The Sunday Ishmael 9/05/2021

Great Ideas that have had their day:

 

1.    The United Kingdom.

Scotland, best part of England.  Photo sourced by mr ishmael  4/12/2011

I'm afraid that's it for the Union. The settled will of the peepul of Scoatland has been expressed through the ballot box

 

Never could she have imagined, a wee gurrul at Dreghorn Primary School, that one day she would single-handedly destroy the United Kingdom. Never mind. At least this one got stuffed: 

 

Scotland's first minister for cholesterol takes a wee walk with his mother. (Ed. note - his wife).

Having sold Aberdeenshire to his friend, Mr Donald McTrump, a man obnoxious even by American standards, Fat Alec Salmond is trumpeting his success in approving the covering of the Highlands with two hundred feet high pylons through Scotland's infant National Park; options of routing the cables from proposed windfarms either underground or sub-sea were not examined.

COUNTRY FOR SALE TO HIGHEST BIDDER, NEWS FROM SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND 12/1/2010

And now mrs Fish can begin to make good on the manifesto promises: 

1. Freeze income tax and remove council tax for under 22 yr olds
2. Increase NHS spending by 20%, abolish NHS dentistry charges and maintain free prescriptions, invest £10 billion to replace & refurbish health facilities over the next 10 years.
   
3.  Establish a National Care Service. Increase investment in care by 25%
   
4. Invest £250 million over 5 years in drug intervention
5. Invest £33 billion over 5 years to support 45,000 jobs
6. Invest £33 million in an energy transition fund to support the oil industry to diversify
7. Set up a £10 million fund to allow companies to explore & pilot the 4 day working week.
8. Provide 100 grants of £50 grand to young people or families to stay or work on the isles
9. Invest £30 million in island infrastructure
10. Increase the Scottish Child payment to £20 per eligible youngster.
11. Provide free school breakfasts, lunches and a computer device with internet connectivity to all primary school children and a free bike if their parents don't get them one
    
12. Provide £1billion to close the educational attainment gap and create a National Digital Academy
13. Build 100,000 affordable homes by 2032. Spend £3.5 billion on supporting an estimated 14,000 jobs in the building industry
    
14.  Decarbonise heating in 1 million homes by 2030, using £1.6 billion in climate change funds

Best get all of this done before the last manifesto pledge - to remove Scotland from the United Kingdom; otherwise, where's the money to come from?

 So, it's all sounding good - lots and lots of jam tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow as we creep our petty pace to dusty death. We really must hold oor Nikki's nose to the wheel on this one - bet everyone will want to come live in smart, successful Scotland, healthier and wealthier day by day.

Mustn't grumble - mr ishmael and I never paid for a single prescription after moving to bonny Scotland, and, over the years, we had two heavily, heavily subsidised oil heating  systems installed. And now there'll be alternative heating systems to replace the fossil fuel systems: we had a chap round once to sell us a windmill system. Here's mr ishmael on what transpired:

 

 

 You'll get seven-and-a-half grand a year in feed-in tariff.  And you'll get all your electricity free;  what's not to like?

And how much the fuck does one of these wind turbines cost?

This one's sixty-three grand. Plus the VAT.

How much?

But you can get a loan for that.  At five per cent.  And so after about eight years, or nine, it'll all be paid for and the seven-and-a-half grand a year'll be yours.

If I live that long.  And what happens if I want to  sell the house?

Well, you're liable for the loan.

And what about the feed-in tariff?

Oh, that stays with the house.

He was an oily bastard. Teeth too white, hair too just-so.  Far too work-out fit for a man of his age. A smile that flashed out Would I lie to you? Too fucking right you would.  And he drove one of those obsidian,  half SUV-half lorry vehicles with blacked-out windows, like he was a gangsta rapper and not a ten-thousand year,  stone age DNA-ed, far Northern  webfoot inbred.  They do actually exist, the webfingered and footed, I know somebody who knows one.

 SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND  8/9/2012 wind turbines

 

2.    The Labour Party

 

Just walk away from the chips, Starmer, and forget about the beer.

And was it fair to sack Rayner just because she may - or may not - have one of these:

Respectable Hartlepool matrons were aghast at the ways of the fancy London Lawyer Labour Leader, flaunting his dietary predilections in their honest, god fearing constituency, as they flooded into the polling station in their massed, handbagged battalions to kick him in the nuts. “Coming round here, eating fish and chips and drinking pints of beer, the very idea!" Didn’t work in Plymouth, either. Eating Fish and Chips in public.  

Can’t resurrect the Labour vote with fish n  chips. Not even pie n chips. Nor pints of wallop.

They’d rather have a proper champagne swilling Tory. Blair and Brown between them did for the Labour party. And any subsequent machination and shuffle could not revive the corpse.

 

 3. The Monarchy

  Forced to support themselves by exploiting their meagre talents and connections, the royal family plumb new depths. This one, 

Micheal Ofkent, appears to have been the subject of a scam by the Sunday Times and Channel 4, who posed as executives from the fictitious House of Haedong, a South Korean firm, and induced the Queen's cousin to boast during a zoom meeting  that he could exploit his royal connections to gain access to Vladimir Putin's inner circle and represent the interests of the House of Haedong for a fee of £143,000 plus £50 grand for a confidential  four or five day trip to Russia.
Ofkent is 50th in line of succession to the throne, but started out in seventh place when born in 1942. There really are an awful lot of them.

He should have adopted mr ishmael's policy for dealing with telephone scammers. You know - the one with the curly-cocked pig.

 

And it seems that Meghan Ofsussex has followed in the footsteps of children's author, Sarah Ofyork by trying to raise some cash by writing a book about a bench. Kate Ofcambridge might join in:

imagined and created by mr verge - chapeau.

Just a thought - is there a county in England that doesn't have a royal named after it?

The "Chilean mining accident", began on Thursday, 5 August 2010, with a cave-in at the San José copper–gold mine, northern Chile. Chile's President, Sebastián Piñera, cut short an official trip and returned to Chile in order to visit the mine.Thirty-three men were trapped 2,300 ft underground and 3 miles from the mine's entrance via spiraling underground ramps. After the state-owned mining company, Codelco, took over rescue efforts from the mine's owners, exploratory boreholes were drilled. Seventeen days after the accident, a note was found taped to a drill bit pulled back to the surface: "Estamos bien en el refugio los 33" (We are well in the shelter, the 33 of us). Three separate drilling rig teams, nearly every Chilean government ministry, the United States's space agency, NASA, and a dozen corporations from around the world cooperated in completing the rescue. On 13 October 2010 the men were winched to the surface one at a time, in a specially built capsule, as an estimated 5.3 million people watched via video stream worldwide.

 

 GOTTA PICKA POCKET OR TWO 

drafted    27/10/2010

I'm sick of them, now. I was thrilled when they were found alive and  when they started coming up. Didn't matter where they were from, it's just shit, that, being trapped, like those blokes in the Russian 'sub, the Kursk, was it; better just to be killed straight off than all that running out of air shit, upsetting the viewers, well, some of us. I firmly believe that Formula One fans follow these racing  cars all around the world hoping, praying, gagging for Lewis Hamilton or Jensen Button to crash and get toasted,  they'll be the ones who had their fingers crossed for a cave-in, down there in Chile.

They could have been from anywhere, the miners, didn't matter a fuck, the heart went out and the stomach turned over,. Now, the whole thing is like a nationalist party political broadcast, Chile this and Chile that and that pimp bandit, El Presidente, waltzing or is it tango-ing, Berluscone-ing his way around the world, as though he, himself,  was down on his hands and knees for two months,  digging like a bastard with his bare hands, rather like Comrade Snot, now of the Kirkcaldy Oxfam Shop, and all his shit about saving the world and it being the right thing to do for the country, and only he could have thought of it because  he was a son of the fucking manse and the cleverest boy in the school and heard voices in his mad,  snot-gobbling head and no,  he wasn't gay, how could he be, hadn't he married enthusiastically, in his early fifties, couldn't wait, and Sarah-George was his best thing ever, especially now that he was working in the charity shop, because nobody wanted to pay to hear his crap, his nailbitten Claw of Doom metronoming on the lectern, his jaw doing that drywank jawdrop thing Dah-Dah-Dah and bits of snot all over his tie; El Presidente was gobbing away, just like Snotty did, only in better English, surreptitiously, obliquely, taking the credit for the rescue, even though the State had fucked things up in the first place, deregulating the mines and letting the el-Mafia run them.

Not happy with that shameless tub-thumping,  he was  giving people lumps of rock, well, giving 'em to Queens and unelected prime ministers. And how does anybody know that they're genuine rescue rocks? Not like they're from the Sea of Tranquility, brought back by NASA.  Coulda just been picked up off the ground. You know what politicians are like, especially Dago ones, probably kept all the real rocks  and are flogging them on eBay - are they Dagos, the Chileans, don't know anything about Chileans, are they Christians, for instance?   Could be head-shrinking cannibals for all I know, like we have in the wilder parts of Scotland, best part of England. I know they make Cabernet Sauvignon and have dangerous mining operations, proper businesses, see, like Zombie George Spunkface wants us to have, none of that regulation bollocks, health and safety and all that.

Betcha anything that those number-crunching folk over at the Taxpayers Alliance* have something to say about health and safety, eh, waste of their taxpayers' taxes which, as we all know, are different, more important, than any old ordinary taxes that other people, not in The Taxpayers Alliance pay, well, other people, everybody, actually, everybody pays taxes, apart from rich people.  Don't hear the TPA going on about rich people not paying any taxes at all. And you don't have to be in an alliance, to be a taxpayer;  some of us actually don't mind paying taxes, me and mr mongoose, for instance;  the social wage, is what taxation brings, roads and stuff, I can get in my SmartCar, here in the far North and just drive straight down, largely without let or hindrance, to Land's End, the roads are signposted, driveable, drained and illuminated, the vast majority of people drive more or less safely, millions and millions of cars don't collide. OK, it can all be better, much better, but that is dependent upon a radical, revolutionary change in the way we order our lives and in the people whom we pay to decide on things;  the elimination of career politicians and the selection,  for limited  terms, of non-careerist,  independent, non-party public servants  is the only sensible goal if we would reverse the Ruin which twentieth century parliaments have wrought. The TPA's incessant whining about taxes, as with the output of most self-selecting ThinkTanks, is  cheap, populist, redneck horseshit. They should shut up and fuck off, the TPA, go and look after their parents, or their greedy bastard illiterate fuckpig thirty-something children, maybe tell them that No, Toby, you can't have everything you want, not even if we shoot all the benefit scroungers, actually, Darling, Mummy and Daddy won't be able to leave you every penny they ever made, with interest, it's because of all those nasty  taxy-waxys that the nasty govament makes us pay. Yes, Darling,  Clearly, it's frightfully unfair.

  They have a mission statement, the TPA, dunno what it is, anytime I hear the word Mission,  misapplied so,  I think: Drunk, Nonce or Non-Specific Arsehole. Missions are what soldiers have, airmen, and the other ones, the ones with no air cover, they do missions, too;  ordinary people have aims and objectives. Anybody come near my house, talking about fucking missions, not that they would, not even the fucking Jovas, impudent fucking bastards, most likely being deterred by the sign: Presbyterians Will Be Hanged, but if anybody does,  come here talking about his fucking mission, I'm gonna kick his fucking missioning arse up an down the lane marked Private. It is part of the colonisation of the language, this mission shit, MDA doggerel,  by the largely illiterate,  the infuriating gabshite, who says Clearly before his every pack of stupid, cliche-bound, Devil-As-Ever-Is-In-The-Detail shitbrain lies. I read the word mission and that was all I needed to know about the TPA. Mission statements are what those awful fuckpigs at  Marks and Spencer have. And Tesco. Save More By Spending More. Easy.

They seem just like Tories without parliamentary seats, the TPA, small govament, private sector is best; shit a fucking red-white-and-blue brick they would, jumping up and down on the toilet screeching, the greedy, grasping jumped-up pseudo middle class imbecile wankers, if any of their services were withdrawn before they can engineer some exclusive alternative, like that insufferable git, Toby Young, of the private school alliance.**

Prick's writing in  the Filth-O-Graph, today, that Barack Obama isn't  quite black enough, needs to be a bit blacker, says Whitey Young, the braying, racist cocksucker; mixed race, you see, doesn't quite  tick Toby's boxes, wants Barack to be a full-on buck nigger. Jesus fucking wept, only in the Filth-O-Graph. Or the Times. Or the Sun. Or the Mail. Or any of them, nasty racist poison disguised as commentary. Toby fucking Young - why is anyone called Toby? - wants to run schools for his wretched, ghastly spawn and probably to rub shoulders with the spit-spraying misfit, Gove, the gobby, apologising idiot; giving parents a choice, giving himself a choice, is what he means.

Oh, yes,  much easier for Jemima and I to have all  of our delightful and gifted children privately,  in very special and suprisingly cost effective  private hospitals, yes, especially if something goes wrong, requiring intensive lifetime care, it'll only cost us pennies, you see, because we take the money from the riff-raff, who aren't as well equipped as us to work the system,  we need to have a private health visitor, pay privately, but only a little bit,  for all the inoculations, drive them to private schools on private roads, pay for our very own private police constables,  yes, and courts and prisons, too; drink private water from private taps; have private libraries, and parks and private, yes, private public transport and best of all privately care for our elderly demented parents who might spend decades farting and dribbling and not knowing who the fuck they are, or us, tubes up their noses and pipes coming from their dicks, stinking of piss.  Think of all the taxes we'd save, if only we could get away from this dreadful notion of society, and people pooling risk, working together so that all can be cared for. Well, Clearly, it's simply not good enough.

Can't think why anyone pays them any mind, meself, the TPA. Anybody with a  hole in his arse knows that local govament, taking its cue from MediaMinster, is corrupt and  useless; fucking Rotarians and fucking Masons buying-up fucking councillors by the coachload;  counting the TPA pennies isn't going to shame them from office. Just look at the so-called parliamentary expenses scandal, last year, business as fucking usual, every last fucking bastard of them guilty of at the very least guilt by association, of turning  a blind eye. And them supposed to be lawmakers.  Oh, fuck me, was I thieving, well, of course, it wasn't my fault, I'm an honourable fucking member and look, I paid the money back; just as soon as I was caught out, I said to Mrs Cameron, Samantha, Darling, we have to pay a few quid back, but don't worry, we'll get it all back again when I'm prime minister, no, don't worry, you won't have to touch your millions, or mine.

But anyway, rescue celebrities, it's a bit much, innit. Get down on their hands and knees and thank God, or Whoever, and never go down underground again;  that's the ticket. Not as though they did anything brave, is it, just sitting there, underground, any bastard can do that. And many of us might have to, as the Pig Society kicks us all  into  reverse gear, onwards, to the Thirties.

 

GOTTA PICKA POCKET OR TWO drafted    27/10/2010

*The TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) is a libertarian pressure group in the United Kingdom which was formed in 2004 to campaign for a low-tax society. The group had about 18,000 registered supporters as of 2008 and claimed to have 55,000 by September 2010. However, it has been suggested that a vast majority of these supporters - who do not contribute financially or engage in campaigning - were simply signed up to a mailing list.

Questions have been raised about the funding of the organisation and there is speculation that significant contributions are received from overseas. The TPA was given the lowest possible grade for financial transparency by Who Funds You, a British project that seeks to rate and promote transparency of funding sources of think tanks.

** Wiki tells us that Young has continued to  be at the centre of controversy. In 2015, he wrote an article in advocacy of genetically engineered intelligence, which he described as "progressive eugenics". In early January 2018, he was briefly a non-executive director on the board of the Office for Students, an appointment from which he resigned within a few days after Twitter posts described as "misogynistic and homophobic" were uncovered. In 2020, he promoted misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Both anthologies of the work  of mr ishmael and his young Polish friend, Stanislav, Plumb Cheap for You:  Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - are available to purchase for mere money at Lulu or Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Here's how to buy your own copies: 

Please register an account with them first. This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the link 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 our 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.) 

 The full title is "Vent Stack love from stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in a green shade.  

Link for the paperback:

 https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/vent-stack/paperback/product-q8jzk2.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Or...

shorter link, which might make it easier if you wish to paste it into an email and tell a friend:

 https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

 Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.

Link for Hard Back : 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/hardcover/product-njr7vg.html

Link for Paper Back : 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/paperback/product-wq2kpg.html

At checkout, try WELCOME15 or TREAT15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) 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, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89