Feed the enemy?

 

'Hurrah! The Butter is Finished!'

John Heartfield, 1935

How many friends have we over there?

The border guards fight unconvincingly.

Whatever we do it seems things are arranged.

We always have to feed the enemy.

The lyrics quoted above are from a 1979 song by English band Magazine, and today they have an eerie quality. I seem a little obsessed with the late 1970s in Britain just at the moment. Perhaps it was the last time that country had a chance of forging its own survival, a sort of event horizon it crossed and which ultimately is leading to its death spiral, along with the rest of the West.

Speaking of Death, he was of course the most famous of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as mentioned in the Book of Revelations. The horseman everyone always forgets is Famine. It's a bit like when someone asks you to name the Seven Dwarves and you forget Doc. But, if the four riders were involved in a horse-race, Famine has just got her nose in front.

Food shortages are being seriously talked about by the political class, which means either that we are being distracted - see an earlier episode in these pages - or that the elites really can feel the rumbling hooves of the horsemen, with Famine now leading by a length and a half.

Of course, Putin is to blame. He has taken on the role of the pantomime villain, hissed and booed by the crowd. Russia and Ukraine are the 'breadbasket of Europe', we are told, (just as Zimbabwe was once called the 'breadbasket of Africa' because of its natural maize production. That ended well) and the current conflict will lead to famine and starvation. Sure. But let's have a cursory look, a sort of thumbnail sketch, of other reasons why there may well be a food supply crisis in the near future. This will be rather unscientific and unsupported, but here are some other factors which may help Famine win Hell's version of the Kentucky Derby.

The French political writer Guillaume Faye wrote that everyone is happy as long as the shopping basket is full. When it isn't, people begin to get restless. Faye also wrote - in reference to the sabotage of capitalism, I think - that one day we will wake up and all the magic will be gone.

When the first inklings of inflation began to seep through the media's defensive line, people were complaining about the rise of the price of petrol - as it is called in Britain rather than the rather more attractive American term 'gasoline' - and trashy food. One could be forgiven for thinking that Americans like to drive and eat, or even drive to eat. The drive-through McDonalds is, sadly, the new version of the American dream. But I digress.

If inflation drives up the price of your Happy Meal, it does not put you on the dietary equivalence of a swollen-bellied Ibo child in Sub-Saharan Africa who has flies on her eyelids and no plant roots left to suck. This much is true. But Americans like their excess, and have grown used to it. It is the main reason that morbid obesity is such a problem in the US.

But what if staples start to balloon in price? I am in Costa Rica, which is a long way from Ukraine, and I have seen an 800g bag of red beans - part of the Latin American staple of gallo pinto, aka rice and beans (I chop a raw onion into mine) - go from 900 Colones, or about a buck and a half, to 1200 in two months. That is a big jump in a country which could probably be self-sufficient.

There is a theory that runs as follows - if the food runs out, even a civilised society has about 10 days until anarchy. At the moment, the big deal in the US is the lack of baby formula. I must say, this is still a bit of a mystery to me. There was no baby formula in Medieval England and, although lots of babies undoubtedly expired from plague or cold or wolves, I don't imagine any died because of lack of mother's milk. But that is a tale for another day.

What happens when the shortages are not baby formula, or Krispy Kreme Donuts, or baseball caps, or candy, but bread and rice and fruit? My cat is an instructive example. I forgot to put down fresh water one morning and I only realised when I saw her drinking rainwater from the leaves of a plant. I forgot to buy catfood one weekend, and on Monday morning I found her eating a bird she had killed and dragged into the kitchen. She ate everything but the wing feathers and the beak. (How do they do that?)

My point is this. If the food runs out, which plant are humans going to drink from and which birds are they going to catch?

No one bet on Famine for the 3.30 Handicap Chase at the Gomorrah race-track. But sometimes the outsider wins the race.

Eat well today, but make sure the pantry is well stocked.

Who wants the world?

 

Shall I carve?

The English punk band, The Stranglers, wrote a song in the late 1970s entitled, Who Wants the World? Getting on for half a century later, it's a very good question.

Traditionally, nations have been the key participants in the carving up of the globe. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at Yalta have the benefit of kindly historical PR, and look as though they are brokering peace. In fact, all three were involved in an aggravated form of real estate negotiation. There is only so much planet to be divided between the strong wolves. Buy land, said Mark Twain. They've stopped making it.

And nations are still in the business of land acquisition. Look at what China is doing in the Indo-Pacific, and doing well. The Solomon Islands are about to be bought off, and their premier is gagged by the Chinese government from even talking about the deal. Like the 1970s board game (the 70s seem to be a feature today) Risk, the Chinese are putting more of their checkers closer and closer to Australia and New Zealand.

While Putin is doing some land-grabbing of his own, his requirements are not global. He merely wants the return of what he feels to be ancestral homelands to a man he feels should also have an ancestral role, the Tsar, which is what he sees himself as. No, Russia just wants its backyard back. China wants far more than just Taiwan, which it also sees as its backyard. Look at Chinese real estate in Central America and Canada. Look at what they already own in Africa. They are colonising the world not with weapons and boots on the ground, but with the Yen.

But there are now other agents. The World Health Organization and The World Economic Forum clearly want the world, and have been helpful enough to include the word in their titles. It is an open secret that the head of the WHO is a Chinese placeman. The man doesn't even have a medical degree. The WEF are somewhat more enigmatic, but seem quite open about their aims not for global dominance in the old currency of territory, but instead a technocratic hegemony over the world seen as a fiscal entity which exists virtually in the same way it exists literally. Here comes digital currency.

The desire to rule not just one's own country or sovereign nation but the entire planet used to be the reserve of Bond villains and aliens. Dr. No didn't just want to annex part of Wisconsin, he wanted the earth. No movie aliens ever traversed untold light years to reach here and then start a smoothie franchise or get an interview with Kim Kardashian. No, they want to buy the farm.

We know that the elites, the Davos and Bilderberg crowd, want to control the world and everyone in it. But why? It is possibly just a natural extrapolation of Orson Welles' comment that directing a film is like being given the biggest train set a boy ever had. The world is, when all is said and done, a far bigger train set. But there is also a metaphysical aspect to this impulse to rule on a planetary scale, like some Marvel comic super-villain.

If I say that the West is now godless I am not castigating from the pulpit. But it is unquestionably the case that the majority of Western leaders and influencers pay lip-service, at the very most, to considerations of deity. And once your gods go, the afterlife goes with them. So there is no Augustinian City of God being built by the elites. As Jim Morrison almost sang, they want the world and they want it now.

George Soros is a very old man. Perhaps the reason that the push for world government has received an accelerant since the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020 is because he realises that the clock is ticking louder than ever. He does not believe that he will watch over his deleterious creation from the elevated position of a better place. Imagine there's no heaven, as John Lennon sang in a rather dreary song that has become the anthem of the new idealists. Soros doesn't have to. He always knew there wasn't a heaven. Whatever the James Bond film title might say, you only live once.

And the rest of us, the peons, the little people, the plebs, the great unwashed, we are like an ant farm in the den of a 12-year-old boy. He watches, he observes, he takes notes, and he knows that if he pours a boiling kettle of water on the tiny creature, he has, in the context of the ant kingdom, become God. Which always makes one a little heady.

Shakespeare famously wrote, in King Lear, that 'as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport'. Quite so. It is Shakespeare's genius, however, to put these words in the mouth of Gloucester, newly blinded and wandering aimlessly on the heath. We are a little like that when it comes to these new and sinister cabals.

If these people want the world, I can't honestly see what we little ones can do to stop them. Many of the elites are childless, and I feel that this is not coincidental. Who wants the world? And for what purpose?

Introducing Vincent Kellner

 

A writing desk in Central America, earlier today.

We are fortunate here at Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know to have secured the services of arts and culture correspondent Vincent Kellner. For those of you who knew SatsumaMag and The Nuremberg Gazette, Vincent will need no introduction. He is currently putting the finishing touches on his new book, Little Guy Bigfoot, an illustrated history of Thai kick-boxing, and lives at an undisclosed location in Moldova.

As an introduction to MBD, Vincent has set a culture quiz. As he himself says - no Googling!

Ten statements follow. They relate to culture. You're going to have to pay attention because, culturally speaking, the vast majority of you don't know shit from Shinola. Try to grasp this - only one of the following is true. Best of luck.

1. The Mean Reds was the third studio album by English punk band Inside Job. Recorded in 1981 on a barge in Northumberland (which partially sank during recording), it failed to make the charts, although a live version of its most famous song, Never as Sad as Today, did reach number 22 in the UK charts in 1982.

2. Paul Callum's 1999 novel, A Ghost Story With No Ghosts, won the Henry James Award for best debut in the 'supernatural thriller' category that year by the largest voting margin in the 44-year history of the award. The book was filmed in 2004 and starred Jodine Palmerstone as Lucretia, the mentally unstable heroine.

3. Los Brujos was the second film by Central American director Hector Camenez after his triumphant debut, The Kindest Man. Released in 1977, Los Brujos centres around a group of 16th-century Nicaraguan witches who fall in love with the same man. It was nominated for a second-class Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978.

4. De occulta lumen ('On the Darkness of Light') was reportedly the first book printed on a Gutenberg printing-press without the permission of the Pope, circa 1501/2. It is said to have given rise to the phrase 'dissident literature'. The author is unknown, and although there is an opinion within classical academia that it was Boethius, this has been largely and convincingly discredited, not least by Casaubon.

5. Robert Walser, the Czech writer who was a friend of Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Herman Hesse and Robert Musil, was found dead in a snowy field in 1956. His diagnosis of schizophrenia has been highly debated by literary historians, and his death remains a mystery.

6. Toshiro Yamauchi's painting Quixote Against the Windmills made the Japanese boy (from Okinawa) the youngest-ever winner of the country's most prestigious art prize in 1992. He was 12 years old. The Prime Minister Kontajo Kantachi called the painting 'a beautiful example of cultural translation. It is as though the Knight of the Sad Countenance visited Japan'.

7. It's Time to Light the Lights - An Illustrated History of the Muppet Show, was officially entered into The Guinness Book of Records in 1997 as the best-selling biography of fictional characters ever published. Daniel and Dennis McCreavie's book sold over 14 million copies, translated as it was into 19 languages.

8. Hungarian philosopher Yungan Otman wrote the first chapter of his 1966 book En Ikalke Rural Philosophia (On the Philosophy of Rural Life) on goatskin using a quill from a crow's feather and ink made from quail's blood. He told a Hungarian newspaper that this was not a publicity stunt, but 'a genuine attempt to give a voice to those Hungarians who still till the soil to live'.

9. When the red, white, and blue flag of Costa Rica was designed after Independence, the first President's wife wanted the tones of the colours to be exactly the same as those of the French tricolor. The French recently changed the exact tone of blue in their flag. Costa Rica followed suit.

10. British member of Parliament Rita Birch, who represents Bradley West in South Yorkshire, is now officially the 4th-best female backgammon player in the United Kingdom. Although she lost the 3rd/4th place play-off in the recent national championships to former British champion Rita Panswara, she is the highest ranked British politician ever at the famous board game.

No Googling now!

Yours,

Vincent Kellner.

It's a kind of magic

A magician, earlier today

Every magician knows the importance of the art of distraction. When I say 'magician', I mean someone who practices magic for the entertainment of others, not Aleister Crowley. I know whereof I speak because my brother actually is a magician, specializing in sleight-of-hand tricks involving cards and coins, and a member of the magicians' professional guild the Magic Circle. In Sweden. That's my brother for you. Which brings us back to distraction, which he describes as the use of one hand to gesticulate and carve arabesques in the air, thus distracting the audience, while the other hand holds the glittering coin, about to appear or disappear.

The media use exactly the same technique. Stories are used to lure people away from topics or events which do not square away with the accepted narrative. A perfect example is the current brouhaha in Britain concerning what has been termed 'Partygate'. Quite apart from the fact that the obsession with echoing the infamous Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon is one of the media's more irritating habits, this is as flimsy a non-story as a local cub reporter could come up with, and yet it has dominated the news cycle for weeks, taking  a lot of what used to be called (in the days when the print media was unchallenged by its online version) 'column inches'.

The details are tedious and have been so ubiquitous the only people who don't know the story of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's party (birthday rather than political party), which broke COVID lockdown rules imposed on the rest of the populace are perhaps Polynesian islanders or tribesmen in pakol hats squatting in caves in the hills of Afghanistan.

The object of the story is not journalism, it is meta-journalism. The two main crises in the United Kingdom - and England in particular in the case of the second crisis - are without question inflation and the arrival each day of hundreds of illegal immigrants on the Kent coast of England. Rather than focus on these twin evils - the latter preventable, the former unfortunately not - the British media ('Fleet Street' as it is known after its traditional London home) is instead trying to turn a birthday party into the Suez Crisis or Chamberlain's meeting with Hitler. This tawdry gathering of the political class - who was it that so accurately said that politics is pop music for ugly people? - at worst shows the contempt the ruling elites have for the peons, and at best makes you think that Nero and Caligula wouldn't have taken this kind of backchat from the media.

This is not to say that all major stories are distractions from other journalism equally deserving of attention for the benefit of the public, who are after all the people that the media are supposed to inform, even if it often seems that the media is a mutual appreciation society for which every day is the Grammys.

Putin didn't invade Ukraine because he wanted to give the Western media something to chew on while he carried on doing his usual round of dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Putin invaded Ukraine because he wants it back, his view being that it is and has always been a part of 'Greater Russia' just as China sees Taiwan as a runaway toddler in a supermarket who needs a tug on the reins to come back to Mommy.

But the Western media went full steam ahead for Ukraine. The story has become the magician's waving hand, keeping the audience's attention away from the coin or playing card. The narrative was constructed quicker than a stage set, which it essentially is. Ukraine became a sort of sovereign nation version of George Floyd and, in much the same way as the career criminal whose clumsy death effectively started America Civil War 2.0, a lot of faults were overlooked for the sake of the narrative. Just as Floyd was an unpleasant man who has been beatified, so too is Ukraine an unpleasant country which has been sanctified.

Distraction is not simply the boosting or promotion of one story to keep the public gaze away from something counter-narrative, but also simple omission. The BBC is notorious for this. A demonstration in favour of some faddish cause of which the corporation approves and attracting a few hundred people with purple hair and nose-rings will get generous coverage, while a demonstration a few blocks away drawing tens of thousands but being in support of something of which the BBC disapproves - free speech, say - and there will be no coverage. If it were not for the dissident media, the citizen journalists, the rogue YouTubers, the media would control public opinion as tightly as Pravda (which laughably means 'the truth' in Russian) once did in the Soviet Union.

I say 'Soviet Union' and not 'former Soviet Union', as is the style in the mainstream media. The Soviet Union is not former, it simply changed addresses, moving further West, to better weather and dental care. But I digress.

There is, and has been for some time, a graduate degree across the West called 'Media Studies'. By all accounts it is as steeped in Left-wing propaganda as a cookie in a coffee-cup. It is also wholly unnecessary. Media studies is simply studying the media. But beware, don't look where the media are pointing, don't direct your gaze to where they want it directed. Watch the magician's other hand.

Amending the amendment

The Second Amendment

The times they are a'changing.

The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, brings the tally of victims of mass shooters to around thirty for the week, slain by two young men who, at the age of 18, were unable to buy beer but somehow managed to end up with assault weapons. There is only one conclusion to be drawn. America is not psychotic, it is becoming a psychosis.

The Second Amendment argument is not helped by the fact that this piece of legislation was written in a time of muskets and rifles, not automatic weapons. The right to bear arms has become the ability to massacre innocents in schools. One has to consider adapting this legislative instrument.

On the other hand, dictatorships always begin by disarming the people, and the Biden administration - in which Biden himself is just a marionette operated by darker forces - is beginning to shape up as precisely that.

The first thing Biden did was to politicize this slaughter. Shamelessly invoking God, he did his raging old man act and turned the whole incident into a party political broadcast against the gun lobby. There is every reason to be cynical about this. Americans are, I suspect, aware of the fact that their government just earmarked $40 billion to protect Ukrainians, but are unable to offer the same service to elementary school children and innocent shoppers.

A gun culture does not automatically lead to this kind of chaos. Every Swiss householder is obliged to own a rifle in case they are called up as a reservist army. But I don't recall many mass shootings in Swiss schools. America is quite simply a violent country, and guns in the mix exacerbate this.

There is a level of hypocrisy one has come to expect from the media. People are gunned down in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore and dozens of other cities every day, but nothing is heard about the NRA in these cases. One hesitates to mention this, but the question of ethnicity is not ungermane.

The week's first shooter was a white male, and so the mantra of white supremacy was immediately begun, despite the shooter being registered as mentally ill - and even having spent time in a mental hospital. The Texas shooter was named Salvador Ramos, and there has been no mention, for example, of La Raza, the demonstrably racist Latin supremacist movement. As for the victims of inner-city shooters, both they and the perps have a tendency to be black. Again, this does not interest the MSM.

It is unfortunate to have to focus on race, but the Left will not stop doing precisely that, so it cannot be no-man's land for the political Right. The American Left are desperate for another white shooter because the idea of 'white supremacy' is essential to their anarcho-tyrannical aims to bring down white America. One hates to sound like some kind of Klan member, but it can scarcely be denied that the war on whiteness is very real.

The school which was the scene of the shooting in Texas has a word on its entrance sign - Bienvenidos. There is something immensely tragic about immigrants arriving in the land of the free and their children being cut to pieces by one of their own, identity politics and group cohesion and solidarity being another shibboleth of the Left.

It is famously said that if you criminalize guns then only criminals will have guns. But the notion that background checks and profiling will still allow mentally ill people to buy them is somehow worse. If one was to have Tweeted something critical of race or gender ten years ago, you know that a potential employer will find you out and you won't be getting the job. So can the authorities not detect those who should not be in charge of weaponry?

America has to do something to protect its citizens from mentally ill people with powerful weapons. It might be well advised begin by looking at its own mental illness.

Too much monkey business

 

A monkey, earlier today.

"Sorry, but why is it that we get the blame for this?"

When legendary film director Stanley Kubrick was interviewed about what turned out to be his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, he told an interviewer that the film, which famously starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, was based on a German novel called Traumaville. This was reported by a British magazine and I sub-edited the interview in question, so I know that this is not the fake news we hear so much about.

In fact, Kubrick had used the German word Traumnovelle, meaning 'Dream story' or perhaps 'Dream tale'. It was written, or at any rate published, by German author Arthur Schnitzler in 1926. The interviewer had obviously misheard the word from his or her recording of the interview. But Traumaville is a linguistic invention - albeit by mistake - far too good and apt not to be used as the perfect description of where we in the West live now.

Our leaders - an extremely sinister cabal of interlinked psychopaths, as far as I can see - seem intent on keeping us frightened at all times, so that we are more receptive to what is popularly known in the United Kingdom as 'the nanny state'. An alarming number of people during the COVID pandemic seemed only too willing to do exactly what the state told them to, in Europe, the UK, the Commonwealth and the USA.

It is as though the advanced civilizations of the Western world agreed with the final couplet of Hilaire Belloc's poem, The Jim Poem, from the 1907 collection Cautionary Tales for Children.

'Always keep a-hold of nurse

For fear of finding something worse'.

Well, the deep states across the quilt of Europe, as well as the aforementioned Commonwealth and north America, tried to keep COVID going for as long as they could, but finally they couldn't keep all the plates spinning on the top of the bamboo poles, and another pandemic was desperately needed. Enter monkeypox.

The details can easily be found on line, so I won't bother. It is not the virology of the condition that is a cause for concern, it is the political use to which the new despots will put it. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) has just arranged a 'Pandemic Accord' (the Americans didn't like the word 'treaty') which will effectively give the WHO the ability to enable sovereign governments to enforce lockdowns in the event of any new pandemic. A few moments later? Golly gee. A new pandemic.

The elites can do this forever, and if the accord comes into force, you will be locked down whenever our rulers say you will be locked down. And if anyone believes that is democracy, they don't know their Ancient Greek. Demos. The people. Kratos. Power. Democracy is the power residing with the people, and if they can be effectively imprisoned in their own homes - as happened recently in Shanghai - then they have power to make coffee and watch TV and that's about it.

The WHO is unelected. You really have to let that one sink in, have a good mull over it. If unelected bodies can enforce the global segregation of citizens who did not vote for them, all bets are off. This is potentially a worldwide curfew, and will have one of two consequences, either compliance or revolution.

There are other factors. There is a fairly prevalent medical opinion that monkeypox is much like HIV in that it is spread prevalently by sexual contact of, shall we say, the rougher kind, which really needs no further explanation. Should this be the case, it is another disease for which lax moral conduct is responsible. But we must not anticipate.

Some countries are almost jumping the gun. Belgium has an estimated three cases - from a population of around 12 million - and is already mooting 21-day quarantine plans at parliamentary level. It's almost as though... No, can't be. I am not a conspiracy theorist, not me.

The UK, apparently, has 71 cases of this new and conveniently timed disease. The first case apparently arrived via a gentleman from Nigeria. Again, without being too indelicate, it might be an idea to impose a moratorium on too much global criss-crossing during these Biblical plagues.

There is no question that the elites will not waste a good crisis, even if they have to whip it up themselves. What is it that makes the elites wish to psychologically torture their people? Mental health problems in the UK have leapt, and I don't imagine there were fewer suicides during COVID than the regular statistics.

It takes a peculiar abdication of conscience to allow people to act in this way. It is always a mystery as to why small groups of people wish to make the lives of the majority more rather than less miserable, and with this new 'pandemic' we have an extraordinary example of this.

So, welcome to Traumaville.

Be not too afraid.

But be afraid.

Don't get fooled again

 

Keith Moon in Taiwan earlier today

Rather confusingly, the media have begun calling the World Health Organisation by using the acronym as though it were a word in its own right. Instead of spelling it out, as with the BBC or the FBI, they have begun referring to 'The Who'.

Now, for those of us who grew up with this magnificent rock band from west London, this has put us in a bit of a tizzy. How can we take the pronouncements of this oracular and divine body seriously if we can't get the lyrics to Tommy or My Generation out of our heads?

The WHO is currently having one of its regular junkets, attempting to lord it over the monkeys despite the fact that its head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (whose name invites anagrams) has no medical degree. To put that in context, when COVID began, the Minister of Health in Costa Rica, Daniel Salas, dealt with it brilliantly. He has two medical degrees and a background in epidemiology. That's how you do it.

But our man Tedros has the backing of the Chinese, and that is what counts at international level. The only problem is that it is a little bit rich to call something a 'world health organisation' when the whole world is not invited. You will not be surprised to learn, as China effectively runs the WHO and Tedros is very much their glove-puppet, that one country has not been invited to the carnival.

As far as the Chinese are concerned, Taiwan is not a country in its own right, but part of what they call 'Greater China'. Their attitude to Taiwan is exactly that of Vladimir Putin's to Ukraine. They see these countries as a part of the homeland and they want them back.

China is slowly buying the world, but it should not be allowed to own something called the 'World Health Organisation'. A treaty is about to be signed - by everyone but the Taiwanese, one assumes - that will be a dry run for the social credit system China is looking to foist on the world at large.

The only concern China has is that it runs out of money, or at least credit. Its economy already has no engine-room because of its absurd one-child policy which ran for so many decades, and it is running out of young people. It will not mimic the West by importing immigrants, as China is a notoriously racist country who look on other nations as inferior.

So, The WHO may be run by China, but if the fortune-cookie jar runs empty, new sponsors may be needed. Recall Jim Chanos, the man who predicted Enron's collapse all those years ago. A few years back, he said he had found a new Enron, and it was called China.

Don't get fooled again.

Crisis? What crisis?

 

German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, earlier today.

'They called it a what?'

There are so many things about mainstream media journalists that irritate, I sometimes don't know where to start. Oh, just a tick. Yes, I do.

Have you noticed the tendency of MSM hacks to fasten onto a phrase like a lamprey on some poor crustacean? The last really annoying example was 'the elephant in the room'. This of course refers to the hypothetical situation in which several people are present in a room, and so is an elephant. No one mentions the presence of the beast because they are not sure if the others can see it, and they have no wish to be seen as mentally deranged.

Actually, that is quite funny when it comes to journalists. Mentally deranged people are extremely interesting and great company. Not so the average journo.

But this phrase was ubiquitous, still is. But now there is a new kid in town. Everything bad is now 'an existential danger' or 'an existential crisis'. Oh, lawks and lordy. Where does one begin?

One thing you have to understand about the political Left is that although they are not very bright, not the sharpest chisels in the toolbox, they do like to appear as though they are. They are like Mickey Mouse in Disney's brilliant version of Goethe's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, all tricked out in their master's robes and wizard's hat. They don't know much about philosophy but they like the livery, they like to play dressing-up.

Listen, you muffins. Existentialism is a very specific school of 20th-century philosophy (although Kierkegaard coined the phrase in the 19th century) and is essentially opposed to essentialism. It's not a fortune-cookie motto you can use when you like.

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, even Albert Camus, were all great existentialists. They would spin in their respective graves to hear this term used and abused.

Note to stupid people - using the language of intelligent people does not make you similar to them.

Taking notes

 

Jen Psaki finally tired of making a fool of herself as the White House press secretary and has effected a career move that will allow her to make a fool of herself at MSNBC instead. A replacement was needed, and one could be forgiven for having predicted a certain level of diversity hiring.

Karine Jean-Pierre has a name that would have fitted in neatly during the French Revolution and is certainly easier on the eye than Psaki. The outgoing and ferociously red-headed ex-press secretary has something fish-like about her, and not in a nice way. There is a touch of H P Lovecraft about her features, as though she hangs out with Dagon at weekends.

Jean-Pierre certainly ticks all the boxes, and one of her first announcements from the press podium - aka Peter Doocey's personal coconut-shy - was to tell the world that she was a black, gay, immigrant woman. We couldn't see her legs, so it is mere conjecture as to whether White House staff amputated one to get the full house of minority victimhood.

She is one of the generation that begin sentences with 'so' or 'I mean', but it is not that aspect of her mangling of the English language that is of major concern. She was clearly reading her answers from notes. Let's have a little think about that.

Press questions at White House briefings are not, to the best of my knowledge, submitted in advance. Most of the press pack are MSM, and so their questions are lame and softball. Only Doocey plays hardball, and he struck out Jean-Pierre in the first five minutes. But she was reading from some kind of crib-sheet. In other words she was not answering the questions but mechanically repeating an inventory of buzz-words and rhetorical nonsense. No one was expecting Horace or Seneca, but her answers made less than no sense.

It shows a level of contempt from the elites that we are becoming used to. Jean-Pierre's parroting of a pre-prepared script - quite possibly written in crayon - effectively says to the press, and by extension the American people, that questions are not worth answering. Shut up, they explained.

I don't give Jean-Pierre that long in the job. She already looks out of her depth, while Doocey lurks like the shark in Jaws. Next up for the job? Well, they would have to outbid a black, gay, immigrant woman. Maybe that amputation is not too far away.

Taking the King's shilling

Welcome aboard, although don't be too quick to congratulate yourselves for being accepted, either as passenger or crew, on this particular voyage. We have only just set sail. We don't know yet if this is the Medieval Ship of Fools, Rimbaud's bateau ivre, the drunken boat, an efficient destroyer like the Tirpitz, or a ghost ship like The Flying Dutchman.

Whatever the vessel, hoist that rag...