The suspicious origins of the coronavirus...

So the coronavirus 'escaped' from a government-funded lab in Communist China, to spread quickly throughout the rest of China and then the world.
Wonder is it the next, new step in the Chinese government's attempts to limit its population - after the failure of their earlier, 'one child per family' policy? - as the coronavirus ideally (for them) kills mostly the old and the ill.
And the consequences of its spread in the rest of the planet will be dire. In the 'West' with the direct consequence of wrecked economies and millions unemployed, I can see Populism spreading rapidly (Populisms the new name for Fascism). We have it already in the States, with Donald Trump - in Russia with Vladimir Putin, and in Hungary & Turkey amongst other countries - while waiting in the wings are other would-be Mussolinis - the Le Pen's in France for eg...and now with animals & fish farmed in their trillions, for our tables - why not farm the old and ill bipeds as well?
The NAZI's tried it with the sick and mentally ill (as well as the Jews, of course)...it's called eugenics and with an ever increasing elderly & ill population, it's an economic issue that's got to be faced...!
Thank god, I'm not a politician...!
(Oh, and, by the way, I'll be 84 soon...

It's coming to an end - the three year impasse enjoyed by the UK!

The present impasse in Westminster comes from, I think, the uncertainty on both sides about the outcome of a second referendum! The Remainders know they have the money but not the votes while the Leavers are confident they have the vote, but are afraid that in the acerbic run-up to a Second Referendum, the Remainders will use the vast money available to them to scare the voter into voting Remain!
This is why Boris wants a general election - because a general election, he sees, will oblige the Remainders to separate into the several political camps which will then start to do battle with each other as well as with the Leavers …whereas a Second Referendum would only ask one question, uniting all the Remainers & their unlimited funds... And for exactly these reasons, the Remainders do not want a general election - but there will be one because the mass of the people now want one to clear up the political mess that has existed in Westminster for the last three years and the Remainers will lose it as these last three years have also highlighted, for the first time in memory, how little the voter actually matters to them – or is represented in Westminister. And for those of you convinced that leaving the EU will lead to poverty & starvation…just consider that the two richest countries in the world are both European – and both have also declined to join the EU…now, there’s a thought for all you Remainers!

How not to improve justice...

I think they should bring the death penalty back for murder!  Not because it would improve justice - the general consensus is that it doesn’t! Nor that it would reduce crime.  No, I think it should be brought back, the death penalty, purely for the general public interest it creates!

I remember the Ruth Ellis case, the last woman to be hung for murder in the UK - she killed her boyfriend, for cheating on her, so 50% of the population thought it was unfair from the getgo ...and the publicity she garnered was immense, right from the murder itself, to her actual hanging and afterwards and Come on, there’s nothing worth watching on telly anymore... 

...our immediate future...!

It's about 4am on Thursday morning and it all seems to be going maybe too well for Boris - as most of the MPs, both tory and labour panic as the roof to their comfortable existence is ripped opened to show the voter once again how utterly irrelevant their politically incestuous lives have become under the Westminster bubble…  

And Jeremy Corbyn is, for Boris, the perfect opponent (and beyond satire) as the paper maiche, 1970’s  ‘commie’ hurrying home to sort through his manhole covers… while all the old, established Tory MPs conveniently throw themselves under Boris’ famously over satirised bus – and so out of the political future… because it’s really all about the inevitable general election now lurching, in a matter of weeks, down the autobahn…and Boris will sleepwalk this election as it will be fought on all the awful deals Brussels will now force onto the UK, via the moderate Quislings MP’s who now imagine they are saving the country from itself…!

The modern soldier is becoming enervated by legal questions...

Soldiers should be guaranteed that they will not face prosecution afterwards for any deaths they are deemed responsible for in war zones.

I say this for two reasons. One, that an internal military court system should deal with all these charges, because, two, any soldier who has this hanging over his head will be unable to properly do his duty as a soldier.  And so he or she is likely to end up dead him or herself, if they first have to first assess that every other individual in a war zone, is a legally defined enemy and not some inappropriate* third-party   He will also be unable to do his/her job, as a soldier, properly - i.e. kill as many of the “enemy” as is possible.

* …without the word ‘inappropriate’, many youngish would-be intellectuals would be unable to effectively rail against us ‘oldie thickos’ whose mantra is, “…context, context, context is (almost) everything”

There is a broad, right wing movement, crawling across (sweeping is too final) many countries in the West now, as traditional, old-time politics appears to have lost relevance with many voters. These right-wing movements, from Trump to Marie Le Pen to that guy in Hungary, are often seen and classified as 'populist' movement, where populism is a handy expression when closer definitions are intellectually impossible! Because populism has, since its invention in the nineteenth century, worn many hats - from the extreme right to the extreme left - and the only thing they all have had in common, is that populism, while always claiming to be the voices of the people, are always all top-down hierarchies.

What worries me now is the background to all this, where not only are we systematically destroying other species, but also, to ensure our survival in an overpopulated world, the introduction of eugenics may soon become unarguable - not in my time (I was going to say, "...not in my time, thank God" - but he's already been effectively swallowed up and spat out by surging science, like all the other unconvincing therapies that limped us through the last two millennium).

So, to young people everywhere, I can only say; be bright enough, tall enough, fit enough and white enough, not to end up on THE LIST.

And at least, Adolf will stop spinning in his grave....

It's not only Free Speech that is under attack...

Two contemporary court cases worry me. Jack Shepherd sentenced for  manslaughter after his date died in a speed boat accident on the Thames and Julian Assange who is going to be extradited to the United States on charges of revealing state secrets after Swedish charges of sexual assault against him were conveniently dropped. Now Assange faces the prospect of a prison sentence long enough that he likely dies in jail there.

First, Jack Shepherd was also on the boat when it sunk - and so was at equal risk of dying…so six years in jail does not seem appropriate – and he did voluntarily ‘turn himself in’ to the Georgian police after doing a runner while on bail…while Assange’s charges now related only to revealing US state secrets to the general public via WikiLeaks  – which should probably have been in the public domain anyway.

The significant thing these two men have in common is that they are very unpopular with the British tabloid press – and so a Tory government desperate for any good publicity is backing them while its present Home Secretary, Jeremy Hunt – now directly in charge of ‘common law’ should have been charged for a whole raft of misdemeanours’ including receiving secret payment from Rupert Murdoch while in charge of television policy…instead, just like what used to happen to priests in southern Ireland when they were caught sexually assaulting little boys, he was moved to another, better ‘parish’.

These two cases are not about the contestants in some popular daytime tv panel show – they are about the independence of our judicial system...

The dog's breakfast of brexit...!

This whole Brexit thing has become a dog’s breakfast because

it is now generally believed that we will not go despite the people's vote to leave the EU in 2016 - because those within the Westminster bubble, including most Tory MPs and their civil servants (about 80%) are committed to remaining in the EU no matter what the people say!

But this does not appear to include Mrs May, the Prime Minister, who was and is a Remainer but also seem genuinely determined to enforce the referendum decision of 2016, to leave the EU – so why do I, as a
complete outsider, from a distance of a thousand miles away in southern Spain, suppose that Mrs May is genuine in her efforts to leave the EU.

Simple! Just step back and look at all the desperate, often apparently pointless actions she’s taken to try to achieve this.  These could only have been the actions of a sincere but incompetent politician, trying to achieve exit from the EU while being obliged to cover up the fact that most of the other MPs in the Tory party, and most of their civil servants, have been assiduously sabotaging the UK exit from the EU.  
Mrs May cannot even acknowledge that this is going on as it would lead to the instant collapse of the government and her being replaced by Jeremy Corbyn, as Prime Minister – while in Brussels they do not want us to leave simply because they don’t want any EU’s nation states to leave…because such an event would probably lead to an implosion of the EU – and if we do manage to leave, they want to make it as economically and politically disastrous as possible for us – so as not to encourage other member states to follow…and maybe you wonder why she hasn’t been replaced? Simple, because to be Prime Minister at the moment is in effect political suicide.

And Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister would be unsuitable in so many ways.  First of all, he lacks the support of a majority of his own labour MPs – and he’s actually a communist throwback to the 1970s, who hates his own country, is endemically anti-Semitic and is a vocal admirer of each and every terrorist group that have the worst interests of Great Britain, Israel or the United States at heart.

I am not a Tory, have never been a Tory and can’t imagine any circumstances in which I would support a Tory government - but neither
am I a supporter of Corbyn or communism, being one of those pathetic, democratic socialist whose inspiration comes from the Peterloo massacre by way of Ramsay MacDonald, our first and fairly useless, socialist Prime Minister.

…and the reason I’m not a communist or a believer in Marxism is simple. Marxism has a deep faultline running through it in that it doesn’t allow for the impact of individual, human psychology!  Karl Marx a genius in many ways, assiduously wrote the Great Men of History out of History - treating individuals such as Alexander, Hannibal, Julius Caesar and Napoleon as if they hadn’t mattered…but I've got to go now as Dad’s Army is coming on…

Why was Hitler antisemitic...?

Was thinking about Hitler’s antisemitism and where it came from? I dismiss it was simply a convenient political choice because, after the First World War, Russian communist association with the Jews (re Trotsky) became a popular and hated, belief in right wing circles – because antisemitism was obviously a grounded belief with Hitler as otherwise, he wouldn’t have  continued to use critical military and other resources to further the holocaust when, after the battle of Stalingrad, they were so badly needed to win the war!

And yet his mother’s doctor – who Hitler admired through his efforts to save he beloved mother, was Jewish – while it was rumoured that Hitler himself was Jewish (it comes from maternal side) may be the reason that after Anschluss with Austria in 1938, he had all the family records meticulously destroyed.

So where did Hitler’s antisemitism come from?

I have a suggestion – that it originated in secondary school when Hitler had to share a class Ludwig Wittgenstein. Yes, the famous philosopher who was as well known for his impossible social manners as his impenetrable philosophy – which I reduce to,   ”… ïf it cannot be said – then it doesn’t exist”

He came from a very wealthy Jewish family in Vienna...

Why Brexit has become a dog's brexit...!

Why is this Brexit deal taking so long that it has now decsended into a shouty, rhetorical debate where all rational, above board sense, seems to have drained away.

Could this impasse be because none of the parties involved, actually want or intend that we should leave the EU?

Our present cabinet, from Mrs May down, almost all voted to Remain - while the politicians from Brussels seem absolutely determined to negotiate such a desperately impossible deal for us, that in the end we just won't want to face it, by leaving the EU - and if we do actually depart, it will be with such a truly terrible arrangement that it will repel any other EU countries from ever trying the same - and why is this?



It's fairly obvious! In most Remainers opinion, here and in Brussels, if the United Kingdom leaves the EU with a half decent deal, this would lead to an almost immediate implosion of the EU as other member states such as the Latin countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal), Greece and some of the Eastern European countries with struggling economies, wanting to follow suit - leading to the EU inevitably ending up as some semi-industrial arrangement probably known as; The North German Federation, something like that - and composed of Germany of course, France, Holland and Belgium, Denmark and maybe Poland - and that would be about it!



And what about Corbyn (our next prime minister!) and the Labour Party? From what I can gather, a majority of Labour MPs also want to Remain, making them not an issue here!  So it comes down to Mrs May and the Tory cabinet, mostly all Remainders at heart, pretending to negotiate our departure from the EU, while decidedly not believing in it - and indirectly assisted by the politicians in Brussels, equally desperate to keep us in the EU, prompted by the very real fear that our departure, with or without a deal, will lead to the end of the EU as they know and exploit!

So there we have it; Mrs May and the close coterie around her, pretending to act in the best interests of the majority, while all the time, under the table, trying to bring about the exact opposite…with the help of the Brussels politicians and bureaucrats, panicking at the prospect of losing power!



So what will the inevitable outcome be? It will be a second referendum - and a third and so on until 'they' get the result they want...and then the people will finally have spoken - in harmony with their secret desires, of course!

Populism by any other name...is still fascism..!

The world is being engulfed by fascism as complete as in the Thirties. Here I’d better give my definition of fascism, because under its swaying umbrella, I include communism - any total, top-down political control such as happened in the communism of Mao and Stalin, who went on to slaughter more of their own citizens than Hitler ever managed.

Fascism to me, is any regime where all the significant decisions are made by one individual at the top and the people are expected to accept his/her opinion on everything of significance - and if they demur, the best they can hope for is to end up in some prison camp – while control of the media; TV, the press, books and films will lie with a Goebbels like acolyte.

But these dictators do not appear from nowhere to take over a country, they need the support of a majority of the people, in fact, they are only articulating the desires and the longings of the masses. And already China, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, to name but a few - have Great Leaders in place while in the West, in the United States and the United Kingdom, unintentionally maybe, they are already preparing for him in the universities - the only real source of intellectual empowerment for the nation, with strongly organised movements against freedom of speech…and these populist movement are now going from strength to strength in the West, getting the support of many politicians and even some political parties: in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party is already half way down this familiar old road to nowhere…

If you cancel debate and free speech, you turn any so-called democracy towards a single state with a single leader, the stifling and curtailing of meritocracy leads, quite inevitably, to dictatorship! It will also lead, equally inevitably, to a new dark age where ignorant, mullah like, cretins will control and regulate everything.

I am unlikely to live to see this happening, but the future, which comes out of the past, seems to be going in this direction – making it, maybe, an inevitable outcome – and with the concealed support of Big Business, now as powerful as many medium sized states, meritocracy will bite the dust – and with it any hope not only for ourselves – but also the planet’s survival.

Why I don't speak Spanish after forty years living there...!

This is a personal post explaining why after forty years living on and off in Spain I still hardly speak a word of Spanish. It becomes even more bizarre when I tell you that I was brought up in a multilingual (Gaelic and English) household in the West Highlands of Scotland, where English – the second language, is still the only language I can speak.

So what happened to Gaelic - my First Language? Nada - we simply never had a chance to learn it as our father would hit us across the face if we try to speak it. Why did he do this? Why did he stop us speaking our own, official and main language? Because he did all his business in Gaelic and being a sheep farmer, he didn’t want us going down the school and giving away to the other kids his plans to sell say, a sheep - or even a cow! Yes, that’s why he prevented us from speaking our own language!

Now I can only attribute these early, traumatic experiences to my lifelong and complete inability to learn another language (I tried to learn French in high school and later Hindustani in India, with no success).

And I have seriously tried to learn Spanish, signing up and attending at least half a dozen Spanish language courses and doing numerous online tutorials, over the last four decades - even had a Spanish girlfriend who didn’t have a word of English, so I hoped that not having a common language would force me to learn Spanish – except instead it led to a near perfect relationship, while every so often, she’d rear up and start slapping me vigorously about the face, as Latin ladies do! Of course, I’d no idea why except I knew it was nothing I’d said!

So it’s not laziness, arrogance or insularity that prevents me learning Spanish – but seem sourced in these nonsensically absurd traumas from my early youth…

By the way, this will all be in an autobiography I’m bringing out later this year.

GOOGLE TRANSLATION…

Esta es una publicación personal que explica por qué, después de cuarenta años de vida, la mayoría en España, apenas hablo una palabra de español. Se vuelve aún más extraño cuando te cuento que crecí en un hogar multilingüe (gaélico e inglés) en las Tierras Altas del Oeste de Escocia, donde el inglés, el segundo idioma, sigue siendo el único idioma que puedo hablar.

Entonces, ¿qué pasó con el gaélico, mi primer idioma? Nada, simplemente nunca tuvimos la oportunidad de aprenderlo porque nuestro padre nos golpeó en la cara si intentamos hablarlo. ¿Por qué hizo esto? ¿Por qué nos impidió hablar nuestro propio idioma oficial? Debido a que hizo todos sus negocios en gaélico y siendo un granjero de ovejas, no quería que bajáramos a la escuela y les diera a los otros niños sus planes de vender, por ejemplo, una oveja o incluso una vaca. Sí, es por eso que se nos impidió hablar nuestro propio idioma.

Ahora solo puedo atribuir estas experiencias tempranas y traumáticas a mi total incapacidad para aprender otro idioma (intenté aprender francés en la escuela secundaria y más tarde en hindi en India, sin éxito).

Y traté seriamente de aprender español, me inscribí y asistí al menos a media docena de cursos de español e hice numerosos tutoriales en línea durante las últimas cuatro décadas, incluso tuve una novia española que no hablaba nada de inglés, así que lo esperaba como nosotros progresó, y como yo no tenía un lenguaje común, me obligaría a aprender español, excepto que, en cambio, me llevó a una relación casi perfecta, mientras que de vez en cuando, ella se levantaba y comenzaba a abofetearme vigorosamente en el cara, como lo hacen las damas latinas! Por supuesto, no tenía idea de por qué, excepto que sabía que no era nada de lo que había dicho.

Por lo tanto, no es la pereza, la arrogancia o la insularidad lo que me impide aprender español, sino que parecen surgir de estos antiguos y absurdos traumas de mi temprana juventud ...

Por cierto, todo esto estará en una autobiografía que se lanzará más adelante este año ...