Sunday 19 May 2019

THE SUNDAY ISHMAEL

CRUELTY TEEVEE: A SELFIE FROM SODOM.


There's an awful lot of immensely popular TeeVee which I've never seen - West Wing, Downton Abbey, the Simpsons, Doctor Who,  Game of Thrones, loads of runaway success series......there's no particular reason I've missed these shows, I don't believe that popular culture is automatically bad, far from it but even when it is bad it can  be compelling. 
I am currently watching, fascinated, back-to-back NCIS, an American cop procedural in which the cops are actually US Navy Special Agents - Feds - investigating crimes perpetrated  or suffered by serving or former sailors and marines, their friends, families or anyone they ever met or might meet, anywhere in the world;  NCIS is the very long arm of the law. 

The head of the Washington-based team  is seventy year old Leroy Jethro Gibbs, 

semper fi.

a US Marine Corps Vet,  former crew-cut psychobastard Momma'sboy gunny sergeant sniper who has metamorphosed into the parfit gentle knight and Special Agent; it is a characterisation  originated by Clint Eastwood who has played it as both gunny sergeant, Thomas Highway, in Heartbreak Ridge and 'Frisco cop, Dirty Harry Callahan. Further, like Eastwood's outlaw Josey Wales, Gibbs lost his wife and child to bad guys and is now taciturn, watchful, cool and deadly; suspicious of his superiors,  fiercely loyal to his comrades.


Special Agent Gibbs is the archetypal rogue within and the Navy, the Congress  and the President would rather have him in the tent pissing out and killing the bad guys than outwith the tent pissing in on the good guys.

Gibbs' team of smiling, sexy assassins and MIT-educated techno-geeks


can, withn a second, access the financial, educational, employment, marital, telecommunications and criminal records of everyone on the planet and call down a drone strike to kill them.
 The show perfectly metaphorises Uncle Sam's vicious Exceptionalism, its out of control privatised penal and military-industrial complex and its surveillance state, militarised, racist LawnForcement agencies. 

 Everybody in NCIS is WASP, aside from the Director who, as is the case in all US cop shows, is a shiny, angry black man and Gibbs, a true WASP exponent of Dubya's Patriot Act, is quick to threaten anyone defying him with a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay,  proudly seen in the States as the Shining Torture Capitol of the world.
Twentieth-century Hollywood has largely sanitised the military history of the USA. The internicine, industrialised butchery of the Civil War is deftly transformed into wise eulogy, sentimental song and statesman's Address;  the drunken, gang-raping, child- slaughtering Ulster-Scots Seventh Cavalry slickly  portrayed as boots'n'saddles, bugle-blowing, honourable warriors. Hollywood even made heroes of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki aircrews, as well as, we shouldn't forget,  Nazi mass murderer  and RocketMan, Werner von Braun.  
The NCIS show, similarly, is twenty seasons of Savagery Ennobled.
No business like showbusiness.

Aghast and open-mouthed I can watch all sorts of rubbish like this on the box. mrs ishmael often enquires You  gotta brain the size of the planet, why're you watching this shit and I always respond Because it is;  even so,  I have never been able to tolerate Cruelty TeeVee and have been banging-on about it for as long as me and stanislav have been blogging.

I guess it started in this country with nonce-lover, Esther Rantzen,  and her hideous smirk-show, That's Life, 


this below, from Victor Lewis-Smith in the Evening Standard

THAT'S LIFE!

In life, there are some certainties. Tributes always flood in (they never trickle), lucre is always filthy, virtues are always extolled, rises are always meteoric, gauntlets are always run. And on That's Life!, no matter how pitifully tragic a story they might be relating, you won't have to wait long for a gratuitous mention of either willies or titties. This week we had both.
It's significant that the first word in the opening titles is "Help" because Esther and her catatonic catamites desperately need some. For twenty-one years they've been getting away with murder - shamelessly repeating the same shallow format of vulgar misprints mixed with tales of stupid people who've given money to clever people - but now their show is on Death Row, with the execution date already fixed. On Saturday night, the Patron Saint of Patronisers appeared, wearing a startled expression usually only seen on the faces of blow-up sex dolls, and dressed in a yellow number that made her look like a tube of mustard surmounted by Shergar's teeth. She'd even chosen to make her entrance through the studio audience; presumably, she thought ordinary people might like a last chance to touch the hem of her garment, before she departs at Easter.

By piggy-backing on Atrocity Ratso managed eventually to deify herself, well, in her own eyes, anyway.
Her dodgy past, though, as dodgy pasts do, caught up with her and with her customary psycopathic bare-faced  cheek

 

the mangy old crow claimed that when, years ago, she was sucking Sir Nicky Fairbairn, MP''s cock she didn't know that  he rammed it up children, was a child rapist and maybe much worse. 
Well, how would she?


 Rantzen, had not at that point opportunistically developed her self-glorifying, phoney Childline persona and the ability to spot a nonce at a hundred metres, unless it was Sir Jimmy Savile.

I can do this to your cock, I'd  love the taste of broken  children on it. Why don't we start a charity. for abused children, yeah, I know, hilarious. But we'd make a fortune.
No, you're alright, love, a bit old for me; twelve, thirteen, that's my top limit.

or indeed any other pushy, showy pervert fingering, buggering and murdering his way through a gilded  career in MediaMinster.

Rantzen's That's Life schtick was as Lewis-Smith describes, the cruel and spiteful  presentation of the foibles of the poor by the mocking rich.  The flea-bitten old slag can take historical credit not for helping children but for inventing Cruelty TeeVee, a genre in which people who have been to university, people who have had  the good fortune to receive a bit of education mock, lampoon and ridicule those less fortunate.
Arise Dame Esther.  



The format, of course, went global  often driven by female presenters, notably Bob Maxwell's office fluffer, Anne Robinson's, The Weakest Link.


  
 She was truly corrosive, I remember at the time hearing teachers complain that the playground, already a killing field for the more vicious little darlings had become even more lethally toxic after the kids had seen the Weakest Link, a show where producers whispered gratuitous  insult and humiliation in the moron Robinson's earpiece so's she could apparently spontaneously and wittily abuse her guests. 
 Robinson, clad absurdly as an elderly dominatrix, winking and dribbling, parroting her producers' insults really did seem to relish her incessant humiliation of ordinary people.

She's old now, botoxed, bewigged and hacked-about 

but has disentitled herself to such respect as age brings.



 I hope her arse falls out and she slips on her caustic innards, breaking her scawny neck and that lying paralysed and drip-fed, former contestants of Weakest Link come in  and poke her with sticks.

This cheap, nasty and cruel approach to one's fellow man has spread to other formats, Big Brother; I'm A Celebrity  Get Me Out Of Here; the various Simon Cowell-inspired talent scam shows; the Masterchef and Sewing Bee  series, although not as ritualistically offensive nevertheless thrive on a nail-biting revelation of whoever is this episode's failure, I hate it. There's Bukkake Boy, George Osborne's, best friend, the repulsive screeching Queen of pseudo-legal venom "Judge" Rinder,


 basing himself on America's hideous Judge Judy, insulting all who come before him. 

In all these shows the crucial element is the humiliation of the ordinary person or in the case of Get Me Out Of Here the humiliation of some z-list celebrity nobody debasing him or herself for a few quid; people like George Hairaway,  seen here in his latest showbiz identity
 

Aye, see me, greatest parliamentarian ever, it's no' that I'm a vain ould fella,  I just havetae wear the hat indoors, it's terribly cold in these Russian TeeVee studios, doin m'shouty wee bits tae camera.
See if any bastrd sez I'm bald, I'll see them in court. 

The producers of this poisonous Cruelty genre claim that the ratings prove the popularity of their creations but the ratings are the products of the same charlatan industry which didn't foresee the Banking Denouement, the result of the Europe referendum and the last general election or the election of Trump and even if the ratings figures were accurate it doesn't matter, people used to watch, disembowelments,  bear-baiting and public hangings; in a civilised society we expect broadcasters not to pander to our baser instincts but to refine and elevate them. 
 Well, I do, anyway.

 The watchers and the hapless participants  are  not to blame;  these people have been impoverished, beggared, spiritually orphaned and culturally outlawed by decades of Far Centre politics. These are mr mike's Sheffield nightmare, the Inkies, the bloated, the pierced,  the tattooed obese, breeding like rabbits, tottering drunkenly on high heels through our cities' streets every weekend, their one realisable ambition to be on a sewer of a Cruelty TeeVee show, brawling and squabbling,  their disadvantaged shortcomings  ridculed by some cunt born with a silver spoon in his shitty mouth.

 Industries and  their dependent communities have been obliterated, their families forgotten, ostracised, demonised and fragmented by the likes of the spiv, Tebbit, blowjobbing for organised crime  while braying that unemployment was a price worth paying. 

 British mining, steelmaking, car manufacturing, ship-building and fishing industries were crushed underfoot whilst press barons  and teevee moguls blamed the workers exclusively. 

Children's entertainer and notorious thug and bully, Jerry Clarkson, still maintains that disastrous design decisions by senior management at BMC/British Leyland were all the fault of the unions. as though Red Robbo designed the Allegro and the Maxi. Jerry never utters a word of criticism of bungling, crooked Tory and NewLabour industry ministers, no doubt because he lives among them, down there in Chipping Sodom.  

Although it is to be deeply regretted the existence of a Cruelty TeeVee audience is perfectly understandable.
 Council house dwellers - schemies, here, in Scotland, best part of England - are cast by most cabinet ministers as an underclass, worthless, promiscuous, idle, stupid and addicted. This, of course is only national government policy. Government is owned by organised crime - the banks. There is relatively little for bankers in council housing, Thatcher's ideal of a property-owning democracy enslaves for life all who buy into it and as well as being too scared to strike those buying their "own" homes from moneylenders at massively inflated prices are now told that "their" homes must be sold eventually  in  order to fund their old-age care in a bank-owned care home, a shithole of cruelty and neglect,  staffed by brutish Magda who has "come in UK to make better life." Magda, who hates and mistreats her patients and sends all her earnings home to Warsaw in order to fund her cousins "coming in UK to make better life." Bless.

The far-centre coward, Corbyn, should commit his cesspit of a  party to building not a few thousand but five million council homes, as soon as fucking possible, and then another five million but also to refurbishing the physical and spiritual fabric of older council estates, turned wasteland by unemployment and the demolition of social underpinnings.

Instead of London being the money-laundering capitol of the world, gangsters buying up workers' homes and leaving them idle, Corbyn should outlaw money-laundering property scams and confiscate any such criminal assets, he and his worthless NewLabour mayor, Sadiq Khan, should make London a city in which its essential workers can actually  afford to live, instead of it being the HQ of organised  crime, the cops and politicians in the pocket of the Underworld, the people shat upon or as in the case of Grenfell Tower, roasted alive, the survivors  subsequently ignored and patronised by filth like Tracey May. 

George Cadbury,



 a genuine, late-Victorian, paternalistic, industrial Quaker philanthropist said that if he, like many of his workers, lived in the dark squalor of Small Heath and Aston, in Birmingham,  then he, too, would be drunk on gin a lot of the time. 

Cadbury, therefore, built the Bournville Estate


workers housing then...


.....and now.

to house his workers;  no house could occupy more than a quarter of the plot, ensuring opportunities for fresh air, light, laundry drymg,  gardening, fruit and vegetable growing and exercise.  The chocolate factory grounds and other plots of local land contained sports facilities and a lido, I swam in the latter as a child, it still existed into the late twentieth century as a facility for Bournville workers.

Now, those workers and their descendants, discarded by 'seventies capitalism live in places like this,


 entombed, uninspired, neglected and vilified.  No wonder they watch that cunt Jeremy Kyle, is it?
 I have seen a few minutes, over the years, of all the above shows but never more than  a few seconds of this cunt.


Jezza ...... has only got one ball.

The only good news I've learned about this vile parasite is that he lost a testicle to cancer, 'sno fucking excuse mind.
Kyle's old man was a royal lackey, wiping the pisshead QueenMum's arse or something with his tongue, hissing and mincing around some of the royals' many council homes or historic palaces as thay call them  and so his cuntspawn went to an expensive private school and managed to scrape into university; he'e been in Cruelty showbiz ever since, attacking the poor for their poverty.

Nothing will happen to him, he's in the charmed circle of BeastCelebrity and if they turned on him they'd have to turn on themselves.

This other cunt hack, Brunt, 



of skymadeupnewsandfilth, a lifelong Murdoch cocksucker,  hounded an obviously distressed woman to her death; she had made what  he in his filthy tabloid wisdom considered unacceptable  remarks about the unacceptable Gerry'n'Cilla McCann and Brunt, quite improperly, threatened  her with the Court, as though he owned it.  He should've been jailed but he's still there, cunting about on Sky with all the other bullies.








 This one, too, young bridegroom, Andrew  Neil's, best man, should've resigned in shame but they love him in MediaMinster, he's a survivor, an institution, yes, like Harvey Weinstein.

A decent,  modern,  compassionate society would never permit Cruelty TeeVee, would abhor the idea of the poor being thrown to the wolves, eviscerated live on air by verminous cretins like Kyle.  We are  not such a society and until we move towards one the grander cruelties, contempts and betrayals of MediaMinaster will flourish as never before.








53 comments:

mongoose said...

You looking like a saint, Mr I.

call me ishmael said...

..careful not to touch the wall, mr mongoose, there's a brand new coata paint, glad to see you're still alive...

mongoose said...

The festival is over for Mr Kyle, or so it would seem. Never seen a minute of it and don't need to. Doubtless the same as all the others - find unattractive/dishevelled/disfunctional person, preferably dim, find the swine they shagged at school, create triangle with AN Other person or animal or circumstance of emabrrassing nature. Titter ye plentily.

There is another genre that you have missed out which is to invite really, really simple folk onto quiz shows. And then laugh at them as they seem to know nothing except who killed whom on Corrie. "And for £10,000, Trixie-Blue, who was the wife of Charles the Mad?" "Was it Camilla?" Laugh? I thought we'd never start.

At Mongoose Towers, we have solved most of this by turning off 'live' broadcast TV. The schedules now don't go by. The antiques and moving house shows are not watched by accident. Everything is there and can be pulled out of the interweb if need be but the eternal muttering cabaret in the corner was ended. It has its downside in that the female mongoslings are watching something called Grey's Anatomy - from the beginning to the bitter end. 20 seasons of hokum, hospital serial, lots of unseen shagging in "on call" rooms, many more lesbian doctors than is probable, tragedy-strummed 'eartstrings every ten mins so it is. Rubbish from the first scene to the last but relatively harmless.

Welcome back, Mr Ishmael. The world is in tatters since you been away.

call me ishmael said...

Yes, the clever old public schoolboys at the Hislop Eye got that one covered, mr mongoose, in a feature they call Dumb Britain - bizarre answers, usually to Bradley Walsh or warbling Al Armstrong . Ha-ha-ha, ordinary state school oiks, how stupid they are.

I can quite understand someone being spectacularly wrong answering a relatively simple question - lights, cameras, floor managers, it is easy for the unfamiliar brain to be stampeded into nonsense. The clever folk on HIGNFY, though, Satire's burying ground, well, even their farts and piss dribbles are dazzlingly brilliant.

And then there's the Rag'n'Bone shows, Bargain Hunt and Flog It and so on.

Don't start me talkin', I'll tell EVERYthin' I know.......

Mike said...

Tour de force, Mr I. Took my breath away. I'm off for a lie down on the chaise longue, with a glass of shiraz, to recover.

Re our American cousins. I can't watch any American programme/film. Its over, as the new people say. Too much shit has passed under too many bridges. Trump's latest "tweet" telling Iran - a 3000+ year old cultured civilisation - that it will be history if it dares resist uncle sam - well, it makes we want to sign up for the revolutionary guard. I'm normally a peace-n-harmony kind of person, but I'm hoping I live long enough to see the good ol' US of A get its arse kicked.

I now don't touch anything with a US provenance.

call me ishmael said...

It underscores mr tdg's point, a couple of years ago, mr mike, that Trump is the perfect realisation of Amerikanism. Piggish as he is, though, I do not find him in any way worse than his predecessors, we have to go back to Jimmy Carter to find anyone remotely decent and then FDR. There was a science fiction story when I was a kid called Eastward, Ho! by William Tenn, in a post-apocalyptic North America, the native tribes, more skilled at survivalism than the whites are moving back east, from the Great Plains, reclaiming the country; what a lovely thought, sending the Trumps back to Scotland, best part of England, the Kennedys back to their Irish bog, the Obamas back to Africa and the Zimmermans to Russia and so on.

The US legislature is openly criminal, its courts political and the head of state often a criminal billionaire and sex offender.. I have read a good deal of Amerikan literature, some of it the best of the twentieth century; I like a lot of its painted art and much of its minstrelsy, black and white, the native crafts though are just that, artefacts, woven, plaited and forged from the earth, daubed on hides and bits of rock, it's not our kinda shit.

I know just what you mean about Iran. Everytime I think about Wall Street, Hollywood and the White House I cannot but feel on my cheek the hot breath of the Jihad.

the noblest prospect said...

Marvellous. Great to have you back, Mr Smith.

tnp

call me ishmael said...

Thank you, mr tnp, I hope you are well.

Years ago, when stanislav was around, a woman, in New Zealand, I think, commented that this was all very well but her husband had been laughing so much she'd had to call him an ambulance. I had a sort of a Crikey! moment, realising the potential impact of internet comment. I have since then tried to be responsible and courteous - it was stanislav who started the mr prefix on the comment threads, hoping to improve the rowdy horde at Guido Fawkes' Order-Order - well, responsible and courteous to everyone but the subjects of the post, who can fucking well look after themselves. My absence, therefore, has been an ongoing self-reproach. I think mr bungalow bill, in his last two comments on Cry Baby, Cry, has intuited, if that's a word, at least part of the reason behind my silence; to those here otherwise curious or concerned I tender my apology.

Thanks, again, mr tnp. I never did get to see Jackson Browne.

Oldrightie said...

Just marvellous you're back, Mr I. It's been very empty in blogland these past couple of years
or so.

call me ishmael said...

I was thinking about the Dead, mr oldrightie, the other day, how they never go away, those we have known, anyway; bastards just keep hanging around, repeating what they always said, inviting endless, futile reinterpretation by the living. I hope mr ishmael and his chronicles of ruin never become a haunting, in the corner.

Thank you, as ever, for your kind words.

Mr SG said...

I'm glad you are back Mr I. The shit that's been going on while you've been away... I've been thinking of 'self-identifying' as a kangaroo, so as to have a spring in my step as I shuffle off to work in the morning to help keep the scabrous procession of 1st class travelling, virtue signalling luvvies, Z- list clebs, LGBTQI-Xe, politicians of every stripe, politicised police et al in the life they've become accustomed to.

call me ishmael said...

I can't look at the news, mr sg, nor the 'papers and just about the only reliable show I hear on the radio is Choral Evensong on Radio Three - all the old psalms and anthems beautifully sung and the service half-sung by the celebrant, arresting and transcendent even to a Godlessheathenbastard like me but even that anachronistic delight is sometimes hijacked by an LGBT priest and a choir singing the New Discord Blues; I know, therefore, exactly how you feel. I thought I'd better start writing my own news again. We go back a ways: thank you for sticking around.

mongoos said...

re Iran, Mr Mike, there was a time when I thought that the generally stupid destruction of the developed world's energy system was a response to unstable dominance, the post-OPEC lack of control. I thought that the gaia-worship vector was about that - reduce dependence on the head-choppers' control of oil. Then I put away childish things and worked out that rationing of a declining resource and eco-inflated prices served only one master.

The USA is untamed because shale-gas has slashed the tether to middle eastern oil. As far as my one-time orange friend is concerned, the ragheads can go fuck themselves. The middle east is becoming its old self - a route, and that alone. Maybe that is the missing bit of the muslim reformation idea that I was wrong about. They saw it too and are securing the ground - to Africa perhaps and the recycling of the old Mediterranean world.

But ho hum, Thursday's votings looms!

Mike said...

Mr Mongoose: The US shale oil/gas thingy is a massive Ponzi. None of the shale companies make money, and its becoming increasingly necessary to raise more capital (junk bonds) to drill more holes to keep the scheme flowing. The shale fields are past their peak.

The pipeline infrastructure in the US is obsolete and contaminates the oil - recent reports of countries refusing supply because of quality.

Also its the wrong type of oil - short chain hydrocarbons no use for diesel fuel etc - hence the US still has to import 2mil bpd of heavy oil.

US LNG ferried around the world in tankers will never compete on price or reliability with Russian piped gas.

Hence, the US attacks on Venezuela and Iran - which produce the right kind of oil. And the hostility to Nordstream 2 etc.

Interestingly, Russia supplies the US with its nuclear material for its reactors. There is no indigenous US supply. Russia could literally turn the lights out if it wished.

mongoose said...

I did not know much of that, Mr Mike. I shall be more diligent and try to learn more closely.

True - gas is a wonderful fuel wasted in being burned to make electricity. But in the long term, nuclear energy is our only current answer. Atomkraft, yes please.

call me ishmael said...

My understanding of the US shale gas bubble accords with mr mike's - at best a Ponzi scheme, an illusion to enrich speculators and big Amerika up. The eternal underpinning of US foreign and now domestic policy is Ike's military-industrial complex run riot, the need for war outwith and now, happily, within, against its own - we have reported here on the massive militarisation of US domestic lawnforcement. The popularity of NCIS and such shows illustrates an audience happy to be on a war footing against itself or anybody else. There was a C4 wogdoc last night, about Jihadi John and ISIL in which all of our spooks and former generals - not actors - wore black, were stubbly and filmed in half light. No business like show business. As well as energy, mr mike, there is always the US/Israeli axis of evil. Let us not forget that it was actually the Persians and the Palestinians who enslaved, tortured and exterminated the jews in the Hitler war and it is they who should forfeit their human rights, their lands and their lives.

Love the idea, mr mongoose, of a revived Silk Road, the Chinks, though, have already built a railway between Peking and dear old London town and plan for a ChopSuey express to roll into St Pancras every hour, laden with tat.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of culpability in the Hitler War, Mr Ish - some bint on Radio 5 this morning (I assume an historian, but missed her name) described what followed D-Day as a campaign culminating in the liberation of Germany. "Defeat", presumably, being too harsh and judgemental a word for the new dispensation.

v./

call me ishmael said...

We used to call that Revisionism, didn't we, mr verge. I'd have liberated them by shooting everyone above the rank of Feldwebel and setting the rest to twenty years hard labour, the whole filthy shower, we wouldn't then have seen Idi Amin, Slobodan Milosovic, Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon slaughtering three million gooks nor the Bush/Blair/Obama atrocities.

Liberation, make you fucking puke, wouldn't it?

Mike said...

Mr I: I just read about Tracy's new deal. I think she has medical issues much more severe than her Type 1 diabetes. If this were to come to pass (at the moment I doubt it) then this will result in civil unrest if not outright rebellion.

Re Hitler's war. It was 27 million dead Russians that defeated Germany. Most of the ruling elite in US and UK wanted a "deal" Sounds familiar?

Dick the Prick said...

I think I searched out the shite - Marc Harman - wasn't he a teen star also, did it twinge a memory? I managed up to about half way through 9th series of NCIS before it became abuse. Turns out Abby, the MIT nerd claimed pestery. With Robert Wagner on the cast, you kinda assume it.

Great to have you back dude, like you ever went away....

mongoose said...


I am not that concerned re the corporate economics of shale gas BTW. The entirety of the energy sector is so perverted economically and politically that it is almost impossible to know what is real money and what is not. So all of that will be lies.

It is however a fuck off amount of energy that used not to be (potentially) available. It is rumoured isn't it that the Argies have almost as much as the Yanks and the Chinese have more of everything then anyone I am sure. And more widely, ask yourself, if you were a traditional energy multinational, would you be for or against a plan to escalate the price of energy and ruthlessly ration its usage thus spinning out the life of your existing reserves and multiplying their apparent value without lifting a finger not a penny of investment?

We could bicker about WWII but I'd put having a world class loon at the top of the organisation as one of the biggest factors. Let's fight the whole fucking world with the assistance of... ? The Italians. Great plan, Herman.

Poor Theresa. I begin the feel sorry for the mad bint.

call me ishmael said...

Always been curious about that, mr mike. OK,Stalin was a cowardly monster, an early Hitlerite and the Soviet state apparatus the stuff of nightmares but those losses were colossal, worse than everybody else's put together, if only we'd cut them some slack the whole Cold War thing might not have happened, although that would've wiped trillions off Wall Street, which must always be uppermost in our minds.

call me ishmael said...

Great to see you, mr dick, more later, battery issues. You, too, mr m.

call me ishmael said...

They claim afresh, mr dick, that he killed Natalie Wood, Wagner, I dunno, nothing would surprise me. Strictly speaking it's not Hollywood but it's better, Harman??? Harmon??? is worth sixty million bucks and never has to go off on location, he's like Ken Barlow, a teevee job for life, only super well paid. Abby, by the way, was in her fifties during the last series she appeared in.

call me ishmael said...

You being an engineer, mr mongoose and mr mike being a Cantabrian numerologist will both understand the global energy situation better than do I. The overriding concern though is how to rein it in and put it in reverse, Growth, that is. I wrote here years ago, probsbly in midnight conversation with you that I looked forward to a chancellor standing up in MediaMinster announcing I am pleased to inform the House that this year there is no growth and I forecast that next year there will be even less. Seems that proper grown-ups are now saying the same thing.

It was a costly lunacy, Hermann the German's and the rest's.

I lack the strength to follow Tracey's doings but in the interests of good manners I will try to.

mongoose said...

Fuck Brexit, Mr I, it's the panto that entertains.

If you get down your box set of The West Wing and search out the episode where the tall Press Attache woman is being targeted by a loon/terrorist, you will see that she is given a flinty/flirty Secret Service agent to protect her. Harmon without the T-shirt. None other. He even does that looking away one-sided grin thing. And thus was a career clad in gold.

I cannot promise that it will be an improvment on your windowsill.

Mike said...

Mr I: Uncle Joe, inevitably, got bad press in the West. I'm not saying he was an angel, but radical action was needed in Russia to transform it from a rural peasant country to a modern industrial nation, which he did. The ability of Russian industries to literally transport their factories east, in the face of the German onslaught, and get them into full production was one of the miracles of WW2. His dalliance with Hitler at the beginning was to buy time. Indeed, a little like Chamberlain who went to Munich needing to buy time as the UK forces were woefully under-prepared for what was coming. Chamberlain has always been vilified, rather like King Canute, but they were the smart ones knowing their limitations.

If you want confirmation that nobody will conquer Russia watch a bit if the Immortal Regiment's annual march.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ2x-oLsi8I

Every family in Russia lost somebody and they carry pictures to remember them. If it came to an all out war, its not just soldiers, but every man, woman, and even the children who would be fighting. Uncle Sam's gays and transgenders would know what hit 'em.

call me ishmael said...

You know me, mr mongoose, I've watched this stuff all my life but I just don't have the stomach for such comprehensive, demophobic totalitarianism; everywhere you look, it is all across the telegraph, a dark pantomime starring Betrayal and Deceit, I simply don't have the strength, even to observe. I will vote for Sid Farridge tomorrow, it is a PR election, isn't it, no point otherwise, up here, where they still think Jo Grimmond leads the Liberals and that we will soon rejoin Norway, farm, fish, marry our cousins and eat haddock smoked in our chimneys.

Never seen the West Wing, it was Marty Sheen, wasn't it, being presidential. He and his non-junky son, Emilio did make a decent movie, recently, set around the pilgrimage to Santiago. Father and son stuff, the film, and its production but better than his usual schtick.

Doug Shoulders said...

Zero growth? Can’t have static share value. They’ll put them somewhere else.
Untrammeled growth is the elixir of globacorp.
Wasn’t Harmon the original Ted Bundy made for TV two-parter.
I remember watching it as a kid…or maybe a teen, scared the bejeezus out of me anyway.
I bet he’d like to forget that one.
Didn’t Herman and Joe Buddy-up before WW2 so that they could concentrate on their own plans?
Then later Herman was used to try scupper Joe’s movement of his vast realm to the 20th century?

call me ishmael said...

Broadly agree with all that mr mike although I did see a while ago, Martin Jacques, lifelong editor of Marxism Today, making the same case for Mao and his successors, they had dragged a stone age economy into the modern age in a few decades so some slaughter was acceptable. I think that until we reject such lethal pragmatism the Holocaust and Blitzkrieg will always be knocking on the door; if we cannot, furthermore, respect and cherish our own lives it is no surprise that the planet is limbering-up to extinguish us.

call me ishmael said...

We must have zero growth, mr doug, or perish. We must hang the Pope unless he affirms and promotes compulsory birth control. We must massively reduce our consumption of red meat. We must all stay the fuck at home and stop being airborne tourists. I am sick to death of my virtue-signalling peers coming here, "borrowing" my electricity for their worthless up-their-arses electric cars and then flying out to visit Sonny Jim, who's teaching, in the fucking Falklands. And then to Vietnam, where their visit "helps" the local economy. At least the Gary Glitter fraternity don't say they're off to Thailand to help the native economy, they wanna fuck children and marry ladymen, that's what they want.
And then these loathsome Sons and Daughters of Virtue fly off to some Godlessheathenbastard hypocrites' fucking Pilgrimage to Israel. 'snot really damaging the environment, cos it's a pilgrimage, not a holiday. What a bunch of cunts I know. Me? I never fly and I don't eat meat, so fuck 'em.

Never seen Gibbs before although I believe he has a history in children's programmes and low-grade soaps, like NCIS.

There was a pre-war Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact which when broken by Herman and which sent Joe into hysterics and into hiding in his forest retreat, when the Chiefs of staff came for him, seeking orders, he thought they'd come to execute him.

Tdg said...

Perhaps the cultural category of televised cruelty is inverted tragedy: the evocation of emotionally provocative circumstances in the context not of the heroic, or the anti-heroic, but of the aheroic, of those to whom no notion of grandeur or distinction, malicious or benevolent, is attributable at all. Its purpose is not to refine emotion through its controlled expression but to rehearse it in place of the real thing. To paraphrase Eliot, you must have real feelings to know how to escape from them.

Bungalow Bill said...

Esther, Noel and Princess Angel of Althorp combine to make the Axis of Telly Age Evil. There is a traceable route from That's Life right through Wootton Bassett and beyond. It is the way of Sentimental and Aggressive Entitlement, and it is making zombies of us all.

For an alternative view of human worth, the work of the recently deceased Jean Vanier and his L'Arche community might be considered. Summer in The Forest is a film without an atom of cruelty.

mongoose said...

I must recomment once again the sadly dead statistical hero, Hans Rosling and his Gapminder. They work through the visual presentation of the actual numbers and show that far from going to hell in a handbasket, since WWII the world is getting better, people healthier, happier, more equal. It's just that good news is not "good" news. Find your own highlights

https://www.gapminder.org/videos/200-years-that-changed-the-world/

Bon camino.

call me ishmael said...

You customary and enviable elegance and concision, thanks, mr tdg.
I weas reminded today of the work of the Canadian sociologist, Irving Goffman, whose Asylums i studied for A level, it was an examination of the total institution - the prison, the mental hospital, the monastery - in which all of the crutches and underpinnings which help us define and portray whoever it is we think we are suffer denial, prohibition and obliteration . Goffman is celebrated for the verve of his writing and for the clarity with which he describes the multiplicity of personality confections and locations in which we act-out whichever identity we perceive as appropriate at that time and in that location or relationship; he also observed that it is necessary for us not only to maintain and reinforce that identity but to simultaneously support those of others around us, lest the whole shebamg fall apart, likening this mutual delusion to the necessarily furtive glance in the nudist colony. Whatever you do, don't blow the illusion.

In a way Goffman's work is merely an expansion of Shakespeare's All the World's a stage but no matter, we all plagiarise/are inspired, I'm doing it now.

Thinking about these grim arenas in which the pitifully ill-equipped are humiliated by the unprincipled and slick I thought of Goffman. These pre-beaten combatants step out of their crutches, abandon their props and the locations in which they are someone, however lowly, subordinate and helplessly addicted and enter, instead, a war zone which they cannot survive, in the hope of being someone bigger. I wonder if that is not actually a form of heroism. I know I wouldn't do it in a million years, not for all the tea in China. Far from the Madding Crowd's ignoble Strife, that's my meek heroism, running away from it all.

call me ishmael said...

Both positions are arguable, mr mongoose and you know that I often stress how much change for the better there has been in my lifetime, human rights and medicine are only the most obvious areas of massive change, there is also a truly transformative technology, although used as much for ill as for good. There needs, however to be much more change, lest the species perish. When people do nice things I write to them in congratulation, why should I not traduce and chastise the unGodly? Y'know, for Evil to triumph.....

And all you regret is just here, by definition a chronicle of ruinous behaviours. I do other things for which, in some ways, this is a rehearsal room. I'm sure that is true of everyone here.

The world will go to Hell in a handcart, melting ice caps and the poisoned ocean alone will see us off and these pollutions are maintained by the people and practices challenged here.

I will have a look at GapBinder and I am sure to agree with his measurements for I have made them myself, the planetary prognosis is the hurdle at which Optimism falls.

call me ishmael said...

It is fixed hatred, mr bungalow bill, of the poor and underprivileged, for their existence cannot but illuminate the injustice and indefensibility of the Silver Spoon and the Charmed Circle. I believe it goes further back than you note, starting with the workingman-hatred of Coronation Street's creator. All of the soaps now afford no nobility to the lower orders, who are all violent, angry, stupid and dysfunctional. I never used to let the children watch EastEnders, I thought it vile from the word Go; much difference it has made, the same old shit is going strong decades later. I try to watch the Christmas omnibuse just to keep tabs. In the last one I saw the 'pub landlord's Christmas present was his realisation that his sistah wasn't his sistah but his muvver and his Grandfavver wasn't his grandfavver but his favver, having fucked his own daughta and colluded in the fiction that the landlord' sistah was his muvvah. Just teatime family entertainment, eh?

I never heard of M.Vanier; I will ree-surch him, as the New People say.

mongoose said...

It is all "news", Mr I - none of it to be taken at face value. Was the 20th century warmer than the 19th? Yes. IS the 21st warmer than the 20th? Not yet, no, it isn't. Are the glaciers and ice caps melting? Well, that's a complicated question that cannot be answered with a yes or a no but I would say probably not these last 20 years. Are the oceans increasingly despoiled with ick - plastic, chemical and pharmaceutical? I'd say yes. Are the rivers likewise cleaner but more insidiously poisoned? Yes. Is the planet warmer than twenty years ago? Probably not but the past is surely cooler than it used to be.

http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg and it's their own data!

So is it going to get warmer than this? Yes, almost certainly because it is almost always warmer than this outside of glacial periods. The outcome is inevitable, only the profits are yet to be counted.

You're a practical man, Sir. Just consider the likely practical utility of fucking windmill. Is it likely? All is subsidy, grant, greased palms and the wider politics of global corporatisation. FFS if Al Gore is for it, if John Selwyn Hamburger Gummer is for it, it must be a lie.

But we'll not argue about it. How is the Orcadian wilderness this Spring? Got a good daffs crop?

Mike said...

Mr I and how is Harris? Asking for my wife.

Walter said...

Salut Don Ishmael! Regarding your Vegan/Vegetarianism, I was reading an article about plants i forget where but they said plants dont like to be eaten so they produce toxins mostly situated in the leaves,So if your eating lots of spinach rocket and other shit your poisoning yourself, the old adage about moderation in all things applies to diet ,regarding Climate they make it up as they go along another generation to bamboozle Regards Walter

call me ishmael said...

Yes, I am and no, I'm not, mr walter; there is at least as equally persuasive evidence that dark green, leafy vegetables are very good for one and my regular blood and major organ test results prove this beyond doubt. Watercress, which I eat daily, is what they call a superfood. I am moderate, not a zealot, wouldn't touch tofu with a barge pole and don't eat any of the ersatz bacon or chicken products, I just try not to eat animal products and in the future, if there is a future, which is most unlikely, everyone will have to do the same.

As for the feelings of plants, well, fuck me Jesus but I'm one of God's Jains, agonise and apologise to the grass and the hedges and the trees for cutting them. Salut, yourself.

call me ishmael said...

My view, mr mongoose, is that there is a beautiful justice in icebergs as big as Ohio breaking away from the caps and melting whilst the New People are too busy emailing each other pictures of their cocks or their dinners to notice. The farmer across the bay, once a sanctimonious self appointed custodian of the landscape now has a windmill and we think of him every time we pay our electricity bill, inflated as it is to pay his subsidy. No argument about fucking windmills, here; let's get nuked-up to fuck.

Daffs and Harris are in the pipeline.

Anonymous said...

Everything in moderation, as everyone I ever spoke to has said.
My carbon footprint is moderate. The CO2 (Plant food) debate became global warming became climate change.
Like the energy thing…nobody to be trusted to many folks with skin in the game.
Anything the BBC is promoting ... not to be trusted.

call me ishmael said...

No,mr bungalow bill,got that wrong, should read: .......the fiction that the landlord's muvvah was his sistah. Anyway, all sorts of vicious Hell broke loose in the Queen Vic, as you can imagine.

call me ishmael said...

I don't pay much attention to climate/energy pundits, mr anonymous, just to my own primary school arithmetic, probably equivalent to today's university-taught higher mathematics. The world population was about two billion when I was born, it has now more than tripled and shows no sign of slowing down and yet we cling to the idea that the control of resources must be subordinated to the desire of a tiny handful to be ever more obscenely and uselessly rich.

In this bizarre and suicidal atmosphere we talk grandly of extinguishing life on the planet, conflating our brief existence with Creation, itself. The planet will survive and recover from our collective madness and we will be, at best, a fossil imprint, our cultural achievements mere radio waves, whispering unheard at the edge of the galaxy.

Anonymous said...

Have to hope those wandering radio waves you mention will include a layer of those emailed cock-pics also aforementioned. If ET doesn't already have us marked as Planet of the Dickheads on their Ordinance Survey Maps, they will now (or then, or whenever...)

v./

mongoose said...

It is not, is it, the principle of the thing? I am sure that you could not get many fag-papers between the lot of us when it comes to the actual stewardship. It is the ruinous fear-mongering and swinery. "Five years to save this and trhee minutes to save that." All lectures delivered by fuckers who have seldom done a day's work and probably never had to worry about their power bill getting doubled. The Millitwat of course being the author of the most stupid bit of legislation ever passed, Carbon Neutral Codswallop by 20-whatever Act, has two kitchens. How a sod can lecture me about energy when he has not that to totter downstairs to make a cup of tea is beyond me. How much carbon is locked up in your spare kitchen, you bastard?

Just beetled out to vote and found a queue. Never seen one of those around here before. Theresa is going to get an awful kicking and this in True Blue Bandit Country. They'd shoot the likes of Corbyn on sight.

call me ishmael said...

Yes, we've been to vote for Sid, having thrown away our voting cards in disgust, weeks ago. No matter, the card is, here, anyway, no big deal. As well as Tracey I would love to see Mad Wee Nicola and by association Cock-waving Alec get their scabby, pus-dribbling arses kicked. Miliband, eh, an embarrassment and shame-free zone.

call me ishmael said...

I liked that: .....whispering unheard at the edge of the galaxy; glad you did, too, mr verge.

But is it poetry? That's the thing.

Anonymous said...

course it is, Mr Ish: last orders' final rhyme /a lonely whisper at the edge of time

("No words to that effect" daubed on the tailfin of a drifting, broken ark.)

v./

call me ishmael said...

Nah, wrote it all meself, just came to me.

Didya know that even though it carries messages from Chuck Berry, Don McLean and Michaelangelo it will be 40,000 years before Voyager comes close to anything at all? That's proper poetry, that is mr verge. (sighs) Just let me hear some of that rock and ro-oll music.....

Anonymous said...

Voyager stuff reminded me of an essay by a friend of mine; well worth a look -

http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com/periodical/gung-ho/

v./

Unknown said...

You`re back! Our Juvenal is back!

Alexius