid the referendum.

He requested concessions from the EU on immigration and other things.

They gave him nothing.

That triggered the referendum and the public decided to leave the EU.

Our politicians duly trooped back to the EU to "negotiate" the terms of exiting the EU. Remember this is not where we stand after we leave the EU. This is just the deal to administer the exit process between March next year and whenever agreements are made and talks concluded.

The EU gave away no concessions, but the UK government conceded every single red line.

Such was the deal that was shown to the cabinet yesterday.

The chances are very high that as of March 29th 2019 we will exit the EU without any kind of agreement to easee the transition from in to out, without a process to export to the EU and for the EU to import to us. The borders will be closed.

German car manufacturing will catch a cold.

In it's zealousness for the grand project, the EU has rejected not only our requests, but has also failed to understand the reasons for our dispute with them. They fail to compute that the EU steamroller is doing wrong, or that anyone can criticise the direction of said steamroller.

Over the decades, repeated Prime Ministers have tried to reason with the EU secretariat in an effort to get it to work more democratically and fairer. These have ALL failed.

David Cameron's entreaties to the EU back in 2015 were the last gasp saloon for the project with UK membership. It failed spectacularly to understand our viewpoint despite the decades of negotiations.

Now the EU has again failed to understand the UK sentiment and sense of fair play in these one-sided negotiations and quite rightly MPs and the population at large have a problem with the deal put forward this week. It not only ties us to the EU, but also fails to provide a point where we will leave. The EU have learned from article 50 and this time have not allowed any exit mechanism as part of the deal.  We cannot tell the EU we are leaving, we have to ask permission. Just on that point alone the deal is unaccceptable.

It's quite clear that the EU had no intention of negotiating a deal that is mutually beneficial, instead they decide to punish the UK, provide the worst deal available and also lock us unto some limbo state we can never escape.

In effect, the EU has committed suicide. All those German car workers, the wine merchants of France will not forget that the EU put the political project above jobs.

Brexit Deal Published. Where is Ireland?

After reading some of the text of the Brexit deal and coming to the same conclusion as others that we will be locked into a customs union in perpetuity (BRexit In Name Only), it seems the great stumbling block that the EU have used with great skill is Northern Ireland and the border with the South.

They have used Northern Ireland and our own Union of Nations against us, so that in order to preserve the frictionless border between Northern and Southern Ireland the EU have cannily locked the rest of the Union into lockset with EU regulations.

The EU have gamed us into this. The kicker is if we agree to this agreement, we have no way to unilaterally exit the agreement, we have to ask permission to leave. A lovely way to hamstring any subsequent government, even if it was an anti-EU one ( for instance if UKIP get into power).

All I can see now is a rejection of the deal by Parliament and a no-deal exit from the the EU machine, with several political scalps along the way.

That's if out MPs and Lords respect the result of the referendum. Time will tell.

Diversity and Multiculturalism

There is a growing movement of people following the Tommy Robinson/ Britain First anti-extreme Muslim sentiments that are growing in the UK.

Several terror attacks, the rise of "extreme" Islam and the unwillingness of more devout Muslims to integrate into Western society points to a big error in the way the Muslim community have been accepted into the UK and the Western World.

First, you have to look at history and how this clash of cultures has come about. I've blogged before about back when I was a kid in the 60's I lived in a multicultural area. Hindus, Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians and yes a smattering of Muslims all lived in my area and went to my schools. We hardly had any racial tension because we all got along. Even the Muslims in those days understood the value of Western Society and were grateful for the opportunities that immigration to the UK afforded.

Obviously the second-generation Eastern Europeans had an easier time becoming fully integrated, although they paid for their own community centre so as to save their cultural identity.

The Hindus and the first wave of Muslims integrated fine.  I had Hindu and Muslim GPs back in the Eighties when the NHS wasn't as reliant on immigrants as it is now.

So, I'm talking from a position of tollerance and fair play: the essence of Britishness I guess.

Diversity in it's literal form I have no problem with. I know a racially diverse country is not a bad thing at all.

However, what I do have a problem with is the monster that has become multiculturalism.

The multicultral phenomenon started in the Eighties although it had it's roots in the late Seventies. It professes that once person's culture is just as valid as another, that no culture is superior to another, which then infers that cultures need not integrate with one another. I'd throw the phrase "Cultural Marxism" in here, but reeaaallly, is it?

It is the monster that has allowed Muslim enclaves to be created (because all cultures are equal and therefore Muslims have the right to a separate culture, identity and community). In effect rather than the intergrational policy that diversity and equality promoted, multiculturalism promote cultural racism (although racism isn't really accurate as it's a separation of cultures, but the term fits because it has the satisfactory overtones).

This cultural racist (cultural separatist for want of a better phrase) policy gained traction in the Nineties. In that decade you saw more and more Muslims and especially young Muslims being influenced by incoming immigrants and their strong cultural identity.

That in turn led to the more devout Islamists gathering a flock of followers. The more extremist organisations that are now two decades later mostly proscribed came to prominence.

Those organisations reached out to their brothers in other countries. At that time Iran wasn't the poster child of Muslimhood and to be honest, the tide of Muslimhood in the UK at the time was turing from a Shia majority, to a Pakistani Sunni majority.

As the Islamic power in the world was the Sunni side, backed in the main by Saudi Arabia, but reinforced by the other gulf states and as Muslims in the UK became a Sunni majority. The Sunni-led Gulf Staes was where the funding came from and that's why in the main the Imams that came to preach in UK Mosques were the more fundamentalist Wahabbi sect of Islam.

Hence why in 2001 the Muslims in the UK quietly (or not so quietly in some cases) celebrated the twin towers attacks

History may have been different had Iran not been ostracised after the Islamic revolution and the kidnapping of the US embassy hostages. The Islamic problem probably would not have happened as there would be a balancing affect in the Muslim world putting the brakes on the domination of Wahabbism.

Anyway, back to the point: the multi-culti/everyone and every culture is equal policy in the West has caused a great deal of problems.

The debate has not yet turned to where and how multiculturalism has failed and how to rectify the problems it has caused. But turn it has to, because the problems will not go away until they are recognised and brought into the daylight and debated.

To find an answer to a problem, first you have to recognise you have a problem.

The alternative is unthinkable, because it usually involves violence and violence is to be avoided at all costs.

But the clock is ticking.......

Muslims - Agenda 21 Fodder?

Okay people, we're delving into conspiracy tinfoil-hattery here, be warned.

Many years ago, I blogged about Agenda 21, the United Nations' programme for a sustainable world. Basically it emphasises measures to provide a sustainable water supply, food supply, and importantly population control (in essence reduction).

Many moons ago there was a conspiracy going around that agenda 21 was the UN's charter for mass exterminations of population. Of course it died down when we weren't all shot and mashed into Soylent Green.

But.... what if for instance instead of anihillating a population against their will, you created the circumstances where they voluntarily killed themselves. Say for instance if you created the circumstances that propagated a civil war? A new crusade?

Could Western Government's overwhelming affection for mass immigration be explained by the above? Creating a situation to be manipulated to create civil war and extreme loss of life?

A neat way to reduce the population don't you think? And if the inter-religious crises in the West causes unrest in other highly populated mixed religion countries like India and Pakistan? The U.N. gets a nice reduction in global population. Agenda 21 targets met - cold and callous, but those boxes need to be ticked...

It's Getting Warmer... and we're all Satan. Or Some Such Bollocks.

In this report, the BBC comment on a report by the Met Office about how the current climate is warmer than previous decades.

Now you know at some point, the AGW argument is going to be thrown in  to propagandise the "people are Satan" argument.

So, let's read on...

They compared data between 1961 and 1990 between data between 2008 and 2010. Now colour me suspicious, but why not just report on each decade in turn? What happened to the years between 1991 and 2007?

Could it be that by cherry picking for isnatnce the very cold winters of the 1960s (especially the very cold winter of 1962) against the later dataset that the maximum warming figure could be achieved? That comparing any other pair of 10 year periods between each other that the warming wouldn't be as pronounced?

Anyway, lets see what that maximum figure the Met Office massaged out of the datasets: 1 degree Centigrade. Yep, they cherry picked decades to get a maximum warming figure and the maximum they can manipulate is one whole degree. Actually I'm being generous: the actual figure is 0.8 of a degree.

Now that's 1 degree warmer between 1961 and 2010, five whole decades.

So days are 0.8 of a degree warmer in the summer, whoopee do. When the temperature can get up to 30 degress, less than a degree is a fraction of a percent. Certainly not something you'd notice.

The article goes on to show graphs which basically show London and Essex to be the areas that have warmed up the most over the decades. I may be a bit cynical, but those are the most highly populated areas in the country and the East cCoast Main line runs through the wrming area of Essex, which just happens to be one of the areas most highly conurbated by the spread of commuters over the decades.

The urbanisation of Essex farmland might have something to do with the warming phenomenon. Something entirely local and not related in any way to global wrming other than to skew any local figures for the global dataset.

Still surprisingly the artical doesn't push the AGW agenda just yet. Instead it heads into victimhood territory: indicating people will suffer more because they won't get any respite from the heat. Aparrently a big risk for elderly people. Well it is, if you don't fund them well enough to run air conditioning in summer and heat in winter.

Finally, at the end of the article, it can't help but blame humans. Which in essence are to blame, for building in what was once rural counties. Howver, the article and the Met Office report  leave it open and don't specifically mention it as a local and entirely predictable and identifiable phenomenon. Instead the article eventually links the local warming to AGW in the final paragraph.

See, it had to go there. It's all humanity's fault. Rather than explain how AGW data can be skewed by comparing apples and eggs and the temperature of what was once a rural area with a newly urbanised area, it just plonks the steaming AGW turd on the carpet. Proudly. And then smiles at you, proudly.

The Death of Progress.

Remember when the Word "Progress" was used by Politicians and people in Education and Science?

Remember when it was commonly used and it signified that the West was striding forward, making progress and making the future better for everyone?

Have you heard it recently, expecially in that context? No, neither have I.

Despite not acknowledging the fact directly, Politicians and Scientists and Educators have all subconciously stopped using the word, because there is no progress. Not any more.

There are many reasons, the movement of wealth Eastwards to the oil-rich nations and then to China is a good example of Western money moving Eastwards, but also the greed of the 1%, who have seen their wealth increase massively over the last decade. It's also an indication of the end of altruism. Since the "greed is good" time in the Eighties, those with wealth tend to hang onto it.

For the first time in history, future generations will have less than the previous generation.

I have seen, in my lifetime the death of progress.

Wage Depression Over the Decades

Many people of my age (mid-Fifties) can still remember a time when a single parent could earn enough to run a family and have the mother stay at home.

Then in the seventies thanks to inflation, if you wanted nice things the second partner had to go out and get a part-time job. The imability of wages to support a family had started.

In the eighties, if you wanted to run a car, have a VCR, etc the second partner needed to go out and get a job. The rise of non-parental childcare in the form of child minders boomed.

In the Nineties, the two parents started to struggle to support a family. When Labour came into power in the late Nineties, they decided that the family needed help and in 2003 introduced tax credits for working families.

All the while, in the background you had non-working families fully supported by the state in the form of very generous benefits.

Over the decades wage stagnation has caused wages to depress so much that now even two people working full time cannot support a family and the government has to chip in with in-work benefits like tax credits. But that's taking money from people without kids and give it to families just because employers won't or can't pay proper wages if they wish to stay competitive. i.e. we all suffer wage deflation, even if we don't have a family.

At the same time, benefits eventually became so generous, there was no incentive to work. The differential is still pretty big. Stay unemployed and you get everything paid for: rent, council tax, National Insurance, prescriptions.... The moment you step into work, the full reality of competing in a global market hits home.Thanks to globalism you are competeing with someone in Vietnam whos housing costs amount to a tin shack with no electricity, water or sewage system. They don't have to pay for any of the utilities that western workers have to pay for.

I've yet to formulate a plan as to how to equalise the playing field. Of course as that Vietnamese worker's life style improves, pressures will increase on his wages so that eventually he will be demanding similar wages to a wesstern worker.

In the meantime the disparity is being exploited by the global corporations. It's this disparity that is causing the rise of populism in the West. The global corporates and western governments have failed to effectively manage the issue and have largely ignored the poor working class in the west. There's a lot of people at the bottom of the pyramid and they are getting increasingly angry and connected by technology.

The poor working class see mass immigration as another attempt to further depress wages, not the advantage or benefit that the elites would have us believe immigrants are.

40 years of wage depression and the various attacks on the ability to raise a family in the West from all side has created an atmosphere in the West amongst the poor that enough is enough. We're already seeing workers on zero hours contracts, workers living in tents, trailers and shacks. The workers of the West can see a future where their families live in Shacks like the Vietnamese guy and the rich get even richer.

There is an overwhelming feeling amongst the poor working class that a red line has been crossed. Especially after the financial crisis where billions of pounds of taxpayer's money was used to bail out the banks rather than allow them to fail, in the process inflating the wallets of the richest 1% of the country. There's also a growing realisation that "climate change" taxes are not being used for the purpose of mitigating the effects, but instead again lining the pockets of the mega-rich.

The past decade has seen the biggest and fastest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history. Quite rightly the poor are unimpressed, and angry.

Brexit Matters not just for Leavers, but Remainers as Well.

Ok, first off, lets state the FACT that 52% of people voted to leave the EU. It's also a FACT that 48% voted to stay. It was close, but still it's a fact the leave side won.

Now, without getting into the semantics of what happens post-Brexit, the deal, etc. There is an overall importance to what is currently happening to the Brexit process that the Remain side should be paying attention to.

The Leave side won, so it's already been decided that we should leave the EU. All the manipulation about leavers not knowing what they voted for or supporting the 48% that voted to stay or now the new people's vote (which will include the option to remain) are just semantics and a way of keeping us in the EU in some form or other.

In other words ignoring the will of the people, or refusing to accept the democratic decision of the people on a vote that has already been cast and the outcome decided.

It's also pertinant to note that had the vote gone the other way and the remainer had won, there would be no talk about they didn't know whet they were voting for, or the 48% of leavers need to be respected. No the leavers would have had to suck it up and keep quiet and the process of ever greater integration would continue, like back in 1975.

Now this becomes important to remainers because if the government can ignore the democratic decision of the people on this most important of votes with the biggest turnout for decades, if not in history, what other votes could they ignore?

I mean, why not ignore the outcome of general elections? Oh, the majority voted Labour? Tough, the elite want a Tory government so some way will be found of keeping the Tories in.

The majority voted for a Liberal controlled council? No, sorry the elite want Labour to run that council....

All I'm saying to the remainers is: be careful what you wish for. And think very carefully about the course of your actions.

Tommy Robinson Court Case Today.

Today is the day that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, AKA Tommy Robinson appears at the Old Bailey on a retrial of his civil contempt case, after the ajournment of the last appearance.

The case is interesting from a number of angles.

The first is that he could have been tried (effectively illegally) in 15 minutes or less. Without preparing a case, withiout effectively uttering a word (I know, unusual for Tommy) he was sent down for 13 months. On a civil (not criminal) offense of contempt of court.

The issues around the case are manyfold, including his incarceration in prison and the handling of him there compared to someone else tried and handled properly of a civil offense.

Anyway, back to the point. His case is being handled in the largest criminal court of the land, the Old Bailey. I assume to be able to handle the crowds of supporters and protesters that will turn up to voice an opinion.

Looking at the live streams there looks to be a significant number of supporters ouitside the Old Bailey.

The Justice System would seem to have a dillemma on their hands. If the initial contempt court case and subsequent prison sentence for Tommy was illegal or suspect and was rightly quashed (and Robinson released), then if today's Judge finds him innocent then it calls into question the whole process of the original case. It also opens up the prospect of Tommy sueing the Government for false imprisonment and damages.

So, today's court case connot find hime completely innocent. There has to be some half-way house so the Government can save face and shut down any lawsuit for damages.

I suspect the Judge today will find him guilty of contempt and issue a sentence very close to his time already served so that he can stay free, but still guilty. That the original case was procedurally flawed, but correct in it's finding.

By lunchtime hopefully the Judge will have made a finding and a judgement.

God help the government if the Judge finds him completely innocent.

Also the media reports will be very interesting..... if they do ever report on it.

UPDATE:

Tommy's case is being referred to the Attourney General. Which it should have been instead of the kangaroo court in Leeds. After all, this requires a polictical solution now, as it's gone way past the point of providing an entirely legal solution.  As I said, I'm sure the end decision will try and placate everyone.

Anyway, Tommy remains on bail until the AG makes a finding.

Lidl Parking Policy

Here in the South Lidl have had a policy in place for a while where customers that use their car park get free parking if they buy something. They then scan the receipt on a machine and enter the registration number.

Anyone not buying something and getting a receipt cannot validate their parking and I expect get a fine.

Which is great if you turn up at Lidls for something and they have it on the shelf. But what if they don't have what you want in stock? You're forced to buy something and queue up for ages just to scan a 20p box of Paracetamols or something.

Bloody ludicrous.

Grooming Gangs: Lots More to Come.

Finally the names of the members of the Hudderfield Grooming gang (the one Tommy Robinson was sent to jail for reporting on), has been released due to the release of the reporting restrictions.

Ther have now been cases in Rochdale, Rotherham, Huddersfield, Oxford, Dewsbury, Newcastle, Bristol.... which on their own should be shocking and there should be an outcry in the media.

Back in 2013 the BBC reported there were 54 cases and 54 gangs being investigated. I have heard that the number of cases yet to be prosecuted is approximately 32. Whether that is the truth, I have no way of proving, which is the root of the problem. There is no way of knowing the truth of the matter.

The majority if not all of these subject to reporting restrictions, hence why there is no mention of the number of upcoming cases and an ability to show the scale of the problem.

This is where the media is failing: the reporting restrictions need to be lifted to show the scale of the problem so it can be honestly debated. The restrictions are currently lifted weeks after the cases have been tried and the defendants prosecuted, hence old news and only given passing notice in the media.

Had it been 54 tower blocks combusting, or 54 boats sinking in the Med, the media would be all over it and begging the government to lift the restrictions. But it seems the minorities are the media focus, the majority have second-class status, especially if they are working class.

UPDATE:

In this report in the Indenpendent, it state operation Stovewood (the National Criome Agency inverstigation into has 34 ongoing investigations involving 114 suspects. It is unclear in the report if this is Just in Riotherham or Nationwide. The report makes reference to locations in Rotherham, so it's possible that Stovewood just invetigates child explitation in Roltherham.

If so the number of defendants and cases beggars belief.

At the end of the article it references a number of other ongouing investigations and a gang in London the Independent itself exposed.

The conclusion is that this grooming culture is prevalent across teh country and there must be gangs in virtually every town an city in the country. The current restrictions on reporting must be lifted so the public can get a sense of the scale of the prolem, so they can make informed choices about the security of their own children. Who by the substance of these reports are at very serious risk.

On a related subject, this report on the BBC suggests that women and girls are subject to continuous harrassment when out in public. It would be nice for the report to go further and provide details on where and by whom these women are being harrassed, so women can make an informed choice about their safety. I wonder if there is a lack of detail on the perpetrators or the hotspots because that points to a certain ethnicity....

The War on Drugs...if There is Such a Thing.

I've never been involved in recereational drugs. Never taken them, never wanted to.

Howeveer, it strikes me that the supposed war on drugs is not being won by our lackadaisical Police force and lenient law courts.

It can't be when drugs are so freely available, which of course most people realise, but the Governmentfails to understand.

So it shouldn't shock me when outside the local Co-Op store last night I could hear a pretty fed up teenage girl shouting to a bunch of kids that could not be more than 11 that she could only afford a gram and that if they wanted it they would have to be quick as her source goes to bed at 9pm.

But still... to be shouting it so that anyone within 100 yards could hear her tends to suggest a blase attitude and a sense that it's okay.

IT'S NOT OK.

The war on drugs needs to heat up.

Why Self-Declaration of Gender is wrong.

There are moves by the Trans community to take the declaration of gender out of the hands of the medical professionand allow self-declaration of gender.

That means that once you declare yourself as a different gender, then you can just send off to get your documents like birth certificate and passport changed to your new gender.

While I have every sympathy with the trans community on this issue, there have to be definitions on what constitutes gender. Society has to have boundaries and those boundaries are agreed by society in general as to what is acceptable and what the majority of people feel is comforatble and workable.

Self-declaration of gender is (at least at this point in history) a step too far for society at large. It's not like declaring sexuality. Sexuality is an easier subject to cope with, mainly because whether you are gay or straight, it doesn't affect your interface with the rest of society and (stereotypes aside) it doesn't affect your attitude to the rest of society or their attitude to you either (other than the few bigots still left).

However, gender is a different thing entirely. Despite what the Social Justice Warriors would have you beleive, gender is not a social construct and it cannot be changed overnight at a whim. The debate on gender is quite new and it has not gone through the decades of turmoil that the debate of sexuality has. Society at large has yet to come to a firm conclusion or a majority agreement at which point gender changes from one to the other.

Currently society specifically separates based on gender. Society has not yet got to the point where gender is immaterial. There are some pretty good resons for that, especially as the genders quite clearly act differently. So we segregate based on gender, for instance when it comes to toilets. We have not yet as a society accepted toilets and changing rooms for all genders. Clothing and appearance is immaterial, because there is always going to be some gender neutral androgenous clothes that can be worn comfortably by both sexes.

Society demands that whatever happens in that society, it is neutral to society at large; Society quite rightly demands that it comes to no harm. So as an example in this instance society demands that women won't get raped by men dressed as women in female toilets, or that young girls won't be exposed to male genitalia in female changing rooms. Trans people might think that these claims to harm are specious and that they wouldn't harm anyone in that way. But they can only talk from a personal viewpoint and can't guarantee that someone won't act improperly.

So currently a male cannot wake up one day, wear female clothing and then demand the rights of a female or demand society treat them as a female. Society's current view seems to be that what quite clearly is a bloke in a dress is not a woman. That doesn't belittle whatever internal struggle the trans person is going through. BUT, in order to prevent specious claims to gender, there has to be a procedure to go through that reflects societal expectations of the transition from one gender to the other. After that transition process the person becomes societally acceptable as the gender which is opposite to their birth gender. But not until that (I accept difficult) process is complete.

For instance those that don't fully transition cannot claim to be the opposite gender. Quite clearly they are anatomically still male or female. Those that chose to stay in this state for whatever reason will suffer, because society demands a person be one gender or the other. But then is gender dysphoria a proper diagnosis of someone who doesn't wish to be fully female? If a person changes their appearance (say) from male to female but still keeps the male genitalia then they are still male as far as society is concerned. The same goes for a female that changes their appearance to male.

That's not to say society shouldn't be accepting of people in those states, but society does not grant them the status of the gender they dress as and those "in between" genders should understand the issues that society has with them.

Only once they have fully transitioned is the point they should have legal status of their chosen gender.

There is an argument that the transition process should be shorter. I think it's something like 2 years before you can be seen by a specialist to even start the process. That's in my mind unacceptable. Once you have decided to "come out" and have made the decision to transition, then the process to fulfil society's requirement to be oficially, surgically  and legally changed from one gender to the other should be a relatively short one.

On a personal note, I have seen this before in fetish society. It's a very male trait to demand acceptance of a particular viewpoint, that appears to be what is happening in the Trans debate. For instance a male submissive demanding that a female dominant er, dominate them... yeah, go figure. But that's a very common scenario.

Especially when Trans society (in a quite male manner) attempts to brush aside the issues raised by CIS women, who have experience of inequality and male attitudes, shows a very male viewpoint of Trans attitudes to Women's issues. Hardly helping the acceptance of male to female Trans women.

Bow Down to Your Saudi Masters, they can do no Wrong.

The Khashoggi affair has highlighted in the most illuminated way possible that the West is utterly powerless against the Gulf States.

By now most people will know that Turkey have accused Suadi Arabia of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi when he visited the Saudi embassy in Turkey.

The details are a bit strange, with reports of covert recordings via an iWatch that recorded his incarceration, torture and eventual murder in the embassy, but what is definately proven is that Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi embassy in Turkey two weeks ago and hasn't been seen since.

It's a pretty serious accusation, so it would be interesting to know for sure what proof the Turkish authorities have regarding his murder.

However, as per the title of this post, the salient point is the lack of action against Saudi Arabia and the reasosn why.

Donald Trump really spoke the truth when he asked why would he jepardise the relationship and the multi-billion dollar arms sales to Saudi over the death of one guy?

The hidden agenda is America, like all other Western countries have been bought and paid for by Gulf State oil money. The UK's ports are owned by and all the Western Stock exchanges float on a sea of Arab oil money and there are a host of other vital industries like BAE, Boeing and Airbus that rely on Gulf State money to buy their products. Just look at how much money Emirates Airline has invested in their Airbus A380 fleet...

You cannot criticise the Gulf States or their extremist ideology any more without suffering significant harm to your economy. Slag off Saudi? There'll be no more oil exports to you then... Implement legislation to turn off the financial taps to Safalist Mosques? That'll be the FTSE 100 tanking then.

That is the honest debate that Western governments need to have with their citizens. Do we roll over and allow the Wahabi/Salafist religious, financial and political onslaught to continue against the West, or do we stand up to it and suffer the consequences?

In a way it's essentially the same conversation that was had about Brexit. Do we stand up and regain our sovereignty or do we roll over and submit?.....

UPDATE:

Please read the Wikipedia entry about the TV programme "Death of a Princess" that was shown in 1980. In particular pay attention to the fallout after that programme was shown. Also pay attention to the fact that countries whose TV stations bought the rights to show decided in the end not to show it in case it endangered their relationship with Saudi Arabia. That's just a TV show, which was effectively censored from being shown in parts of the West.

That's the amount of influence the Gulf States had back in 1980. Several decades and billions more dollars in trade, arms deals, investments in property and companies and just extrapolate the amount of influence they have now.

M.I.6 Former Head Sir Richard Dearlove Speaks Sense.

This is one of the best and most measured interviews of someone linked to government I've seen in a long time.

Some interesting points. He aligns with my views on Brexit and everything else in this interview, which is no surprise. Free from the shackles of government and I presume happily retired and independent financially he is free to speak sense rather than any government line.

He was pretty critical of the government line when it came to the dodgy dossier regarding Iraq and has always talked sense in my book.

There's nothing more to say really.

American Internal security on the Move.

Lately I've been reading interesting reports from over in America. The Trumpites seem to think that the FBI is on manoeuvres to "drain the swamp" and incarcerate those in the elite that are working against American freedoms and the little man.

My take on it is somewhat less delusional. I think it's pointed at espionage both industrial, economic and political.

For instance there are reports of 5000 sealed indictments a month being bandied about in the "drain the swamp" circles. Te conspiracists maintain this is a growing list of elite actors that conspire with foreign powers to subvert the power of the USA.

I personally think that the indictments are a list of domestic and foreign personnel that are working to bleed America of it's technolgical, industrial and military supremacy. For decades China for instance has been syphoning industrial and military information away from US companies for decades. The latest batch of high-tech aircraft are one example, spearheaded by the latest revelation of the Hong-20 stealth bomber, purported to be a rip-off of the B-2 stealth bomber.

The case of Su Bin, a Chinese spy in Canada who was caught by the FBI identifying targets for Chinese state hackers and then validating information found by them is a classic instance of what I'm talking about where I think the FBI are going with these thousands of indictments.

One of the main failings of Western governments is dealing with people within their borders who act privately and publicly against the very countries they live in.

Whether it's Chinese industrial espionage, people traffiking, drug importation or Muslim Jihadis, all are acting against the countries they live in.

America has subtly changed the legal rules regarding those people so they can be tried in military rather than civillian courts. The swamp drainers think that means a French Revolution purging of the elites, but I think it's aimed at these foreign actors.

The recent closing of the Sunspot Solar Observatory is most likely related to this wide-ranging and on-going investigation. Its position oversees the White Sands missile testing range and it would be quite easy for a spy to insstall some covert device there to do some serious signals intelligence and thereby find out the frequencies and waveforms that US missiles use to locate and lock onto targets. It may be that hackers used existing equipment to  do the spying. Quite handy for anyone wanting to jam such signals.

Another link in the chain are the latest revelations (currently being denied all over) that a Chinese actor planted devices in servers that allowed a back door to Chinese hackers. It's possible the report is factually inaccurate, but the substance of devices planted into everyday network products may not be far of the mark. I've always wondered at the intelligence of companies that allow their hi-tech equipment to be made in a country that will aggressively interrogate, reverse-engineer and if necessary infiltrate them.

A small and probably unknown factor is the flow of money to radical Muslim organisations via the Halal meat trade. Stemming the flow of money would cut off the money supply to extremists within and without America, as would the sequestration of the funds held by those wealthy Muslims sponsoring extremists and money coming in from Gulf states to Salafist Mosques.

Clearing out the rats nest infesting the USA and directly syphoning technology to China would be the biggest blow to the Chinese economy.

Putting an end to the flow of money to Jihadis from wealthy Muslim sympathisers in America would deal them a blow too.

Closing down people traffickers on Americas Southern border and the associated drug industry and the money they make is another step the FBI I'm sure are looking into.

The rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration points to all of this and not before time.

However, if I were a Western person living in China, the Gulf States or South America, I would be considering my options to return home.

Hopefully the Mid-Term elections will give the Trump administration the boost and the personnel in place needed to implement the end game.

End to Austerity Means More/Better Services? Don't Hold Your Breath.

It seems the single take-away point from the Conservative Party Conference for the BBC is the declaration that there will be an end to austerity.

Don't hold your breath.

Despite the "cuts", the national debt has spiralled. Controls on spending have failed to curtain the increase in the amount of debt the country as a whole has to service.

That people across the country still see reduced services means that there is something systemically wrong happening with public finances. We are taxed more than ever as a proportion of GDP, yet the debt is rising, public service wages have flatlined and services are reducing... how can that be?

The problem is the system. The system that controls spending and oversees expenditure is broken.

Take the NHS: I hate to bang on about this, but almost half the money being put into the NHS goes into settling negligence lawsuits and paying lawyers. That's half the NHS budget gone before deciding on priorities like wages and service provision.

The system allows this to happen because it fails to tackle the cause of the lawsuits. Doctors and nurses found guilty of negligence are allowed to continue to practice. It's just one of those things, human error, etc.

This systemic failure needs to be addressed. Quality control in the NHS needs to be stepped up and the bad apples rooted out. Otherwise the lawsuits will bleed the NHS dry like an infestation of ticks. When exactloy do we do something about it? When three quarters of the NHS budget goes to lawyers?

Exactly the same goes for MOD procurement. There is so much waste. Yes, I get that the military should have the best equipment going, but it can get the same capability at a far cheaper cost by being a bit savvy. First, by specifying better contracts with contractors so that the contractor takes the hit for any failures to meet specification. Second, by buying equipment already available rather than keep inventing brand new equipment every time it needs something. A little compromise can bring great savings. For instance making our new carriers suitable for cat and trap aircraft would have made them interoperable with other Navies and allowed us not to rely soley on the expensive F-35 to provide fixed-wing capability. For the 4 million (probably 8 mil by the time it had been implemented, such is the creep in costs) or so it would have cost had it been specified ofrom the outset, we could have had far greater flexibility and larger numbers of cheaper aircraft flying off their deck. As it is, we will have the humiliation of never being able to fly decent numbers of fixed-wing aircraft off the carriers.

When it comes to tax, there is lots to be done. The corporate abuse of tax havens needs to be stopped. Brexit will go some way to end that by forcing companies trading in the UK to pay tax in the UK and not in Luxembourg, Lichtenstein or Ireland.

Making tax simpler by reducing tax at source rather than collect it and pay someone to administer it being paid back is just a more intelligent way of doing things. Instead of tax credits, a universal family tax allowance will stop the tax credit job creation scheme. Abolishing the IR35 tax rule will free up investigators scrutinising endless tax returns for small discrepancies so the HMRC can jump on the self-employed. Lets free up that sector and get back the freedom, ingenuity and entrepreneurship that produced such a boom in I.T. across public and private companies back in the 90's. it will also put an end to the persecution of agency workers in the NHS, mission creep using IR35 as a tool it was not envisioned for.

In local government a cap on earnings can keep ludicrous salaries to a minimum. These are public servants and there should be no need for them to be paid six figure salaries. The person doing the job needs to be aware of their position as a servant of the people and should not take the piss by paying themselves 100 times the national average wage.

There needs to be a big push to rationalise national and local government. It's not about cuts, it's about doing things smarter, cheaper, freeer, it's about stopping practices that cost the puiblic money, it's about cutting the dead wood from the public purse.

Cutting the EU payments from the buget will be a big boost, but the impact can be magnified if we do things smarter and better.

Fake Brexiteers.

There's a big following for jacob Ress-Mogg and his pro-Brexit stance. He is very articulate and talks a good talk. The reason I haven't praised him that much in this blog and subscribed to "Mogg-mentum" is the fact he doesn't denounce Thereesa may but instead vociferously praises her.
I always had my suspicions that he was just a brexit voice in the Conservative party to placate the true Brexiteers in the country: that there was someone in the Parliamentary Conservative Party pushing "our" agenda.

The same goes for Boris Johnson: I thought he was a heavyweight Brexiteer that would help push a closer out thatn in approach to Brexit.

That was until Boris' Speech this week at the Tory party convention. To give much pro-Brexit rhetoric and then to promptly undo it by saying stick with Theresa May I find spineless and quite patronising. Either Chequers (Theresa may's own version of Brexit remember) is the way forward and everyone shuts up, or it's a load of rubbish, tantamount to treason. In which case the author (one T. May) needs to go and go quickly.

To say she's shit but stick with her is pretty poor form from both Bo-Jo and JR-M.

Fake Brexiteers the pair of them.

The only way to get a Brexit that is actually an exit from the EU seems to be a mass vote for UKIP.

Rise of the Working Class

Much has been said about the direction that UKIP is taking in relation to Islam. There is quite a vociferous minority if UKIP members that baulk at the direction Gerard batten is taking the party.

All I can say about it that I welcome the debate, an honest debate about the inability of Islam to integrate within Western society.

So many of those that baulk at the debate have not yet had to contend with iniquities of Islam. They have not seen their areas turned into Muslim enclaves, such that in that area Muslims become the majority. They have not had top put up with it because they can't afford to move. They haven't been able to see Muslim influence increase disproportionately to their minority status, locking the majority out of the political process.

This is why it's so hard to convince the moderate majority of the issues around Islam: they have yet to see it for themselves. The working class are there are the forefront. They are not bigots, or racists. They like I, welcome people into the country who integrate to our culture and value our culture and freedoms. What we don't like are people that set up a community apart from the rest, with their own laws. We have perfectly good and equitable laws here in the UK, there is no need to set yourself apart.

I'm fully behind this new direction for UKIP and welcome the debate that it throws up. Just like the debate around the EU started an open debate and scrutiny of it. Islam needs the same.

Broadening...

Yeah, I'm over 50 so the title could just as well relate to my waistline. I've recently had the ignominity of the wife asking if I'd join her at Slimming World.....

But I'm not referring to waistlines today.

It seems fair to say that my Blogger site gets very few views these days. I'm not sure if that's because blogger is a bit of a blogging dead end or not. All I know is that the sites I have on Blogger seem to have a pretty restricted audience and I can only look on jealously at those on other platforms getting large viewing numbers.

I've never really got on with Wordpress, but it does seem to be one of the top blogging sites, so I'm gonna have to suck it up and crack on and create content on there.

But as most people these days seem to have multiple accounts on multiple platforms, I'm jumping on the bandwagon and I've set up accounts on Wordpress  and Gab.

Let's see how things go.
I have almost 10 years worth of posting on blogger, so it's a bit sad to be thinking of abandoning ship. There's a fair bit of history in these black and orange pages.

Gab is fresh and new, I have no idea what I'm going to do with it yet. YouTube may be another thing I need to stake a claim on.

Do I need to do Twitter as well? hmm, maybe. I think I need a whole raft of "Delphiusdebate" accounts setting up all over the place so there's some form of consistency. 

I'm working this weekend so maybe over the next week I'll get the ducks in a row and start  creating new accounts.

Alternative Influence Network: The New Russia

In the past week Data & Society released a report on what they call the Alternative Influence Network. Basically a loose collection of YouTube vloggers nominally not of the left i.e. vloggers that call themselves moderate, classic liberal, or libertarian.

The report aims to attach these moderate vloggers to Racist Extremists through the process of degrees of separateion. For instance vloggers that have never espoused extreme right-wing views are being smeared because they chatted to someone who chatted to someone else who hosted a right-wing extremist to debunk their viewpoints. Talk about desperate!

This report has been timed quite critically, coming a week after vlogger Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad - he of the link over on the right  of my page) really got involved in polituics and went to Brussels on behalf of UKIP to highlight the new legislation going through the EU Parliament to stifle the internet.

So a week after he gets involved with an honest to goodness real life political party, all of a sudden a smear campaign is launched to discredit him and other non-leftist vloggers.

The report is worth a read, because of the degrees to which credibility is stretched to link these vloggers to white supremacists is well, incredible.

To say for instance that someone two or three links away from Sargon are tainted by white male supremacy (even the vloggers who are not white, nor male) is a pretty paranoid viepoint. Under normal circumstances it would be ignored and more than likely ridiculed. But because it esposes the leftist media viewpoint that someone has to be to blame for the loss of control of alternative media, leftist corporations will pick this report up, swallow it as gospel and use it to shadow-ban or completely ban these vloggers, even if they have not proffered a far-right viewpoint.

This is exactly the same leftist fear-mongering that started during Brexit and the Trump campaigs. In those instances Russia was to blame, for influencing the result of both votes. Note Russia doesn't seem to be to blame for Labour losing the general election. They were so shit even their Soviet sponsors couldn't influence that election even though the Tories were consistently crap throughout the campaign.

But it's the same old lefty whinging:  "it's not my fault people won't listen to me, someone must be to blame!" It can't be that your viewpoint is bollocks, that people just aren't convinced that your supposed utopia is achievable and that they definitely don't want to lose all their freedom to attain this socialist nirvana.

For many years, I've been here writing this blog and I must admit it does seem to be a bit echoey in here: there are no comments like there used to be, viewing stats are abysmal and I do often wonder if there is a bit of that creative filtering going on to stop my viewpoint being viewed widely. Way back in the early days of this blog I used to get regular comments and encouragement from some of the top bloggers of the day, such as Anna Raccoon (RIP).

These days, not a jot. Just maybe I was the Sargon of my Day. I don't know and have no way of proving any censorship. But if it has happened to me, then it can and probably will happen to those liberal blogs and vlogs out there just so the leftist media can continue to spout their BS unopposed.

The vloggers of YouTube have to be on guard and aware. The right also need to start looking at alternative content providers in order to keep the contrasting opinions out there.

When in a Hole, Remember to Stop Using the Spade.

Labour seem insistent on committing suicide.

The latest thing they've done to join the Liberals in political irrelevance is to vote for a second referendum. Of course Jeremy Corbyn said he would repect how the party conference voted.

So they voted for a second referendum.

Bloody good job, well done. Let's ignore the first referendum result and go and vote for a second bite at staying in the EU, or even worse accepting any shit deal the EU force us to accept.

Wonderful.

I very much doubt there won't be an option to forget the 26th of July and go back to the status quo. After all to be fair, we've already decided to exit the EU, we just need to decide which leave option to chose.

But knopwing politicians, they will slip in a "stay in the EU and forget the past two years" option into the options list of any second referendum.

All those Northern Labour voters that voted to leave need to understand that voting for Labour is not a vote for the working class working man. Not any more.

This is about as clear a statement of that there is.

UPDATE:

I had a think about this last night and I can't square the issue of Labour's avowed intention to nationalise everything in sight and this latest spasm (spresm?) of voting to have a second referendum with the option to stay in the EU/customs union/single market.

Being in the EU means that the government of the UK has no alternative but to privatise certain industries. It's EU policy intent on creating competition  (don't snigger at the back!).

So how could a future Labour government (look, I've told you once about that sniggering!) be part of the EU and nationalise industries the EU says they cannot nationalise?

Interesting quandry....

Brexit - IEA Steps in with size Nines.

Okay, let's reprise where we are up to at the moment with Brexit.

Mrs May originally had David Davies the Brexit minister working on the Brexit strategy and he came up with the Canada ++ option where we are fully out of the EU, the customs Union and the single market. We then negotiate from being fully out, to cherry picking the best bits of previous EU trade deals with other third countries like Canada and Japan. That then becomes a framework for the UK to interact with the EU in a more or less frictionless way with the EU.  Sure there will be some border checks, but the majority of trade will be pre-approved and minimal checks will take place. The N.I. border will not be an issue as goods being transferred across the border from North to South will already be to EU standards, guaranteed. It just requires the regulatory framework to be agreed, which could be a self-financing approvals body that checks companies to ensure products are made to EU standards. It could be paid for by the companies wishing to trade with the EU, or it could be paid for by the taxpayer, but it would be a whole lot less than £40-80 billion to run.

Then the Maybot and her henchmen chopped David Davies' proposal off at the legs and came up with the chequers proposal, whereby the UK will exit the political EU entity, but will stay in the customs union and sinle market, but somehow will not be signed up to free movement of people and will not be subject to ECJ edicts. Since Chequers, EU heads of state have been making approving noises about the proposal, but they are not the EU commission.

Then last week the EU catagorically rejected chequers. Understandably and predictably, because what it requires is for the EU to modify ECC and EFTA membership requirements, specifically the free movment of people and the primacy of the ECJ. Ain't gonna happen just because one country requests it. Even the sweetener of collecting EU import taxes and the UK being subject to EU tariff regimes wasn't enough.

So, that's where we stand at the moment.

Today, the IEA launched their own version of Brexit, which Big Bad Boris seems to prefer. I'm going to have a butchers at it and see where it compares to David Davies' proposal and whether it does indeed form a "proper" Br-exit from the EU.

Jack's Shit - Quelle Suprise

All over  the news the other day are the reports that Tesco is entering the bargain supermarket sector to compete with the likes of Aldi and Lidl.

Great, I don't have a problem with that, the more the merrier in the sector because I bloody love Aldi and Lidl. Their food is good (as long as you pick the right things) in the main and the special buys can sometimes bring useful bargains. I equipped my boat with a decent Fire Extinguisher and a Fire blanket at a fraction of the price I'd have paid at a chandlers.

So yeah, I love the discounters.

Where I have issue with the Tesco approach is well, the approach.

With Aldi and Lidl, they have got their act together and when you visit those establishmants you don't get a cut-price feel. The tills are smart and modern, as is the shelving. The products on display do not have a cut-price look to them. The whole experience exudes quality.

Cue Tesco: My first gripe is the logo: it looks like some cheap effort from the 70's to rival KwikSave or SuperSavers. Bloody appalling and unappealing.

Remember Tesco "smart-price"? Yep, the instantly recognisable logo that marked you out as a cheapskate or on benefits. Hence it died a death.

The same applies to Jack's. Everything is in the same bloody dreary chalky red and blue. Maybe it'll appeal to someone with OCD but the appeal of the German discounters is that there looks to be variety on the shelf just like the big boys. You don't feel like you should be wearing a denim boiler suit in some chalk-blue Gaol walking through rows and rows of Jack's products.

The cleverness of the Germans is to not plaster the store with their own logos, but to invent brands and packaging that look like the premium product, but are just different enough to satisfy the lawyers. Just look at the biscuits for instance. Brilliant and clever, because it does not condemn the customer to rows of cut-price misery, but instead instills that air of variety.

Even the walls in Jack's are painted in the low-rent magnolia that anyone that rents a house will instantly recognise. Bloody depressing. As opposed to the clean, modern whites and greys in Lidl, or the modern brown/grey tones in Aldi.

The modern, uplifting  shopping experience in Aldi and Lidl could not be further from the monotonous, mediocre misery of Jack's.

My prediction is that Jack's will die a death just like Smart Price and all those other ideas that mark you out as a cheapskate.

Until the big boys recognise the essential appeal of the German discounters they will be doomed to fail on the cut-price sector. We want cut prices, but don't want to feel bad about it or be punished for it.

Common Purpose in the USA.

It seems that the Marxist Common Purpose organisation that influences large numbers of people in authority across the UK has made it across the pond to America.

Just idly Googling I see the Common Purpose Project was started under the Obama administration. At first you may think it has nothing to do with the insideous UK Common Purpose Marxist organisation, until you see that Julia Middleton (The founder of Common Purpose in the UK) has been to the USA and spoken to the American Common Purpose Project about "Authentic Leadership" whatever that is.

I suspect it's more of the "leading beyond Authority" bullshit that UK CP espouses.

If I was an American, I would be looking very closely at the CPP organisation. The issues that it causes over in the Uk are many-fold and I would hate for the upper echelons of American organisations to fall under it's influence.

In the UK we have Police enforcing diversity rather than tackle the problems caused by it. It's as if they turn a blind eye to the problems caused by it. They concentrate on hurty words on the internet rather than crimes that cause actual hurt like stabbings. It's ludicrous, but that's Common Purpose Mantra for you.

The UK Military are so under the thrall of it that they consider equality before actually doing the stuff they should be like fighting. We now have advertisements on TV showing an Army patrol stopping top allow a Muslim member of their group time to pray..... it's all about diversity and inclusivity rather than the job that particular organisation was supposed to do.

"Leading beyond Authority" describes this. Bollocks to the job you were employed to do, lead beyond authority and make sure your organisation is diverse, caring, enriching and inclusive rather than do the job you are paid to do.

A true leader would not be swayed by thes organisation. Only those who are not leaders and want to be a part of the herd and subscribe to the groupthink would come to the fore under the Commmon Purpose regime. And we see it time and time again where useless, spineless unleaders fuck up and carry on unhindered. There's always some excuse, like health & safety, diversity, equality,

This is a warning for people in the USA. In the UK we already have Common Purpose drones in place across senior positions in media, politics, industry, commerce, security services, emergency services and the military. For us it's probably too late to root out these people and end the influence of common purpose. Anyone that tries would have the full force of the elite and their drones aimed at discrediting them.