Electioneering

 

Last Wednesday I got stopped in the street by a coupla grey hairs.  Did I live locally, did I know abt the elections, had I heard of Andrew Feinstein and would I like a leaflet abt him ??

A's to Q's:  yes, yes, yes and, only if it'll make you feel better.
I told them I'd been following him since he exposed corruption in the ANC Govt and had to do a runner.
They were open mouthed.

They said they/ he'd been trying to find venues to hold public meetings but kept getting obstructed by the Council !!

I asked if they knew what was happening abt hustings ??  They didn't but are as amused as I am at the prospect.  The Council have stopped the public attending Council meetings on account of the amount of disruption,  so we look forward to Starm meeting more than that in an enclosed room.
I pointed out the Corbyn constituency had been denied hustings by the Labour pretender refusing to attend.  So we had a laugh about that.

I asked them what kind of reception they'd got out on the streets.  Said they'd had a few committed Starmtroopers but largely people didn't know what they were going to do and were grateful to learn there were options.  (doesn't mean they'll take them.)

I said it was a pretty safe seat, which is how he got it, but we keep our fingers crossed for the day.

I got the impression Feinstein's got a prob with getting the word out.  No poster campaign that I've seen and the only leaflets through my door have been Lab + Reform.

 

I let them kiss the hem of my robe and bid them go on their proselytising way.

Shoulda sent them to me YT Channel  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJI6LQRLOoU  

 

 

Rishi

 

An hour before I heard about Sunak calling a General Election I’d read his speech at Policy Exchange on Security  the previous week.

JFW  :facepalm:  I think the medical model is overused but the first word that sprang to my mind was “pathological”.
“axis of authoritarian states ...blah blah ... undermine our values.”
Fear of war in Europe.
“War in the Middle East as Israel defends itself ....barrage of missiles fired ...directly from Iran.” 
“Iranian proxies are firing on British ships in the Red Sea “Putin cut off the gas supplies....”
“Countries like Russia are weaponising immigration ...”

And a load more of “Russia bad and China bad” etc etc.

I’m in awe of how uninformed he, publicly, is.   Everyone knows Israel’s declared policy is the elimination of the Palestinians.  That the Pals are a people under occupation against whom Israel has no “right” to defence.  And it’s an unequal conflict.
That Iran’s attack was a response to Israel blowing up its Consulate and assassinating its officials.
That the Houthis are attacking shipping heading to Israel in an attempt to prevent the genocide of the Palestinians.

As for “Putin cut off the gas supplies....”  Chrissakes !!  The EU sanctioned Russia including not buying any more of their gas.  Even Joe Biden said so and, with the German Chancellor beside him, said the Nordstream pipeline project wouldn’t go through.
Shortly after, the pipelines got blown up but no one, officially, has said by whom.  Ahem.

Freedom of speech is threatened, the streets are choked with antisemites blah blah blah.

I haven’t watched the vid of this speech.  His brains must be dripping out of his ears.


I was sympathetic to Sunak when he got in.  It was a shit situation, even though he’d been part of it, but there was no one else to do it.

I’d’ve expected before he got the gig that he knew what was involved.  And, if not before, someone would have briefed him.
You gotta toe the line if you don’t want to end up in a  Kevin Taylor situation or, if you’re not that lucky, succumb to a sudden heart attack while on a hill walking holiday.  


Anyway, the week before, he looked to be having a nervous breakdown.  That or early dementia. 
There are various suggestions for why he’s gone at this time.  I’d like to think it was because he realised he was eligible for an ICC arrest warrant for the collective punishment of the Palestinians when he cut off aid to UNRWA.  He needs to skip to the USA or some other non ICC country asap.
But I don’t think he’s that aware.

More likely are the inflationary pressures when he's pegged his "success" to bringing down inflation.  Food prices are going up as the weather's wrecked harvests.  And the renewal of fixed term mortgage packages are going to double the repayment costs for nearly a million homeowners.


Everyone I’ve spoken to does think he’s gonna skip the country after the election.

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.