On his eponymous show this morning
Andrew Marr attempted to rout Welsh Health Minister, Vaughan Gething, who was having none of it:
With respect, Andrew, he said, in his De'ath voice: Let's have absolute clarity here. There are two choices here: there will be a longer Firebreak or you will all have a very long fire break indeed:
The virus has not got tired, or frustrated, Andrew. It has not gone away. 61 deaths this week, up from last week, up and counting.
Let me put it to you, Minister, the swathes of plastic and crime scene tape across so-called non-essential items that the Welsh people are not allowed to buy in the supermarkets are going to come down on Monday, aren't they? With respect, Andrew, let us achieve absolute clarity here. Books are not essential to the Welsh, leastways, not supermarket books, look you. I myself have a very short shelf of books and I like to keep them up high, out of reach, like, so as not to be tempted into reading them.
Turning to my next guest, Dr. Tiny Anthony Fauci, the Director of the American National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, there is considerable scope here for practicing my refined bullying techniques.
Dr. Tiny Anthony, is it true that President Trump calls you Flip-Flop Fauci?
I have a very important job and I will not be drawn into this. We have 70,000 cases in a day and 1000 deaths.
What do you think of President Trump declaring that he's immune?
Put it this way: don't let President Trump kiss you.
Any news on a vaccine?
There'll be a safe and effective vaccine by the end of November. However, the anti-science bias in America translates into an anti-vaccine movement. Americans won't take it because they don't trust authority.
That's enough Andrew Marr - Ed.
Sometimes, you just couldn't make it up - The New Yorker magazine has suspended one of its long-time
staff writers, legal expert Jeffrey Toobin, while it investigates a
report that he was allegedly masturbating during a Zoom work call
earlier this month.
“I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera,” You could say that. Ishmaelites, everywhere, should you wish to join the Me Toobin movement, wait for your next Zoom conference call and hold up a placard: Je suis un branleur.
Which segues us into news from France, where it is really ill advised to exercise freedom of expression:
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Jeremie Breaud, we will cut your head off.
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A week after schoolteacher Samuel Paty was decapitated by Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, an 18-year-old Muslim avenging his victim’s use of caricatures of the
Prophet Mohammad in a class on freedom of expression, Jeremie Breaud, the mayor of Bron, near Lyon, has also been threatened with decapitation. French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin expressed his support for Breaud on Twitter, and said the mayor would get police protection. Breaud posted on his Twitter account a photo of graffiti on a wall in the town saying “Jeremy Breaud, we will cut your head off”. Police are investigating the precise circumstances behind the threats. Paty was murdered on October 16th in broad daylight outside his school in a middle-class Paris suburb by an 18-year-old Muslim. Police shot the teenager dead.
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mr ishmael's Book of Martyrs:
THE ASSIMILATION BLUES.
Where I come from Micks don’t
marry Prods.
Now, any reasonable person,
that is to say a person concerned with social justice, would have to damn the
Micks for Schism-ism, the counter-productive clinging to an ancient rift in
pre-Reformatory Christendom, and seek to implement a programme of Anti-Schism-ism measures,
throughout the province of Northern Ireland; wouldn’t he or she?
Jews,
as a rule, don’t marry
outside their own faith; it is just a faith and not a race, for there
are Jews
of many races and skin colours. Even so, any disapproval of Israeli
foreign policy, for example, their UN resolution-violating ethnic
cleansing of occupied Palestine, that is described as racism on the part
of the critic, even though it would more accurately be descibed as
humanitarianism.
Now, any reasonable person, that is to say a
person concerned with social justice, would have to damn the Jews for
Anti-Gentilism, wouldn’t he or she?
Muslims don’t even like the idea
of one of theirs marrying one of ours, indeed have been known to kill
daughters who tried so to do, honour killing, they quaintly call it. The reasonable person, concerned with stuff,
he or she must surely damn the Muslims for this, what would you call it,
Infidelism?
Same with the Sikhs, they do
honour killings if one of the family gets too close to a non-Sikh, generally
meaning an English boy. And don’t tell me they don’t do that shit, the Sikhs, because I
worked with a lifer who had killed his daughter and didn’t see much wrong with
his actions, merely regretting their necessity. What would you call a father
who killed his daughter, rather than see her married to an indigenous citizen
of his adopted country?
What word would be chosen by
a concerned, reasonable person, the sort of person who would never say Cunt,
not ever, because he respects women, even though he’d vote to bomb brown, Arab
women to bloody smithereens?
I dunno, the Sikhs, those
vile, snooty, bloody Hindus who maintain their hauteur by treating hundreds of
millions of their fellow citizens as Untouchables, whilst pretending to a lofty
civilisation; what is a reasonable man to make of all these people who despise
us so?
We may not call them racist
for it is now an article of faith that it is we who are racist towards them.
But that’s just babytalk, racism,
from the mouth of the concerned and reasonable person who would never, ever say
Cunt, even though he says it all the time, under his breath, or among his
friends.
And any talk of racism is
babytalk.
The correct word, the word to
make things better, is Otherism.
I think it is not only fine but quite natural
for people not to like other people. I don’t like Glaswegians, fuck ‘em,
misshapen, inebriate, wife-beating ginger mutants. I don’t like Scousers; I was in Liverpool as a boy seaman and every
Scouser I met or sailed with was a lazy, worthless, thieving, gabshite bastard. I would
nuke Anglesey, having been there as a child on a Sunday School holiday trip and
been vilely bullied and intimidated by a gaggle of old wifeys in stove pipe
hats and shawls, cackling in that angry, vomiting talk they talk. But all of these evil bastards – and I
haven’t even come to the Hermanns – just because I don’t like them, to put it
mildly, doesn’t mean that they should be formally or informally discriminated
against or disadvantaged; they can’t
help being bastards, they were born bastards or became
bastards-by-circumstance, like sick people, disabled people and old
people. I think, in fact, that Angelseyism
is a disability, something which can’t be helped; I will always hate them,
nevertheless. And they’d better just
hope that I don’t pay them one of my Indignant Visits, now that I’m almost
grown-up.
.....POOR PRIESTS LIKE TO WALK IN CHAINS
AND GOD LIKES TO FORSAKE THEM
He should have been retired, surely, Father Jacques Hamel,
that
he wasn't renders his murder a bit more poignant; his was a grim
ending, another couple of wistful summers might have been his portion,
maybe more;
instead, he endured a shocking, choking, bloody death at the hands of crazed children.
Wholly
irreligious, I have attended an Easter Mass in one of those Northern
French towns, heard a dwindling, enfeebled congregation respond to an
elderly celebrant and found it deeply, deeply moving.
Jacques Hamel's flock must be shocked by this event,
and troubled; they will probably never recover themselves.
Could have been worse, mind, could have been their good friends, the Hermanns, running amok, and if it had, they'd have filled
the church with villagers, especially women and children, and set fire
to it; maybe tossed-in a few grenades, made the parishioners jump about a
bit.
Ain't
it funny? Who knows where the time goes, who knows how grotesque
atrocity becomes atoned, becomes inconvenient memory, how the foul
becomes assimilated into Greed's melting pot?
In
the strict sense, though, Father Jack died as a representative of his
faith, which is what Christians are supposed to do, and in that strict
sense he is now a glorious martyr.
You
only have to take a peek at Fox's Book of Martyrs to realise that it's
a dubious honour, martyrdom, one you're only vaguely aware of as you
smell your own flesh burning at the stake or, in this case, taste the
blood in your mouth.,
I
read in one of the Shardlake novels, recently, that Poxed-up Henry the
Eighth's - what would you call them - Sergeants of the Burning Stake,
were empowered to tie around the neck of a condemned heretic,
such as Anne Askew, a small bag of gunpowder, the idea being that the
burning person need only endure the incineration of their lower parts,
and, as a sign of the King's gracious mercy, would - or might - as the
flames came higher, have their heads blown-off.
All
seems a bit academic, to me; most of those burnt had been tortured to
within an inch of their lives before they were set alight by servants of
the state. There's no relief from it, though, the behaviour of
lawnforcement, just take a peek at the Chicago cops, ruthlessly cuffing
the kid they've just shot in the back. If I was black, in the States,
the ClintonDemocrats, under whose black president this racist horror has
multiplied, would be the very last party to get my vote.
Not
what it's cracked-up to be, I shouldn't think, being martyr'd to
death; more of a spectator sport, actually, and so it has proven to
be, today; the shameless, cock-waving incompetent, Frankie Hollande,
bathing his worthless self in the blood of the elderly lamb, there
being, in Frankie's book, no such thing as a bad 'photo opportunity.
Every verminous, shit-eating Godlessheathenbastard in
politics, however, after the French priesticide, is doing that
head-bowed empathy that they do, when they sense an opportunity to fool
some more of the people some more of the time, as if Angela Merkel or
Frankie Hollande or Mrs Askey give a flying fuck about some old fool of a
priest, ministering to other old fools; hark, though, as they chorus:
it-is-not-only-an-attack-on-the-Catholic-church-it-is-an-attack-on-my-incompetent-premiership-I-mean-an-attack-on-all-of-us.
Fucking vermin, they are.
Shamelessly grandstanding, tub-thumping and blame-shifting,
like a loony ward full of mad Nicola Sturgeons.
And what a hoot she is proving, Gnasher, beaten in the IndyRef but claiming victory; beaten in the EuroRef but claiming victory
rebuffed by the EU but hailing her triumph of diplomacy and now kicked
up the arse by the UK Supreme Court, interpreting European Human Rights
Law and finding the wretched little mutant, unsurprisingly, to be
totalitarian.
It is beyond farce, the SNP, beyond satire, almost beyond belief
She
is a sign of the times, Gnasher, shouty and stupid and I guess if Mrs
Askey called a snap election the SNP ranks in Westminster would be
significantly thinned; Ruth Boy Davidson would claim some seats, and
maybe the Greens, maybe UKIP, maybe even Jock Labour, although its
leader, Ms What Who, needs to cuddle-up a bit to Jerry Corbyn, if she
wants to survive, distance herself from the Blairish, whose days are
numbered, any way you look at it - either the voters'll shit on them or
the reselection committees will.
But
enough pigmy talk. The knifing of the priest serves two sets of unGodly
fucking bastards - firstly, the headchoppers have clutched to their
bosom another wretched young man, another of their virgin-crazed martyrs.......
“Adel, he didn’t have much in his head, he wasn’t very smart and he’d never succeeded at anything.” said a neighbour.
and secondly the secular Frog press has cried Martyrise! at the death of Father Jack.
If
there be sides in this latest episode of the Bush-Blair Crusade, if
we are not all equally degraded by it, then both sides have nailed their
martyrs to the mast, one of them a hapless victim, the other two just
fucked-up. It's always dodgy, trying to second-guess a bail decision,
the judges, in France or here, cannot lock-up everyone, just to please
the cops, and young Adel had only conditional liberty, anyway. If it
hadn't have been him it would have been some other boy, with Jihadi
smoke in his eyes.
Christ,
if dying under a hail of police bullets becomes a boy's only option in
life, well, where do we start apportioning blame for that? And given
the poor old man has single-handedly exculpated, eradicated centuries
of his fellows' cruel beasting of defenceless children. All washed away
by the blood of Father Jack, or so you would think.
But
hang about a bit, as a matter of historical Christian fact, my
understanding of martyrdom means that Father Jack wasn't a martyr, just a
murder victim; a proper martyr is given the chance to recant his belief
and on refusing so to do suffers the fires or the arrows or the blades
of Cruel Hegemony. In the case of Saint Margaret Clitheroe of York, on
Good Friday, 1586, she was executed, having failed to plead at her trial
on a charge of harbouring Roman Catholic priests, during the Tudor
Terror:
The two sergeants who should have carried out the execution hired four
desperate beggars to do it instead. She was stripped and had a
handkerchief tied across her face then laid across a sharp rock the size
of a man's fist, the door from her own house was put on top of her and
loaded with an immense weight of rocks and stones so that the sharp rock
would break her back. Her death occurred within fifteen minutes, but
her body was left for six hours before the weight was removed.
Father Jack just happened to be there, that's all, when Murder came down his aisle;
his
killers, however, knew that they would either be shot at the scene or
in pursuit or else face lifelong incarceration and mistreatment; both
they, therefore, and the killers of Lee Rigby knowingly martyred
themselves, whereas their victims didn't.
In
the background, yesterday, I heard a BBC hack enthusing about the
Church of Rome, about Pope Frankie de los Fray Bentos, about the
strength of the Church and how it had kept Polish democracy alive during
centuries of Communist occupation, 'swhat he said. Poland he said,
remained fervently Catholic, unlike other countries, such as Ireland,
which had drifted away, grown more secular.
Not
a word, from the PBC, about why even dumb, bog-trotting, spud-gulping,
Guinness-swigging, red-faced, shovel-toting, melancholy Momma'sBoys had
finally sickened of their nation- wide, centuries-old infestation of
noncing monsignors, bent bishops and sadistic, nuns-cum-kidnappers.
Nah,
one of the last bastions of freedom in the world, Holy Mother Church. I
don't know who the PBC's gibbering half-wit was at the surreally-titled
Roman Catholic Youth Day, in Cracow, but he certainly deserves the
Papal Order of St. James Savile the Exemplary being pinned to his
fucking eyeball.
Jacques Hamel (30 November 1930 – 26 July 2016) was a French Catholic priest who served in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. On 26 July 2016, Hamel was murdered whilst saying Mass by two Muslim 19-year olds; Adel Kermiche,who was on judicial supervision after his arrest some four months earlier for plotting terrorist attacks,and Abdel Malik Petitjean. They discussed the Koran with the nuns they had taken hostage after slitting Father Hamel's throat and said "as long as there are bombs on Syria, we will continue our attacks". The teenagers charged at police shouting "Allahu akbar"and were shot dead by officers from Rouen's Research and Intervention Brigade.
..................................................
Mr Ishmael's essay today was:
THE ASSIMILATION BLUES drafted 9/8/2016
.............................................
Medical Bulletin.
Harris had a relapse at the beginning of the week and was hospitalised for a couple of nights, but he's home now and doing very well indeed.
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Got any morphine?
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........................................................
We have stanislav from as long ago as 2007, and some of the
finest ishmael essays from the present blog. The book is available from lulu.com. and it is now listed by both Blackwells and the Book Depository. To buy a copy:please
register an account with them first. This will save you a couple of
quid, as going straight into the links provided below seems to make
paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own
conversion rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer.
Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links (to either
paperback or hardback) or type "Honest, Not Invent" into the Lulu
Bookstore search box. If you follow a link, a pop-up box asks for age
confirmation - simply set the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and
proceed. If you type the title, the anthology will not appear as a
search result until the "show explicit content" box (found at the bottom
left by scrolling down) has been checked. You may also see the age
verification box, as above, at this point.
Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.Link for Hard Back :
Link for Paper Back :
At checkout, try TREAT15 in
the coupon box, which takes 15% off the price before
postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try
a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up. With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £14.35; HB £23.74.
28 comments:
Christmas presents will be easy this year! A wonderful achievement; thank you to everyone who made it happen.
I meant to say thank you for your kind welcome when I last left a comment, mrs ishmael. There is nowhere quite like here.
Hi, mrs narcolept - so good to know you are still dropping in, and thank you for your kind words about the anthology. It is all down to mr verge, and it is a great thing that he has done. I did a bit of proof reading, but it was the house filthster who selected, arranged and edited - without whom Honest Not Invent would never have been realised.
Mrs I: good new re Harris. I was getting worried with the lack of updates.
Re the Islamic headchoppers. I'm in two minds. I have Iranian friends (notionally muslim) but nicer, gentler, more educated people you could not possibly hope to meet. It maybe that we are adding the adjective Muslim to the generic noun terrorist. Also, I've no doubt that many of the so-called terrorists in the middle east are paid by the West. And if my family wedding had been droned I would harbour a grudge.
Quite right, Mr Mike. The Iranian people have suffered dreadfully but it is a beautiful country. I love the Sufi tradition in Islam, the mystics of all religions meet somewhere.
Great news about Harris, Mrs I.
Thanks, mrs narcolept - that's very good to hear. While we hope to get some wider traction eventually (and I have, with his agreement, sent a copy to GF, unacknowledged so far but with luck it might lead to a mention on order-order, which would help) in the first instance the approval of known ishmaelites and stanislav enthusiasts is all that matters. Mrs ishmael does herself a disservice, as the book would not exist without her support, and I'll be forever grateful to messrs mike & caratacus for their careful proof-reading. Ishmael's Blues will be a big job, and I expect it to take a wee while, but before that (months rather than weeks down the road) there'll be a stanislav-only anthology, possibly a slim volume in ironic honour of mr ishmael's catchphrase "how dare there be poets." But maybe not that slim...
cheers
v./
Harris had a tough time of it, mr mike, and I guess I was too preoccupied to pop along to Call Me Ishmael to let you know how he was getting along. Seems he's okay now, and his medical team no longer fear for him, as long as he eats sensibly, takes his meds, doesn't over-exercise, hydrates and gets lots of sleep. His senior vet phoned this evening to tell me Harris' lab work is back and there's now nothing untoward going on in his insides - thank goodness for that, as at one time he was smelling like the devil's sulphur factory. I won't say anymore, as this is polite family blog.
One religion is much like another, I suspect. Ancient books, arcane rituals, strange clothes, a jealous and suspicious God - and that's just the Christians. The monotheistic Abrahamic religions - Jewish, Christian and Islamic, have a great deal in common, share origin myths, sacred books and precepts for living a kind and non-exploitative life. The inescapable fact of these three major religions is that they have been at odds with each other over the centuries, with much spilling of blood, cruelty and abuse of power. As mr ishmael points out in his essay, the murderers of Father Hemel in his own church were still teenagers, as was the lad who decapitated the French teacher. Testosterone, adrenaline and ideals coursing through their veins, they had been ruthlessly exploited by older men, to whom duping lads into suicidal killing missions was simply another move in an international chess game of aggression, retaliation and revenge. I think the West started it. And perpetuates it.
Tit for tat lunacy will do for it in the end, mrs i. The Tommies used to be masters of the matter. Prods and Romans setting fire to each other's naysayers at the drop of a match. After a couple of rounds of that, the punters smelled a rat and we have since left off the martyrdom business. I used to tell mr i that this is the Islamic Reformation that we are living through, and although I wavered for a while, I think that I was right. it will take a while though. Certainly longer than I've got.
The covid lunacy is almost as much fun as the US election. Sleepy Joe can it seems barely string ten coherent words together unless he is juiced up for a debate. That's of course eight or nine more than our Inglorious DJT can manage. And now we have tonight's "hackers" getting hold of Donald's website and their proof of his evil-doings. I wonder from which part of the swamp have they surfaced? Yon Amy is going to have her hands full come November.
Good news too about the Blog Pooch.
Can't help feeling sorry for Sleepy Joe, getting his presidents mixed up - "Four more years of George, er, George, er, he – we’re going to find ourselves in a position where, if Trump gets elected, we’re going to be in a different world.’He could have been thinking about George Bush or George W Bush - good thing his wife was able to prompt him audibly by feeding him Trump, Trump.
And he gets his big numbers mixed up - was it 200,000 Americans dead of Covid, or 200 million?
Still, he won't be the first POTUS to be the puppet of his FLOTUS.
A simple competence, an articulate and/or moderate Democrat nominee and the game was up for Donald. That the Dems failed again to make the most of their advantage beggars belief. Now we have a mess and a split nation whatever happens. If Donald loses, "postal fraud stole the election". If Biden loses... It would be fun to watch Nancy explode but I've had enough of Donald now. It's a bit like my three-quid's fun out of Corbyn's leadership win. By the time, we got rid of him that wasn't funny any more either.
Oz politics, mr mike. How's that going for you?
Oz politics. That a bit like an oxymoron. At least we jail a few of the buggers every now and then. The only thing to be thankful for is that relatively speaking we don't have too many problems that need fixing or we would be in trouble.
Thanks, mr mike. (That was me above there - forgetting me manners.) I had heard that Dan Andrews is getting a bit of a shellacking down in Victoria.
Yes, Mr mongoose, Victoria let the side down badly with their dodgy hotel quarantine security for which the polis are totally at fault.
It it wasn't for cruise ships and the hotel stuff we would have been hardly touched by the virus.
Its coming to summer now; a few days of >40C should kill the bloody thing off.
I would think that it will, mr mike.
Of course, there's nobody down there to catch it from:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/56/Australia_on_the_globe_%28Australia_centered%29.svg/900px-Australia_on_the_globe_%28Australia_centered%29.svg.png
I see France and Germany are going back into lockdown. Spain and Italy also with increased restrictions. This will be the end of the Eu economy. Not looking good in UK either. Worrying times.
Today our numbers are 3 new cases; 907 deaths total to date of which >800 are because of cruise ships, dodgy hotel quarantine for overseas returnees, and a few care homes.
But a big hit on our economy; thank God China (our main export market) is bounding back.
Update: 8 new cases today (271 active cases currently, 25067 recovered).
Wow, Oz must be doing something different to the UK Mr Mike, here no one recovers, we all suffer from loooooong Covid and get it for a second time along with Covid toe, cat Covid, Covid dandruff and anything else Handcock can make up.
A puppet to the FLOTUS. Oh yes Mrs I, Ronny was under the spell of Nancy’s astrologer and Hussien under Big Mike, literally.
Pleased for mr blog dog.
Howdy, mr inmate (that's my attempt at speaking American) and, in your litany of potent Flotus (Big Mike's a good'un), don't forget Hilary, who always was the Potus.
Whatever the anti-covid measures taken, messrs mongoose and mike, it seems to me that they have no impact on the transmission of the virus nor on fatality rates amongst the vulnerable. But the policy of instil mindless fear, assume absolute power, abandon the concept of parliamentary government and ruin the economy seems to be working well.
Little mr blog dog seems to have adopted the same policy. I think he's better - but he's not going to abandon his new powers readily. All he has to do is look sad or threaten to throw up on the carpet and I'm roasting chickens, carefully preparing four meals a day and handing over eye-watering amounts of cash to his medical team. Just spell dog backwards and you'll understand the real relationship with man's best friend.
Sorry mrs I, I did for a second allow the thought of Spunky Bills minder - I can’t use her name - to enter my head, but I just couldn’t do it.
Harris #proper bloke
Grace, you know, is what we need. In the top 3 most important words, it erases all the insubstantial nonsense and overwhelms you when it takes you by surprise.
It also has to do with your treatment of Harris, Mrs I.
Gosh, mr bungalow bill, you take me back to my Catholic girlhood, when I had ideals and beliefs and before I developed my cynical camouflage."Grace: (in Christian belief) the free and unmerited favour of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings." We could certainly all do with more of that.
If I think too deeply about it, I grasp at the horrid hypocrisy at the heart of our relationship with our warm furry friends. Some animals we breed, rear and kill to eat. And some we feed to our chosen animals.
Somewhere back along that evolutionary tree, a clever little dog-bloke decided to throw in his lot with ours, reckoning slavery was an acceptable price to pay for 3 squares and a place by the fire. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Mrs I: pry poached chicken, but only lightly poached - done, but not too much. Mr Pug also likes poached salmon.
To true mr bill.
Beautiful mrs I, but, is not we who are the willing slaves to the dog blokes? And don’t forget the Cats, do not forget the Cats.
The Cats thought that slavery was not an acceptable price for 3 squares and a place by the fire, mr inmate. So they rejected the slavery and just took the food and fire and diamond collars.
We have acquired one such, Mrs I. Supremely selfish and indifferent to our needs. A lesson in life, I suppose. The disillusioned novelist, Anita Brookner (not everyone's favourite), used to point out how the shits inherit the earth while the compassionate are cast down. Grace notwithstanding, she was on to something.
PS ahead of the sombre, murderous twaddle we'll be getting at 4pm, I'm bound to say (as they say) that this is the most repellently deceitful. malevolent and generally shite government in British history. At least our age Age of Corrupt Imbecility will not go unnoticed by posterity. Is that a consolation?
Add incompetent and venal to your list, mr bungalow bill. And throw another shitcake on the fire, dip sharpened sticks in poo and set them at your gates.
All this was prophesised by mr ishmael.
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