Martin McGuinness, Provisional IRA leader & Deputy First Minister, | died 21/3/2017 |
|
The
deputy first minister of Northern Ireland is handsomely paid,
resourced, pensioned and protected by the British taxpayer. As is the
case with Tony'n'Imelda Blair, the security costs in relation to
McGuinness will be unlimited and will be paid until his death. Millions
and millions of pounds, to protect an acknowledged mass murderer, the
most successful criminal of our time.
Serial
killer, Marty Kneecaps, has never worked, is a career revolutionary
sadist and, at my expense, leads a life of luxury, fawned upon, even
though his psychopathy is ill-disguised and although cruelty, menace and
viciousness crackle around him, like electricity. McGuinness is a
freak. Although, by any evaluation, he should be held in a secure
institution for the criminally insane, this psychokiller is welcomed
and entertained by the British monarch
and by our motley crew of first and prime ministers.
First ministers 4 Justice.
Och,
aye, intimidate our electorate and tell them lies, well, that's just
what you have to do for their own good and anybody says otherwise is
scaremongering; Project Fear.
Aye, yer no' wrong there, so yer not, Alec.
Marty
is also feted abroad, by a community of fellow monsters, anxious to
acquire from him what he impudently describes as his conflict resolution
skills, his knack for peace-processing, by intimidation, by torture
and by murder.
During
the Ulster war, largely instigated and waged by the now deputy first
minister, then commander of the Provisional IRA, nearly fifty thousand
civilians were injured and of the three and a half thousand killed,
eleven hundred were members of the official security forces,
approximately three hundred police officers and eight hundred members of HM armed forces.
Challenged
about his astonishing criminal record, Marty, the repulsive shit,
counters that he deplores the killings on all sides, so he does; many
bad things happened on both sides, so they did, as he bombed and shot
his way to power, but since he wasn't responsible for all of them, he's
not responsible for any of them, sure, how could he be? British
Govament, it was all their fault. When it comes to effrontery, even
Gerry'n'Cilla could take lessons from this monstrous piece of filth.
Nearly fifty thousand civilians were injured during
what is euphemistically termed The Troubles. Many of those responsible
for this orgy of largely nationalist slaughter were either not
prosecuted or were released early from prison sentences, prime minister
Blair's and president Spunky Bill Clinton's view being that the only
way to burnish their piss-thin, tinny legacy was to stop the IRA
killing, torturing and maiming people. And the only way to accomplish
this rudimentary compliance with Decency's rules was to pardon their
previous crimes in the hope that they wouldn't commit any more; it is a
stratagem unique in British jurisprudence, the pardoning of mass
murderers, torturers, arsonists, bombers and vigilante kneecappers in
order to ensure their future good behaviour. Oh, yes, and then
permitting them to frighten and persecute their way into elected office. Bit of a mixed message, that, to put it mildly, from an establishment which never does deals with terrorists.
Harry
Roberts, on the other hand, a London criminal, during the commission
of a 1966 armed robbery, participated in the murders of three police
officers, sounds a lot but it wouldn't even be a practice run for
Ulster's deputy first minister; he'd manage three before breakfast.
Since his conviction, Mr Roberts has been in prison for forty-eight
years, and at the age of seventy-eight has been granted conditional
release on parole. One would think that the Devil, himself, after an
Eternity of murder, mayhem and noncing, was being granted a Royal
pardon, a seat among the beasts in the House of Lords and a country
estate.
Marty
Kneecaps is immune from prosecution for hundreds of times as many
police murders as Harry Roberts committed. He enjoys similar immunity
in the matter of tens of thousands of people maimed, burned, blinded and
seriously injured, as well as in the matter of billions of pounds worth
of security costs, of damage and compensation claims - more than
enough to fund a five-star health service - being borne by we, the
taxpayers. This startling state of affairs is hailed as a triumph of
statespersonship. And while it is second-nature-easy for Spermface
Osborne to blame poorly-paid dinner ladies and cleaners for their greed,
blame the weakest for NHS decline, you'll never hear the pasty little
crook say, Actually, D'YouKnowWhat, it's partly Martin McGuinness's
fault that we are short of money, even though, obviously, it is.
It
is hard to find official figures on the costs of the Troubles, troubles
which, incidentally, could and should have been avoided, could easily
have been short-circuited in 1969 by the arseholes then in
MediaMinster, had they simply extended universal franchise to Ulster -
one man, one vote - none of this McGuinness shit would have happened. I
was there, in Belfast, when it started, a perfectly legitimate civil
rights protest by nice, mainly young, non-sectarian people; met by
government intransigence, it was allowed to be escalated and hijacked
by the then marginal Provos. Maybe it is government's collusion in
stupidity which makes it reluctant to provide proper accounts. But fuck
them, the bent politicians and crooked mandarins, we can make a guess.
Academics'
estimates of the military bill range between half a billion and a
billion pounds but, as we know, courtesy of prime minister Snot, War
Money is Magic Money, comes from contingency funds, doesn't therefore,
really exist, doesn't actually cost anything; half a million pounds
missiles, they are not paid for with real, schools'n'ospitals money, but
with contingency funds which never run-out, never need replacing,
don't actually exist; but, look, lessbeclear, you can't expect
ordinary stupid people to understand that, they must just be told. And
on top of that, Brigadier General Rupert Golightly-Jockstrap often says
that wars like this provide valuable training for his chaps, or is it his people, these days, - in passing, I think the Army was fucked from the moment its members started talking of one another as colleagues not comrades, but
that's another story - one linked to the army widows' TeeVee careers, the
exhibitionist Amputees 4 Harry and the Royal Cheshire Torturers
Regiment, aka The Queen's Own Beasters - giving them an opportunity to
get in there and do a real, magnificent, professional job of work and
anyway, we already pay for the forces, may as well get some service
out of the bounders; doesn't really cost anything, y'see, because we
have the soldiers anyway, so what's the point of a standing army if it's
sitting down on its arse, may as well get their balls blown off in
Ulster as anywhere else. Actually, therefore, according to Whitehall,
the thirty-year war in Ulster and on the Mainland didn't cost a penny in
military terms; we could just as easily have sent eight hundred Tommies
off to their deaths practically anywhere and as for all the guns,
armoured vehicles, helicopters, body armour, we would have needed all
that anyway; Golightly-Jockstrap, in fact, was actually, at the end of
the day, when all's said and done, the bottom line is, that he was only
sort-of spending his own pocket money; the Devil, as we MenOfTheWorld
say, is in the detail, detail which, on the grounds of national
security, we never release. But take our word for it, we wouldn't lie to
you. And as for looking after the hitherto healthy but now limbless,
eyeless and bowel-less squaddie, well, that's what the Poppies are all
about, isn't it? Ulster, then, probably a net profit, miltarily
speaking, we should, as a matter of fact, shake McGuiness's gravedigger
hand, old man; wossat, we often do? Yes, yes, I suppose we do. Yes,
even her Majesty.
But what about the decades-long blitzes,
on Belfast, Enniskillen, Lisburn,
Omagh, Warrington, Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry, Guildford,
Now youse had better just pay attention.
Them two wee lads in Warringtom, they just had to be blown to fuckin' bits, so they did.
For Ireland's Freedom.
And let me tell youse, there's nobody in Sinn Fein regrets them deaths less than me.
Mr Gerry Adams, responsible for thousands of murders.
Years spent in custody for same - none.
Commander of the IRA, Martin McGuinness.
Fought
a war of terror against the British state, its security forces and
civilians, men, women and children, their lives, limbs and properties.
Fifty thousand assaulted and wounded, four thousand murdered.
Years spent in custody - none.
One
of the McGuinness expenses is the still-ongoing search for Ulster's
Disappeared, IRA victims snatched, tortured and buried in the bogs, on
his orders.
And what about Canary Wharf,
Hyde Park?
We
have already established that murdered troops and civilians don't
matter but lots of these locations have been completely rebuilt, must've
cost billions. Billions of pounds of schools'n'ospitals money. No? Oh,
right, city centres need rebuilding anyway, so Marty and the Monsters
did us all a favour, hurrying us along, towards a shiny, glass-fronted
Cathedral of Consumption in every town. The construction industry and
the citizens of these places, they should shake Marty's widowmaker
hand? Yes, of course they should. And it is of course tragic that
children were blown to smithereens, of course it is, but we mustn't get
involved in the blame game, must we, gets us nowhere, quite frankly.
Mr Tony Blair.
Instrumental in the deaths of tens of thousands,
instrumental in creating millions of refugees and in inflaming,
prolonging and spreading multiple conflicts in, so far, the Middle East
and Southern Asia.
Years spent in custody in respect of same - none.
But
back to the question of what it all cost us and we are making progress,
now, on the matter - the military costs were non-existent, soldiers'
resettlement costs are a matter for charity and the reconstruction costs
are, in fact, a blessing; Angels in disguise, actually, saved us some
of the demolition costs, Marty Kneecaps and his Torture Brigade, the
HardMen of West Bulfaaaast. Well, nancy boys, really, if you ask me,
cruel, cruel arse bandits,
taking BDSM to stunning, exotic new heights;
burying
people alive, what a rush that is, slapping women around in front of
their children, and there's just nothing, nu-thing com-pares2 drilling
though a young man's knees with a Black and Decker. But no, it was a
dirty job, murdering and torturing and somebody had to do it, even
though they didn't, not really, not in the sense of being held
responsible, and that's the thing that counts, no, if they haven't been
charged and convicted and done time they're not criminals, and in fact
they did us all a great favour, actually. And we should be proud to
shake their hand, yes, that's good, that is, proud to shake the hand
that held the drill. Pure poetry, so it is.
And
all the health and social security costs attendant on fifty-thousand
casualties and four thousand deaths? Yes, but they woulda had to be paid
sooner or later, everybody gets sick, everybody dies, right? So no
cost there, to the taxpayer, either. And actually, members of this
house should know that, challenged by the results of the unimaginable
cruelties perpetrated by the deputy first minister and his bumchums,
surgeons in Northern Ireland were able to develop a whole raft of
treatments for extracting bags of broken nails from the bodies of
teenagers and children and old people, for repairing and rebuilding
joints and tendons patriotically ruined by a power tool's intrusion and
expert twisting about. Aye, conflict resolution, 'swhat we call it.
President Hillary Trousers courts the American-Irish vote.
I am sure she's kissed worse things.
But probably not for a long time.
And
surgeons, surgeons es-pecially, them's the ones, so th'are, as should
be proud to shake the mutilator's hand, for if it wasn't fer us, me an'
yon brave boys, there, sure they'da had hardly any work to do. Patron
Saint of Surgery? Saint Marty? Aye, well I wooden mind, so I wooodent.
Only be the right thing, after all, so it wood. Fair's fair.
Our
national debt of honour, therefore, is owed not just to Tony'n'Imelda
but also to the saintly Marty McKneecaps, a man who has demonstrated,
time and again, that Yes, you can torture and kill hundreds of police
officers and hundreds of soldiers, year after year after year; yes,
you can kill thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children,
injure tens of thousands, year after year after year; yes, you can
destroy city centres like you were Hermann fucking Goering; there need
be no limit to your own personal and political depravity, clad in
Nobility's balaclava, you can bomb the nursery's comfort and the
sickbed's sanctuary; young, old or ill, combatant and civilian alike,
shoot them in the back, bomb them in the dark, bury them alive. And not
only will it not cost anything but you will never, ever, ever go to
jail, so you won't.
Mr Harry Roberts, however,
Harry Roberts.
Committed two murders, convicted of three.
Time spent in custody - forty eight years.
and
his partial release at the end of his life and for a year or two at
best, is damned as an outrage to Decency and has led some lardy,
embarrassingly ignorant and fearfully stupid Poundland bint
to
call for the reintroduction of the death penalty, although if it wasn't
this that prompted her immoral indignation it'd be something else; for
Sergeant Filth and his union to insist, again, that his life and his
members' are more valuable than that of any other murder victim's; best
of all, this tiny act of tiny mercy has chorussed together all the
rotten, wormy, inebriate, poxed-up, crooked and rotten tub-thumping,
rabble rousing voices of skymadeupnewsandfilth - what ToryTurd Ian
Hislop describes as the free and independent press - as they scream
and howl for the devising of Infinite Punishment.
Briefly,
on the box, I saw some silly old cunt, a child in the vicinity at the
time of Mr Roberts's offences, still, fifty years on, engaging in
recreational mourning for the cameras, I never got over it, he wailed,
why should he be allowed out? I don't know what that fucking numbskull
would do if he'd lived through the Blitz or been born in Belfast at
the time I was.
I
knew a young social worker in Selly Oak, in the mid-'eighties, she and
all of her young, female - and male - colleagues would, almost daily, in
the line of duty as officers of the court, go to places to visit or
supervise those whom Old Bill would only visit tooled-up and
mob-handed; Francis and the perpetrator's wife were
murdered, by a man who had been in my office a week previously, I did
tell his caseworker that I thought him highly dangerous but she and the
victim had many such on their swollen case-loads, many such but
potentially worse; the Police Federation, never too keen on equal
opportunities, had nothing to say about the murders but then even the
trauma of having his helmet knocked-off generally leads constable Filth
to six months' sick leave, his being caught in criminality to early
retirement on health grounds. I don't deplore and regret the killing of
a police officer any less than I do that of any other victim but I
certainly don't deplore it any more and there is, indeed, a perfectly
reasonable argument which says Better Him Than Me - he voluntarily
joined-up to protect me, he is trained, equipped, he is paid and
pensioned to protect me, he retires early as a result of having
protected me, his wife or partner and his dependents will be well
provided-for should he die in the line of duty; nurses die in the line
of duty, are killed by their patients, social workers, teachers, too,
risks of the job to which, clearly, there is no absolute deterrent; if
you don't want to be killed as a police officer then simply don't be a
police officer, job done, evenin' all.
The
random apportioning and non-apportioning of guilt has become a
commonplace of Ruin, successive home seckatries hating the petty
benefits cheat, pursuing the impoverished non-BBC-taxpayer to the ends
of the Earth, whilst endlessly and guilefully deflecting any scrutiny of
My Noble and Learned Friend, the Lord KiddyFucker, QC, PC and so on;
the disabled are paraded naked across the pages of the Daily Filth,
nonces and war criminals spirited away to Brussels or the Middle East,
their dodgy personal relationships, like their expenses, accidentally -
Oh, Whoops! - shredded. Or closed to public scrutiny until after all
concerned are dead.
McGuinness,
though and Adams and all their ghastly fraternity, their pardoning is
the most cynical reversal of Decency and Common Sense that I have ever
witnessed - torturers, proud of their scourges, cigarette ends and
power tools, waltzing and fucking each other around the legislative
palaces, rebuking us for even knowing of their Devilment, threatening
us, should we complain, with more of the same. Yet a one-time
conventional criminal with but three deaths to his account - nothing,
compared with McGuinness's rapsheet - has leapt over Mayhem's Premier
League to colonise our attention, our outrage.
For
the Parole Board to have reached this decision about Mr Roberts' final
years - that he must be deemed as not presenting a risk, that he understands
the seriousness of his offences and is remorseful. One would imagine
that Mr Roberts' forty-eight years in jail would satisfy even the most
vengeful among our punishment-fixated society, that in a country which,
though largely faithless, now, more than ever, boasts implicitly of
its white Christianity, a simple, end-of-life mercy such as this would
not be controversial; shame on Poundland, shame on the coppers, shame
on skymadeupnewsandfilth, shame on Joe fucking Bloggs, drunk,
wife-beater, bigot and ignoramus, shame on them that they would piss on
even a moment's Mercy.
What
they want, these insatiable punishment arseholes, what they really,
really want is Sharia, dressed in a Union Jack; as mr tdg said, were
they not too stupid to recognise it, what they will see is the face of
their own slavery, leering back at them from Poundland's dark mirror.
They
are not all Poundlanders, of course; Colonel von Fawkes, this year's
model Kelvin Mckenzie, for all his Newsman of the People schtick, is
Bigotry's Fool, the Brute in Liberty's stolen clothes; vast swathes of
the Redneck Forest on the Tory benches would wet themselves at the
thought of a good hanging, a flogging or a thousand -year jail
sentence, the Daily Mail panders to I'd Pull The Lever Myselfers, Life
Should Mean Lifers, Spare The Rod And Spoil The Child-ers, people who
daily, credulously fork-up and swallow-down the Peace Process Can of
Worms whilst working themselves into apoplectic stupor at the thought of
one old man enjoying a few months of tightly-regulated freedom outside
Custody's walls.
Fuck
UKIP, fuck the gutter press. When they pursue well-connected criminals I
will join their hue and cry. In the meantime, I hope Harry Roberts
scents a Spring or two's blossoms, knows, once more, the feel of the
wind on his face and sniffs a fragrance more wholesome than those of
other men's piss and sperm. Forty eight years of that is enough.
15 comments:
thank you mrs ishmael for your, and your late husband's, excoriating exposition of ira-ideology and its inherent subtleties.
with the help of their ira-informers - one of whom was probably a member of the birmingham active service unit itself - british and american intelligence-services insidiously ensured that the 1974 birmingham pub-bombs exploded without the bomb-planters being able to issue their conventional coded warning - and of course the resultant nationwide outrage at the birmingham-bomb-carnage not only scuppered prime minister harold wilson's plan for peace in a united ireland, but also ultimately undermined britain's, then socialist, government.
in hindsight, it is now apparent that ultra-right-wing factions of the british and american intelligence-services actually colluded with key-members of the provisional ira in order to derail prime minister harold wilson's programme for the unification of ireland - and thereby fatally undermine his left-wing labour administration.
meanwhile, back in the present troubled times, uk premier boris jiffsnort, predictably, wants all of us to pay for his war...
however, despite his cheery-chappy exhortations for us to go over-the-top of our fragile financial fence, opinion-polls suggest that folks aren't too chuffed about shelling out for the big fat nazi-bastard's nasty neo-imperialist war, and so in order to reverse the self-inflicted death-spiral into which britain's economy now finds itself inexorably being drawn, the new prime minister will have either to end support for nato's futile war-of-convenience in ukraine, or else - along with the rest of her nasty nazi-arming neo-imperialist government - get the sack.
to be quite honest, i'm becoming rather sick-and-tired of boris junksperm 'saving' me: he commands all the grace and charm of randy rooting pig
Thank you, mr ultrapox - it wasn't an easy piece to write, as my mind prefers to celebrate the creative and artistic achievements of the human race, and squirms protestingly away from the reality that we are a rather unpleasant species. I hadn't connected the dots re the IRA, the right-wing intelligence services of the UK/US and the plot to undermine Wilson's government - but, of course, it makes perfect sense. The working class are entirely expendable to the ruling establishment - they just do enough to ensure that folk keep on voting rather than rioting.
I also hope that you are right that Truss will back away from support for Ukraine and encourage Zelensky to sue for peace:it is the pragmatic thing to do, but all her war-posturing will make it a tricky U-turn to accomplish.
Not long now, and we will see what sort of a Cabinet and policy direction she will form.
“Not long now, and we will see what sort of a Cabinet and policy direction she will form.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And we won’t get fooled again. Oh how we laughed.
All murderers are equally evil, however, some are elected and become more equal and more evil.
Thank you for this mrs I and thank you mr ultrapox, this I was unaware of.
It is all bollocks, I am afraid. The notion that the intelligence services - including their propagaanda arm, the media - are either for or against governments depending on the colour of their rosettes is childlike in its innocence. The spooks are on the side of spookiness. They have their own agenda, their own interests. Where these agencies intersect you will find an endless, swirling, maelstrom of deceit and cant.
If you doubt me, look across the Pond to the USA. The current incumbent President is a doddery old man who cannot read a sentence, let alone frame one. David Aaronovitch - winner of the Orwell Prize for journalism ("How we laughed, Poppy and I, over the canapes, darling! How we laughed!") will tell you without even a hint of a smile that it is completely clear that the old boy was properly elected, that he won a record vote although he hardly campaigned at all. The CIA, the FBI, the DOJ - all of thwm will line and lie to your face, demand of you that you buckle under to the lie. Brexit and Donald and similar are what they are aginst because they threaten control. Wokery - trannies madness, pronouns, carbon, shopping bags, lower speed limits at the dead of night are all just extra demomstrtions that they can do what they like. Most of public discourse is a huge exercise in Room 101 compliance to all of this.
Mongosling3 - a reader of Law at one of the finest universities in the land, had never heard of the Guildford 4 or the Birmingham 6, God help us. All 10, of course, were one veneer deep credible fall guys. Oops, I mean suspects. The 4, innocent had relatives and connections. Fuck I've got those! The 6 were hoisted off a train on their way to an IRA funeral. (Footnote1: The chap blew himself up bombing a telephone exchange in Coventry. As the decades pass, the number of us who profess that we heard the blast increases so tht it now outnumbers the then population of the city.) So they were all connectable as long as you didn't ask too many questions. Sensible candidates for a fit-up, I guess. And the 6 were up against the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad which was probably the most corrupt police force to ever stalk the land. (Don't ask me how I know.) And so we have educated Number 3, and added the necessary subclauses: One, all coppers are bastards, and two, never speak to a policeman!
The Ukrainian unpleasantness is maintained to provide a credible villain who can be blamed for the coming energy disaster across Europe. It is a lie as thin as the lies that doomed the 4 or the 6 but the media will parrot it, that Dogshooter lad will parrot it, and poor people will die in their thousands this winter while Naga Manchetty and David Aaronovitch whisper their lies into unsuspecting ears before splitting another case. "The good stuff, please. Cheerio!"
i had overlooked the fact that until the early seventies there existed no equitable electoral, housing, or employment rights in northern ireland, and therefore thank you, mrs ishmael, not only for highlighting this once constricting tentacle of systemic uk oppression, but also thereby revealing the labour party for the corrupt bunch of fascist establishment-cunts it has always truly comprised; of course, the labour party has come a long way since its imperialist manifestation in the 1960s - via biafra, afghanistan, and iraq - and in blind pursuit of nato-nurtured neo-imperialist ambitions, is now unashamedly applauding the arming of ukrainian nazis.
was the labour-movement by-any-chance one of adolf's early social projects...?
i apologize, mr mongoose: in order to make clear their significance in a politico-historical context, i should, more correctly, have referred to the 'anti-communist elements' of the british and american intelligence services, rather than to the 'ultra-right-wing factions' of these state-sanctioned facilitators-of-genocide - and in this respect, i should add that, despite harold wilson being an avowed anti-communist, his ideological adherence to socialism somehow always triggered, within britain and america's rabidly communophobic intelligence-services, the enduring suspicion that he was actually a crypto-pinko agent-of-the-kremlin, who seditiously slumbered in bright red pyjamas beneath decent folk's beds.
finally, may i also thank the damsel-in-distress for her most intriguing and insightful 'letter from ukraine'? unfortunately, the 'ukrainian letters' received by our promiscuous prime minister were - like a lot of stuff in present-day ukraine - full-of-holes, and as a conjugal consequence, he has been morally obliged to found a chain of boris-nurseries - which, reports indicate, are subsidized by hundreds-of-millions of uk-tax-payers' dosh, and largely populated by little blond-haired goose-stepping johnsons.
This is very difficult and disturbing reading Mrs I. To paraphrase Herman Goering: "the next time someone talks about their democracy I will reach for my Luger".
I lived in London during the prime time IRA bombing campaign, but I recall most people paid it no attention. The slaughter of the horses at Hyde Park seemed to touch a raw nerve and change that. BTW I was around the corner in Green Park that afternoon.
The role of the US in all this has not yet been fully revealed in my opinion - particularly when Reagan issued a veto to Maggie about a UK military night of the long knives to wipe out the IRA - there were not that many and all were known.
I am sure that you are right, mr ultrapox, about factions. Twas ever thus, I reckon. The Brits have always been masters at factions. The IRA, the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA. Divide and rule. Sinn Fein can be translated as "We ourselves". If only the daft buggers had understood that and been happy.
The Yanks are having a time of it. The Republicans having had a presidential election stolen from them in plain sight had but two options - climb out of the mire or sink deeper into it and be more skullduggerous than the other bloke. Sadly they have chosen the latter. So now we have three Republican parties: Trump's MAGA, the De Santis MAGA-Lite, and the RINOs. They are doomed if they don't work this out in about 6 weeks because the mid-terms are the last chance to save what remains of democracy in that benighted mad land.
I think that there is something about federations. The Federal Government in the US, the EU, maybe even the old USSR. Whatever they have is never enough, the machine grows, the tentacles get longer, and they end up breaking themselves. And then comes despotism. There is that lad in the US - the name will come to me - who openly says that "Yes, we did, we enrolled all of the media and the net and we stole the election but it was necessary to stop Trump". Completely void of self-awareness. Was it for this that the clay grew tall?
OTOH it is almost as if someone somewhere doesn't want democracy to work. These green shoots of it - even if you don't agree with the policies - the green shoots that we get from time to time have to be ground underfoot. Perhaps that is the true role of the Deep State, the moiling sack of puppies that is the Establishment. To stop things until once every three hundred years we have a clear out. We're overdue, aren't we?
A collector's item from the Peeb for you, mr mongoose - having turned over from Radio 5 (happens more & more these days) when Carpet Munchetty was being even more annoying than usual, I heard a World Service interview with a Pakistan govt minister. Not a peep of perplexed dismay, nor a modest request for clarification, when the minister assured the Peeb's listeners that whereas previous floods were caused by overflowing rivers, the present horrorshow is down to excessive rainfall caused by manmade global warming.
We lived about a mile away when the IRA tried to blow up Nigel Havers' dad, who was away on holiday and whose house sustained structural damage but stayed standing - months later there were builders outside on scaffolding when my English teacher, who rented part of the Havers gaff and might have perished if he hadn't been up late marking our essays (so the legend went) was tutoring me. Tutoring is not a squalid euphemism in this instance, before anyone asks. The bombers had strolled across school playing fields to get to the back wall, apparently. Even a mile away, and down a hill, the noise and vibration were alarming.
mr ultrapox reminded me of the murky ambiguity surrounding Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bomb in 1995. There's a good synopsis here, from 2001 :
https://www.salon.com/2001/06/09/john_doe/
Though it doesn't mention McVeigh's own claims (in a letter predating the bombing) to have been recruited for black ops government work. (Then again, would you put something like that in a letter if it were true?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing_conspiracy_theories
Millwall fans used to have a Harry Roberts song - to the tune of London Bridge Is Falling Down - "Harry Roberts is our friend, is our friend, is our friend. Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers. Let him out to kill some more, kill some more" etc. Maybe it's still sung, or maybe it died with Harry the Dog. Tempus fugit.
cheers
v./
NB Harry the Dog was not Harry Roberts.
v./
Having started this thread, I'd like to be able to say something philosophical and profound in response to our regular commentators. Something comforting even. But there is no comfort and the only conclusion to be drawn is that homo sapiens is a shit species; stupid, emotional, violent and indifferent to the suffering and death of others. I am surprised by how quickly we forget the most appalling atrocities - but I suppose it is a manifestation of the brain's ability to ignore the certainty of its own ending - we live our lives as though, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we are going to live forever.
Thank you, mr verge, I hadn't known about the conflicting theories surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing. The speedy execution of Timothy McVeigh reminds me of another of Lord Denning's obiter dicta in respect of the Birmingham Six: “We shouldn’t have all these campaigns to get them released if they’d been hanged. They’d have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied."
I don't think that that is true at all, mrs i. The human species is the only species that we know of in the whole universe that strives to regulate the conduct of its members against their selfish instincts - however imperfectly - by a framework of shared rules and values. We alone have the written word, the musical notation to record our achievements and to pass them on. We alone have the wheel, the right angle, the pencil. We alone put a vase of flowers on the table because it's beautiful.
Life expectancy today is twice what it was a hundred years ago. Go to gapminder and click the link to update your view of this world. We are magnificent.
Alas, one of us is Gerry Adams. One of us was Black'n'Decker McGuinness. But one of us was Isaac Newton. One of us was Nina Simone. One of us was Marie Curie. One of us was John Clare. One of us might be something even better tomorrow. Chin up! We'll get there despite the buggers.
Thank you, mr mongoose, encouraging and uplifting words. I think music, literature, medicine, technology, art and architecture should be up there in our appreciation of human abilities.
On the human exceptionalism angle, though, let me remind you that the black seabird, the shag, decorates its nests with flowers and shiny things to make them pretty, crows and rooks live in communities regulated by shared rules and values, and when a member of the community transgresses, its fellow-citizens debate its guilt and then impose justice - which can be exclusion or being pulled apart. Bees communicate by complex dances that describe flight paths, distances and obstacles - I know, not the written word. All the apes are tool-users. Rats are great problem-solvers and heroically self-sacrificing parents.
Après nous les mouches.
Those crow buggers are vigilantes, mrs i. In their way, just as bad as myopic old Tom Denning but I take your point.
Dark, dark days about to happen in the USA.
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