Stay Away From the Freakshow

Dog bites man is not news: man bites dog is.

That defines news-as-freak show.

Right-wing freaks tend to be scary. They have short hair and boots. Or they are big and fat and coarse. They have very firm beliefs about who this country belongs to and express those beliefs in simple, Anglo-Saxon, terms. Even if they are suave, they come across as harsh and unsympathetic. It is very difficult to express right-wing ideas in a way that gains public support.

Left wing freaks are more friendly. They are victims. They are often female. If male, they are soft and squidgy. They want to give shelter and welfare to everyone. They want Equality. They want to be nice to people from other countries they have never met and will never live near. They look helpless and sympathetic in photographs, and better still, some of them look sexy. They REALLY BELIEVE. They are sincere. And somehow they aren’t threatening. They espouse beliefs that many of us think we should have if we were Good People.

So the left-wing freaks get the media coverage.

So people with real political agendas, with real consequences for taxation and quality of life, use the left-wing freaks to front their message. Someone organises those marches. Someone decides who gets hit by #MeToo. Someone chooses the targets for the SJW Twitter Army. Someone arranges the caravans from South America through Mexico. It’s not the same someone, and those different someones might not know each other. Someone else, many someone else’s, fund them. For reasons best known to themselves.

The same way that certain activist groups look around their communities for men who are psychiatrically-troubled and can be manipulated into driving a truck along the promenade at Nice. Or blowing themselves up in a nightclub. The activists can hide behind the man’s mental illness. The Police will go no further. MI5 will, but the public won’t see that, so the commentators say nothing is being done.

The point is, the mentally-ill truck driver and the left-wing marching protestors are fronts. Useful idiots. The issues the useful idiots promote aren’t the real issues, but are there to achieve other ends.

The freak-show isn’t real. What’s real is what’s behind the freak-show. If there is anything behind it except mislead, deluded rich people donating money to a cause that only exists to provide its organisers with salaries and grants. Sometimes, that’s all there is: a bunch of charities and activist groups whose first purpose is fundraising so they can meet the payroll.

Stop paying attention to the media coverage of the freaks, or of the latest faded forty-something to take down a man who got rich by luck, and is now going to be less rich because he’s dumb as rocks about women, or of the latest outrage faked up by a charity that has a big grant up for renewal.

You’re smart, you’re media-savvy. You know when it’s fake.

It’s all fake. Right now. Even more than it ever was. Lord Rothermere said it, Randolph Hearst said it: the news is what somebody doesn’t want the public to know, all the rest is advertising. Editors know this, and all they publish is advertising. Do you really think scandals about MPs’ expenses and rich people’s tax arrangements are news? These are stories that suit the Liberal-Elite Narrative. Advertising for Good Think.

Read a good book. Watch a black-and-white movie. Take a walk. Clean your kitchen.

You’re not disengaging.

Because you never were engaged in the first place.

Not through the media.

Wise Words Hard To Live By

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Rather than crazy people, ugly people, second- and third-rate pop culture, why there are so many Quisling politicians who want to sell the English people into slavery to Brussels in return for avoiding some customs forms, why and how the so-called 'liberal elites' hate ordinary people, and all that other stuff. Put the headphones on, take out a book or an iPad with a keyboard and shut out the world.

Sunset in November 2018 over my Air Park.

The EU's Agreement Rejected 432-202

Just so you know what really happened. The EU will not back down on the backstop, and 432 MPs have decided they don't trust the EU not to exploit it. So nothing will change. But the carefully-constructed chaos will continue right up until 23:00 29 March 2019. So everyone can say they worked hard right up to the last moment to avoid a hard Brexit, but in the end, the date had been set, and the EU would not back down, so...

Green Water, The Barbican

It Could Be The South of France, The Barbican

Well, I think it looks like some French building projects, from this angle.

The Green Tree, The City

Taken last year when every day was hot and the sky was clear blue.

That Gatwick Drone Scam In 10 Points

1. £2.9bn deal for Vinci SA to buy a 50.01% share in Gatwick airport being discussed in private

2. One dumb report about maybe a drone from clueless members of the public, none of whom have been named or even described

2a. If it had been a pilot, ground controller or some other authoritative source, we would have seen them on TV every half-hour

3. If it is a drone and an aircraft strikes it, Gatwick will be hit with CAA enquiries, insurance claims, terrible publicity if there are any dead or injured people, along with attendant civil suits, for the next five to ten years

4. And the airport will be closed for at least thirty-six hours while they clear up the mess

5. At this point the decision is a no-brainer, because no-one wants to take any risks

6. Bring on Gatwick’s PR department / agency. You know they’ve got one, right? You know that PR departments’ job is to fill the press with BS that suits their company / client?

6a. “I know,” says Rebecca (25) in PR, “let’s say it’s a drone. The public hates drones, and only creepy weirdos use them.”

6b. PR Director calls the CEO and says “We’re going to say it’s a drone.”

6c. CEO asks “Is it a drone?”

6d. PR Director says “Who cares? It’s the right story. The public hates drones, and only creepy weirdos use them.”

6e. CEO says “Okay. Sounds good to me. We cannot screw up the thing we’re talking to the guys about, until the guys sign the thing.”

7. The media are briefed by Gatwick’s PR department and does what it is supposed to do: repeat what corporate PR departments say.

8. Absolutely NOBODY in the British public believes it, because...

8a. No authoritative witness, not even “Sharon Williams, 27, Schoolteacher from Penzance, said…"

8b. No video - there’s always video. Ten seconds of a dot does not count.

8c. Absolute unanimity in the media, which only happens when they are all singing from the corporate hymn-sheet

8d. Only creepy weirdos use drones, and creepy weirdos don’t do things like fly drones over airports because they might be creepy but they aren’t dumb

8e. Everyone knows drones have to be line-of-sight to the operator unless it’s a military drone, and those are very large and not subject to vague reports

9. On Monday, the deal goes through.

10. On Tuesday the story vanishes.

Things that make you go "Mmmmmmmm"