Means testing is bullshit.

Fuck off, The Guardian. Means testing is shit, it just forces people to jump through smaller and smaller hoops to get help, and traps poor people on benefits (sometimes for life). Also, the inflationary effects of the fossils' price gouging is felth throughout the economy, it is unpredictable, which is why businesses need to be protected from it as well as consumers.

 

I am sooo fucking sick of mealy mouthed liberals and their bullshit. Can we just put them on an island somewhere and... oh.

 

(link: https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2022/aug/15/starmer-bungled-failing-energy-bill-target-support )

Lebedev's other dog and Putin's pooches

It's just struck me (and several million others, no doubt) that there's a very good chance that our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, may have effectively sold classified information to the Russians by giving the oligarch Evgeny Lebedev a peerage in 2020. (Peerage = seat in the House of Lords. House Of Lords = US Senate)

That's not a snarky sobriquet - that's his official title. Lord of Hampton And Siberia

That isn't the worst of it. The worst of it is that nobody outside of Twitterland gives a flying fuck about it.

Our political system is hopelessly compromised, both the Left and the Right seem to have sold out to the Russians lock, stock and barrel. In fact it reminds me of things I've read about pre-Euromaidan Ukraine.

The only senior person in the system behaving with any kind of honour is the leader of the Opposition, unfortunately he is a bit of a charisma vacuum and he is under attack by the left wing of his own party, who are being suspiciously supportive of the Russians (blaming NATO for everything, etc) and not uttering a peep about the very blatant corruption of the ruling (right wing) party by the Russian oligarchs. They're not demonstrating outside of the many properties owned by them, they're not demonstrating outside the Russian embassy, they're just running around with their dumb placards waving Soviet flags and chanting their stupid, bleating chants.

I'm not kidding! Actual footage shown.

I repeat: The Left in this country are failing to criticize the Right for selling us out to the Russians, which they have done. (For example Brexit was notoriously funded by Russian money).  Is this ideological, or have they also sold us out? (They wouldn't be the first.) The ONLY people telling the truth are a few liberal journalists and the not very popular, incredibly bland opposition leader Sir Kier Starmer, who has as much chance of being elected Prime Minister as I have of being elected Pope.

It is worse than you could possibly imagine. We are basically a Trojan Horse of the Russians, we are talking a good fight but actually giving them time to hide their money before we implement any sanctions. At this point I have to wonder if any of the weapons we're supposedly giving the Ukranians even work.

Speaking of which, we're now officially turning away Ukrainian refugees. I guess it helps that the electorate have been conditioned to see refugees as the enemy by the same right wing politicians that Putin has obviously compromised - in the case of the PM, by literally having him along to a massive party in an oligarch's castle.

Links as and when I can be bothered. I just had to get that out of my system.

Lebedev with his other dog

 

 

Aw, crap, not again!

So the Russians are shelling a massive nuclear power station in Ukraine. Before bed, a quick theory (in case I'm proved right by morning).

Paranoid theory: The Russians have given up on conquering Ukraine and are now deliberately trying to cause a nuclear disaster, or "If we can't have it, nobody can!"

Ukraine is notoriously a breadbasket region: when famine hit, it was often because the Russian government had stolen all their food - and they certainly wouldn't help them if they were in need (A bit like the way the English exploited the Irish).

This is doubtless part of why Ukraine is considered so strategically vital by the Russians - and why a bunch of crazy bastards, who fucking hate us so much they've spent the last decade pushing literal Fascist propaganda into our homes, probably would cause a nuclear disaster if they felt cornered. 

In a way, it's perfect for the Fascist mentality: You get to nuke someone without nuking them; remember, Fascists are cowards, and everyone knows that the next person to die after you press the button will be you. But to cause an "accident"? It's ideal! As with Coronavirus, they get to try out their theories of eugenics on an entire population, ie, "The weak will die, the strong survive!", and punish their enemies, AND scare the fucking crap out of everyone on Earth, all at the same time.

I really, really, really fuckiing hope it ain't so.

Sources:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/02/24/most-immediate-nuclear-danger-in-ukraine-isn-t-chernobyl-pub-86521

https://www.npp.zp.ua/en/activities/performance-indicators

https://www.wiredprnews.com/russia-ukraine-live-zaporizhzhia-power-plant-on-fire-mayor-says-russia-ukraine-war-news/

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3419559-zaporizhzhia-npp-on-fire-due-to-shelling-by-russian-invaders.html

Partygate: Watch these moves!

I didn't think they'd get away with it, but now it looks like they might well do.

Watch these moves! Here's how it works:

Boris Johnson is saying that the investigation will "draw a line under the affair". This means that the investigation will be a cover-up. The "clarity" the public "needs", is of course, complete opacity.

 

The propaganda line has already been finalized, which is that somehow "people" are "fed up of hearing about it", and that it was "only a slice of cake". 

 

Meanwhile the details will actually be carefully hidden as part of the cover-up. This is what they mean when they say they are only publishing the "findings", they are conducting a completely corrupt internal investigation which will then reassure us that the Prime Minister is completely innocent guv, and whose processes we will learn nothing about, because the "details" are not part of the "terms of reference" (ie, complete snow-job).

How do you I know this? Look up Sue Grey. She's notorious for covering-up paper trails; she has advised government ministers to use personal emails to avoid transparency laws, has advised SPADs to double-delete emails to destroy evidence, and has intervened at least six times to help departments fight Freedom Of Information Act disclosures.

 

In short - She's one of them. Sue Gray is a very part of the culture of secrecy, impunity, and lawbreaking that she is investigating. It's a big club, and you're not in it.

This is how corrupt governments hide their corruption. Cover-up, propaganda, and more cover-up. The corruption itsself, of course, helps with the cover-up.

Result: It becomes OK for Important People to break the law. It's normalized - of course they broke the law, the law doesn't apply to them - they're Important! Which fuels more law-breaking and more corruption.

And so, we fall.

Kremlinology at No. 10: Who will our next Great Helmsman be?

Basically it'll be anyone that baby-boomer aged gammons think is a "nice young man" or "just like Maggie".

 

Politics in this country is fucked because it is dominated by the old and the rich. As a result, nothing good is going to happen here for the rest of the decade. Everything else is just kremlinology.

That being said, for the sake of argument people are saying it won't be Sunak cos the Tories are too racist. I think it WILL be Sunak, or at least it's possible that they'd pick him anyway because these days even lots of racists like to pretend they're not racist - and he would be the perfect answer to such accusations.

Also, a lot of Labourites have started to completely lose their shit over India / Pakistan (having already done as much damage to themselves as possible over Israel / Palestine), and an Anglo-Indian would cause them to 'sperg out bigtime. Remember that horrible election poster that portrayed the PM meeting the Indian PM as a betrayal of the electorate? That times 100.

That one.

 Additionally, Sunak's relatively untainted and nice enough looking that he'd tick boxes with middle class liberals, a demographic that Tories have had mostly lost and desperately need back.

Here's the thing though - nothing is going to change. We're like the Soviets, stuck in a rut, nothing ever changes, politics is just a bureaucratic power struggle for the boss class while the economy is controlled by a rigid, sclerotic ideology.

It's hypernormalization: Everyone knows the system's broken but nobody is allowed to fix it. So we just pretend it's working.