Bonfire of The Independent Thinkers.

 No matter what criticisms you have of Boris Johnson or Nicola Sturgeon, the thing they has was charisma. They also bucked the trend of bland, unthinking robotic politicians.

But, that bravura caught up with them eventually.

There was a point I defended Boris as originally the "PartyGate" scandal was essentially a bunch of workers having a drink at work. They were at work and it doesn't matter what you do if you're an essential worker whether you're there working, or having a sherry to toast a colleague as they leave for pastures new. 

The Covid rules allowed essential workers to be at work. Anything else is semantics and splitting hairs out of jealousy.  It appears that the dispute is what constitutes an essential worker, or a person that was allowed to be on the premises under the Covid rules. 

I was an essential worker and we had Pizza delivered the bosses ordered as a thank you for working through the pandemic. It wasn't much of a party, but it was a nice gesture as we stopped work for a bit and collectively took a break. We were sensible and distanced as much as we could., but still if you want to get extremely nit-picky there were occasions where it just wasn't possible. Carrying a two-person heavy load, for instance. 

In the end we chose to work as much as we could within the rules within reason and common sense. That's all you can do, otherwise you might as well say even essential workers should have gone home. Because at the end of the day if you make enough disparate o rules or make the rules especially vague, then you 're going to fall foul of one eventually.

It's an old Soviet tactic: keep watching someone for long enough and with enough rules around they'll eventually break a rule and you'll be able to prosecute.

In Boris' case I think this is what has happened. The knives have been out from the start and this is the thing they pinned on him. It's a bit like Al Capone: the only thing they eventually pinned on him was tax evasion, which was just enough to put him in jail, despite the heinous acts he masterminded over the years.

Sturgeon is a completely different case. There looks to be definite evidence of fraudulent activity. Enough to warrant charges and arrests. Whether she was directly involved is not yet proven, but it's not looking good for at least her husband and others in the SNP financial apparatus.

In both cases however, I get the feeling there was a concerted effort to remove them and replace them with other, less headstrong replacements. In the UK we eventually got Rishi because the establishment didn't like the people's choice of Liz Truss. Don't forget that Rishi didn't even win the confidence of his own party's members, let alone win a general election.

In Sturgeon's case I think she was led down a path that she followed which led to her demise. 

In both cases we got inferior replacements. Rishi the Billionaire accountant and that bloke in Scotland whose name I can't remember. 

Bland placeholders, no agenda, no plan. 

And that's what the globalists want: people they can influence and get results. Rishi will not rock the boat like Liz Truss and Boris did. They will not stir up trouble and keep pressing the independence button like Nicola Sturgeon did. The globalists right now want open borders, not fragmentation. They want seamless trading, not customs barriers. Just look how quickly the original Northern Ireland agreement was modified, when both sides realised they'd reduced profits for the globalists.

Just remember we used to be their employers, their masters. That appears to be no longer the case. I've been banging on for over a decade that modern governments have been corrupted and co-opted to serve the global corporations. They no longer serve the best interest of the people, the voters that vote them into power. 

Would You Jump Off a Cliff?

Well, it seems a large minority of TikTokers would, if someone on there did it first.

Now, it takes a certain type of cretin to follow the dangerous dares or "challenges" on TikTok, or dubious advice, but I'm forever seeing a litany of children and adults alike that believe everything they see on TikTok is (a) safe, (b) actually really happening like it is depicted on screen.

I mean, hopefully the majority of us have learned that the videos where a person throws an object, be it a ball or whatever and it lands in a net or lands upright might not be what they are actually seeing.

The throwing a ball into a net trick only needs someone to throw the ball out of shot and then another person closer to the net to drop a ball into it with the requisite delay, to make it look like the thrower actually landed the ball in the net.

The TikTok "hack" of using gorilla glue to smooth Afro-Caribbean hair down famously caught one girl out who was actually brave enough to highlight how stupid she was to follow the advice and how it actually damaged her hair and skin.

Then there are the deadly challenges where kids have ended up choking themselves to death.

Now you can't censor this shit off the internet, it will just pop up somewhere else on the internet.

But what you can is hopefully instil a healthy dose of  sceptical intelligence into your kids that they will carry on to adulthood, so when they see this crap they don't take it as gospel, or they don't instantly go out and copy it. Obviously choking yourself to unconsciousness is not a good idea, gluing your hair down to your head is not a good idea either. 

Those "hole in one" videos? How many attempts failed before they actually succeeded? If the object goes off camera shot, do you think that maybe someone is positioned off camera closer to the net/hole or whatever in order to make it look like they did a hole in one? 

Don't get me started on the prank videos where kids prank their parents or grandparents to the point of  heart attack. One day grannie will drop dead from shock and a TikToker will be up before the judge on manslaughter charges.

And then there's Mizzy. The most despicable TikToker of them all. 

Fake threatening people, making them think he has a knife and getting in their face to try and get a reaction. Dog-stealer and home invader extraordinaire. He's rightly been slapped with a court order to stop his shenanigans, but I fear he's one of the Zoomers that have never been told no. 

He's abused enough people all his life from parents to teachers to (probably) social workers, to know how to play the game and until he meets some form of authority that  will put up some boundaries for him to slam into I suspect he'll just ignore the court order.

Had someone been able to slap him or punch him for his abusive actions, then he might have stopped earlier. But these days abusing someone up to the point they react is okay. It's the person reacting with a slap or a punch that gets into trouble. 

The problem is as in Mizzy's case, they just continue to escalate until typically something unfortunate happens. Either Mizzy ends up stabbed or shot because he abused the wrong person, or someone reacts to his abuse and they end up in jail. 

I doubt Mizzy will end up in jail. His sort don't. They know how to play the system, how to abuse and then play the victim when caught out in their abuse. He's the sort that will become a wife-beater in later life. He doesn't know any different. Abuse is part of his DNA and he'll use some aspect of his life to excuse his actions, like all abusers do.

Government by Fad. (The Danger of Slavishly Following Focus Groups).

 For decades now, probably even before the Blair Government, we had Government policy influenced by Focus Groups.

The John Major Government really started it, but Blair really went to town using focus groups to influence Government policy. Successive governments have followed suit, slavishly following fads as suggested by focus groups.

For instance, take Diesel cars.

Focus groups insisted that if Diesel cars were more economical and used less fuel, shouldn't government promote their use?

So in the Nineties and Noughties, we got incentives through reduced taxation to move to Diesel cars. If you try and buy a car from the noughties, then it's hard to find a Petrol-powered car, most are Dirty Diesels.

And it wasn't long for focus groups to class Diesels as dirty, once there were so many of them the problems with Diesel engined vehicles became a serious enough issue. So government policy went hard on cleaning up the engines with particulate filters. 

But then the engines and emissions system became so complex, they started to become unreliable.

The particulate filters did nothing to reduce Nitrogen Oxide (NOX) emissions. So we then went to adding extra stuff into the exhaust to reduce NOX. Hence the rise of "Adblue" tanks on cars. Some easily filled, some tucked away and essentially unfillable. 

This adblue additive was so important that manufacturers made it impossible to start the car if the tank was empty. A tank on some cars you can't fill yourself without dismantling the car or getting it up on a ramp. Hardly a good idea on something that is a normal consumable like washer fluid.

Then the Diesel cars got older and dirtier as they wore out and focus groups really, really didn't like the amount of black smoke they chucked out. Focus groups wanted government to protect the lungs of the little ones. so now Diesel engined vehicles are fined if they enter our cities and their Ultra Low Emission Zones. 

Now we are in the strange situation that Diesel cars attract less vehicle excise duty, because the old incentives are still in place, but will be fined if they enter a city because they're not welcome.

This is how governments making policy based on focus groups and fads can seriously fuck up things for people. 

Governments should not be social engineering. They should not be flip-flopping according to the latest fads. 

The same goes for current fads like gender ideology, so-called climate change, net zero and the rest.

Stop following fads and start governing. Government should be above fads, above public expressions of fashion. 

Government should govern, which means consistency, reliability, steering a steady ship, so that there are no shocks to the system. There are no u-turns. The country has a long-term strategy rather than the short-termism we see these days.

The Conservative government has been in power now for 13 years. The last three with a 80-seat majority. You'd think there would be consistency across those 13 years, but no, there hasn't been any consistency in policy as the Conservatives have bickered constantly, we've had several Prime Ministers as their approval waxes and wanes according to public opinion. We've had policies and u-turns on policy.

This flip-flopping on policy based on public opinion really has to stop. Government's are not in place to be likeable, they are in place to govern.