Fighting talk

 

A British army officer, earlier today

General Sir Patrick Sanders is the new chief of staff of the British Army. I suppose it is a relief that his opening address to the troops did not stress the importance of transgenderism or using your commanding officer's preferred pronouns. What he did say, however, is even more ominous.

He told his soldiers to prepare for the possibility of land war in Europe, stating the following,

"I am the first Chief of the General Staff since 1941 to take command of the Army in the shadow of a land war in Europe involving a continental power. Russia's invasion of Ukraine underlines our core purpose - to protect the UK by being ready to fight and win wars on land".

Anyone who understands the European Union, Vladimir Putin, and the role of the United Kingdom in this conflict will see that these statements lack integrity. Let's start with Putin.

A lot of nonsense gets talked about this man. He is undoubtedly a bastard, but no one ever got a job with the Soviet Union's not-so-secret police, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (a bit of a mouthful - we know them as the KGB) by being a nice guy. But I have heard respected American commentators describe Putin as 'the ex-head of the KGB'. He was no such thing.

Putin was a middle-ranking KGB officer who was posted to Germany early in his career and wanted to go to Berlin for the nightlife. Instead, he was posted to Dresden, a city so boring that the British tried to bomb it off the map in World War 2. He never got over the perceived snub, and has been working out his resentment ever since. Never underestimate a frustrated man who has even a tiny bit of power.

His invasion of Ukraine is being presented as some sort of European power grab. Again, this is nonsense on stilts. He wants Ukraine because he feels it is a part of Russia, the same reason China wants Taiwan, exactly the same reason, in fact, and the Chinese will be watching the action in Europe with their usual inscrutable interest. Putin doesn't want Finland or Byelorussia or Azerbaijan, and the idea that the British Army is somehow defending the UK from this new Peter the Great is just absurd.

So, why is General Sanders so exercised about the possibility of land war? Essentially, because the EU wants him to be. The fact that the European Union wants an EU army is no secret. The fly in the ointment is that the British Army - still regarded as the best troops on the planet - left the bloc along with the Brexit vote. So, they are being called in not to protect London against Putin's tanks - which would require a longer haul than even Napoleon made in the opposite direction - but as a sign that Britain will do the EU's bidding. There is another aspect to this, and a seriously unsavoury one.

War, as the song goes. What is it good for? Well, two answers spring immediately to mind. Firstly, profits for arms manufacturers, always a motive force behind war. Secondly, a bloody good war deflects and distracts the public's attention from the decline and fall of the British empire.

Putin is not Hitler. Adolf wanted lebensraum for the German people, room to live, who he felt to be superior to all other races. It's all in the book My Struggle, the accepted English translation of Mein Kampf. This book, incidentally, is a long read - and don't read it on the beach - but worth your time if only as a study in psychosis.

Putin does not want this for Russia, which is the largest country on the planet, covering 11% of the earth's land mass. He wants what he thinks is his. Why should Britain be so concerned? The British Army couldn't care less about Eritrea, where essentially the same thing is happening.

If there is land war in Europe, and Putin has to be stopped, why do the British have to rush over from the farthest point West from Vladivostok before Ireland, next stop being the USA? I suppose there is one answer. You can't exactly rely on Sweden to do it.

There's a killer on the road (from Mexico)

 

A pharmacist, earlier today

Despite the horrors the media-junkie (such as myself) finds every day, it takes a lot to shock me. I seem to have developed a second immune system which inures me to some of the stories that used to make my head reel and my stomach retch. It could just be that it is a sort of psychical adjunct to my ordinary immune system (pleasingly robust as it has been over the years) and designed to keep one's blood pressure down. But I read, and heard, something this last week that staggered me.

It concerned the number one killer of people aged 18 to 45 in the USA. My immediate suspects were obvious. Auto accidents? Firearms? Suicide? If it is anything like the UK, even domestic mishaps could have a chance at top slot. You would be surprised at the amount of people who die falling off ladders in the kitchen or attempting to do their own re-wiring. But is was none of the above.

It's Fentanyl overdose.

Note I don't write 'drug overdose'. This is specifically the drug Fentanyl, although street drugs are usually the delivery system of death.

Fentanyl was synthetically produced in the 1970s and originally designed as an anaesthetic for use during surgery. Now, it is both the ultimate street drug as well as being the angel of death for many as lungs collapse and hearts stop.

Fentanyl is increasingly being found in every street drug from cocaine to heroin to Xanax, and overdoses have quadrupled in the last two years.

The first question here has to do with basic business economics. Now, I am no businessman and can barely haggle for mangoes at the local Feria, but even I can see that killing your customer base is perhaps not a four-square business model. But, hey, when demand is high, piggy goes to market.

Fentanyl is shockingly powerful. The average coke addict would have to snort a hell of a lot to wind up in the morgue. With Fentanyl, a few grains will send you to the country from which no traveller ever returns. The government - always traditionally ready with a war on drugs - make this their top priority, right? Wrong.

In the past month, the White House has let us know that they are pushing for an Asian-Pacific museum, they have made a number of bathrooms on Capitol hill gender neutral, and Kamala Harris is being made some sort of online Tsar (Tsarina?) with a brief to stop cyber-bullying.

Harris, of course, was famously put in charge of the southern border between Texas and Mexico. She visited once, some quiet sleepy town about 800 miles from the hot-spots on the Rio Grande where thousands of illegal immigrants cross into the land of the free every day.

Many of them carrying Fentanyl.

The famous English politician Sir Enoch Powell once stated that the job of the politician was the prevention of avoidable evils. The only possible conclusion to draw from the fact that America's borders are Fentanyl portals is that they are quite happy with the death rate. Gender-neutral toilets in the West Wing are, I think we can all agree, more important than dead people dying from a drug which could be apprehended at the point of entry.

At what exact point will the American people realise that their government doesn't just want them subservient, in some cases they want them dead?

Shot, hung, or knighted

 

Lord Byron, earlier today

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one likes a mercenary except the government they are fighting for. The British mercenaries who fought in the Belgian Congo in the early to mid 1960s, for example, were widely despised at home. Fighting for your nation is honourable. Fighting for someone else's money is not.

However, a number of young British men went to fight in and for Ukraine when Putin invaded that country over three months ago. Far from being dismissed or dissuaded by the British government, however, they were encouraged.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss gave her blessing to young British men with a Flashman-style taste for swashbuckling adventure when the invasion first happened. She was warned that this implicit call to arms was both unethical and very probably illegal, but anyone wishing to virtue-signal at that time needed to look no further than the Ukraine, despite the fact that the country is a nasty and fascistic little regime. Putin is more than welcome to it.

Now, however, there is silence from the Foreign Office for the simple reason that some of these British guns for hire have been captured by the Russians and, rather than being given a comfortable jail cell in St. Petersburg, with a nice bunk and a warm samovar full of chai, they are going to be executed.

What the hell did they expect? As a matter of fact, pro-Putin Ukrainian separatists are going to the be the ones putting on the show trial before the two men are likely put up against a wall and shot. Putin is out-sourcing his death squads.

Putin is not a nice guy. Neither is Ukraine's Premier, Zelensky. If it were a sports game, you would want both sides to lose. But don't travel thousands of miles to fight for a country which is not yours and expect lenient treatment if you are stupid enough to fall into enemy hands. I don't imagine Putin has the Geneva Convention framed on the wall of his Kremlin office.

I feel no sympathy for these men, who really should have paid more attention to Lord Byron's lines on the subject.

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home

Let him combat for that of his neighbours.

Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,

And get knock'd on the head for his labours.

To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,

And is always as nobly requited.

Then battle for freedom wherever you can,

And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted.

Sorry gentleman but, in another age, Hunter S. Thompson did say, buy the ticket take the ride.

Crosstown traffic

 

The Mexican flag, which a lot of Californians

will have to get used to. Just not in the way that you think...

When the American government tells you that inflation is at 8.6%, take that with a pinch of salt. The Fed has changed its measurement of inflation on an absurd amount of occasions, each one designed to fool you into feelgood, or at least not feelbad. The calibration has altered something like 30 times in 4 decades.

The inflation rate for the average American, interested in buying staples and gasoline, could be up to twice as high. And this is leading to a migration which may come as some surprise given the current crisis on the Texan border and the direction in which the immigrants are arriving in record numbers.

Californians are beginning to leave their state for - wait for it - Mexico. The main reasons being given are the rising cost of living in the US, especially in high-tax California.

Apparently undeterred that in some Mexican towns it is not impossible that you will find the head of a slain drug cartel member in your trash-can, increasing numbers of Californians are financially downscaling by moving to Mexico. This is producing a bizarre situation in which, while thousands of Mexicans are wading across the Rio Grande towards Texas, Californians are passing them on the freeway overhead heading in the opposite direction.

I have said to anyone who is prepared to listen that property where I am (Costa Rica) might be worth some investment, as a lot of gringos will be fleeing when the US inflation rate hits that of Zimbabwe, Venezuela, or The Weimar Republic.

The Biden administration can try to divert your attention from climbing prices (which are also now hitting Latin America, so it won't be the low-rent Shangri-La it used to be), but there comes a time when a family has to relocate, one of the founding traditions of the USA. Once the Fed hikes rates - an inevitability - it will hammer the housing market (as well as pricing a lot of Mexicans out of their properties, although landlords will prosper when the first wave of gringos arrives) and as increasing immigration hobbles wages in the USA, it may be better to start those Spanish lessons now.

One word of warning. If you do take the high road to Acapulco, it might be best to take some rosary beads and a Kevlar jacket.

I am the law

 

A judge considering British immigration police, earlier today

The British government has been prevented, literally at the last minute, from removing illegal immigrants to the African nation of Rwanda for the processing of their asylum applications. Despite British judges at the The Royal Courts of Justice (Britain's supreme court) ruling the first flight legal, this ruling was overturned by judges at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.

I know what you're thinking. What about Brexit? Well, that was only the European Union (EU). The union remains firmly tethered to the ECHR, and these two entities are two sides of the same malevolent coin.

This seems embarrassing for the government of Boris Johnson, but it is all smoke and mirrors. The anarcho-tyrannists of the British deep state want more immigration, as illegal as possible, because they know they are managing decline and need as many distractions as they can conjure up. This will keep the media busy for days while everyone forgets about Johnson's recent scandals and his unconvincing 'victory' in a Parliamentary vote of no confidence (a sort of equivalent of an American recall vote, but with the voting limited to party members).

Illegal immigrants, almost all Muslim men of fighting age, continue to pour into Britain. The country's health services are already under strain after COVID-19, none of these men are tested and none have passports (they throw them into the English Channel from the boats they arrive in). They are immediately given money and telephones, then housed in good hotels.

The ECHR may still be the law, but how long before the British people decide they have had enough and take the law into their own hands?

Power to or from the people?

 

Aristotle discussing democracy earlier today

The Congressional hearings concerning the laughably named 'insurrection' in Washington on January 6, 2021 (which have been compared to Pearl Harbour, 9/11, and the American Civil War by deranged Democrats) have featured one word probably used as much as the definite article. This 'attack', we are told by the Pelosi-Schumer political street gang, are 'an attack on democracy'.

Democracy. If I have heard that word once on the American media in the last week, I have heard it a thousand times. I wonder if these chuckleheads know the provenance of the word.

Like so many terms which still make actual sense, it is an Ancient Greek portmanteau word. 'Demos' means 'the people', 'kratos' means 'power'. Democracy implies that power resides with the people. Increasingly, in America and across the West, this is coming to mean power to the right people, the ones who think - and vote - in approved ways,.

It is quite clear that the Democrats (who despise America) are using the Jan 6 detainees as fall guys and gals. Many are still in jail, while the BLM rioters who burned down police stations and actually killed people during the rioting they fomented were mostly released quietly when the media had stopped looking, which was pretty quickly.

The Democrats are even called 'the Democrats', but more and more they wish to remove both First and Second Amendment rights. With every day that passes, power is being drained from ordinary Americans (at least, the ones who have voted the wrong way) like blood from a vampire's victim. I know I bang this drum a lot, but this cannot end well, and there will be blood.

If people fail to hold on to the reins of their nations, those horses will become an increasing menace to their well-being. When ordinary, conservative Americans have no guns and no free speech, it will be much, much too late.

It is time for real Democrats to take control of the chariot.

America. Home of the knave?

Peter Navarro. Clap 'im in irons, Mr. Christian!

Something strange is happening in the USA. This country, the first experiment in democracy in the world and by far the most successful, is turning in on itself and eating not just its young, but its founding principles of freedom, liberty, and a country founded on constitutional rights.

In the last week, the January 6th committee hearings, the FBI's purging of conservative elements in its ranks, and the extraordinary arrest of economist and ex-Trump advisor Peter Navarro, have served only to confirm that a deep-state putsch has gone from warm to hot.

Navarro lives more or less opposite the offices of the FBI. When he was arrested for failing to respond to a subpoena to attend the Jan 6 hearings concerning the events which are laughably termed 'an insurrection', a deliberate spectacle was made of his arrest. The Feds could have strolled across the street, had a coffee with Navarro, and invited him to come over for a chat. He is hardly going to go on the lam. Instead, they trussed him in handcuffs and leg-irons - they really did - in a public place. The Left are getting serious now. Look up the French phrase from the Revolution of 1789, pour encourager les autres, and all will be revealed. The deep state is starting to show conservatives what it can and will do.

America is moving inexorably to a civil war. They won't be wearing grey or blue this time, but suits and wing-tips and dark glasses.

At what point did the American political class begin to hate the country whose libertarian system put them where they are? It is happening in Europe too, and as mentioned in yesterday's episode, those who resist this type of self harm, and express love of country and people instead of the new agenda of anarcho-tyranny, are despised by the various deep states operating across the globalist West.

If they are not trying to foment American Civil War 2.0, then as we used to say in England, I'm a Dutchman. There is a fractious feeling about the USA at the moment. There has been an accelerant poured on the bonfire over the last two years - partly hidden behind the smokescreen of COVID, an entirely manufactured crisis - and it is not hard to see what the play is.

If the American Left were hell-bent on destroying the country that used to lead the world, you know, like the conspiracy theorists claim, what would they be doing any differently?

If the breakdown comes - or rather when - there will be an overload and the wild animals will be let into the arena to face the gladiators. I don't believe the US deep state realises how many people are out there packing heat and prepared to defend the ranch. Let a thousand Ruby Ridges bloom...

Be very careful, O American Left. You may despise your country like some poor self-harming gal cutting her own arms, but you could well be kicking a hornets' nest.

And the Pelosis and the Schumers and the Joy Reids may find out that they are about to reap the whirlwind.