When the Nazis came

Sir Gerald Kaufman
House of Commons.  15 Jan 2009

"My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came...a German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza."


IDF BodyCam  Gaza 2024

Atta Ibrahim Al-Muqaid, aged 73, who was deaf.

I'm in a far right group spreading poison ... thumbsup

Saturday was a soggy day in London town.  (Strange no crooner has had a hit with a song with that title.  :)

I'd resolved a few days before to go on the local demo.  It looked within my ranging distance, starting just up the road and finishing at the bottom of Tott Ct Rd.

The weather forecast was grim but the clips I saw of the PM having a nervous breakdown on the Fri eve made that an irrelevance.  https://twitter.com/Number10cat/status/1763625031945383973

So I went out to the rendezvous.  I dunno where everyone was hiding, the v.wet streets were empty.  I sheltered in an empty bus station as it bucketed down.

Suddenly, at the appointed hour, there was a crowd and off we set.

The abundance of umbrellas made it obv there were going to be few photo ops.

We hadn't got v.far up the Hampstead Rd when we passed this fellow.

I raised the fist.  He raised the fist and we both shouted "Resist".


We wound our way up the road towards Tott Ct Rd.  An ambulance. lazily drivivng in the wrong direction, tooted all its way past the procession.
As did a few cars.

There was loads of cops. Keeping their distance and amiably chatting among themselves, probably abt organsiational matters.  Ahem.
They did a good job of directing the traffic to ease the passage of the march.  There's HS2 (it goes on) road works and a major road junction along the way.

Of course there was chanting.  I dunno what's proscribed but I didn't hear any inhibitions about which prominent figure was what and what should become of them.  Also a lot of "Free".

Half way down Tott Ct Rd progress slowed and the chant changed to something I didn't recognise and couldn't quite make out. 
Then I realised we were passing Starbucks and two bemused tourists sitting at a table in the rain were having "Boycott Starbucks !!" shouted in their faces.

People come from all over the world to be in London in the rain.  That'll learn 'em.

The whole thing wrapped up near the bottom of Tott Ct Rd.  I tried to vid the whole crowd coming to it, so's I could get an idea of how many turned out.  I make it around 120 give or take a bit of double counting and the ones I missed.

The very end of the procession, and far behind, was this pair.  (low quality as a screen shot from the vid.  I so wish I'd asked them for a photo.)

A young mum and her youngster.  Obv she'd walked it at his speed.  I exchanged a few words with her and she was delightful.

He's gonna have something to tell his grandchildren.

Getting the future back

 

WTF ??  It’s like whoever wrote this doesn’t understand English or the meaning of words.

“Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future” is a cute line from a fun, sci fi  movie of the 1980’s.  The premise being time travel.  The hero is transported a few decades from his present, into the past.

We measure time in the sun’s passage across the heavens and the seasons’ change as we circle the sun.

We are in the present and if we knew the future, we wouldn’t go there.  Hence the popularity of fortune tellers.

Where’s the future supposed to have gone that they’ll get it back ??  We have enough difficulty understanding the past without dumping the future there and trying to retrieve it.

“Get Britain’s future back” is a meaningless jumble of words.  It reinforces my opinion that someone tells the Labour Leader something but he doesn’t understand it and so repeats it as nonsense.

Missions Statement

 

WTF is it with Starmer that he comes out with stuff like, he’s got Five Missions ??

A man may have a mission,  e.g. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it ....”
Or,  “We’re here on a mission from God.”  But he can only have one.  It makes no sense otherwise.

If you have more than one mission it’s because you are an institution, such as a  Church bringing the true faith to the heathen.  (i.e. the moral justification of the conqueror.)  That’s why California has twenty-one “Missions”.
But an individual only has one mission at a time.

Dunno if the guy is plain witless, or ignorant of his own language and culture. 
Whatever, he comes across at best as an ass.

The Strong and the Weak

 

Suppose, just suppose, that a strong state lay next to a weak state.  The strong state attacked the weak state, annexing its territory and interning its population in a camp.
Time passes and the strong state begins to build settlements in its acquired territory.

The internees witness this and protest they should be allowed to return to live on their land.  Their protests are ignored by the strong state.

More time passes and the internees see more development and settlement of their land.  They become louder in their protests and begin a campaign of weekly going to the fence which holds them in and demonstrating.  They appeal that the laws between nations prohibit their internment and settlement on their lands.
The strong state responds by stationing its army around the fence and taking pot shots at the protesters.  No other nation intervenes.

Over 21 months,  220 demonstrators are killed.  More than ten times that number have gunshot wounds.
It becomes plain to the dispossessed that peaceful protest is not getting them anywhere.
They will have to seek another strategy.

That, I propose, is why almost four years after the Great March of Return, the Al Aqsa Flood occurred.

Huw Edwards

 

WTF is this all about Taffy Edwards ??  Huw /Hugh Edwards is a good Welsh name.

The "story" broke a coupla days ago that a BBC personality had paid 35 Grand for pictures of some guy.
No one pays for pictures.  Where do you think you are ??

(Incidentally, you can have any pictures you like of any part of my body, excluding my face, for 35 Grand.)

Story, at first, was that parents of some guy had gone to the Police with a complaint and were told nothing illegal had happened.

It then developed into .... miscreant had been looking at pics on some gay "dating" app.  So what ??  I've seen it accounted that Edwards was in a mid life crisis.   A mid life crisis is when you go to a party to see if you can "pull" like you did back in the day.  Pulling doesn't involve paying a prostitute,

And what's wrong with looking at pics ??  Does " l'origine du monde" send folks crazy ??  Should we avert our gaze from "manneken pis" when in Belgium and has anyone told Sam Smith ??

Let's go all the way and close the art galleries and the libraries.  I've got an illustrated Bible so that's straight in the bin.

I don't see what's the prob.  It's shit for his missus and fam but wharrabout the rest of us ??
Every crossing on the road is now in rainbow colours.

I can't walk into the bank but it's festooned with balloons and bunting in rainbow colours and there's a sign up about they take "Pride" in their service.

Suddenly we're all prurient,  I don't mind as long as we're consistent.  Otherwise, F.Off.

Unaddressed is the 35 grand payment, which sounds to me like a blackmail shakedown.

Trouble comin' every day

London  Fri 14 Apr 23

I got the Council “Happy letter” through the door.  It led with the news that the residents’ association of some estate in Holborn had started a scheme for sending food parcels to needy residents.
WTF ??  WTAF ??

Why are they treating this like a normal situation to be negotiated ??  Why aren’t they outside their MP’s office or Parliament screaming ??

For its survival, a Govt needs to feed its people.  All that stuff about  “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy”. 
They must know about it if it’s being featured in the Council literature.  Not a squeak from them on the declining situation.



I went out.  On my way I came across a doctors’ strike demo outside UCH.
WTF ??  WTAF ??

Hospital doctors are on strike because their standard of living has dropped 25% in a decade. (Chancellor Osborne’s austerity, for starters.)
Nurses and other health workers are also holding strikes over pay.

It’s an extraordinary situation.  These are professions that never go on strike, they’re too essential.  This is the pass we have come to.

I walked the length of the demo with my fist raised in solidarity.



Down the back of Tottenham Ct Rd I discovered that Pollock’s Toy Museum is now an “Investment for Sale”,  or at least its site is.  It was a landmark
WTF ??  WTAF ??

I gather they’ve been at that address for fifty years.  Now they can’t afford the rent, though I puzzle who can ?? 
The big shops, and many of the smaller ones, are now gone from Tott Ct Rd.  Likewise Oxford St now has only Selfridges and John Lewis as department stores.  Its days as a shopping attraction are gone.



Rounding off my trip, a corner I’d passed earlier now had some camper bedded down.   It was 11.30 am.  They weren’t begging, they were asleep.

Poverty and homelessness have been “in yer face” for the last dozen years but it wasn’t good for the two decades before that.  A characteristic of all Govt’s in that period has been their consistency in failing to address the deteriorating situation.
 

A survey last Nov  found that one in six adults were living hand to mouth and one in four couldn’t find a hundred quid in an emergency.
Inflation is supposedly running at 10% but that’s diluted with domestic appliances and other stuff people without a hundred quid aren’t affected by. 
Their concern is the price of food.  It's what they mostly spend their money on.  Over the last year, dairy produce prices are up 60%, potatoes are up 60%, supermarket brand pasta 35%.

So one in four adults are getting financially hammered, just on buying food.


Start fretting about a rerun of the London Riots in 2011

"There's no way to delay that trouble comin' every day."