Questions Of The Day (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

Dear Vlad

It's all kicking off again. This time you're nicking Covid vaccination data apparently. As if. Now look, these dudes have a point when they say it might not be you necessarily but rogue elements from the security services or private labs, even maybe an oligarch needing a new income stream, so can you do me a favour and let me have details of all the efforts you're making to track these people down (or rule them out, obvs). It's really noticeable that you haven't mentioned it. And we both know that's not the case. You must be steaming, getting the wacks but not the vax.

Love to everyone in the Big K

Mick Harper
Consultant

[Mick Harper]

Black worship is reaching ever-greater heights in the right-on media. What did the main Channel 4 News bulletin lead with? The death of John Lewis. Not the high street giant closing its doors but an elderly American civil rights activist passing peacefully in his bed after a lifetime of excellent work of relative obscurity even in the heyday of black civil rights activists.

Is this so bad on a slow news day? Well, if news organisations are going to eschew the principle of news values they are getting perilously close to being Russia Today. Just because it ain't the government, and just because it happens to be a cause that every Channel 4 News viewer thinks is a good one (that's true of Russia Today of course) doesn't mean it's not propaganda. Nor, in my opinion, is it sound propaganda. Every Channel 4 News viewer thought, "Who?" and felt a little guilty about it, but somewhere in his or her innermost recesses there was another and quieter thought, "Are the blacks starting to take over the asylum?"

Many of them might have said, "And a good thing too" but I wish I could convey to our liberal elite that every time they push, the backlash is pulled that little bit closer.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

Wiley, you know I hate shooting fish in barrels.

[Wile E. Coyote]

I like lists. As long as they only have 3 things on them. I inherited this from J F C Fuller. The Book of Imaginary Battles has loads of lists all with 3 things. I blame Fuller. No I actually blame the AEist that recommended Fuller, as up to then I only owned 2 books. Either way this is clearly not my fault. I am certainly not taking responsibility for this. Any mistakes are down to others, not to me.

[Mick Harper]

I am presently reading The New Unhappy Lords by a friend of Fuller's, A K Chesterton, or maybe his successor. Anyway an intelligent anti-semite. By which I mean he believes the Jews are taking over the world but rather admires them for it. Unfortunately for him he wrote it back in the sixties and it turned out they couldn't even take over the West Bank. What a bunch of dumbnuts they turned out to be. Next!

[Mick Harper]

It's becoming increasingly clear that Trump intends creating all kinds of mayhem if he loses so it would be best to vote for him.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Polite request to Katherine Viner.
Please rehire Steve Bell.

Polite request to Anon Burglar.
Please can I have the signed original Steve Bell "Monkey" back, in exchange for my wife's jewellery which you managed to miss, as you were too intent on nicking our pictures off the walls.

[Mick Harper]

I don't think a sense of humour is Kathy's strong suit. However it has to be said that even the best and the greatest have their term. Except me. Within the parameters of security can you satisfy our slavering curiosity by filling out the following questionnaire

a) was the Monkey via a benefit gig, a straight auction, him being a friend of yours etc
b) why's the trouble's tom about the drum and not in a Swiss bank where it belongs. Let her wear paste or live in Switzerland.
c) what are the pictures of which you speak
d) who has local burglars with a taste for fine art
e) and are susceptible to appeals in obscure forae?

[Mick Harper]

A minor kerfuffle occurred yesterday about whether a Cummings critic had or had not been invited to address the nation in two of the daily press conferences. There was a slightly awkward disagreement about the first but everyone, everyone, was adamant, adamant, the second absence was because she had been 'held up in traffic'. Thus setting two world records:

1. the first time this explanation has ever been advanced by any minor non-governmental figure attending a major government event (to my knowledge)
2. she was the only person in Great Britain held up in traffic that day because lockdown rules had rendered every street in Great Britain virtually traffic-free.

Just unlucky, I guess. Like a lot of Cummings' critics.

[Wile E. Coyote]

It appears that the nasty Russians tried to influence the Scottish referendum, not the Brexit one. It sends a shiver down the Coyote spine.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The Chinese are providing some novel problems for the west. What happens when the authoritarian anti-democrats make the best technology?

The current consensus is that we the US, Brits, French ban them.....though Gerry is less sure.

It's bad news for the Coyote paradigm. Time for a rethink.

[Mick Harper]

Al Jazeera tonight says you don't know the half of it, Wiley, with a jawdropping account of where the Chinese are at in the space race -- basically, galloping away into the distance (from a standing start). We have to come to terms now with the fact that China is unstoppable and decide on a collective response. One thought would be that it is our last chance to get them to behave with some kind of restraint. But maybe that has already left the station.

As for us, we've decided to go head to head with Russia and Europe as well as China, leaving us only with Trumpite America which will be a thing of the past come 2021. First thing we should consider is giving up our seat on the Security Council. That way people might stop wanting to go head to head with us.

[Mick Harper]

But there is another aspect to the story. Undeveloped but raring-to-go countries can piggy-back on developed countries. Germany, for instance, did this on the UK's back at the turn of the nineteenth century. But once the piggy-backer has caught up, it is on its own. Germany had no difficulty forging ahead and everybody was soon borrowing from them. Japan did something similar in the twentieth century but, when it had reached parity, its breakneck development slowed and has now pretty much stopped.

Communist states have added espionage to the ordinary rules of emulation and the Soviet Union made enormous strides until, when there was nothing left in the western larder for it to steal, it collapsed. We await China's fate. They will find, or so the theory goes, that true homegrown development requires a hundred flowers to bloom. So the theory goes.

[Mick Harper]

Sorry to go on about the yellow peril (and Al Jazeera) but another documentary illustrates why China will conquer the world a lot more all-embracingly than the Anglo-Europeans. We arrived in Malawi in the second half of the nineteenth century, left in the 1970's, and the place was left to the tender loving care of the NGO's and not-very-competent (though not by any means the worst) African politicians.

Then some bloke arrives from Taiwan and sets up an orphanage. Next thing you know his orphans are touring the world putting on martial arts displays and improving dramas and the orphanages, or Buddhist temples as we would call them, are sprouting everywhere. https://www.acchk.org/en/acc-info

But unlike Dr Livingstone they don't make any bones about the fact that in reality they are exporting Chinese values. Well, a bit like Dr Livingstone, but whereas he relied on us buying Sunday School stamps so drippy spinsters could set out from Blantyre, Scotland to set up mission schools in Blantyre, Malawi, and producing generations of rather pointlessly Christian Africans, the Chinese charities have industrialised the whole process. God knows what generations of Buddhist Africans are going to do but I have a hunch it won't be turning the other cheek.

A great improvement in my view.