Brexit For Dummies

                                                                                                                            Sackerson

Boycott the Daily Mail !

Here is a letter I am sending today:

Mr Geordie Greig, Editor, Daily Mail
Northcliffe House
2 Derry Street
Kensington
London W8 5TT

Wednesday, 21 November 2018

Dear Mr Greig

Why I am cancelling my subscription to your newspaper

I have today instructed your marketing department to cancel my Direct Debit for the daily and Sunday editions of the Mail.

I have been a subscriber for a very long time but I cannot support your otherwise entertaining and informative publication while, presumably under your direction, it mounts a biased and vituperative campaign against those who are working to see the result of the EU Referendum carried out.

May I also say how illogical it seems for a Scot to desire independence for his country within a profoundly undemocratic and micromanaging European Union, moreover a Union determined to become a single nation in which Scotland’s fate is to be a negligible backwater; and how contradictory it seems for him to wish this peculiar freedom for his country while doing his best to deny genuine self-government to the rest of the United Kingdom.

Yours faithfully...

Cc: Mr Paul Dacre; The Bruges Group

Weekend Wonders: The Arctic Moth

FRIDAY MUSIC: Mellifluous Melly, by JD

Many years ago I saw George Melly with John Chilton's Feetwarmers. One of the most entertaining and enjoyable shows I've seen. Melly was a showman through and through with his immaculately tailored eccentric elegance and his outrageous humour. They don't make 'em like that any more, sad to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Melly

(The final video here is from the TV show 'This Is Your Life'- unfortunately the last ten minutes or so are missing.)

Capitalism or Socialism: a false dichotomy? Open thread

"So much of our history since the mid nineteenth century has been about the people with money and power doing their best to push socialism into extremes so as to make themselves the only possible choice."

Right or wrong?

Defenestrate the trollop!

A new book has been widely reported. It lists 600 English words that are in danger of falling out of common usage.

I think I have found a use for two of them already; the British Cabinet, the 1922 Committee, the Labour Party, the House of Commons and the electorate at large may find them most apt at the moment:

"Defenestrate the trollop!"

Placards under construction now.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6388837/Gadzook-Writer-says-600-endangered-words-including-conk.html

Imperialism never died, by James Higham

With all the wonderful political capital afforded by the "Russian menace" in America and "the U.S. menace" America, let alone China, it's as well to remember that imperialism never died - it's been going on in the modern era since at least the 1700s.

The French in the New World of America, the Spanish, the French sniffing around Australia and beaten to it by the British in 1788, the Dutch there also on the other coast a century earlier, the Chinese ten years ago in Africa - it's going on the whole time, as the Germans can attest.

In my time in Russia, the British were "known" over there for using the British Council for its purposes and I was caught up in the wash in 2008 when the BC was expelled from Vladivostock.  

And so it goes on and on.  Exxon in Sakhalin is another example.

This one below is from the heart of "the enemy", the European Council on Foreign Relations and I'd say it's par for the course:

https://www.ecfr.eu/amp-article/commentary_russias_hired_guns_in_africa

The murder of three Russian journalists in the Central African Republic in July 2018 raised new concerns about Russia’s presence in Africa. Because the reporters were investigating the activities of Russian private military contractors (PMCs), there has been widespread speculation that they were killed at the behest of a Russian state determined to expand its presence on the continent. This explanation is plausible: after years of irrelevance in resource-rich but politically unstable central Africa, the Kremlin has heavily relied on PMCs – a cost-effective and efficient tool for hybrid confrontation – in making its return to the region.

Putin publicly supported the creation of mercenary groups in 2012 but, officially, they remain illegal in Russia. Although the Kremlin refuses to acknowledge their existence, PMCs have become an essential tool of Russian foreign policy. This has been apparent in both the Ukraine conflict and the Syrian civil war. By employing irregular armed groups, Moscow has gained the luxury of plausible deniability: the ability to simultaneous be and not be party to a conflict, thereby escaping public accountability for casualties of war. The Kremlin’s response to the decimation of a Wagner Group unit in Syria in early 2018 provides a good example of this.

I could equally write of the US and NATO in the Ukraine through their puppet Poroshenko - let's be evenhanded here. And now we have the spectre of the EU Army:

It rather undermines talk of the nationalism versus patriotism which Macron went on about on the 11th at the Arc de Triomphe, surrounded by flags and the military.  It's not my intention to get into party politics in this post, only to point out that nationalism and imperialism has never died and all the EU is is a new artificial nation, not unlike Belgium, its headquarters.

Sackerson sends these two links which delve into this matter of the Merkel Army:

13.11.18 - https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/merkel-europa-111.html

03.06.18 - https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/merkel-eu-interventionsarmee-101.html

Sackers' further comments:

Or does [Frau Merkel] mean merely to start it off as that until the EU is a full nation and can indeed boast its own national armed forces?

Alerted to it by John Vasc's 02:02hrs comment on Raedwald