I was woken this morning at 6.00 a.m. or thereabouts by a deep, deep, regular thrumming - the sort of sound and vibration that gets in your head and bones, alarming with thoughts of exploding boilers or a drone strike - God knows what it's like to live in a war zone. When I got out of bed and went investigating, the cause of the sound, which abated when the damn thing dropped its anchor, was this:
It is the MSC Preziosa, on a 10 day round trip of Northern Europe. She was in Stornaway yesterday and will be in Invergordon tomorrow. She carries 3,502 passengers stacked up in those tiers you can see in the photo, and has a crew of 1,325. Costs £1789 per person for a week's cruise, which is really quite cheap for an all-inclusive holiday. Also in Kirkwall today is the Seven Seas Splendour, which is quite small, with only 750 passengers. She was up in Shetland yesterday and will also be in Invergordon tomorrow. The centre of Kirkwall has been closed to traffic today, the better to accommodate the potential influx of 4,252 people, plus crew, roaming the streets, looking for something to look at. So far this month, Kirkwall has been visited by The Oceania Mariana, the Seaborne Sojourne, the Ambience, the Viking Neptune, the AIDsol, the Viking Venus, and the ms Rotterdam. For the rest of September, we will be visited by Celebrity Apex, the Regal Princess, the Hanseatic Nature, a return visit from Seven Seas Splendour and Mein Schiff 7 to round the month off. When they prepare to leave after a busy day's sightseeing, the big liners sound their big, bone-reverberating steam hooters twice - whether to round up stray passengers or to say So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Orkney Islands Council owns the Harbour Authority. Its website says: "With cruise vessels that bring over 4,000 passengers down to the smallest liners that can accomodate 12, Orkney is able to safely berth and anchor vessels to allow passengers to be enchanted by Orkney’s Neolithic and Wartime history, the splendour of its 13th Century Cathedral and the wide range of jewellery and arts and crafts on offer. The World Heritage Site of Skara Brae, Ring of Brodgar and Maeshowe located in Orkneys west mainland is renowned globally." Which was clearly written by someone wholly unfamiliar with the arcane arts of correct grammar and spelling.
Harbour fees brought in £400,000 in 2022 and a 2023 survey estimated that the aggregate of harbour fees, passenger dues, spending at tourist sites and shops yielded £3.1 million, although each cruise passenger spent an average of only £46 while ashore.
The ordinary Orcadian doesn't get a sniff at that £3.1 million. Anymore than they get any of that "free" wind energy.
Instead, their lives are disrupted - they can't drive in Kirkwall, which is tough if you are disabled; even walking around and shopping is rendered hideous by the great crowds of aimless tourists. At the hospital, the A&E staff are kept busy by passengers and crew who can't afford to use the onboard medical facilities, where even a solitary paracetamol tablet will separate you from your holiday money. An acquaintance, sitting at her dining table, was startled to find cruise passengers pressed up against her window, staring in at her, another found a small group in her garden photographing her plants. I have had a group gesticulating and mouthing at me to slow down, whilst I was driving on the public highway, observing the speed limit and going about my ordinary business. You see, they don't believe that this is a real place, where people go to work, school, live in houses, buy sandwiches - they think it is a theme park, and we are there to provide local colour. The cruise liners have fleets of bicycles which they rent to passengers in large groups, so if you are unfortunate enough to be behind one of those groups enjoying Theme Park Orkney; tough. Add 30 minutes to your journey.
The cruise liner crews descend on the charity shops, wielding black plastic bin liners which they fill with second hand clothes to take home for re-sale. Sometimes they even pay for their hauls. The fish and chip shops, though, do tend to do quite well out of liner crew.
There has been a bit of a problem out at the Ring of Brodgar, a Neolithic stone circle, which has neither an information centre nor public toilet.
The local fishing club has complained that the loch is contaminated by the urine and faeces of the cruise liner passengers who are herded onto massive buses and driven around the sites of archaeological interest.So I understand why the Once and Future Trump confidently spread the rumour that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating people's pets. It gets to the point where you believe anything of these people.
............................................................
Every Cloud - mr ishmael 7/7/2016
Peepul ov Britun....
I remember flinching, when I saw those images of what they disgustingly called Shock and Awe,
they being Uncle Sam's GangsterForces, and thinking to myself, under that barrage there's people, people who have done us no harm, people just like us, and here's some fucked-up rancid prick of a RN wallah,
smirking on his submarine, telling us that we must understand - we little people - that these are smart weapons, targeting only bad people, people whom, quite illegally, Uncle Sam wants killed.
I remember thinking that this was a snuff movie, for the titillation of the Bush family, one in which Lt. Cmdr. Horatio Cocksucker, has a tiny part. I remember Tony Blair simpering that no prime minister had ever been so well served by his armed forces, as though he was the queen - in reality, and not just in public toilets. If this wasn't a war crime, then there aren't any war crimes.
It was, as mr richard said, a war of entirely unjustified aggression, the sort for which we hanged people at Nuremberg, an illegal war, spun, for some, into an unavoidable and virtuous police action on behalf of civilisation itself. The former British prime minister and his chums, especially Porno Ali Campbell, are mass murderers; that MediaMinster indulges them with endless opportunities to exonerate themselves, that it listens in respectful silence to the bleatings of the wretched Blair,
permits itself to be orchestrated by him, as though it was his propaganda ministry, is nauseating. Only once in that dismal press conference, yesterday, did someone come close to the point of it all; Nick Watts of Newsnight enquiring why it was that the Bandit Gulf States, the home of beheadings, whippings, amputations and stonings, as well as being the home of the purported 9/11 bombers are now Blair's employers, y'know, what with him and his doxy being so hot on human rights. No-one there pressed the question home, after Blair ignored it. He must've gone back into hiding with Imelda as he always does, sheltered by security men whom we pay for, pissing himself with laughter.
It is true, of course, the body language reveals that Tony Blair was coming in his pants, snuggled up to George Dubya Chimp
and mr mongoose's observation about the kid cosying-up to the playground bully to attack a weaker kid is right, a mutants' mateyness, there for all to see, George gazing at Blair from some drug-cocktailed, personality-disordered, poisoned consciousness, like a groomer, and young Tony, pouting, looking delighted to be with the biggest of the big boys. In these meetings, alongside George Chimp, Blair looks like an utter wanker and that is some achievement.
And Donald Trump, Prime Minister?
Well, I simply say that he is entirely mistaken, although as consigliere to much bigger criminals than him, I would be happy to serve his administration in any capacity, depending on the package, of course.
Wrong how?
Well, as I said in my Chicago Gospel, in 1999,
something now viewed, I should say, Jon,
as being as influential, even moreso, than the Sermon on the Mount, what I said in that epic, ground-breaking declaration of principle is that when it comes to Muslims, we simply have to kill them, and regime-change them into the one True Faith of Mammon,
and its founding principles, Slavery, Greed, Pornography, Usury, Tax Avoidance and Arms Sales. Y'know, Jon, it's what my entire Foundation's all about,
Killing Muslims and earning vast sums by doing it.
In passing, it is one more reason for we sad, old lefties to applaud Donald Trump, because he kicked the next Bush pretender,
Brother Jeb, back into the swamp whence he came.
.................................................................I've reposted this 2016 piece by mr ishmael because Casey Michel, American journalist and author of American Kleptocracy, has done a splendid hatchet job on Blair. He has just published a new book: Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World.
He says: "... in the UK there is one man who single-handedly launched the modern lobbying industry, laundering the reputation of tyrants, and showing others how much money can be made in the process: Tony Blair."
Casey Michel describes Blair's record since leaving office in 2007:
Blair supported the Azerbaijan dictatorship, despite reports of torture by the regime, earning £90,000 for a twenty minute speech in support of methanol plants in Azerbaijan, building close links with the regime and being hired as an advisor on an Azeri gas pipeline.
In Kazakhstan, notorious, under dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, for the massacre in 2011 of striking workers calling for basic labour laws, Blair participated in a regime propaganda video. He wrote to Nazarbayev, advising him that the massacre, "tragic though [the events] were, should not obscure the enormous progress" of his rule. He also was a speech writer for Nazarbayev, deflecting from the massacre.
Blair's wife, employment lawyer, Cherie Booth, who should know about basic labour rights and that massacring striking workers asking for those rights is not a good look, provided her own legal services to the regime, at a discounted rate of £1,000 per hour, making hundreds of thousands of pounds by reviewing 'bilateral investment treaties'.
Casey Michel alleges that Blair and his network opened doors in London to autocrats. "From Kuwait to China, the UAE to Vietnam, Blair apparently never found a despotic regime that he felt was too compromised to do business with." The funds yielded by all this busy-ness, claimed Blair, didn't go into his trousers, but funded, instead, his charities. But who knows? There is no requirement in Britain for registration and disclosure by lobbyists, so we just have to believe our Tone's claims. The Kuwait contract is believed to be worth $40 million, and the Kazakhstan contract $27 million, but Blair isn't saying.
There's no keeping up with him: the obscurity and secrecy surrounding his endeavours guarantees his privacy as a private citizen, but it is known that he has a special relationship with JPMorgan Chase, which reportedly pays Blair about $3 million a year. Blair appears at multiple corporate events for JPMorgan and acts as the head of the company’s International Council, which means that he is essentially on call for high-level advice about global affairs wherever JPMorgan does business. “He will drop anything for them,” one former Blair associate says.
He also does consulting work for Zurich Insurance Group, for which he receives an estimated $750,000 a year.
In addition, he is an adviser to Abu Dhabi’s investment fund, Mubadala Development Company, which reportedly pays him about $1.5 million a year. Blair is currently looking to open an office in Abu Dhabi.
It seems that all has not been entirely smooth in the marital arena:
It is rumoured that Tone had an affair with Wendi Murdoch, which caused the Murdoch's divorce and old Rupe to withdraw any media backing from Blair. Ah well - all's well that ends well, and, obviously, money can buy you love....................................................................................
There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:
Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps
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.
Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4
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.
Formerly writing gentleman's literature for Forum, under the pen-name Riviera Gigolo
16 comments:
We have the ships here in Liverpool too, Mrs I. They've been back for a while after decades of loss. We had Queen Mary 2 a week or so ago and the more restrained Scandi vessels appear; so do the Disney boats and a few of the monsters. Pleasing on a level but, like many things now, they seem to be parodies of former glories.
Blair is another sort of monster. In his moral vacuity and consuming greed, in his radical truth-shifting, he incarnates the presiding spirit of our times. It is not a spirit of light.
The descent, mr bb, began when Maggie trounced the Windbag. The one before could be assigned to te Falklands bounce but this was destruction of the heart of British leftism. Call is socialism if you like. Whatever it was the people were no longer buying it. There was no longer any point. The poor, the voiceless, the invisible, the uneducated were no longer any of those tings. They had got on, Comrades, and wanted to get on further. Labour and the Dems in the USA then turned to constituency building. They turned to inventing, to magnifying, to triangulating difference and just lplain looking for power without any real pusrpose except that they remebered that they used to hate the Tories/Republicans... the raycists, the gammons, the Brixiteers... It is a movement now without honour or purpose. Until they find one, a real one, we should just ignore them.
No crisp or Pukka pie ads before 9pm? Oh, do fuck off. There is a real ground war in the middle of Europe and another one in the ME. FFS Starmer, try!
If anything, Blair was ahead of his time, a leader, if you like. He made lying, spinning, genocide - and never apologising - fashionable amongst the western elites.
We have cruise ships in Sydney harbour, disgorging the unwashed at Circular Quay by the Opera House and harbour bridge.Fortunately is a narrow and shallow tidal channel in the main harbour which imposes limits. My part of the harbour (North Harbour) is off limits.
I should think that Liverpool and Sydney have the infrastructure to deal with these massive cruise liners and an influx of thousands of people each day - but little Orkney, with its ancient towns of Kirkwall and Stromness, narrow streets and a lack of toilet facilities, cannot cope. The Council, though, blinded by the supposed income, cocks a deaf 'un at the complaints of the people. I think Venice is even more compromised, as the massive liners push bow waves into the lagoon, accelerating the crumbling of the buildings.
All this mass tourism erodes the very things that the holiday-makers want to look at. One is cursed as an elitist for criticising it, though.
The Blair phenomenon never fooled mr ishmael. He always knew him for what he was - a self-serving hypocrite, pretending to espouse Labour values and ideologies. He was no more a socialist than my dear, deceased mr Harris, who cared nothing for other dogs, as long as his own bed was warm and soft and his bowl filled.
I reckon that the last time I voted labour, mrs i, was under Michael Foot
Nope! Forgot the Fulham by-election. The Windbag was in full sail by then.
The Blair thing fooled many people mrs I. What was it they said about Satan ? that his greatest trick was to make people believe he doesn’t exist. He is the most evil creature since Hitler or Stalin and I reckon that the evil fucker is directing Kieth 2tier Stammer in his quest to fuck over the lower orders, like those greedy pensioners who expect what’s rightfully theirs.
An I see that Huw Welshman has escaped prison, surprise surprise, p’raps there’s a few he could name from his watts app group, who would rather keep things quiet.
Huw Welshman's sentence was actually quite swingeing, mr inmate. A prison sentence, unless it was of several years, would not give the opportunity to engage Welshman in a sex offender programme. Given the over-crowded state of Britain's prisons, most offenders are having their sentences drastically curtailed, to create space for those sentenced for the new offences of being a keyboard warrior, for example.
As it is, Welshman has been sentenced to 6 months imprisonment, suspended for 2 years. Should he re-offend within those 2 years, his prison sentence will be activated. A Suspended Sentence Supervision Order has been made, with a requirement that Welshman engage in a sex offender programme. If he doesn't, he will go to prison for the original 6 months and additionally, for breaching the Suspended Sentence Supervision Order - Courts don't like offenders ignoring their orders, as it undermines the authority of the Court. Having led sex offender programmes myself, in my former murky life as a Probation Officer, I can assure you that the programmes are rigorous and emotionally demanding. I think it is unlikely that they change the offender's sexual orientation - any more than you could turn a heterosexual into a homosexual by a conversion programme, but they do tear down the lies that offenders tell themselves and anyone they can persuade to listen to them. You know the sort of thing: it was a victimless offence, I was depressed and vulnerable, bad men led me on, the children are well-paid, no one was harmed, I'm a victim myself, it was only once, the wife doesn't give out anymore and she's let herself go. Once the lies are out of the way, the sex offender is confronted with the reality of their behaviour, the abuse of children that they have been a part of and that they have been financially supporting organised crime. And they are given strategies for avoiding re-offending: chemical castration is no longer in vogue,; while I think that having no sexual feeling is better than abusing children, that doesn't deal with the power rush that isn't dependant on a functioning cock. Circles of Support and Accountability engage the sex offender with a group of non-offending citizens who provide support, companionship, distraction and busyness. Check out the website - they are looking for volunteers: https://circles-uk.org.uk/
The third element of Welshman's sentence is that he is on the sex offender register for 7 years. The register is actively monitored by the local MAPPA (multi-agency public protection arrangement), which comprises the Police, Probation and Prison Service, to regularly evaluate the risk Welshman would pose of further offending, in light of any unofficial information the police already have or gather - oh yes, your record of previous convictions also contains a lot of grey information, how the management plan for the offender needs to be amended or if he needs to be returned to Court or prison.
And the fourth element is that Good Evening, HuwWelshmanYere has to pay £3,128 in costs and a victim surcharge. That's the bit I'd quibble with. What's a mere three grand to Welshman, a former very very highly paid presenter with the BBC? I suppose the amount was constrained by guidelines imposed on the court, but a £million or so to a relevant children's charity would set the right tone.
Rehabilitation is all well an good mrs I, it undoubtedly keeps a good number of well meaning professionals in employment, in the vain hope that deviants like Welshman won’t re-offend. There is no such thing as victimless crime involving child porn, child rape or child abuse. These fuckers can’t be converted, as you say, whole life solitary as a minimum.
Removing his meat n two veg would be more affective and cheaper, hard labour and loss of his gold plated PBC pension might put other media types off of repeating his crimes.
The thing is, mr inmate, our prison system can't accommodate on a whole life term all the people already in prison for sex offences. Not enough cells. And, as things are currently constituted, even lifers are usually, eventually, let out. Very few offenders are in prison for the whole of their natural lives. Therefore, since they will be returned to society, best to have a go at rehabilitation coupled with close monitoring and supervision.
And this is not some minority interest offence we are talking about - it is fairly wide spread - more so since the internet removed the need to frequent porno video shops in sleazy areas.
Mind you, offending generally is a lot more common than the public would like to believe - of all men born in England and Wales in 1953, 33% have at least one criminal conviction. 18% of that group have been convicted more than 5 times.
Then there are not enough prisons mrs I, or as we’ve seen recently, people sent down for posting hurty words or putting stickers on lampposts with ‘all lives matter’ printed on them, or calling TeeVee personalities bike nonce, or shouting at a police dog, or failing to abide by a court order for non payment of parking fines or council tax, or failing to stop at a red light ffs. Govament priorities are all wrong, back to front. This is the soviet system, release violent criminals lock up your political opponents.
That's a compelling observation, mr inmate. Building more prisons was not a priority for the Tory Government; the Probation Service in England was ruined by Tory ideology - you wouldn't think they could monetise it, but they had a go - splitting the Service into two and hiving off Community Service supervision, surveillance of tagging and prisoner escort to private firms and reducing the complement of probation officers. I read this morning that all the prisoners let out early to make room for political prisoners (the riots and generators of hurty words), will not be getting tagged on release because of a lack of resources, tags and tagging personnel - so, effectively, they are being let out without supervision and monitoring.
I have been thinking about this all week. What is politics for? What is the point? If one does not believe something, does not want to try something different, does not have a commitment to a better try at something familiar - well, what is the point?
At heart, I am an old Liberal.Mostly I think because experience shows that tax and law don't work to do anything and even if they do work to start with, they eventually end up a slab of concrete that folk have on their backs night and day. But looking back and trying to remember, I have voted in parliamentary elections twice for Labour, twice for the Conservatives and once - the only time they were available to be voted for - for the Liberal Party. The other six or seven times, I have loyally gone down there and spoiled by ballot paper - once or twice with a witty line but usually just a single black line across the piece.
So I don't really participate. Maybe it is partly my fault that we are where we are.
As I mentioned above, let violent prisoners out without supervision is the Soviet way, terrorism of the populace.
Serco the biggest company no one has ever heard of, they were given the contract for all you mention as well as housing illegals in 4 star hotels, privately run prisons, court security etc. they are the most incompetent of companies, yet continue to be awarded contracts, more blair corruption.
What is politics for mr mongoose, awarding contracts to politicians mates, see Michele Mone, then collecting backhanders an future directorships.
We have never been happy or good, Mr Mongoose. We should, perhaps, craft our own politics (and rediscover our crafts), throwing off the assumption that there must always be national and global agendas. Do the local things well - was that not a Liberal nostrum (?} - and attend to what is in front of us. From that we may recover ourselves and much may follow. Anyway, we have survived, so far, despite ourselves.
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