Today was brighter. Lots of blue sky. I walked up to the top of my hill and looked out to sea. The land changes slowly. We are nothing but a flicker. The timescale is too enormous. But nature is still wonderful. There was some bird song and the sound of a woodpecker. It’s the first day of Spring.
I doubt if it feels much like Spring down in the car parks and bunkers in Ukraine though!! Putin is doing the usual tyrant’s approach – targeting women and children – indiscriminate bombing of residential areas. He practised it in Syria!!. One minute these are Russian brothers and sisters requiring liberation from a fascist Western-leaning government, the next they are evil vermin to be exterminated.
The paranoid dictator is threatening mutual destruction in a self-generated nuclear holocaust!!
Like with the Ukraine, I think the majority of Russians would prefer a close relationship with the West to life under this dictatorship. You can always judge a society by the level of inequality and the way the ruling class treats its people. Nearly all societies are poorly organised. They nearly all have a wealthy elite exploiting the rest, but Russia must be one of the worst. It’s ironic. The Russian people had a revolution to solve the grotesque inequality. Didn’t work did it? The Russian secret police crackdown. Nobody is free. The right to protest. The right to have a say. This is a far cry from a communist system – it has become tyrannical fascism. This supposedly communist system hasn’t created greater equality. The new elite live in opulence and the people live in poverty. Putin has his palace and billions stashed away for a rainy day. The Russian people live in hovels. I think it’s time for another revolution!!
We need one here too. Our inequality is far too great. Ordinary people might not live in quite the squalor they do in Russia but the profiteers are raking it in!!
Why the hell can’t we ever create a fair society? Why do we always end up with a bunch of nasty, cruel, heartless profiteers taking over and a political class bending over backwards to support them?
We need a revolution and a fair distribution of wealth!!
Workers of the world unite!! Drive out the profiteers.
Well today I’ve been reading (finished Philip Roths I Married A Communist and just started Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots) and listened to some Roy Harper – Death Or Glory. Good enough.
Meanwhile, out in Coronaland, Johnson is jumping for joy!! There is war!! It’s wonderful!! A Godsend!! One minute he’s fighting for his political life because he is a lying, law-breaking, incompetent clown, and everything looks dire. The media has turned on him. The opposition is going for the jugular. Partygate is looking like the end of his useless career. The public are steaming. We’re all waiting for Sue Gray and the Met. Everyone is calling for his resignation. Johnson’s end is nigh!! The next minute Putin invades Ukraine and the heat’s off. We’re in a war situation. Johnson can play at being Churchill again. The focus has changed. The public are now furious with Putin. Johnson is forgotten. Putin has even threatened us with nuclear missiles. Johnson is beside himself with joy. The opposition can’t even attack him! In war we all have to come together. Even Blackford can’t call him the liar that he is. By the time this all blows over (or up!!) it will all be forgotten and our lying clown will not only survive but will likely get himself re-elected for another term, another opportunity to line his pockets and rob everyone.
How strange the world is.
So, today, in our new freedom, where pandemics don’t exist and our clown does not even have to talk about them, I noticed that there were 82,113 new cases yesterday with another 137 deaths. Not that anybody seemed bothered anymore. The pandemic is over!!
Hancock was not really breaking rules at all. It was fine. He was in love with his mistress!! You can break rules if you are in love!
I wonder if Johnson with use the same excuse??? ‘I had a load of parties, not because we are the important people for whom rules don’t apply as they do for the little people, but because I was in love!’
Then Putin could do the same!! ‘I attacked the Ukraine and am killing hundreds of women and children because I am in love!!’
No laws apply when you are in love!! I must remember that!!
Mind you, those shop owners who got fined £35,000 for keeping their shop open while Johnson was partying are not happy. They are appealing!! They should have told the police that it was alright – they were in love!! Fools!! Didn’t they know they were the little people?? It’s only the important people who can do as they like!! As sure as Johnson will get off with a slap on the wrist for becoming the first criminal to inhabit Number 10, they will not get off!!
Stay safe!! What to do with your 4-minute warning??? Pour a glass of beer, sit back and watch the sky light up in a magnificent display of fireworks signalling the end of the monkey experiment, a clean canvas and an opportunity for nature to give the whales a go!! They at least have bigger brains than us and like music!! Maybe…………..
Opher, the UK didn’t report COVID data at all this last Saturday and Sunday. Your 82,113 needs to be divided by 3 to give a fair picture. It looks as if they have “stood down” the people who were doing the reporting at week-ends. Other countries have done the same – Spain and Sweden, for example, haven’t reported cases at the week-ends for months. They think it’s all over!
But you need to get your mind in gear on fascism and communism – which, in reality, are/were almost exactly the same. Both were collectivist, with no concern at all for the individual. Both exalted elites at the expense of everyone else. Both had no concern for truth. Both were aggressive towards anyone who disagreed with them. The church of the middle ages, and BoJo and its kind today, are not much different.
And even more, you need to think about equality versus justice. But that’s a homily for another day.
As to nuclear missiles, who will Putin use them against? The Ukrainians? He already has their capital and largest city. Someone else? Who would he pick? I suspect that he’s trying to trigger the US establishment into an indiscretion. Biden is senile, but – I hope – not so senile as to fall for the trick.
Lol Neil. That was the figure up on the site. Most probably complete bollocks because I think all data is crap now. There is little testing, no reporting and hence no data.
While I would agree that both fascism and communism have ended up as the same tyrannical end product they are not the same. If communism had not been taken over by totalitarian leaders and transformed into fascism it might have worked differently. I wonder if the Mensheviks had taken control in Russia we might not have had a democratic form of communism creating a much fairer society. We’ll never know.
Perhaps the way forward is a socialist approach with much more worker participation in ownership of production? Trade unions on the board? Partnership not exploitation? Sharing of profits? A tax system that creates more equality?
Equality, to my mind, is not all people being the same, it is all people being of equal worth and treated fairly. A healthy society is one in which there is not a massive discrepancy between those at the top and those at the bottom – not one where everyone is the same.
Opher – Fraught days, dangerous times, in a European war that could see mass destruction carried out across Ukraine and possibly other nations as well, and all whilst the world is held under potential threat of a murderous mushroom cloud. Will NATO stand-by and do nothing as Putin flattens Kyiv and subjugates the Ukrainian people? It’s conceivable that direct NATO involvement in Ukraine may come to pass…the forty-mile armored column approaching Kyiv might suggest such involvement will be sooner rather than later. I hope for peace.
I can see social revolution taking place in the not-so-distant future in Russia, but quite how that would end is anyone’s guess. Regards the U.K…certainly we need to change our political system, from FPTP to proportional representation, to make it fundamentally transparent and fully accountable to the electorate, whilst simultaneously redistributing wealth to achieve a better semblance of equality. The removal of all private wealth from politics is long-overdue.
Lastly, to cap off a disgruntled grey day, I see MP’s have awarded themselves a 2.7% pay rise! For doing what exactly? I can only assume a pay-rise is compensation for the money some of them will miss from sanctioned Russian friends.
I think that a NATO intervention might well be necessary!! The threat of nuclear war should be no deterrent for doing what is right. Perhaps this is the time to grip the blade??
The Russian people might just rise up and solve it!!
2.7% huh – they sneaked that through!! And teachers and nurses????