Street battles

Well, just to add to the delays, our water supply shut down last night. It happens once in a while, the pipe from the well gets an airlock which has to be cleared. The pipe delivers water by gravity feed to a large storage tank in the house and then it’s pumped through filters and UV treated. If the pressure in the tank drops too far the pump can’t operate. Since it happens about once a year we always have reserve water to hand.

It’s fixed now, and it shows one of the benefits of renting. If I bought this house I’d have had to pay Sunday rates for someone to come and fix it. Fortunately the landlord is well versed in the mechanics of this system so was able to repair it quickly.

Right, I am behind with editing and still have to put those novel prices up. It’s complicated by Amazon’s web crawlers which, if they find the book cheaper anywhere else, will flag it up and possibly get it withdrawn from the Amazon site. So they all have to be changed on Smashwords first, let those prices filter through to the outlets they distribute through and then change the Amazon prices.

In case I was feeling a shortage of distractions, the internet is full of stories about the ‘riots’ in London and elsewhere. They aren’t really all that big as riots go, nothing like the Tottenham ones a few years back. Still, people have been getting hurt at them.

It is all starting to look like a clumsily engineered plan of sorts. Last weekend, BLM and Antifa were allowed to vandalise a lot of things and the police pretty much gave them free rein. In Bristol, police stood back and watched as the mob pulled down a statue of someone nobody outside Bristol has heard of and dumped it in the harbour.

This triggered a nationwide demand for statue-smashing. In response, London sealed Winston Churchill in a box.

Yes, really. He doesn’t even have a window.

You see, all of a sudden, Winston Churchill is a Very Bad Man. I’m sure the Wehrmacht thought so too. However, our side thought he did rather well. We did end up winning that war, although it is increasingly starting to look like we needn’t have bothered.

Google even removed his picture, as well as any reference to the period 1940-1945, from their search results for British Prime Monsters. He also no longer appears on a list of world leaders in that war, although Hitler and Stalin are still there. Google likes them, apparently.

Statue smashing is not a new sport. Americans have been playing that game for some time. It’s new to the UK and… well sir, we don’t like it. Okay, I’ll admit to having paid scant regard to statues and monuments, other than Cenotaphs, throughout my life, but a lot of people like them and even a Philistine like me doesn’t want them smashed. They are, for better or worse, part of our history, and once you delete history, what is left? Pol Pot’s ‘year zero’, that’s what.

Those hippie squatters in Seattle’s breakaway state of Soymalia, aka Chaz, seem to be practicing for just that. Although they are really going to have to improve their farming techniques. They might also want to consider what a Seattle winter can be like. Tents are going to be a tough call in December over there.

But I digress.

Last week it was all BLM and Antifa and most of it was just people marching around with signs on sticks. They were protesting about the brutal actions of a policeman in America and many have now been led to believe that the same things happen in the UK. The rowdy element was allowed to have a little tantrum and threaten a lot of monuments and pretend that they have only just been freed from slavery.

There are a lot of bona-fide slaves in East Africa and around the Middle East right now who would trade places with them in a heartbeat, but the protestors don’t care about them. The rowdy element don’t even care what the protest was really about. They have their own agenda which they were allowed to get away with.

Was there a reason? The BBC and Sky and the Scale Model Mayor all lauded the protest as mostly peaceful. I doubt the injured police would agree, and neither would those who had to clean off the graffiti afterwards. Emboldened by their consequence-free tantrum, the rowdies drew up a list of statues they wanted destroyed, some tenuous link to past crimes was devised (usually slavery even though they targeted abolitionists too) and bragged they were out to smash them all.

The Scale Model Mayor of London joined in with this. He thinks all the old statues should be replaced with new ones to reflect London’s diversity. If he suggests one of Mohammed, the resulting collective sharp intake of breath would suck all the air out of the city. So, History and its tangible residue, the statues, are under threat. A few token ones were removed to rile the public and move to the next stage.

What happened next was entirely predictable and, I suspect, exactly what was supposed to happen. A load of enraged people went to London to defend the cenotaph and the statues. All of these people, including many military veterans, were labelled ‘far right’ and ‘football hooligans’ determined to ‘stop legitimate protest’ because they are ‘racist Nazi bigots’.

What has been glossed over is that these ‘far right’ people did not come to attack the BLM marches. They did not come because they are racists who despise black people. They did not come to tear down the notion that Black Lives Matter.

They came to defend the statues and monuments. That’s their only motive. Having seen the police back off, run away, bend the knee and generally let this toddler tantrum escalate out of control, of course they decided to defend the statues themselves. Any idiot, even Khan, saw this coming.

Tommy Robinson (NHRN) saw it coming. He declined to attend. He saw the jaws of the trap and decided not to walk into them. I have to admit, that’s a smarter move than I expected from him, but thumbs up for seeing his opponent’s next move. He’s getting the hang of the game, I think.

So, last week the police were in shirtsleeves, no armour, no helmets, no protection at all. Around 30 were injured (numbers vary), some seriously, in that ‘mostly peaceful’ event.

This week they arrived in full riot gear. Six were injured. The BBC, Sky, and Mini-Mayor described it as ‘carnage’. These far right thugs spoiled their toddler-tantrum fun!

It was set up. They tried the same thing in Glasgow with predictable results. Glasgow turned out in force and the rowdies ran away. Antifa have also threatened to invade Milwall. Good luck with that one. If we ever have nuclear war and run out of bombs, then we will escalate it and send Milwall fans over. I suspect Antifa are all talk on that one.

Why are the police standing back from the Rowdies of Antifa and the militant wing of BLM? They’ve been told to. The same is true in America. Seattle police are not allowed to enter the Soapless Zone, not because the inmates demand it, but because their mayor will not allow it. There are Hell’s Angels and others on the way. I bet the police will be told to stop them, and I’m sure I know which lot the police would rather deal with.

Meanwhile, politicians everywhere insist we stay home, don’t meet even family members, we cannot see dying relatives, we cannot attend funerals or weddings, now we have to wear masks on public transport (well those of you who actually have access to public transport).

Every other toilet is taped off, bus seats are taped off, you have to stay two metres apart and Boris’s ‘experts’ are threatening to resign if he relaxes that rule.

At the same time, mass protests are allowed. No ‘social distancing’. No control at all. You can forget contact tracing. That’s right out of the window now.

The virus was dying out. Scientists were afraid it might disappear before the highly profitable vaccine was ready. It needed another surge.

Brexit is happening. The government have refused to extend it any more. Remain need chaos, pain, suffering, a reason to make an extension inevitable.

The Marxists want to bring down government and delete history. This is the perfect opportunity.

All of this is happening at once. Every faction sees their chance. Every player in their own particular game sees advantage in this. Every maniac is let loose, every scheme for profit, power and gain is running at full tilt now.

Sometimes, two and two really do equal four.