The Sunday Ishmael 26th July 2020

Bo-Jo the Ho-Ho Can’t Tell One Scot From Another

 

Alistair Carmichael

Crab

On Wednesday, Boris was unable to tell one Scot from another, assuming that Liberal Democrat former cabinet minister Alistair Carmichael is a Scottish Nationalist. Big Al, who lives in Orkney,  asked a question in Parliament about beef labeling, which is important to his constituents in the farming and fishing communities of Orkney and Shetland. Boris admitted to not having a clue, saying in his characteristic mangled English: “I can only say that it must be governed by one of those things that is currently governed by the laws of the European Union, to which he is bound to return an independent Scotland, should that catastrophe ever arise.” Big Al, of course, is a committed opponent of Scottish Independence, leading the fight against it in the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition until 2015. He has been in Parliament since 2001, the same year Boris first became an MP, and of the 59 Scottish consituencies, is one of only three non-SNP Members of Parliament. Hearing a Scottish accent, however, Bo-Jo went straight into an attack on Scottish Independence. Carmichael was unimpressed. “Downing Street staff literally give Boris a sheet of paper with MPs’ pictures, names and parties and still he gets it wrong,” he said. “That in itself is a bit worrying. It makes me wonder how he might cope with the nuclear codes.”

 

Ian Blackford, the SNP's leader in the Commons, implored Boris to visit Scotland - maybe because the more the Scots see Tories, the greater Nicola's support will be. So on Thursday,  Boris popped up to Orkney, it being sufficiently out of the way, (and Liberal Democrat) to avoid the SNP.

On arrival in Stromness, Boris went through his prepared routine. No one loved theTribesmen more than him. Which is why they were better off in the union because without Westminster  they would all be dead from Covid. And all talk of another independence referendum was just nonsense because they'd had one back in 2014.

Meanwhile down in Edinburgh, Sturgeon was conducting her weekly coronavirus press briefing. No, she didn’t want to score any political points during an ongoing global pandemic but she did think it was inappropriate for the prime minister to have come up to Scotland while people were still dying to crow about how much he had done for the union when the UK as a whole had the highest mortality rate in Europe. And she would have been happy to have met Boris if he had been polite enough to request a meeting and she would also have reminded him that though the money from Westminster was very welcome, it was still only borrowed money. So if Scotland had been independent, it could have borrowed the money itself and probably spent it a whole lot better as it had dealt with the coronavirus  much better than England. But as this was a public health briefing, she wasn’t going to say any of this. Nicola accused him of politicising the pandemic, adding that leaders should not use the crisis as "some kind of political campaigning tool".

Back in 2014, Gordon Brown similarly and equally futilely  tried to win Scotland away from a vote for independence.  Stanislav was caustic about his performance:

stanislav up in Scotland is, best part of England, for sure, but maybe not for long, eh.  NutterTribesmen is running about like Old Testament prophet  and scaring decent Jock - not pisshead, gingerbastard wifebeating child molester layabout -  but decent respectful bloke, half to fucking death. Could be fucking murder up here. And worse than that, Gordon Snot is from grave dug-up and arriving at meeting of proper human being, Jock-human-being anyway. Until now has been OK Snottywise, comes out from coffin once a week and helps out but not very much,  down at local Oxfam.

See:            https://mrishmael.blogspot.com/2010/05/snotty-in-retirement.html

mr ishmael on Quantitative Easing

BANDITRY A LA GRECQUE.

I remember, when Mr Gordon Snot and Mr Alastair Darling were saving Usury's arse for  a grateful, captive world, thinking to myself, not  for the first time, What is this shit? This is way beyond Capitalism's bottom-of-the-deck cardsharping, this is risk-free brigandage, the bandits have bushwhacked the wagon train and the wagon master is helping them loot the chuckwagon, ransack the pioneers' belongings, fuck all the women, steal all the horses and enslave all the children while offering them a vote of sincere, heart-felt thanks, before inviting them back, next time, Sir Fred, please.

It seemed that a maelstrom of counterfeit assumption, heretical supplication and zombie arithmetic was pulling everyone into its crazy vortex; the circulation of worthless, fiat currency bog-roll notes was threatened and Devilish anarchy must ensue,  unless, that is,  Organised Crime was given a free pardon and trillions of pounds from the poor box; only if the criminals escaped punishment could Civilisation survive; unless the Worthless were excused, exalted and beatified everything we held dear - shopping, extortionate mortgages and the supernova illusion of debt-as-prosperity would become, well, worthless.

Since money no longer properly exists and is only borrowed into existence I didn't see why Mr Snot couldn't just arrest all the criminals, throw them in jail and print-up enough bogroll money for everybody to have enough to be going on with while we sorted-out a non-criminal solution, one in which grubby shysterism, shorting, commodity speculation, sub-prime lending  and insider dealing are not  seen as  the preserve of the nobility, an expression of modern-day chivalry. The thieves and extortionists, Mr Snot seemed to say, are our very salvation, peace and pretend money be upon them. He never listened to me, Snotty. And look where it got him. Look where it got his party, the useless gibbering, snot-eating bastard. Here, thanks to Snotty and the numbskull jumped-up Jock councillor, Darling, be the triumph of  Usury Unbound. Here be Descent into the maelstrom; here be the very government owned  by Shylock.

There is an order of succession in public life -  as the night follows day, bad is succeeded by worse,the idle slut-prince, Brian will succeed  bed-hopping, Don't-Rock-The-Boat Brenda the Cruel;  Bush Senior  was succeeded by Spunky BillClinton, Clinton was succeeded by Dubya Chimp, Chimp was succeeded  by Obama;  crook-torturer follows crook-torturer, wickedness upon wickedness. And the Brown Miracle of Financial Deliverance followed on his predecessor's Great Deceit. The fictions  of a filthy, fucked -up pornographer-drunk, read into the public record, annotated  by treacherous spooks and applauded by a  rotten legislature set the world on fire.  After Iraq they could get away with anything. And they did.

Look at how all the filth of the world coalesced  and encrusted in a giant skidmark at Gleneagles to make poverty history, braindead rock'n'rollers orgasming to the sounds of Pinkl Floyd's dire, icy precision.  Oh, wow, man, they're back together again, somehow the world is a better place, already. Talkin' 'bout my generation, Cuntishness Unbound, the Baby Boomers. And look, now,  at Poverty's millions,  fleeing to a new life at the bottom of the Mediterranean; just as much as Tony'n'Imelda's Snotty Brown's nail-bitten fingerprints are all over this global catastrophe 

Is Brown worse than Blair?  Of course he is, he could have gainsaid Iraq and he didn't, his moral compass pointing due career. A Presbyterian Privatiser Brown was no more socialist or social democrat than my dog, Harris. Post-Brown, post No More Boom And Bust,  criminals prosper, are ennobled and the poor and lame are whipped through the streets, slandered and scourged by filth like Murdoch,  Desmond, Rothermere, the Barclay Twins and now by Harriet Soursister, her ponce husband, the union parasite, Dromey, and reptiles like  Chukka Wotsisname.  The poor must pay and pay,  what otherwise is the point of them? After the notional treasuries were handed over to GlobaCorp the old idea of capitalism involving risk or  failing became ridiculous

And as it is here and in the United States of Atrocity  so it is on what we call the continent.

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 IN THE BEGINNING WASN'T THE SMILEY FACE.

Dwelt  I within Uncle Sam's brash and brutish embrace I would say Fall when I meant Autumn. Both nouns represent the same planetary shift and probably both evoke the same romance - the  same season  of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of fallen leaves jewelling the ground; of days growing short, of thankfulness for Harvest and of a reluctant battening-down after Summer's lazy license; Autumn, though, latin, does it for me, with a poetic power at which Fall only grasps, Au-tumn, the first syllable ajar with wonder, the second snapping firmly shut, sealed like a frozen lake; Fall, a shortening of leaf-fall,  like so much American English is vague, childish and a bit lazy, like Uncle Sam, himself.

I was struck by Wilde's  Division-by-Language when packing, for the hospital,  an edition of Lapham's Quarterly, from Fall, 2014. It just irritated, that momentary correction, forced upon me, like trying to read those kiddy emoticons with which people now litter their prose, an entire keyboard's worth of which this i-thing contains, it only pops up by error and I remove it quickly, like birdshit from my windscreen; corrosive, like real birdshit, of any polished surface, is this cheery infantilism-as-style and if my resistance to such signifies my growing separateness from the main, indicates my aversion to a linguistic lowest common denominator, frames my cleaving to the difference between noun and verb and points to an irrational irritabilty I would counter that language, as well as being the vehicle for mr yardarm's rage is also not only no less than but actually the mother of mr mike's equations, mr mongoose's engineering tolerances and the wellspring of mr tdg's  elegant, remorseless logic; why should we demean it with Twittering amputation,  abbreviation and pictogram? We would not so treat a calculation of load bearing, a flight plan or even the odds on a wager, why do we so eagerly conjoin in the mutilation and enfeebling of our language?

There is a scene in Amadeus, a fanciful film about Mozart, in which one of his Royal patrons complains to Wolfgang that his music is terribly good but would be better without quite so many notes in it. But Majesty, retorts the frustrated composer, it has exactly the right amount of notes in it, no more and no less.

Notes on a stave, though, are unmistakeable instructions; with speech or writing, what you want to say and how say it can cancel each other out.
 I find talking on the telephone a torment and I do it, more or less, only with tradespeople, with whom I can scramble to an understanding.
 Conversation with someone I can see is hard enough, even my closest operates on a different wavelength, speaking meaningfully without visual clues is proving more and more difficult and so  I don't do that much talking, these days.  
 Paul McCartney, having been rebuked for describing John Lennon's death as a drag, said that he wished he had an editor in his brain, to read his words before he uttered them, because a drag meant one thing to him but something less to others.

I knew just what he meant, I'd like an editor, a sub editor, a censor and a professor of conversation studies inside my head.  This talking business, it is the very Devil.
Writing things down, as I often remark, levels my head and eases my mind.

It doesn't happen often in my life but there is a place to which the words find their own way; it is not fixed, nor is it locatable, there is no cerebral  sat-nav, I cannot key-in a postcode; it is a No-Man's Land, between the the intuitive and the mechanistic, the left and the right brains.

mr ishmael's essays:

Stan Over Scotland                                          drafted 21/08/2014

snotty in retirement                                          published 23/05/2010

Banditry a la Grecque                                      drafted 14/07/2016

 In the Beginning wasn't the Smiley Face       drafted  12/08/2015

The Sunday Ishmael 19/07/20

 Déjà vu

  We could wish that the Metropolitan Police Force sets up some training in arrest techniques, instead of leaving this neatly (but exotically) bearded junior officer  to pick it up from You Tube videos of US cops and get down and intimate  on the street. He was clearly unfamiliar with the correct technique as he left off long before death ensued in order to stand up and shout at the onlookers and amateur camera-persons.The beard made a magnificent appearance.

Everybody is elbowing everybody else aside to express their extreme wokeness. Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Sir Steve House called the footage “extremely disturbing,” adding that the arrest techniques captured in the video “cause great concern,” as they are not (yet) taught in police training. London Mayor Sadiq Khan said he was “deeply concerned about this distressing incident,”  The whole embarassing balls-up on July 16th has been referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) for investigation. Sadiq Khan thinks that's a good idea.The victim has been seen by a police doctor. They kept him banged up in cells. Beardie has been suspended.

The  Met has also warned that officers will be deployed to shut down illegal music events across London.Residents of Hackney’s Woodberry Down – a recently gentrified council estate – were kept awake on Friday night by what police called an “unlicensed music event.” Riot police attempted to break up the al fresco party, causing violent chaos as party-goers threw bricks and bottles at the officers.  

"I urge anyone considering attending an event like this to re-think their plans,” Deputy Assistant Commissioner Lucy D’Orsi warned on Saturday. “Officers will be out across London, closing these events down, and they will arrest anyone suspected of criminal offences.” But not by kneeling on their necks, as that technique has not yet been taught.

  But, enough of the Met. Let us consider extradition: we would like the US to send us  Anne Sacoolas, the erstwhile British-based CIA operative who, it is believed, has been promoted in the agency since she ran down and killed teenager Harry Dunn because she was driving on the American side of the road. The United States would like us to send across to them Julian Assange, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, and His Royal Highness Prince Andrew. Bit of an impasse.

Meanwhile, Prince Andrew's daughter, who, we can fairly confidently state, has never been trafficked across continents for the purpose of being pimped to members of the aristocracy,

Beatrice with her suited and respectable parents

has married some Italian.

Hat-tip to mr verge

They got married in a small, lockdown ceremony at The Royal Chapel of All Saints at Royal Lodge, Windsor. 

a small ceremony

The chapel is is a Grade II listed church in the grounds of the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, Berkshire, England.

Beatrice's dad allegedly with Virginia Roberts and Ghislaine Maxwell who has entered a not guilty plea.

Ghislaine Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to offences of facilitating the abuse of minors by her boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, allegedly murdered whilst serving a prison sentence for those offences. It is estimated that she will come to trial in about a year, unless, as she fears, she suffers a similar fate to Epstein. Miss Roberts, pictured above, is one of Epstein’s victims and claims she was forced to have sex with a profusely-sweating Andrew three times when she was 17. Andrew has strenuously denied the allegations, calling in aid an alleged chronic condition of inability to sweat, incurred whilst being a war hero, serving his country during the Falklands War. He has said he does not recall Miss Roberts. He's not setting foot in the US though. I wonder if he's sweating yet?

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 Virus Update

mr bungalow bill said: 

I see the numbers are unravelling and it seems we may not really have been sick at all, or not sick enough.There's a revelation. Still, it's not like we've fucked anything up along the way and it has been a strange joy to do as we are told.   Such days.

Dr John Lee, writing in the Spectator on  the 11 July 2020, reminds us that the early estimate of the death rate from Covid was  3.4%, rapidly declining to 0.9%, then 0.6% with the expectation it will settle at 0.1%, similar to seasonal flu. The defining and reporting of Covid deaths varies wildly, and so the concept of "excess deaths" is now used. Dr Lee tells us: "go to the Office for National Statistics website and look up deaths in the winter/spring seasons for the past 27 years, and then adjust for population. This year comes only eighth in terms of deaths....viruses have been chasing men since before we climbed down from the trees. Our bodies fight them off and learn in the process.... We get sick... But viruses recede, our body’s defences learn and strengthen. The process has been happening for millions of years, which is why more than 40 per cent of our genome is made of incorporated viral genetic material."
 So, nearly half of my body is a virus, Dr Lee?

It has all been a bit of a Bullingdon-mess. Over-estimation of the fatality rate, the building of warehouse-sized hospitals, lockdown, the burning of the money and so on and so forth. 

Who knows what the deep script is, was, or ever shall be, mr bungalow bill? Was it real, did it happen, was it naturally zoonotic or manufactured from bits and pieces of deadly viral code; was it, in fact, deadly? 

The important thing, though, is to take the learning from the experience of 2020:

1. Parliament can pass whatever laws it wants without let, hindrance or scrutiny, in a matter of days.

2. Senior army command can be deployed to "assist" local authorities and NHS Boards instantly.

3. A good crisis should never be wasted - it can always be used to consolidate Establishment power and remove civil liberties.

4. The majority of the population are entirely biddable, joyfully do as they are told, will put themselves into solitary confinement, stop visiting the sick and the dying, and will grass up those few who do not comply.

5. Naming and Shaming is a reliable sporting alternative to football.

6. Should public executions be reintroduced tomorrow, there would be fleets of "Execution Special" coaches commissioned to take avid namers and shamers to Gallows Hill, where they will take the knee, to apologise for their white guilt.

7. As ever, all cops are bastards, but we really, really need them to protect us from ourselves.

8. The summer of rioting is now an established British tradition.

9. The nation can stop worrying about collagen treatments for those pesky wrinkles round the mouth - they can legitimately be hidden behind a variety of face-masks.

10. The Government can invent as much money as it wants.

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Well, it's Sunday, and although the nation's priorities were made pretty clear when shops were re-opened before churches, mr ishmael is here to guide us through the complexities of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic  tradition: 

All this stuff about religions, this one or that one,  being a religion of peace;  well, there's the Quakers but they founded America didn't they, when they weren't sitting around, in their hats and collars and jerkins, being quiet and thoughtful and patient. And holy, in a non-specific way, making chocolate, slaughtering the natives,  up and down the Eastern Seaboard;  a nation born of a longing for religious freedom, just as long as it wasn't  any damned heathen, aboriginal, Earth-worshipping religion, fuck that shit; just white religions,  as many as you want, Anabaptists, Pentecostalists, Christian Scientists, paranoid, lunatic Amish throwbacks, Micks and fucking Mormons, take your pick, they're all barking fucking mad, bloodthirsty, sex-crazed, shoot-'em-up, redneck exterminators; that's what's great about the modern home of ethnic cleansing and slavery,  what they do, gang-raping Iraqi teenagers or microwaving the children of Hiroshima, or just lynching some of them home-grown nigger boys, they do it all in the service of the Lord.

And Islam, Mohamedinism;  Jesus fucking wept.  Cut your head off on live TV. For the Prophet, peace and blessings and hot, spurting arterial blood be upon his name. But not yours,  not your name,  smile, now, for the camera, Infidel, as I hack my way through your vertebrae, your family'll get to see this, what with Google and everything.  Oh, but they're not all like that. They have scholars. Do they fuck have scholars. They have gobby witchdoctors, horrible old bastards, and slimy, American-speaking youngsters, good for fuck all. And they have community leaders, here, in the UK, speaking for moderate Islam, See? We're just like you, really.  No, you're not, you're not at all like me.  None of you are remotely like me.

The Sunday Filth-O-Graph is emboldened by this gang of nasty public school cowboys and its leaders  a couple of weeks back were a redneck, Thatcherite treat.  These judges, it thundered, how dare they not do what Michael Howard told 'em. Burglars must have the maximum sentence, more than the maximum sentence, preferably. Like Michael Howard said, prison works, and he should know, he's a lawyer, too, an eminent QC - they're all eminent, aren't they, eminent and learned, never heard of an uneminent QC, did you, just an ordinary money-grubbing lawyer, charge you a hundred and twenty quid for telling you the time, never heard skymadeupnewsandfilth introduce some bad-breathed, puffed-up, useless, incompetent prick with the words And we are joined by Mr Peregrine Sticky-Fingers-Jones, an ordinary QC. Anyway, ya seen Michael Howard's wife? She's a babe, seventy if she's a day, Sandra;  she was a model, you know; if she'd got her Cleobury Mortimers out for the papers at that election he would have won, romped home, he would, but even at seventy she could sit on my Tory manifesto anytime. But he was bang-on about the prison thing, Michael was, y'know, how he said Prison Works.  It was CallHimDave thought that one up, Prison Works. What a brilliant line, Alright, we know from recent remarks that Dave's not so bright on the old history front - or anything really - but what a brilliant slogan, Prison Works. It's up there with We're All In This Together. And about as accurate.  Punishment, though, that's the Judaeo-Christian thing. In the beginning was the word and the word was Punishment:  You do any of this shit that I told you not to do and I'm gonna punish your worthless,  twelve tribes of Israel asses. And another thing, no use pretending you didn't know it was wrong to eat bacon, ignorance of the law is no excuse. What kind of robbing bastard, tribal elder shit is that, ignorance of the law is no excuse?  The Blair-Brown Terror brought in, what was it, three thousand new things you could be punished for doing, or not doing. Three fucking thousand. Bill Posters will be prosecuted, Tony McNulty will think of something.*

And the Jews, thousands of years getting their arses kicked and their money confiscated and now it's all coming good for them, armed to the teeth, nuked-up and acting out some neo-Nazi prophecy, chosen people, that's what they are, a master race, just like Herman the German was, but chosen by God, y'understand, not Hitler, singled out by angry, old Jehovah,  Himself, we are the herrenvolk, not those fucking Germans, we always were,  and everybody else can go  and fuck themselves, blow the world to smithereens, doesn't matter, it's all written down by some mad paternalistic control freaks, thousands of years ago,  on some parchment, you can eat this but you can't eat that, don't drive that fucking Volvo on the fucking Sabbath, Hymie, fuck no; don't  eat that shit or it's the fiery finger up your ass, or you get turned to salt, probably skinned the goat alive, to make the parchment, more holy that way, out on Highway Sixty-One.** Just off now to bang my head on the Wailing Wall. And then lock  them Ayrabs up, behind a great big Freedom Wall; well we're famous for our sensayuma, right ? Woody Allen, yeah? Only not the bit with the step daughter. Horrible mad bastards. Holy?  Religion? Kiss my goyim arse, Hymie. You know, they say every Jew in the world has a right to go and live in Israel, And any Jews who get born in future, they can go, too. How's that gonna work? God probably'll dry-up the whole fucking Mediterranean and fill it full of milk and honey and strictly defensive nuclear missiles, the OK sort of nukes, peaceful ones, because Judaism is a peaceful religion, just like all of them.


But you can't knock 'em, the Jews. Virtually illegal. If a Jewish soldier in Israel smashes a Palestinian child's arm between rocks, it's ok, You know, because of Hitler and everything,  Atrocity's blank cheque to itself, countersigned by Uncle Sam's Mighty War Machine and by every faint-hearted liberal fascist in the world. 'Swhat it is.  That shit in the camps, Wow, no fucking wonder they wanna let off a little steam. And never mind that that shit in the camps happened because exactly the same kind of liberals were too busy listening to the string quartet in the salon to hear the cry in the street, as Germany's Big Society took hold. And everybody went back to work, rounding up the Jews, making lampshades and melting down gold teeth. Fuck em, eh, time for tough choices, all gotta pull together, after the mess the last lot left us. Weimar, NewLabour, whatever ticks your box, nein?


And that's part of the thing with the Jews, can't say Boo! to them, not because you'd upset them but because you'd upset Herman the German and his nice clean country, hardly a whiff of the crematorium on the nice clean German air. No, Herman, poking about in his poos in the morning, doesn't wanna be reminded of all that Nazi shit, not in his nice, clean, German country.  Fuck, no, best cut Hymie a little slack, else he'll be screaming about all that stuff which a very, very few of our grandfathers and grandmothers did to him, it was only a tiny handful of people, really, were Nazis, probably no more than tens of fucking millions of them.  I mean, all those Jews, their homes and businesses all smashed up, and them being kicked up and down  the strasse, pistol-whipped and jackbooted, like it was the new national sport,  just disappearing, down the trainline to nowhere, all their property being recycled,  their hair and their teeth, come on, how was any decent German to know that that shit was going on? Was only a million of them worked on the Reichsbahn, seeing all those trains going East with starving and thirsting Untermensche all jammed in worse than cattle, and then coming back again, with the clothes and the luggage and the few miserable bits of personal shit that mein cousin, Fritz, in the SS, had allowed them to keep when they first rounded them up. It's not as though anyone saw anything, not as though the bullwhipping railway station guards or the shoot 'em in the back of the head merchants ever went home on leave to their liebschen and  their darling little kinder, was it, and told them that the Nazi Big Society had extermination production lines, specialist units for so-called medical experiment and old-fashioned torture dungeons in which Good Germans, Grandads And Grandmas, could relax after a hard day, counting them in but not counting them out. Nothing like beating a Jewess to death to get the appetite going. And maybe you could have a few of them playing some nice music, no point in putting a concert pianist in the gas oven. Not in a cultured society, like Germany.

And anyway, they hanged a  few of them, had to get Albert Pierrepoint in, our official ropesman, gave him a lieutenant colonelcy, made him a Hanging Rupert, because Uncle Sam was topping Herman with those big nooses that you see in the Westerns and they were ripping Herman's head off, not very salubrious for the Occupying Powers, that. Got Albert in and he did his thing of peeking in the Judas hole, studying the neck and shoulder musculature of his customers, checking their weight and calculating exactly how many feet of rope he'd need to break von Rundstedt's neck cleanly, just so. Master craftsman, was Albert Pierrepoint, it was  a family business;  painstaking and meticulous, he was, or he was in Britain;  used to suspend a big bag of sand from the hanging rope, the night before, just in case it retained too much spring, and Herman came bouncing back up through the trapdoor, scaring the shit out of the witnesses, maybe bouncing up and down like a fucking yo-yo.  Left nothing to chance, usually, and always was sucking on a boiled sweet as he went about his business. Morning old chap, this won't take a minute, suck-suck. In the English nicks the topping shop was next to the condemned cell, so he could actually conduct the whole enterprise between  the clock starting and finishing the striking of Eight; in Nuremberg there was a bit of a walk to the rope, which may have rattled his customary aplomb. I do hope so. 


They hanged  a few of them, the obviously Nazi generals and around Europe  they topped  a handful of the really most barabarous camp guards but mainly it was deemed that most of them were carrying out orders, some of them got some years in the nick, and God alone knows what happened to those in the USSR.

* McNulty moved to the Home Office on 9 May 2005 as Minister of State for Immigration, following the general election reshuffle. In May 2006 his Home Office portfolio changed to responsibility over the policing and crime, security and counter-terrorism. 

** Highway 61 - Bob Dylan: 

Oh, God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe say, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No," Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin', you better run"

Well, Abe said, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God said, "Out on Highway 61"

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WHAT, EXACTLY, THE FUCK, IS AN OFFENCE OF CANNIBALISM?

I could write reams on the subject of Sawney Bean,  the infamous  15th  century head of a cave-dwelling Scottish cannibal clan responsible, it is said, for the murders and eating of over a thousand souls.

 Such contemporary cannibalism as I have read of, however,   seems to be practised not by Jock, not yet, anyway, we must await the impact of Ms Gnasher Sturgeon on our national appetites  but  by Herman the German and sometimes his Swiss neighbours.  Herman, being civilised and polite, engages in consensual cannibalism, issuing invitations to potential, voluntary ediblees in specialist magazines and websites.  There was a case a few years back, of one Herman, Meiwes, who advertised his wish to remove, lightly season and eat another man's penis, advertising on the internet in March 2001 for a "young, well-built man, who wanted to be eaten". Mr Brandes responded and agreed to the cutting off of his penis, which Meiwes then fried for them both to eat. Brandes died of his injury. Meiwes then came to trial, by which time he had eaten a further 20 kilos of Brandes. Was this murder, manslaughter, suicide, assisting in suicide? There was no offence of cannibalism in Germany and during the trial it was alleged that there were 800 practicing German cannibals. Meiwes got life, after a prosecution appeal against a five year sentence. Seems there are some offences you can't consent to, even though they aren't offences.

 Mr Ishmael's draft essays:
 All this stuff about religions;                                         drafted  May, 2006
What, exactly, the fuck, is an offence of cannibalism?  drafted  11/11/2014

The Sunday Ishmael 12th July 2020

"Chunks of the civil service to be moved out of London", says Michael Gove  
"I think it is vitally important that decision-makers are close to people

I think it is vitally important that the strength of the UK Government is displayed across the whole of the United Kingdom and that we distribute opportunity, jobs and investment fairly.

We’ve already got civil servants in Scotland, who are working for the Department for International Development, and in Wales, working for the Department for Transport – but we can do more.

It’s good for the Union, it’s good for equal opportunity, it is good for what we call levelling up.

But my own view? I think that, if people were to see Parliament closer to different parts of the United Kingdom, then I don’t see there are any reasons why we can’t have more operations of the UK Parliament in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Our UK Parliament is a parliament for everyone in the United Kingdom, so making it more accessible, and we can discuss how, is a good thing.
I will  ensure that the Government publishes data showing who applies for and wins a place on the Civil Service’s prestigious 'fast stream' graduate scheme.

   I’ll go back and look at making sure we can be as transparent as possible. I think we should publish figures on the background of people who apply and the background of people who succeed in getting into the Civil Service.  I’ll look back to see if it was the case that we dropped or edited that information, then I’ll ask and see if we can do even better.
One of the ways that the civil service can be more representative of the UK is by having a broader geographical spread of decision-making in the UK. It doesn’t have to be the case that you feel you have to go to Oxbridge and to London to have an opportunity to be a decisive voice in shaping the future of this country.”   

Chancellor Rishi Sunak said that 22,000 civil servants would be moved out of the capital by 2030 in his March budget statement.
Neither Mr Gove nor Mr Sunak confirmed where in the UK the jobs could be relocated to. (It's York, though. It's not Bradford)
The Government has been planning a shake-up of the civil service for months with some Government figures said to see Whitehall as set in its ways. 

Mr Gove is getting on with overhauling parts of the civil service. Last month he called for the Government to “be less southern, less middle class” and “closer to the 52 per cent who voted to Leave and more understanding of why”. About time, too.

Black Lives Matter 

mr ishmael on multi-culturalism, murder and the rights of women to be ignored:

I worked with a guy once, well, I say worked, I mean I was part of a small army of people supervising and assisting Jaghinder with his resettlement.  He had done six years of a life sentence passed on him for murdering his teenage daughter;  somehow, in Alum Rock, Birmingham. She had integrated a bit too much, or been insufficiently Sikhish, and upset her father, this beardy bloke  in a turban.  He'd brought her to Brum but he expected her to behave as though she was in Amritsar. What can a poor bloke do, you know, if it's your religion or your daughter, well, you gotta sharpen up the sacred knife and do your  duty to Shiva or Kali or whichever  six-armed, fuck-mad, nonsensical deity is in charge of  child murder.  He was an utterly charming man, aside from being a rotten, cruel,  fucked-up, heartless bastard who needed dragging  up and down Washwood Heath Road by his fucking beard.  Jaghinder Singh Gill, they're all called something like that, aren't they, those Sikhs. Mad as fucking hatters. Live in some sort of Terry Pratchett world, don't they? Anyway, this was in the 'eighties and the Lifers' Department at the Home Office decided that because this was a cultural murder, the six years would be enough and Jag could go back and pick up the reins as a well-repected community leader and that's just what he did, used to come into my office and tell me, in achingly precise Empire English, how in the short time he'd been away,  things on the street had turned to shit,  the young people, he complained, had little or no respect for their elders.  This is all true, honest, not invent.  No respect for their insane, homicidal elders.

The authorities'  extraordinary view of this kind of crime resulted from  a  multi-culturalism/racism awareness/equal opportunities industry which at that time rampaged through the public sector,  damning all as racist, plundering training budgets  and making tidy careers for the likes of Darcus Howe.   The average life-term, then, was about twelve and a half years, just as long as you admitted the crime and expressed remorse, even if you hadn't done it.  Jaghinder, of course, saw no crime in his actions but they let him out anyway, sending a cheery invitation to other would-be  righteous, vengeful destroyers - Kill the bitch (it's always a female, offends the Gods) and you'll be out in no time at all, your cousin can run the Cash 'n' Carry in the meantime.  It was as though the official wish to smooth the path of citizen-incomers extended to there being a parallel criminal justice system, it never applied to what we came to call the Afro-Caribbean community, the blacks, but it was certainly noticeable - and socially counter productive - as it applied to  Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims.

They have their own cute little ways, the screws,  generally fuck-ups themselves, with lance-corporalitis  they run an organised, criminal racket, far from scrutiny, successive governments terrified of upsetting the greediest, laziest, least productive  and most unreformed branch of the public sector -  Ah, these clever criminals, How do they get all these drugs into the most secure buildings in the country? How indeed, Home Secretary, how indeed? - and another way in which these all male, closeted  institutions discriminated between murderers was that the domestic wasn't really a murderer at all, he'd just topped his Mrs, you know what wimmen are like, she probably drove him to it.  Now it is a fact, or it used to be, that most killers are first offenders,  that most victims are killed by those closest to them and that only a fraction of one per cent of those released on license re-offend seriously,  the lifer system can be said, therefore, to both punish the offender, although nowhere near enough for skymadeupnewsandfilth,  and protect the public. But in the matter of the so-called domestic killer there is a terrifying, almost officially sanctioned culture of  misogyny,  I lost track of the number of times I heard someone say I only killed the wife,  the screws have told me I'll only do ten, twelve max.  The screws, obviously, most of them, from the same flawed mould as the Wiltshire Lads, Sergeant Andrews and his shift of  angry cocksuckers, collude with Joe Bloggs in minimising the value of his spouse's life, the slut, in an official and quasi-official trivialisation of half, or more, of the world's population.

GIRLS ALLOWED

When my business took  me to auction houses I was always amazed at how disparaged and undervalued was traditional women's work,  embroidery, knitting, water colours, Hearts and Crafts. 

Old boxes, on the other hand, rudimentary things, fashioned by joiners or carpenters in an afternoon, would fetch fifty pounds, I would renovate them and they would make two or three hundred, retail, maybe a bit more, they had been made to cart-about the meagre possessions of younger, working women: the itinerant herring gutters or the scullery maids  working in service to the thieving classes - I worked, briefly,  in  a big stately home, when I was a kid. Christ, you wouldn't believe the servility of the staff, the decadent, pampered luxury demanded by the owners; he, the Marquis, a screeching transcontinental fairy, she a giddy Guinness daughter, jumped-up neurotic prats, the pair of them -

 somehow, anyway, these items of working class luggage, which had originated in mediaeval times as kists for storing food and household goods, evolved into wedding - or dowry - chests, containing weddng goods and later were of portable use by those too poor to own proper trunks.  These chests became transmuted, by the chancers of the stripped pine trade, into "blanket boxes"  like what the victorian lady kept at the bottom of her bed, and although they were nothing of the sort, gullible wannabes bought them by the lorryload, even though they had long abandoned blankets for duvets. And sun-dried tomatoes.  I still have a few boxes, among my souvenirs.

pine boxes, made by the thousand by local men

this one, in mahogany, from the Royal Army Medical Corps, travelled all over the Empire

Hugely intricate sewing samplers, however, painstakingly crafted by girls and young women up until the early twentieth centuries,  over long, candle-lit evenings, then framed and glazed in oak firescreens made a pound or two, if that;  there was a time you couldn't give them away.

Amongst other things, mrs ishmael is a needle-person, a sewist and a student of fabric design, makes quilts, single-handed and in concert, so they are a feature of my life, arts and crafts traditionally associated with women. I don't sit-in or anything, I am just aware of it going on and of the finished product, although, as with my stuff, nothing is ever finished, just abandoned. 

 I guess an engineeer can say Right, this bastard's done, this pump pumps, this bridge bridges, this load bears;  a dressing chest, though, like this one, 


restored over Christmas,  is never done;  there are two or three things needed on this piece, a drawer runner here, a drawer stop there,  a couple of tighter screws in those mad rococo handles and I would do them in a coupla minutes if I was putting it in a shop window, just needs a bit of work doing but I am fed up with it now,  and even if I did do those jobs I would discover others, and if I completed them the whole thing'd be covered in finger prints and need rewaxing, it's crazy. And I  only really bought it because I liked the mirror, thick, deeply cut and bevelled  



and because if I hadn't bought it, someone would've covered it with a really out-there  but DoYou-Know-What tasteful gloss paint, cos they're worth it, and it fits their dynamic lifestyle, I'd rather it was burnt.

 Doesn't matter a fuck, really,  what happens to old bits of furniture, it's just that if I lose my link to the old boys who fashioned these things - which is actually a link to an empire which saw, arriving by sail and steam, hardwoods from the tropics and pitch pine from North America and which workshopped for the World - then I may as well join the NewPeople, worshipping bits of silicon, 
and myself. And LuvvinMyKids2Bits, Me-ing.

These contemporary worthies are  aspiring
 not to be something but to have something; 
and, deaf, dumb and almost blind, they are played like fiddles.

And actually, do you know what, now that we've signed to Amazon we probably won't have to pay any tax at all,  they don't.
The prime minister, no, he's a mate, we're neighbours in Chipping Sodom, yeah, with Rebecca, it's where the best people live.

Some say.  That Top Gear only worked because what they call my yobbish, loutish, thicko, racist, bullyboy behaviour had a little frisson, only because it was on the BBC, a bit like getting your cock out in church, not that I go to church,  and that anywhere else we'd just have been seen as what we are, a trio of desperate prats, not very bright but chippy. Chippy and short in Hammond's case.  Others say that post-BBC, on a shopping channel,  we will fall flat on our faces.
 Doesn't matter, we get paid. 
Whatever.

  That's my justification, anyway,  for the ash dressing chest on the top floor, and the mahogany  and the oak  and the red walnut ones, on the middle floor, and the inlaid mahogany one in pride of place and the sideboards and wardrobes and desks.  In their materials they connect me to organic Creation and their makers' hands link us to the first jawbone-as-saw, the stone cutting tool, the bronze, the iron and the steel ages which wrought our world.
Norman Mailer raged that This is what's wrong with our children, everything they touch is lifeless plastic, inorganic, no wonder they're fucked-up.

I may completely finish this chest  but it doesn't matter if I don't, it's near enough for jazz;   Harris keeps his winter clothes, his who-he-is and has-he-had-his-jabs documents, his brushes and balls and flea-powders in its drawers, and there's some hats and gloves, which aren't for Harris.

Most people, on seeing pieces like this, would, at the very least, admire the shine and some might look at the figuring and the joinery but most would walk right past a piece of lace or tapestry, like this one.

There is a partial explananation  for the low regard in which needlework and fabrics are held - unlike wood and metal, they  decay relatively quickly.  I saw a quilt a while back, dating from the American Civil War and it was ghostly threadbare, colours faded, such a shame, if you cried, you know you'd fill a lake with tears, the  sewer's hands  now coffin dust, her work ravaged by sunlight and use.  These old boxes, however,  cared for just a little, will last generations, I have an old, elm one, from the seventeenth century, just needs a bit of work. Abandonment, I suppose that's our gig,  abandoning and being abandoned.

My unease at how we value the past stems from my Zen-Presbyterian-Marxism, the anger at what we clumsily call sexism but is actually just one of Oppression's refinements,   race against race, worker against worker, gender against gender and the latest - generation against generation.  We, the BabyBoomers are now, somehow, cast as the enemy of striving, aspirational yoof, silly fucking bastards, wanting their lives away.

Only in my lifetime have women received equal pay for equal effort and it'll be a long cold day in Hell before GlobaCorp sees the essential work of Motherhood as anything other than an impertinent inconvenience, every governmental impetus is to mothers - or, indeed, fathers - abandoning their children to lowly-paid strangers, that they, themselves,  may step enthusiastically onto the property gallows,  feel the soul-extinction of permanent debt, habituate themselves to  the gnawing at the innards of insatiable consumerism.   How did this happen,  that working miserably down  inTesco - to pay a mortgage which will eventually go entirely to a private care home company located in Barbados and fronted by some cunt like Micky Fallon - is exalted above child-rearing, is seen, patronisingly as Doing The Right Thing,  even though it is obviously The Wrong Thing? 

How did these

supplant these

 with this?

Oh but mr ishmael, it hasn't supplanted anything, it's just about not discriminating against people over  how they have sex.  And why shouldn't gay men farm children, after all they've been through?

Aye, right. All freaks together, now. 
Celebrating Diversity.

Anyway, whilst wondering about the Maelstrom of Gender, I  was looking at some old, local  photographs, mostly from the turn of the nineteenth century but a few from the Nazi War and was struck by the very hard lives led by Orkney women at that time. Men were often away fishing and tasks still needed to be performed regularly -  but even when the men were home  everybody was expected to scratch at the stoney land for a living; motherhood, then,  was no excuse for not doing back-breaking work but it was a communal sort of labour, on the land, in the fresh air and it involved the family. 

The Industrial Revolution never really reached the far North, indeed, Orkney and Shetland were not on the national grid until the nineteen sixties, so patterns of rural working life, long replaced or mechanised  in the South are historically close enough, here, to be have been extensively photographed.

 I have recently read a short history of Caithness, outlining a similarly arduous life led by that county's womenfolk but as usual, a picture  can be worth a thousand words. I thought I'd share some of them.  They were taken by local photographers - rather than by anthropologists, as is often the case - we were talking recently about Alan Lomax's Library of Congress, WhiteMan  recordings of early Blues musicians.

mmr ishmael's essays this week were:

I worked with a guy once   drafted 12/09/2010
Girls Allowed                     drafted 10/08/2015