Sunday 27 March 2022

The Sunday Ishmael 27/03/2022 That's me, back from my hols

Sunset at Sea, taken from the M.V. Hjaltland 26/3/2022

Just back from a 1,144 mile road trip. Plus two ferry crossings on the MV Hjaltand, each of 6 or 7 hours' duration. The Hjaltland is fairly disgusting, as mr ishmael has previously documented, Shetlanders in the bar and huge animal transporters on the car deck, taking the poor beasts from Orkney to mainland Scottish abattoirs to be slaughtered. The stench and cries of the pitiable imprisoned cows of a morning when one retrieves one's car, picking a way around the giant transports, chains, cars and wheel blocks, would drive second thoughts into the most hardened carnivore. Just another aspect of the death industry to be tidied away from the sight of folk who prefer their meat to be neatly packaged in little trays, with cellophane around them and a sort of sanitary towel under them to soak up the blood. And from Marks and Spencer or Waitrose.

The Hjaltland has an on-board cinema - well, not really - it is a big telly with a DVD player - so after fishnchips and two tiny little bottles of indescribably horrid white wine, I watched the only offering. New, it wasn't. Not a wots on at t'pictures experience. More a this is so old you have to get it on DVD. So you may have already seen it. 152 minutes long. That's two hours and a half an hour and then another two minutes. Which, considering I had to kill 6 hours of chugging across the North Sea, was ok. If I'd seen it at home, I'd have been looking for something else to do. Like the washing up. But that would have been a mistake. Maybe my reaction was conditioned by having wrangled the mighty Mercedes Benz over 325 miles that day, so I'd just lived my own race-movie, maybe the drone of the ferry's engines and the swell of the sea provided additional dimensions of sensory experience to the film, but when Christian Bale rammed his footie down to the floorboards, my footie was down, too, my hands gripped the steering wheel, my face was split in the rictus grin of high speed laughing in the face of death, as old Christian with his skull of a tanned, sweating face, gunned his race car into impossible feats of overtaking, scraping wheels as rivals tried to force him off track, ducking as bits of burning car flew past, and in a gentlemanly, team-player concession to the wishes of the Ford executive, slowed down so that all three Ford cars could cross the finish line of Le Mans '66 together. Having rubbished all those Ferrari bastards. That Le Mans race was cruel. Twenty-four hours solid, interrupted by pit stops for new parts, tyres and fuel, the pit crews working with furious, balletic skill, drivers spelling each other with inadequate breaks, cars overturning at preposterous speed, bursting into flame, killing drivers. Henry Ford wanted a race car because Enzo Ferrari goaded him with the line: “You’re not Henry Ford. You’re Henry Ford II.” And wouldn't sell him Ferrari - the winners of Le Mans for three years. Ford was looking like an old ladies' car in the Sixties: “James Bond does not drive a Ford,” the advertising executive explains, to which Henry Ford II, the company’s chief executive, retorts: “Because he’s a degenerate.”

Those are about the best lines in the film and there's an awful lot of reaction shots, bromance crap, executive schenagling, widowandorphanning and Matt fucking Damon - but the race track sequences, shot low so race cars explode into hot metal and flames around your ears are pretty damn superb and Christian Bale's Ken Miles

is like Guy Martin on speed. You wouldn't want either of them driving you to the supermarket.

So Joe Biden had a "who will rid me of this turbulent priest" moment this week. Really not a good idea. What with Tank Girl Truss and Joseph Robinette, its no wonder that Putin is suspicious of the West.

For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power

After the best part of a fortnight in England's green and pleasant land, it was back home to smart, successful Scotland, so clever that 1 in 11 Scots are currently suffering from Covid, and 2000 Scots are hospitalised in consequence of Covid - not in hospital with something else and then either catch it or are found to already have it, but because they have a nasty case of Covid. Hospitals are cancelling non-urgent interventions, operations and treatments.

But still the only thing that the media want us to think about is Biden's War:

Ishmaelian epigram: A CRIMEAN NOTEBOOK 30/3/2014
"In the 21st century you simply cannot invade other countries on some made-up pretext." John Facelift, US Secretary of State

and how we can do our bit to support sanctions by not complaining when our living standards drop and gas, electricity and fuel prices go up, because it is all in a good cause. Honestly, old Russian ladies fighting over bags of sugar in supermarkets and Russian women (am I still allowed to call them that?) not able to find tampons and sanitary towels in the shops, will not cause Putin one moment, one iota of a moment's concern. He's like that.

'sokay, though, because Britain can take the pain. And the millionaire running our economy will help us out with 5p a litre off fuel.

Here's a relevant little rant by mr ishmael:

LOOK AFTER THE PENNIES

They really do think we are stupid, they really do think that a penny on or off the price of a pint is a matter of national concern, that horny-handed churls everywhere will be beside themselves with rage or glee, should the price of a pint alter. Perhaps this astonishing misapprehension arises from the fact that they don't buy their own booze, fuck, no; they don't buy anything unless it can be charged to us; we buy their food, their clothes, their houses, we pay for their holidays, business pays for other holidays or bribes, which is what they are, and we pay for serious fact-finding trips abroad, to the Caribbean, to China, Australia, Paris, Rome and Stockholm, to wherever the whores and the boys and the shopping are good; as a matter of fact, there is nowhere in the world from which a parliamentarian cannot gather useful information of great value to his or her constituents. Free everything, it is vital, if an MP is to stay in touch with life lived by the electors, that he doesn't have to pay for anything and it is this concept which informs his judgement on the crucial importance of the penny on the pint.

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Mothering Sunday.

Here's some daffs.

A better present might be to stop killing every mother's son. And making widows before their time. Here's mr ishmael again:

THE SUNDAY SERMON:

Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God. 19/ 6/ 2010

The Dead, what are they like, eh, a pain in the arse, if you ask me. For some reason, probably ominous, there has been, in my corner of reality, a - what, what would you call a group of them, a Coven of, a Funeral of, a Weariness of - yes, A Weariness of Widows and its presence has ignited a flaming whirlwind of resentful defiance and resentment at tippytoeing around the only-to-be-guessed-at whims and foibles of an entity which doesn't exist, Ah, but it's what HE would have wanted; mustn't, for fucks sake, say something, ANYTHING with which HE would take offence; if HE still was, that is. Who do these fucking dead bastards think they are ?

The young widow of a young husband. By all accounts, even hers, he was an utter wanker - lazy, critical and incompetent, she working and he staying at home on his arse, getting pissed or stoned or both and ridiculing her career choices; greedy, tight-fisted and stupid, he had bullied and humiliated her for a decade; like manys a layabout he had practiced the artistry of being a pretend Artist, Treat me not as you would others, for I am Artist; he didn't play or write or paint anything, he was the Artist of our Times, he took fucking pictures. Just ordinary pictures - seascapes, landscapes, skyscapes; hard to take a bad picture of that stuff, here, at the End of the World. But being an undiscovered Photographer - even in a culture where babies play with cameraphones and everyone is a photographer, and where everyone is a movie-maker - being an Undiscovered Photographer was, he thought, like being apprenticed to Athena, Goddess of Art; Don't speak to me of unpaid bills, unmade beds and unseen hurts, Stop making with those negative waves, Moriar-ity.

Anyway, one morning he woke-up dead, or she woke up and he was. He had a whole lifetime left, nearly, in which to spray his bitter piss all over her and there he was, stretched out, not. And ever since it's been, Oh, I'm gonna do so-and-so, because it's what HE would have wanted me to do. And a gaggle of comforting, tentative relatives nodding, 'swhat he would have wanted, The Flying Mourners, just a phone call away, or they just turn up, out of empathy.

Now, that's all very well, but it hadn't ought to be compulsory on the whole population. Didya hear so-and-so's dead? No? Oh fuck me, that's terrible, you don't happen to have a hairshirt I could borrow, do you, only 'sprobably what he would have wanted, no, never, never met him; the whole fucking world going about worrying about what some fucking memory might think of things. The bastard's dead, doesn't matter what he would have wanted. Well, not to me it doesn't.

I think, what I think, is that widows should go in proper fucking mourning, away from the gaze of the grief-fetishists, indoors, mainly, out of sight and out of mind until their griefs and guilts are purged by time and necessity and lust. The purpose of the funeral is to let those who wish to express their respects and regrets and remembrances do so publicly and forthrightly; after the funeral, the grief, once, briefly, collectively owned reverts entirely to the bereaved, it is theirs and theirs alone, obviously.

And they should be in black, widows, if they do go out among the unbereaved; widows in black, with veils, know where you are, then; can avoid them.Mourning is something they can only do on their own, that's the point of it, you can't share it out, among others, on the other side of the screen, so why do they keep trying to?

I forget this one's name, early forties, hubby was a captain, killed in the Stan and he was just the best this that and the other and I dunno what I'm gonna do when this happens and that happens and he's not there. No? Well what'll probably happen is that you'll be doing it with a new husband, innit? C'mon, stop messing about.

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Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - anthologies of the work of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish plumber - can be purchased from Amazon or from Lulu.

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Sunday 13 March 2022

The Sunday Ishmael 13/03/2022

Well, fancy that - John Bercow a bully - who'da thought it?

Strange place, China. Artificially created popular digital celebrities which originated in Japan but are now generating huge commercial value in China are the Chinese version of the West's influencers. They don't seem to mind that Mr Tiny Speaker is now disgraced as a renowned serial bully and destroyer of mobile phones. Well, I suppose it fits right into the culture. Anyway, Bercow has made a bob or two by his birthday message for Chinese virtual idol Jiaran - and it is an online sensation. The 92-second video clip, in which Bercow sang 'happy birthday' to the, er, fictitious creature, has been watched nearly 3.9 million times on Bilibili, Jiaran’s main platform. I always thought he had a sense of fun. Rod Liddle, though, never liked him. Writing in the Sunday Times today, he described the former Mr Tiny Speaker as: "thin-skinned, smug, pompous, arrogant, dissembling, nowhere near as clever as he thought and puffed up with a grandeur his abilities did not merit." Don't hold back, Rod. He makes the interesting point, though - that bullying is the go-to charge these days to disgrace and negate the outsiders that the establishment wants rid. Bercow was the son of a taxi driver, and attended a state comprehensive school in Essex. He pushed his weight about as Speaker in the House of Commons for 10 years - 2009 to 2019, creating many hilarious moments. As Liddle said; "The establishment hates being told what to do by its inferiors, and it especially hates people who rock the boat a little."

Here's a good dwarfist anecdote. Health Minister Simon Burns backed his ministerial car into the Speaker’s limo. An angry Bercow shouted ‘I’m not Happy!’, To which Burns replied: “Well, which one are you?”

War News

Putin still wants his country back.
NATO wants it too.
Zelenskyy prepared for all the males in Ukraine to be killed: a sacrifice he is willing to make in pursuance of the United States' global economic strategy
Michael Gove launches "Adopt a Ukrainian" scheme. Pop one into your spare room and he will pay you £350 per month for 6 months - well, that's the staffing crisis in care sorted, and the fruit picking, the minimum-pay bar and waitressing work, and the live-in nannie jobs. Give me your poor, your huddled masses, your tempest-tossed homeless -- and we'll find a way to exploit them.

TALKING WORLD WAR THREE BLUES.

25th April 2014 ishmael smith

The Filth-o-Graph is predicting apocalypse over this Back In The USSR stuff, down there in whatever shithole it is, some horse-drawn economy, some invented five minutes ago nation-state or other, as if Barry* and Vlad* are going to run to the bunkers over it all. Dave Wisteria*, mind you, the lardy, slab-faced moron, is prob'ly going in, boldly, to chair a meeting of COBRA, y'know, chumps and nincompoops, like BillyBum Hague and Phil Clausewitz Hammond, closeted with dozens of Field Marshals Rupert Golightly-Jockstrap, all wondering where to send H.M.'s one working tank or H.M.'s one working helicopter, wondering how quickly they can mobilise a platoon of untrained, overweight, part-time Territorial cowboys. Fuck me, be a laugh a minute in there, doubt that Vlad'll be shitting his Cossack pantaloons.

It may be that their - Barry and Vlad's - respective financial masters can wring a few dollar-roubles out of a bit of cross-border shooting but World War Three? Not a chance. Or is there?

The odd thing about this latest Obama misadventure is that Telegraph readers, who you would reasonably expect to be pro-Uncle Sam and anti-Russian are overwhelmingly cynical about the role of the Leader of the Free World, as some still call him, comments run at about ten to one in favour of Putin over GlobaDeath. The MediaMinster arm of GlobaCorp will be rattled that it can no longer so easily brainwash its own, native constituency. Maybe its due to the graffiti in the streets of cyberspace, maybe to the M.P.'s exes scandal, maybe part of it is due to UKIP, maybe it is the exposure of the PBC as a hotbed of beasting and corruption, maybe it is the hatred now widely felt for whoever is Nonce Protector General in the Vatican but there has certainly been a change in the weather. Seems that many now think it is we who populate the Evil Empire, we who, in the form of Blair and Co are the Great Satan.

For me, the best, if the hollowest laugh of the month was prompted by the Veep, Joe Bum*,

Vice President Joe Bum, lecturing Foreigners

insisting that you just can't roll into countries and take them over. Joe, if he can read, and there's no reason to suspect he can, obviously hasn't read the ten-volume Smithsonian History of the US, the study of which currently occupies a lot of my time.
'In 1825 the federal government prohibited pioneers from settling in Oklahoma and reserved the land as Indian Territory, a place to relocate Indians who blocked the march of American civilisation (sic) east of the Mississippi. Cherokee, Creek, Chocktaw, Chickasaw and some of the Florida Seminole - known as the five Civilised Tribes - owned fertile lands for growing cotton and crops, lands which the white settlers coveted. So they were the first to be removed to Oklahoma, forcibly escorted by troops. Government forces burned houses and farms, shot resisters, drove away livestock and even opened Cherokee graves to loot silver jewellery. "I fought in the Civil War," a militiaman recounted much later "and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by the thousands but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew." Faced with hunger, insanitary conditions, extreme weather, disease and heartbreak, about 4,000 of the 16,000 who started the journey perished and were buried along the way. The Indians called the route to Oklahoma the Trail of Tears. Cholera ravaged the Choctaw and some Creek walked to Oklahoma in chains.' pp 339-340, The Smithsonian Guide to Historic America - Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, 1990.
This collection contains hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of such pages as those above; at every turn, in every century, in every state, at every opportunity, white America has been monstrously criminal, the vicious gutter dregs of Europe murdering, raping, robbing, enslaving and torturing in ways they could only dream of in the back streets of Glasgow and the bogs of Killarney and the tenement swamps of Antwerp and Munich and Paris and Madrid. In a million years you would never wash the blood from the StarSpangled Banner.
Home of the Brave, land of the Free, eh, Mr Vice President Bum?
These people, the injuns, had occupied these lands for twenty-thousand years, through an ice age, originally surviving by killing mammoth with flint-tipped spears until, in an act of - for then - unprecedented Earthcrime, Uncle Sam* turned his Gatling guns on their buffalo, with whom they had lived in harmless symbiosis since God was a boy, and wiped them out. People like Vice President Bum's monstrous, bastard, fuckpig ancestors pioneered torture, slavery and ethnic cleansing in a land which their descendants still pollute, ravage and destroy - as they would the world. Someone, some stone-mad Apache or Sioux should kick Joe Biden hard in the face; it is the only language the sonofafuckingbitch will understand. Leaders of the free world? Do fuck off.

A Glorious Seventh U.S. Cavalry Victory: Going into other countries and massacring the natives.

And Another One

If Mr Bum knew anything, which he doesn't, the dumbfuck, he would know that just rolling into countries and just taking them over is just the founding philosophy, the practice, the custom, the habit and the default setting of Uncle Sam; unless you just don't count America as a country, that is, and just don't count its native people as native people, which, of course, Mr Bum just doesn't.

And Another One, in Vietnam, where the massacre's C.0., Lt. William Calley, was all but given a medal for this party.

A demonstration of Uncle Sam fearlessly putting Women and Children First.

I suppose it might just be that now, more than ever widely despised and ridiculed, even amongst his former satraps, Uncle Sam may kick-off; such an economy as he has is, after all, a war economy; without more wars the rich won't continue getting richer. And the rich stealing from the poor - their land, their labour, their resources - is what Uncle Sam does.

Dramatis Personnae

* Barry - Barak Obama, President of the United States 2009/17

*Dave Wisteria - David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 2010/ 2016, so called because in 2006 he claimed £650 in expenses for the removal of wisteria from his home.

*Vlad the Invader - Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, 2000/2008, 2012 and forever more, amen. And Prime Minister of Russia, 1999/2000 and 2008/2012

* Joe Bum - Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, born November 1942, Vice President of the United States 2009/17 and President 2022 to present.

* Uncle Sam - a national personification of the federal government of the United States of America. A sort of death cult.

Exegesis: by ishmael smith

The context of my rage against Biden, in this instance, is that his words are fatuous, hypocritical, darkly farcical; that some useless piece of shit like he can talk about territorial violations is frankly ludicrous. Whatever U.S. achievements there are, they do not, good as they are, remove the stain of genocide, slavery and the rest. And the Abos, on all continents, lived on the planet for tens of thousands of years without, well, what shall we call it, I call it Earthcrime, pollution, weapons of mass destruction, junk-food cancers, poisoned oceans, the natural balance in retreat on all fronts; eco-vandalism, call it what you want, the so-called savage has little part in it. So much of what I recently termed improvement was the result of organised poor people struggling in the face of the sort of vested interests so close to Uncle Sam's black heart. Despite all his techno and pharma accomplishments he still cannot organise a national health service; how clever is that? I see no conflict in applauding Apollo 11 whilst damning Shock and Awe. Like everyone, I contain multitudes.

So much is simply a matter of accident, accident of birth. Europe produced the technology which produced the Gutenberg printing press which led us here; those things didn't happen in Australia or Africa. Different things happened in India and China, whilst we were living in mud huts or sheltering in trees. Different things happened in the Caliphate whilst we were still savage. There is no racial superiority. The Abo can survive and navigate and value a wilderness which would kill us in hours; it is contact with the whites which has demeaned him.

I dunno about the Khmer Rouge, I gather they killed a lot of each other, so what, so have we, but the main reason that I don't get vexed about him is that he is not my cousin; Uncle Sam, by definition, is. And he should know better.

Man appearing at two seconds to midnight, that sort of thing, History's clock. Surely we can do better than Dreams of Empire. Is that all there is, my dad's bigger than your dad?

I am a Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist. I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men: that's what these commentaries are about, chiding and reproving those who believe only in the brotherhood of greed.

All I know about Vietnam is the war and even that is limited and biased. Despatches, Apocalypse Now, various war photographers - glamour stuff. I don't, didn't care for Maoist imperialism any more than I cared for Uncle Sam's but I do think it is telling of our own institutionalised racism that we hosanna, sing an endless requiem blues to sixty thousand grunts and ignore what was it, three million slopes?

I don't know how much of Indo China is given over to child prostitution and ladymen, probably as much as in London or New York. But I would guess from family photos I have seen of trips there that it is an extraordinarily different, more connected and grounded a culture than is our current Facebooking Narcissism.

Once they said that Slavery was the only possible system which would enable human progress. Then it was Feudalism, ordained by God, it was, nobleman and churl. The Enclosures, the theft of common land and the Highland clearances, they, too, were the only way that we might all prosper. Choking to death in mines and factories was the next great leap forward. Now, such few improvements as were brought to our lot by the post war social compact are being hewn down and ploughed under by a govament of noblemen spivs, brutes and thieves, ably assisted by a purblind, Mail-reading class of ragged trousered philanthropists, dividing even its own wretched lickspittle squadrons over whether or not the crook, Farage, is better than all the other crooks for no other reason than that he is even more backward than they are.

But fear not, Money's number is up. Bright young people all over the world are positing a world beyond money. We may not see it but we can say for absolute certain that if we do not arrive swiftly and collectively at a resources management system not based upon a tiny few having far more than they could ever need - which is the basis of the Money economy - nothing will matter, all - food, water, land, - will be desolation.

Anyone with a hint of farsightedness who was also interested in planetary/species survival would have taken any and all measures to curb the massive populations of those countries whose consumerisme et totalitarianisme nouvelle we are now supposed to applaud for the CrimeBusiness opportunities they offer our elites. Any and all measures, any and all.

I have a domestic dwelling here which, in my lifetime, was heated by cows brought indoors for winter; what an extra three billion bodies, with their pensions, their cars and dishwashers and barbecues and frantic telecommunications devices will do to the temperature of things, environmentally, politically and militarily, is unimaginable. White supremacy is all very well but I don' t think it will butter too many lychees. I'm convinced. And I can't understand why everyone else isn't convinced, too. Too many people, not enough food, not enough land, not enough water, too much poison, too much heat; simply cannot have infinite growth and infinite consumption in a finite eco-system. 'sobvious, innit? It was the only sensible thing I ever heard Phil the Greek say. Didn't, of course, make him any less of a parasite; still, he does a great job, what with the tourists and everything.

There was a woman here a while back, quite a senior HR person, in charge of the welfare, personal development and sustainable exploitation of lots of employees. Her kid was looking at the flames in my Rayburn. It's stored-up sunshine, I offered. What Do you mean? enquired Mum. I explained that long ago the Sun had made trees grow and when they had died, over a very long time the dead trees became compressed so hard that they turned into coal and so what we were watching in the fire was stored-up sunshine being released. Is that really where coal comes from, said the Director of Human Resources. I thought it came in bags to Tesco. Where from? Oh, I dunno. Somewhere. You know. Wherever.

Never mind imaginary money, we are beset by imaginary intelligence.

SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford has denied rumours that he is considering quitting the post.

Mr Blackford told BBC Scotland there was "nothing in it".

Shame, that.

There's been quite the stramash about the SNP position on the payment of pensions in an independent Scotland (The Sunday Ishmael 6/2/22, passim). Basically, the SNP won't pay the State Pension to their pensioners because they would prefer that a foreign country pays it. This is just one of the issues that the SNP will have to fudge in its referendum campaign. Other, not-insignificant matters are the border with England,

"R.T. Keedwell has been delighting customers with excellence of service in transport, general haulage and distribution since 1969" website.

which, should an independent Scotland succeed in joining the E.U. will require to be established, and a new currency policy after the UK government rejected its proposal to share the pound in a currency union in 2014. The SNP now proposes to continue using the pound, without consent if necessary, and to switch to a new Scottish currency as soon as practicable. Could take a while, that one.

Madam Sturgeon has set out her extensive and ambitious legislative programme, which includes a Gender Recognition Reform Bill (I had to state how I identified my gender in the Scottish on-line Census. Another organisation asked me for my preferred pronouns); establishing a National Care Service; changes to the Scottish Judicial System (and not before time, too) and, of course, working on the independence referendum.

Guy Opperman, the current UK pensions minister, quoted in the Mail on Sunday, said that "working English, Welsh and Northern Irish taxpayers should not pay for a foreign country's pension liabilities" and accused the SNP of "misleading" the public. But that's the SNP's stock in trade. If they actually told the truth, they'd be out on their ear.

Winner of the Caption Contest:

Not many entries to our competition - but they were strong ones. I liked mr verge's comment, which was clean for once, mr sam cooke's fisting contribution and mr mike captured the dynamism thrilling through the bodies of Trudeau and Rutte as they prepare to swing at Boris. mr ultrapox captured lots of lovely little thoughts and mr tennessee bud laid bare the latent homoeroticism captured in the moment. However, for sheer pithiness, the contest winner is mr mongoose, and here it is:

"Idiot! We're only supposed to wear our gimp masks in private!"

Especial thanks go to our new contributors - unless they're the usual suspects, all dressed up in new names. In which case, thank you for your ongoing support to the Commentariat. Cheers. Za nashu druzjbu!

Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - anthologies of the work of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish plumber - can be purchased from Amazon or from Lulu.