The Sunday Ishmael; 25/09/2022

What fun to be part of an Economics Experiment! Out of the text books and into Life as We Know it.  Unelected Prime Minster Truss and Handsome-but-Dim Kwasi, have decided to gamble the nation's future on a fairly debatable concept - give rich people more money and they will spend it on making us all rich. As if. 

Madam Truss, in her hustings pronouncements, dressed up her nonsense by telling us that letting people keep more of the money they earn would be the best way to lift ordinary Britons out of the fucking mire that Boris inflicted by closing down business, retail, catering  and leisure, destroying jobs, shovelling huge slabs of cash at Covid profiteers, then topping off his success as a Covid leader by taking us into war in support of the Dwarf Zelensky, provoking Russia into fighting back by starving Europe of fuel. (Who'd have thought Russia would do a dastardly thing like that? It's not part of the Rules Of War - which state, as every fule knos, we can do what we want and the enemy must just suck it up and then turn up to the War Crimes Tribunal to take their punishment.)

Trussian Economics, however, seems to have ignored the fact that in order to keep more of the money they earn, Britons need to be earning enough money in the first place to be paying much tax.  Under the measures announced by Pretty-but-Dim Kwasi, to derive any benefit, you'd need to be earning £155,000 per year. I suspect that the game plan is not that which Kwasi stammeringly unfolded under close questioning this morning by Laura the Nose on the Kuenssberg Show. 

She had to shout a bit. 

Nope, what is really going on is that Truss knows they have only two years left in government, so those two years should be employed in stuffing money at those best placed to reward them handsomely during the wilderness years. The economic theory is Self-Interested Short Termism, or doing what Tories do.

Go, Kwasi!

 

Seems that the Russians, or at least those with a bob or two, are fucking off out of it, rather than be called up to fight Mother Russia's war. Miserable lot. Mind, I’d be miserable if I’d been born in Russia. It always was a horrid place. Just nasty. Nastier than Western European countries, which were pretty damn nasty. The western bits of Russia considered themselves genetically and culturally superior to the eastern bits. Until the Russian Revolution, the Tsars fancied themselves to be European, indulged their every lavish and expensive whim, lived in luxury and didn’t even speak Russian. They derived their wealth from draining every rouble from their vast farms in the countryside, so they could live in St Petersburg or Moscow. The people of Russia were serfs. Minimal education, often literally starving, no health care, inadequate clothing and housing. No freedom - couldn't leave the farm, let alone the Cherry Orchard. Just a big mess of a country. The final straw was the requirement to fight the European First World War for their rulers, who were, of course, related to  Queen Victoria the Fertile. Since the Revolution and the execution of their Royal Family, they have been trying to build a country that is a decent place to live, much hampered by the rest of Europe, who didn't think they should be allowed to make a go of it, having offed their God-appointed Tsar and aristocracy. It really is a very new country – only a hundred years old – nothing in the time span of nations. And it is huge, disparate, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-religious, despite the best efforts of the Communist regime to abolish religion, which is, as we know, the opium of the masses, whilst the patriarchal structures of religion are bloated predatory spiders sucking up the energy and spare cash of the people they allegedly serve.

So the westernised intellectual classes are off, rather than stay and build a nation. It’ll be down to the peasant army to unseat the current controlling group in Moscow, just as in the Russian Revolution. And, in the meantime, European countries must host melancholy, dispossessed, self-exiled Russians, just as they hosted the White Russians after the Russian Revolution.

The  First Russian Revolution started on 22nd January 1905, and was a wave of mass political and social unrest throughout vast areas of the Russian Empire, directed against Tsar Nicholas II, the nobility and ruling class, and included worker strikes, peasant unrest and military mutinies. Seven years later, the Russian Revolution completed the work begun in 1905. Over the ensuing bloody six years, Russia abolished its monarchy and adopted a socialist form of government.

Whilst these great events were happening in Russia, over in Britain the King, Edward VII,  was very angry about the loss of his jewelry. He had intended to wear the jewels of the Most Illustrious Order of St. Patrick  to an  event at the 1907 Irish International Exhibition but had to cancel the ceremony when the theft was discovered.  A member of the royal household staff later recalled that he had "never seen King Edward so angry. His rage was something terrible and fearful... I am sure the officials he lectured never forgot his words."

You see where King Charles the Unpleasant gets it from?

Edward VII and Queen Alexandra

The Irish Crown Jewels, originally created from 394 precious stones taken from the English Crown Jewels, and with an estimated modern value of £4.3 million, had been stored in a safe in the library of the Bedford Tower in Dublin Castle, under the custodianship of Sir Arthur Vicars, Ulster King of Arms.

A notorious party animal, Vicars enjoyed showing off the jewels and regularly misplaced the keys to the safe. Once, his chum, Lord Haddo, took the keys from the drunken Vicars, stole the jewels and later returned them by post - as a bit of a jape. On the 6th July 1907, when a repaired gold collar was returned to the safe, officials realised that the jewels were again missing. The thief had used a key to enter the safe.

The subsequent investigation by Scotland Yard sparked theories that the jewels were stolen by political activists who smuggled them to the USA, that Vicars' mistress had stolen them and taken them to Paris, that Unionist criminals had stolen them, or that they had been stolen in a plot to embarrass the Liberal Government and that they were secretly returned to the Royal Family. Whatever, they were never seen again by officialdom and were likely broken up and the jewels sold piecemeal. Maybe there's one of them in your engagement ring.

Vicars maintained his innocence, refused to resign, and claimed that the thief was Frank Shackleton, brother of Ernest, the Antarctic explorer. Frank also had a key to the Tower, was perennially in debt, and was a homosexual - thus being a target for blackmail as homosexual acts were not legalised in Britain until 1967. It is plausible that Frank and his lover, Captain Richard Gorges, got Vicars drunk - not difficult, given his predilections in that line, and helped themselves to the safe keys and its contents. Frank was clearly a wrong 'un - he was imprisoned in 1914 for handling a stolen cheque, but was never prosecuted for the jewel theft.

 

In 1908 King Edward Lack-Jewel VII dismissed Vicars, who moved to County Kerry and married. In May, 1920, up to a hundred armed men broke into their home, Kilmorna House, holding Vicars at gunpoint while they attempted to break into the house's strongroom.  The following year, he was taken from Kilmorna House, which was set alight, and shot dead in front of his wife. According to the communiqué issued from Dublin Castle, thirty armed men took him from his bed and shot him, leaving a placard around his neck denouncing him as an informer. 

On 27 April 1921, as an official reprisal, four shops were destroyed by British Forces in the town of Listowel. The proclamation given under Martial Law and ordering their demolition stated:

"For any outrage carried out in future against the lives or property of loyalist officials, reprisals will be taken against selected persons known to have rebel sympathies, although their implication has not been proved".

 

The last will and testament of Sir Arthur Vicars accused "the real culprit" Shackleton and criticised the Irish government and King Edward for making him a scapegoat.

The following little piece by stanislav was addressed to blog commentator, mr. forty red, white and blue shoestrings, presumably a man of Irish origin, who appears to have committed a grammatical solecism. 

 

Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Heaven's Door

 

forty red white and blue shoestrings said…

 

“Hopefully the platform change blah blah blah”

 

Hopefully is an adverb, so it is. But then what do pretend Paddies know about speaking English, bog-trotting, spud-gulping, Guinness-swigging, melancholy, red-faced, mummy-loving crybaby arsebandits all married-up because the Pope tells them to breed more wee red-faced superstitious saint-worshiping lunatics all called fucking Seamus or Bridget, the girls all dancing around like electrified cripples smirking that wee I’m-a-focking-virgin-so-I-am-and-only-Jesus-can-fock-me-so-he-can-and-you-can-keep-your-big-stinking-willy-to-yourself-so-you-can smirk and banging their big fucking shoes on the floor like sledgehammers, and the big hulking men who can always come over to England and live on the dole or go and dig holes in the road in the pouring rain and eat potato sandwiches for lunch and whistle Val fucking Doonican babytunes to themselves, “Delaney had a donkey, de dum de dum de dum…” and cry homesick tears down their red faces for the Ould Country which they never should have left if it was all that good, that’s when they’re not blowing themselves up or smearing one another with shit for the struggle in an English prison and singing their stupid heads off about Kevin Barry and the bold Fenian ladymen and how everybody should lay down his life for this Godforsaken shithole full of hairy-arse dildo-wielding nuns and noncing fucking priests and bogs and bits of holy fucking rock where not only did the blessed virgin Mary appear but she came down off the fucking mountain and did break-dancing so she did as God is my witness and can you put a few euro in the tin, for the orphans, so it is, and haven’t we built a whole tourist and leisure complex here on the blessed site where the pilgrims can come and get their leukemia healed and their withered fucked-up limbs made whole again and if they don’t well sure it’s because they didn’t believe hard enough in the blessed Virgin and her son Jesus Christ and his miracles and all the saints and the Holy Nazi Father over there in Rome so they didn’t and sure all they need to be doing is saving up their money and coming back next year into this blessed green shithole that God has made His very own, so it is and a few more euro in the tin for the blessed sisters of Clare or wherever the fuck they do all that praying, so it is and no, it isn’t a shame to rob these superstitious fucking eejits of their hard-earned money so it isn’t, doesn’t God move in mysterious ways, so He does especially now as we celebrate the birth of His only son, Gordon and the joy he has brought to the whole world, even the protestantbastards but not beJaysus to anybody that isn’t signed up to His Party and His project for mankind, so it is, and isn’t it better, anyway, that the gullible cripplebastards give their money to Holy Mother Church and His Holiness Pope Nazi of the Forests than spend it on drink and child pornography when there’s a whole global army of us to be getting on with that part of God’s plan for mankind? Amen. Forty shades of green, y’know?

 

Note: "On the evening of the 21st August 1879, a heavenly apparition occurred at the gable wall of the Parish Church, when Our Lady appeared, in the company of St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist. Unique to the Knock Apparition was the presence of the Eucharistic Lamb in front of a Cross, standing upon an Altar and surrounded by Angels." extract from "The Story of Knock".

The village of Knock, in County Mayo, Ireland, possesses an international airport, which facilitates the pilgrimages of  believers.

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 Now Available

If you would like more from the originator of Call Me Ishmael,  look no further than  Ishmael’s Blues - which is now published, in both paperback and hardback editions; both editions are immediately available from lulu.com.  The paperback is also listed on amazon. Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack, the first two books in the sequence are also available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :

 Unless you’ve done this already, please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box.  Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed. 

The book’s full title is "Ishmael’s Blues – further Chronicles of Ruin", and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of blogdog Buster retiring from the fray, cat gloating from a safe distance. The cover is the same for both editions.

Link for Hardcover :  https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage.  If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.  

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

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Look, we're through, over, I've met someone new. We've all met someone new.