Sweden’s Rebels Against Cashless Society Push: “We Have No Weapon Fight Back…If Putin Invades”

This omnibus page is about documenting the global elite’s “War On Cash” (yes that is a bit over dramatic and click – baity, but we have to compete for attention,) which is not about making life better for the masses as we are told it is, but about enabling government agencies to increase their ability to extend surveillance of all our activities. One of the topic we have previously looked at several times is the rapid rise of Sweden’s cashless society, where a natuarally conformist mindset among the people has made them all too ready to accept  that cashless was the progressive, liberal way forward and cooperate with the authoritarian left wing  government’s demands for ever greater control over  people’s money and private lives. The myth that digital is safer. combined with the ‘ease-of-use’ narrative has left many stores no longer accepting cash at all  and even sparked anxiety among Swedish authorities  that:

“If this development with cash disappearing happens too fast, it can be difficult to maintain the infrastructure” for handling cash.“

Last year, the amount of cash in circulation in Sweden dropped to the lowest level since 1990 and is more than 40 percent below its 2007 peak. The declines in 2016 and 2017 were the biggest on record.

But the pace at which cash is vanishing has authorities worried.

“One may get into a negative spiral which can threaten the cash infrastructure,” Mats Dillen, the head of the parliamentary review, said.

“It’s those types of issues we are looking more closely at.”

Riksbank Governor Stefan Ingves has said Sweden should consider forcing banks to provide cash to customers. It seems that a few people at least are waking up to how easy it is for tech – savvy crooks to steal or scam money form inexpert users of online systems. Surprisingly it is the left that are showing most convern, The Guardian reports, a small but growing number of Swedes anxious about their country’s rush to embrace a cash-free society.

While many large western nations have that nagging doubt in the back of their mind that government may not be all-virtuous, naive, gullible, brainwashed  Swedes – until now – have not…

“The Swedish government is a rather nice one, we have been lucky enough to have mostly nice ones for the past 100 years,” says Christian Engström, a former MEP for the Pirate Party and an early opponent of the cashless economy.

“In other countries there is much more awareness that you cannot trust the government all the time. In Sweden it is hard to get people mobilised.”

…but there are signs this might be changing. Following discussions by the country’s central bank, concerns about a cash-free society have emerged into the mainstream, says Björn Eriksson, 72, a former national police commissioner and the leader of a group called the Cash Rebellion, or Kontantupproret.

The Guardian report continues, “until now, Kontantupproret has been dismissed as the voice of the elderly and the technologically backward, Eriksson says.”

“When you have a fully digital system you have no weapon to defend yourself if someone turns it off,” he says.

“If Putin invades Gotland [Sweden’s largest island] it will be enough for him to turn off the payments system. No other country would even think about taking these sorts of risks, they would demand some sort of analogue system.”

In this sense, Sweden is far from its famous concept of lagom – “just the right amount” – but instead is “100% extreme”, Eriksson says, by investing so much faith in the banks.

“This is a political question. We are leaving these decisions to four major banks who form a monopoly in Sweden.”

The best case scenario is that we are not as secure as we think, Mattias Skarec, 29, a digital security consultant, says – the worst is that IT infrastructure is systemically vulnerable.

“We are lucky that the people who know how to hack into them are on the good side, for now,” he says. “But we don’t know how things will progress. It’s not that easy to attack devices today, but maybe it will become easier to do so in the future.”

The Pirate Party – which made its name in Sweden for its opposition to state and private sector surveillance – welcomes a higher political profile for these issues, according to The Guardian. Look at Ireland, Christian Engström says, where abortion is illegal. It is much easier for authorities to identify Irish women who have had an abortion if the state can track all digital financial transactions, he says. And while Sweden’s government might be relatively benign, a quick look at Europe suggests there is no guarantee how things might develop in the future.

“If you have control of the servers belonging to Visa or MasterCard, you have control of Sweden,” Engström says.

“In the meantime, we will have to keep giving our money to the banks, and hope they don’t go bankrupt – or bananas.”

Bananas indeed. And there you have our reasons for having always opposed the idea that cashless is the way forward. Like most ‘progressive’ ideas the policy is politically motivated and has the aim of curtailing individual freedom and extending government control. Consider this: a few years ago, with Quantitative Easing (QE) having failed to lift the western economies out of the doldrums following the 2008 crisis, bankers, politicians and economists seriously discussed the idea of levying a charge on savings and deposits held by banks for individuals.

The result, in those nations most at risk, was a rush to withdraw savings. It was after that exercise the push to go cashless intensified. Why? Simples: if the banks hold all your wealth in digital form, you can’t withdraw it and stash it under the floorboards, in the mattress or buy jewellery and valuables to protect your wealth.

Trump catches attention of CFR, Bilderberg, Trilateral

Donald Trump is portrayed as a clown by mainstream media and his combover is the silliest I have ever seen. Still, he’s a billionaie so I don’t suppose he gives a flying fuck what The Daily Stirrer thinks of him. Not that we think he is all bad, anyone who attacks Obama’s global naziism trade deals, TTIP and TPP mush have some good points.

Greece draws up drachma plans, prepares to miss IMF payment
Greece is preparing plans to nationalise the country’s banking system and introduce a parallel coupon currency so that citizens can carry on their day to day activities in the event of the Eurozone taking steps to defuse the simmering debt crisis. Sources in the governing Syriza party said the government may be forced to take the unprecedented and high risk step of missing a payment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as early as next week.

New Global Crisis Imminent, New Geneva Report Warns
The Geneva Report refers to a “poisonous combination of high and rising global debt and slowing nominal GDP [gross domestic product], driven by both slowing real growth and falling inflation”. The total burden of world debt, private and public, has risen from 160 per cent of national income in 2001 to almost 200 per cent after the crisis struck in 2009 and 215 per cent in 2013. “Contrary to widely held beliefs, the world has not yet begun to delever and the global debt to GDP ratio is still growing, breaking new highs,” the report said.

Cashless Society – The Resistance Begins Here
A seaside market town in Norfolk may be less than 100 miles from the world’s financial capital, London, , it may be the commercial centre of West Norfolk’ as the town website boasts, it may be home to 45,000 people — but there, unlike in London, cash is king.

Establishment Pushing ‘Cashless Society’ to Control Humanity
The global establishment is increasingly pushing the notion of what it calls a “cashless society” — a world in which all payments and transactions would be conducted electronically, creating a permanent record for governments to inspect and track at will.Multiple governments from Africa and Asia to Europe and …

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Baltic Dry Index Hits All Time Low – Don’t Panic
Is a Global Wide Cash Ban Coming?
The War On Cash Intensifies In Response To Trump and Brexit
Game On: Bloomberg Editorial Calls For An End To Cash
Banning Cash Will Stop Terrorism (and end war, poverty, disease and bad smells) says Bill Gates

Washington Signals Fears Over Dollar
Globalist Bankers Make Plans To Rob Your Bank Account
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Living Within The Conspiracy
New World Order
Internet Technology
Science and Technology
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Ending the Ownership of Money

It must be common knowledge by now that some of the world’s most economically powerful nations are insolvent due to the burden of sovereign debt. These economies are held together through by the faith of citizens and businesses in the currency. If that faith evaporates, the leading economies will crash as voters realise the only thing underwriting the economy is debt.

While lefties, tech – heads and science – heads might get upset, people who live in the real world should consider the implications of this for privacy (a human right) and self determination (another human right). Funny how those who screech loudest about human rights are only interested in the rights of minorities and terrorists,

Read more on how the withdrawal of cash will affect you in our Cashless Society omnibus page …

Ending the Ownership of Money

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War On Cash Gathers Momentum – Germany Unveils Cash Controls
On Monday (1 February, 2016) just two days ago, Bloomberg called on the central banks of the world to “bring on a cashless future” in an Op-Ed that calls notes and coins “dirty, dangerous, unwieldy, and expensive.”
We can imagine it would be quite easy to harm someone by firing large coins at them from a gun and terrorists could probably stuff an improvised explosive device with small coins rather than nails or nuts and bolts. And if …

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The Left Attack Free Speech And Thought

The American left is in a feeding frenzy, the neo – Nazi liberals feel they are on a roll, having cheered on their ex-rent-boy President as yet again he shat on the constitution by trashing states’ rights to railroad compulsory acceptance of homosexual marriage through the Supreme Court.

Our local left wing extremists are doing their best to join in of course, but their efforts are only fuelling support for nationalist / tradionalist movements in Europe. Recall the way the same irrelevant law was rammed through the UK Parliament by pink conservative David Cameron when he had no electoral mandate for such a move.

Across the pond, where the new fascists have no coherent opposition, in an ecstasy of hate they are about to rewrite history and abolish every tradition that is an obstacle to the rootless, alien society based on intolerant political correctness that they have dreamed of building.

The epitome of everything they detest and fear and thus the latest target of their politics of hate is currently the Confederate Flag, so that is now the object of a campaign so fanatical and irrational as to seem barely sane.

In totalitarian regimes — a.k.a. police states — where conformity and compliance are enforced by the muzzle of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of acceptable language appear well-intentioned, discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and prejudice, the end result is the same: authoritarianism, intolerance and indoctrination.

Political correctness, fascism disguised as tolerance, civility and love, in reality amounts to the suppression of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

As a society, we’ve become fearfully polite, careful to avoid offense, and largely unwilling to be labeled intolerant, hateful, closed-minded, racist, homophobic, or any of the other toxic labels that carry a badge of shame today.

The result is a nation where people no longer feel free to say what they really think, at least if it runs counter to the prevailing dogma of the ruling elite. Intolerance of free speech and free thought is the liberalism of our day.

For those “haters” who dare to voice a different opinion, retribution is swift: they will be shamed, shouted down, silenced, censored, vilified, marginalised and generally relegated to the status of mean-spirited right – wing nut jobs and bullies who are guilty of various “thought crimes.”

We have entered a new age where, as commentator Mark Steyn notes, “we have to tiptoe around on ever thinner eggshells” and “the forces of ‘tolerance’ are intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.”

In such a climate of intolerance, there can be no freedom speech, expression or thought. But it isn’t as if nobody warned us what was coming …

“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it…. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughcrime literally impossible because there will be no words with which to express it.”

“The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free,” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts….”

(George Orwell, 1984)

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Aspergers Egg Hunt

It’s easter, and as usual the breast beating do gooders in society are going out of their way to ensure everybody can join in the fun.

In our caring, sharing, inclusive society this means changing the way the tradition egg hunts that have been part of the celebrations for the festival of pagan goddess Ostara, need to be changed a little. For example, a special kind of egg hunt has to be organised for people afficted with autistic spectrum disorders.

Ever resourceful however, civic leaders are on the case.

HAPPY EASTER

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Google Plans Artificial Intelligence To Kill Human Jobs

(Picture credit: ibiblio.com)

Artificial intelligence, far from being a boon to humanity might easily lead to mass unemployment and social breakdown if computers continue in extending their capacity to replace humans in jobs, experts warned days after it emerged that Google had beaten competitors to buy a firm specialising in this kind of technology.

Dr Stuart Armstrong, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, issued his warning after news that Google had paid £400m for the British artificial intelligence firm DeepMind was revealed.

While Dr. Armstrong welcomed the internet search and advertizing giant’s decision to set up an ethics board to supervise the development and application of artificial intelligence, saying that such advances in technology carried a number of risks. Armstrong said computers had the potential to take over people’s jobs at a faster rate than new roles could be created. He cited logistics and administration as professions that were particularly vulnerable to the development of artificial intelligence.

Machines have already largely replaced humans in manufacturing while more and more sales functions are being carried out online. Only a few years after community High Streets filled with empty shops, now office developments are full of empty call centres. Dr. Armstrong also warned about the implications for uncontrolled mass surveillance if computers were taught to recognise human faces. “There’s a variety of short term risks for artificial intelligence, everyone knows about the autonomous drones”, he added.

Such concerns are often swept aside by “computer scientists” and media “experts” who are really just nerds so besotted with technology they hail every advance as a major step forward for humanity and never pause to consider that there might be a downside.

Some studies carried out by social scientists however have been looking into which jobs are the most vulnerable and there’s quite a lot of them in logistics, administration, insurance underwriting but ultimately a huge swathe of jobs are potentially vulnerable to improved artificial intelligence.” The Daily Stirrer has previously reported in this in ‘Will Humans become Redundant In Your Lifetime‘.

Such concerns have been reiterated by Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, who commented: “I think it is a very good thing that Google has set up this ethics board and I think there certainly are some short term issues that we all need to be talking about. “It’s very difficult to predict and that is of course a concern but in the past when we’ve developed new kinds of technologies then often they have created jobs at the same time as taking them over but it certainly is something we ought to be discussing.”

But will the nerds and the media wannabes allow discussion of what ought to be discussed? There’s an old adage that goes, “If you don’t use it you’ll lose it.” With a constant stream of propaganda from technology companies, academics and politicians brainwashing impressionable people into believing computers should be left to do the thinking because they are better at it than us, what will happen to our intelligence if we let computers do everything for us?

As computers become more intelligent while humans dumb down, they’ll stop being our slaves and become our competitors or worse. The race will be on to stay more intelligent than the machines and parents will have to select the right genes for their kids so that they stay ahead. Slaves to the machines, what a dystopian future we will be handing to future generations. We’re innovating ourselves into oblivion.

The DeepMind company was set up in 2011 by neuroscientist and former chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, along with partners Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. The company specialises in intellectual property, namely algorithms and machine learning techniques for simulation, e-commerce and games. Phew, games; that’s a relief, I was beginning to think these people were a serious business.

Like Google’s other recent acquisition Nest, a major player in developing The Internet Of Things we are told although while they talk about developing intelligent fridges, microwave ovens and flat screen television their product portfolio to date is a thermostat which does exactly what analogue thermostats have done for over a century. Still while the nerds dream of the day when algorithms rule the world, they are not doing any real damage like developing new weapons of mass destruction for tyrants and war criminals to play with.

Deep Mind is also working in an area called Deep Learning which involves machines being ‘taught’ (nerds love to humanize machines, they mean programmed) to recognise patterns in massive aglomerations of data so computers will begin to learn how to recognise mundane objects such as cars, food items and possibly human faces.

Google anticipate using DeepMind’s expertise to improve the functions of its current products such as the Google Glass, the project that will stick Google’s ads and ‘suggestions’ in your face and generally distract you while you are driving a car, rock climbing, skiing, making love to your Google robot fuck buddy having a dump. The company also plans to extend its current artificial intelligence work such as the development of self-driving cars (so yo can get jiggy with your robot friend and simultaneously respond to Google’s ads and ‘suggestions’, while being driven to work, to distraction or to insanity.

Mao Tse-tung once said it is better to employ 1000 men to dig a ditch than to use one JCB and one man to dig the ditch, because if you employ 1000 men you put 1000 chickens on the dinner table for 1000 families instead of 1 chicken on the JCB driver’s table, and a pile of money in the JCB owner’s bank – or something like that. The evil old tyrant was on the right track.]

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An audience member was quickly on his feet to point out that the figure was misleading as people in zero hours contracts and part time jobs are classed as ‘in work’ to get them off the statistics. The young man could also have reminded the programmes studio and television audience that people who are out of work for two years are reclassified as ‘not economically active’ and removed from the unemployment register. Even if these people would love to work and …

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Intrusive Technology, Evil control Freaks, The Dystiopianometer

Man = machine (picture blogspot commons)

Some time ago Boggart Blog invented the Orwell – Huxley – dick index to chart our descent into a dystopian society that lets the oligarchs live in splendour while the rest of us poor punters try to scrabble a living in the lawless, uncleaned streets. We have reported on progress towards the total surveillance society, the use of mass media in manipulating behaviour and the development of new and ever more intrusive technologies to report our activities and get instructions and “advice” from data centres right in our faces. The powers that be are ever encouraging their pet scientists to work on transhumanism, turning us all into cybodgs, part human, part machine, remotely controlled from a data centre.

And yet we are told the machines are our friends, and the intrusions into our privacy are for our benefit. as if we all need to be watched over by Machines of Loving Grace because after a few million years of evolution, most of which for our ancestors was a daily struggle for survival, we can’t cope alone.

The mistake many people make is to think technology is evil but cannot be resisted. Technology is dumb, you may have heard idiot scientists blethering about artificial intelligence but with a long career in computers behind me, talk of intelligent machines that think like humans only demonstrates an inability to yell the difference between science fiction and reality. Technology is not evil, but too often the people who control it are. On the good side however, we can resist them, all we have to do is think for ourselves and question everything.

In a secular sense evil is not about horned beasts that fart pure hydrogen sulphide. It is about total selfishness and lack of empathy with other humans and therefore a complete disregard for their needs, feelings and wellbeing.

It was always obvious to people working in information technology that while it offered the potential to improve life greatly, it could also easily become a gift wrapped opportunity for fascistic organisations to control information, suppress free speech and manipulate behaviour.

The extensive and intrusive surveillance carried on by the US, UK and EU governments demonstrated the ability of the sick individuals who control technology to create a Panopticon, a prison society with inmates (us) under total surveillance. all the usual suspects are still in the game of course, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon (who surely have developed artificial stupidity rather than artificial intelligence), Cisco, Apple, along with governments.

In the most recent example of corporate fascism via technology, a leading IBM official has resorted to threats and bullying and urged the world to “embrace” ubiquitous surveillance of the public through biometrics, because, he argues, it is too late to fight against it. (“Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated,” to quote Star Trek.)

“…trying to stop this would be fighting the wrong battle.” said Peter Waggett, Programme Leader at IBM’s Emerging Technology Group.

“We’re fighting the wrong battle when we ask should we stop people being observed. That is not going to be feasible. We need to understand how to use that data better,” Waggett added, speaking at a Nesta panel debate on biometrics.

“The information is out of the bottle already — we have to deal with the issues surrounding it now. Embrace the challenge of what we’ve got, embrace understanding it and focus on what we can do with that new data.” he argued, urging people to stop worrying about preventing such surveillance from becoming a societal norm.

“I’ve been working in biometrics for 20 years, and it’s reaching a tipping point where it’s going to be impossible not to understand where people are and what they are doing. Everything will be monitored.” Waggett continued.

A big worry to privacy campaigners, Waggett’s words are all the more scary given that he also heads the BSI British Standards Biometrics Committee – a group set up to develop formal standards in the area of biometrics and promoting their use by government and industry.

During the debate, Waggett referred specifically to depictions of biometric technology in dystopian films such as Minority Report, arguing that such technology is now already in place and unavoidable.

In the film, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s story, the public are under total surveillance from biometric technology linked to massive distributed databases. This snooping is as yet usually used for targeted advertising and the encouragement of mass consumption.

It will not stop there however. The corporate cartels want total control and will stop at nothing less, while the biggest flaw of the scientific (semi – autistic) mindset is it must always go further. Ethical constraints do not exist for such people and ” because we can” is always sufficient justification for doing anything.

The pressure to ID people everywhere they are and whatever they do is growing. Insane, neo Nazi ideas like “the internet of things,” (washing machines and fridges that tell the government about you) will progress it, Waggett noted arguing that people’s biometrics should be made more readily available, by which we must assume that IBM are pushing the idea of RFID chips implanted under our skin. The technology is more sophisticated but the social environment promises to be as oppressive as that of the Big brother regime envisaged in George Orwell’s novel 1984

“Privacy campaigners want to block facial recognition to stop people using invasive technology, but I think a lot of these things can be used for good.” Waggett added, without actually mentioning what good such developments can do.

IBM has recently made headlines because of its involvement in the NSA surveillance scandal. The company is being sued by shareholders for an alleged failure to disclose its involvement in the PRISM program for spying in citizens. The company denies it co-operated with security agencies and claims it has never given customer data or software keys to anyone.

Of course, the company’s shady past with regard to working directly with tyrannical governments to enslave and people is well known. ..

In this context, Waggett’s declarations on how we should all just stop worrying and learn to love the servitude that will be our lot in this Brave New World that is so like the one invented by Aldous Huxley will be greeted with contempt by those of us who are awake to how our world is being hijacked.

The needle of the Orwell Huxley Dick dystopianometer is creeping up.

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Oxbridge bias equals unfunny comedy says Bob Mortimer

Good to see Bob Mortimer of Reeves and Mortimer fame sticking the boot in the elitist lefties who run the media.

Speaking to The Times, the co presenter of Shooting Stars and partner of Vic Reeves said, “I sometimes wonder, with the Oxbridge comics, the broadcasters seem to say, at some point, now I trust you to do a documentary, you can be the voice for a maths show, or whatever. I don’t think we’re ever considered in that way.
“You meet them and some are funny, some of them not so funny. I find it hard to believe that they are […] the funniest people on Earth.”

He’s right, some are funny and other are Marcus Brigstock, an upper middle class twat whose idea of funny is to stand on stage and talk about how screwed up, neurotic and pathetically uninteresting upper middle class twats are. Does he think we don’t have eyes or ears of our own with which to discern these things? And don’t get me started on Lee and fucking Herring.

A big part of the problem is the modern education system. Everybody, no matter what their social background is to go to university and be indoctrinated with middle class, politically correct values. People who have not followed that route do not get a look in. And unfortunately the middle class are not funny, middle class people do angst and embarrassment, working class people do mockery, irony, litotes (even if they don’t know how to spell it), and ridicule, all based on sharp observation and native intelligence and all rooted in personal experience even if it not their own personal experience.

Want to learn to do comedy? Work on the factory floor for a while. With that experience under your belt and the lesson Mel Brooks delivered to those who try to impose politically correct boundaries on comedy, “You can’t do comedy without bad taste,” you are far better equipped to make people laugh than any molycoddled Oxbridge graduate. Delivering a sociology lecture is not going to play well to an audience in the Byker and Gallowgate Welders and Riveters Club.

It is universities that are killing entertainment just as they are killing music, film, theatre and literature. These things thrive on diversity you see and universities, in the way they promote a monoculture, are the graveyard of diversity. Oh they might make a big deal of having quotas for people with different coloured skin, different gentials, different sexual preferences and different silly hats but these people will all end up with the same accent and attitudes.

What I fear most is that if we let these fascists continue unchecked we will have imposed on us a society that has no room for eccentricity, individualism, for people whose careers and material ambitions take a back seat to grand passions for growing begonias, playing tuba in the local brass band or studying the life cycle of the two toed toad.

A big problem is that mainstream society accepts to readily what is imposed on us. The reason we are no longer likely to meet a man who spent his entire working life as a centre lathe turner but in his own time and of his own volition has become and expert on the works of John Milton.

The attempts of such a person to join the academic debate would be scoffed at now, not because of amateurish ineptitude but simply because such a person would not possess a bit of paper issued by a university to certify he had kised enough academic arses to qualify him as intelligent and so guarantee admission to the club. It’s a closed shop just as the aristocracy was a closed shop before The Black Death and various wars killed off enough of the fuckers to make room for new blood.

Most Television comedy or drama is made by organisations managed and staffed by middle class, university educated types, whether it is BBC in house productions or independent producers, and like the rest of the media, government and the professions, it is dominated by a certain element of British society almost totally drawn from upper middle class arts graduates. To these people, the hand wringers and bleeding hearts, bleaters about civil rights and equality, the working class masses are the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, absolute lowest of the low, even more despicable than the hated Tory toffs (Left wing intellectuallls have always despised the masses.)

And that sadly is the joke the posh boy and girl comedians will never get.

BTW your Boggart Bloggers are bohemians and two of us are old enough to remember what ‘liberal’ really means. We defy you to put us into any narrow class culture.

The Leader

The Leader
He seemed an unlikely political leader, puny, odd looking and a foreigner by birth in the country he aspired to lead but somehow The Leader formed an emotional connection with enough of his people to persuade them to relinquish civil liberties and support policies that were not only doomed to failure but that in other times those same people would have found morally repugnant. Though not a charismatic man but one who in early life had been something of a loser, a self confessed heavy drug user, nihilistic dissident and an active supporter of seditionist groups. In spite of all this, and having arrived from nowhere on the political scene with only a series of menial jobs on a thin CV his campaigns generated a level of mass adulation that was almost without parallel.

At its heart the story of The Leader hinges on one gigantic, mysterious question: how was it possible that a character as strange and personally inadequate as he ever gained power in a wealthy, sophisticated and technologically advanced country and became an object of worship for millions of people?

The answer to this vital question is to be found not just in the historical circumstances of the time, the deep humiliation still felt by many of the people following a catastrophic event that had plunged the nation into a deep sense of shock, the anger and resentment among a many people at the way their country had been governed in the time after that event, but also in the nature of his leadership.

It’s this aspect of the story that makes for a particularly interesting study.

Cast by the propaganda machine that propelled him to power as a messianic figure, an archetypal “charismatic leader” who combined the qualities of politician, preacher and humanist, he was further helped by the undeserved praise lavished on him by sycophantic supporters in broadcast and print media; his rambling, cliché ridden speeches were acclaimed as great oratory, his policies, borrowed from socialist leaders of an earlier era were acclaimed as original thinking offering radical solutions to social and economic problems. Criticism of his personal shortcomings or inconsistencies in his back story and hints at involvement in scandals that would have ended the careers of other politicians were brushed aside, the rules that governed ordinary people did not apply to The Leader.

#This was not a “normal” politician, someone who promises things like lower taxes, full employment and better health care, but a quasi-religious leader who offered almost spiritual goals of redemption and salvation and a Utopian vision of a future in which the poor would be made rich thanks to the munificence of the wealthy elite and the redistribution of wealth through the medium of taxation and social benefits. The Leader also claimed he was driven by a sense of personal destiny, a conceit eagerly taken up by his mesmerised followers.

It was strange that his followers, mostly people who were mostly quite casual in their religious observance if they acknowledged having any religion at all, in a nation that had no official state religion, were so readily drawn to his messianic style of campaigning.

Even when other world leaders described him as irritating, arrogant, ego-maniacal and inexperienced the media and voters in his own country refused to look at him in a more objective and critical way.

Before a pivotal event in history The Leader was a nobody, an oddball who was obsessed with race, violent revolution his own sense of victimhood, unable to debate intellectually and filled with irrational resentments and prejudice. He was also identified as a weak, self indulgent, and by some an effeminate man.

But when The Leader emerged in national politics and spoke of his vision for the nation, telling his audiences in words carefully crafted by skilled speech writers, the things they most wanted to hear suddenly his weaknesses were perceived as strengths. The inability to debate was presented as strength of character and evidence of an advanced intellect that mere mortals could not hope to challenge and his aloofness was considered the mark of a “great man” who lived apart from the crowd…
The Leader’s alienation and resentment chimed with the feelings of millions of voters who felt humiliated by the great catastrophe and angry efforts that efforts to rebuild the national community after that humiliation had failed ignominiously. They sought and found one in a large but loosely organised community within their nation.

In a nation ravaged by inflation, unemployment and industrial decline The Leader promised to kick the wealthy, close their tax loopholes and tax them “until it hurt”. Although he showed no sign of ever intending to fulfil these promises beyond a few token gestures directed at European bankers his failure combined with the trick of blaming his opponents for that failure made him more beloved by his fanatical supporters and the millions of people benefiting from an unaffordably generous social welfare system. Organisations that should have known better heaped awards on him, Man of the Year etc.

Who is The Leader? The clue is in the title, throughout this article I am paraphrasing from a review of the book The Dark Charisma Of Adolf Hitler by Laurence Rees. In the German language the word for leader is Führer. Shame on you if you thought my article was about a current world leader.

American ‘liberals are the most stupid people in the world … #1

The chorus of Obama-felching liberal idiots in the USA is nothing if not predictable. It was never going to be very long before they started to blame this week’s riots in London and elswhere on “white racists” and claim the rioters are not theiving scumbags and violent thugs, but political protestors with a genuine gievance against the racist society that denies them a decent life.

One prominent voice, a sociology professor at Chicago University whose name I think is Prof. Waddac Hunt* went so far as to say that the riots occurred because Britain has been taken over by “Tea Party values”.

I can’t for the life of me see any connection. Why would anybody get angry about being invited to drink a cup of Earl Grey and eat scones with clotted cream and excellent jam made by members of the local W.I?

What else could he have meant, the knuckle draggers, arsehones, dickheads anf fuckwits we saw on televiion have never even heard of America let alone the politics of the “Tea Party.”

*Waddac Hunt: Hat tip to one of Sally Dwyer’s facebook friends. I don’t know if he came up with the name himself but it is brilliant.

The riots and the retribution

The rioting and looting this week is an inevitable consequence of allowing the justice system to be hijacked bty the Politically Correct Thought Police and their penchant for excusing all perps by claiming they committed criminal acts because they are victims of society.

Victims of society they may be but they still need a good slapping to keep them in line.

So I was mildly encouraged yeaterday when Dve came out with a good line. “If these people are old enough to commit the crimes they are old enough to face the punishment.”

Good line, I though before it sank it that it was just a political line. Cameron has shown he is right with the Politically Correct thinking of the ‘concensus’ so when he talks of facting the punishment he probably means two weeks on an Intensive Individual Therapy Programme (aka a two week adventure holiday.)