Normal

 “Mummy, mummy! Why is that man wearing a dress?” Years ago that remark would have elicited a different response from today, probably. “Don’t stare, dear, he’s just playing dressing up” might have been the reply, followed by a hurrying away from the freak. Others may have been less tolerant and minded to challenge, but in the main people would have quietly gone about their business and made no more about it.

In the past, a man wishing to be a woman was regarded as an oddity, who nonetheless deserved to be allowed to act out his fantasy only so far as it did not infringe on the rights and sensibilities of others. Such activities would never have extended so far as allowing such a man to associate with children or use women-only changing rooms. They may have sought out the company of the like-minded, or else lived lives of social solitude. Or, indeed, kept their predilections entirely secret, as so many did throughout their lives.

A man in a dress was always seen as less acceptable than a woman in comfortable man-clothes, and the reasons are not difficult to contemplate. A male-inclined woman tends not to present a physical threat to other men, whereas a six-foot, sixteen stone rugby player in a bad wig is a sinister, imposing presence, so out of place that it screams threat from the very top of the lungs. Wolf! Run for your lives!

But transvestism is not the issue. Cross-dressing has been normalised by the pantomime dame and the drag queen scene. Indeed, the majority of men who dress up in female garb are doing just that; dressing up. They otherwise lead perfectly happy male lives and pose no threat to anybody. Actual transexuals are another thing altogether, and so very unusual is this phenomenon that the only way their presence becomes statistically significant is by joining the alphabet soup of LGBTQI+++ to then claim to  be a very small, single-digit percentage of the population at large.

In other words, if you are a transsexual then, by the very definition of the word, you are not normal. Normal: conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected. So how did such a vanishingly small minority obtain such powers as to unseat the Scottish First Minister, and be likely to bring about the demise of the next? Why is the Labour Party unable to define what a woman is, for fear of censure? Why are the arbiters of what is right in society incapable of doing what pretty much anybody else can do with ease, which is discern not only what somebody is, but also what somebody isn’t? Man, not-man, man-in-a-dress, man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman, threat-to-women-who-don’t-want-their-exclusive-spaces-to-be-invaded.

You can feel as sorry as you like for the genuinely distressed transsexual, who finds both the transition and later acceptance difficult, but beyond common decency and the same human rights as everybody else (which are far fewer in reality and sense than many in the human rights circus would have us believe) we owe them nothing. All of which is why the witch-trial hounding of Posy Parker in New Zealand is beyond abhorrent.

Mummy, why does that man look funny?

So far down the trans rabbit hole have those who seek to speak for society been dragged that they are every bit as much the problem as are those rapists who hanker after being incarcerated in pens filled with vulnerable prey. So dangerous are the proponents of Newspeak that it is they who should be held up to scrutiny and proscribed. In fact they have done for the rights of peaceful transsexuals to live their lives unmolested much what Pol Pot, Mao and Orwell’s Ingsoc did for the nuclear family. Being transsexual is not a crime, but you abandon all rights to dignity and acceptance when you demand that others treat you as ‘normal’.

As You Were

The current culture war – selfish, individual identity versus national cohesion – is quite bad enough, all by itself and threatens stability for all. The LGBTQIP+++ alphabet people are aided in their assault on reason by the parallel war on intelligence, waged over at least the last half-century, which churns out ever more dependent, ever dumber, ever biddable young volunteers to the cause. Meanwhile the judiciary appears to have turned on the majority law-abiding in favour of the disrupters.

Banking is broken, the globalised Ponzi scheme of growth by consumption has feasted on the ready supply of lowest-common-denominator immigration, and we are, it seems no longer able to hire for merit, being driven by the diversity agenda to hire by skin colour or gender or disability. The great and the good, from their altar at Davos have proclaimed that we will own nothing and be happy.

Well, the first part of that certainly appears to be happening, owning nothing that is. Our roads are riddled with potholes, our rail infrastructure is creaking, public services everywhere are physically breaking down when they are not merely on strike, and the chances of getting a doctor’s appointment are close to zero. Zero is the theme – it seems to be the end goal of every policy, every administrative effort; it may as well be in the main parties’ manifestos.

So it seems uncannily timely that the latest orders from the seat of world government, the UN and the IPCC, that despite the impossibility of achieving the already ridiculous Net-Zero targets, developed nations must hit that unachievable milestone ten years earlier than pledged. 2040, they are saying, not 2050, and lest you be in any doubt, 2040 is effectively tomorrow. Emissions are still rising, they wail. Yes, they are, because the unseemly dash to achieve ‘not-zero’ by 2050 is creating industrial output on a scale not seen before… in China. Using coal.

You could not invent a fiction worse than this reality. Cleverer heads than me have worked out that not only do we not currently know of sufficient mineral resources – raw materials for batteries, wiring, electronic components, etc – the extraction of these resources is despoiling vast acres of the natural landscape while also emitting ever more CO₂ into the atmosphere. It doesn’t even matter where you are on the anthropogenic climate change debate, 2050 was problematic, but 2040 is far, far worse.

Some are even calling for – and brace yourselves for this – 2025 (yes, just 20 months) to get the ball in that back of that impossibly small net. If Greta Thunberg wasn’t bad enough, prepare yourself for your kids to come home and denounce you as murderers for daring to have them, clothe them, keep them warm, transport them and feed them. Oh yes, food, that’s something else we are going to have to learn to do without, apparently.

Who is going to pay for it all? Yes, you guessed it, the taxpayer. We are. Again. No matter what the cause, no matter what the cost, the sacrifices will not be made by those making the policy. But here’s their problem; in order to muster the will and the resources to do things on the scale being demanded, you have to herd the sheep along a single path to the slaughterhouse. And for that you have to get some form of buy-in from the sheep. What’s in it for us, we ask?

As it stands, nothing. We get nothing in return for the pain which will be inflicted on us. Worse, we will be berated as ignorant and bigoted (and no doubt, racist) for resisting the reduction of our living standards to that of the third world and the payment of reparation to that same third world so that they can experience the industrial progress that dragged us out of the gutter. It is the same as seeing your hard-earned council tax go to replace the windows in the housing society property next door, occupied by universal credit dependent recipients, while you in your owner-occupied hovel shiver through the winter months.

Coming soon, to a neighbourhood near you...

Madness. If you wanted to dream up a scheme to foment mass rebellion you could do far worse than the climate change lobby. But even in the face of all of the above, I still see little active resistance. In the end the Net Zero lunacy will fail not due to the scale of the technological challenge, to which we are not equal, but to apathy, our new defining national characteristic. For, if the inanities of gender ideology, enforced diversity, and the winding up of all that once made us a force for good in the world isn’t enough to get us out on the streets, I doubt very much that climate action will ignite that spark. 

Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler?

It is hilarious listening to the closest thing to an actual psychopath in public life, Alastair Campbell, arguing for Gary Lineker. It is a bit like, oh, I don’t know, the language used in 1930s Germany to defend the actions of that funny old Mr Hitler. Al-Goebbels-Campbell, was always good at spin and propaganda, but with the Lineker affair he has excelled himself, describing his latest brief as standing up against ‘these right wing extremists’ who have taken over the government.

Oh, my aching sides. On the journey home last night I heard Armando Iannucci, on BBCs PM programme, vigorously defending the jug-eared goal-hanger while Evan Davis tried his best to maintain the impartiality of the nation’s broadcaster. Would he, he asked Iannucci, defend the freedom of speech of a presenter who had, for instance agreed with the views of many tens of millions of Britons who would gladly repel the incoming migrants with force?

In the discussion, naturally, the case of comedian Jo Brand’s suggestion that protesters could maybe have thrown battery acid, instead of milkshakes at Pol Pot; sorry I meant Nigel Farage. Several other examples were raised, of occasions when the BBC had suspended or failed to suspend various other well-known people for their words on air, but such comparisons were batted away as entirely different; wishing harm on those who disagree with you is simply fair game for the left.

The issue is, as it always is, that your free speech is my offensive rhetoric, and my sensible viewpoint is somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan and likely to cause actual physical pain to all who hear it. For my part, I see Gary Lineker as a smug, righteous, lefty twat who nevertheless has a right to say what he likes just as long as I am afforded the same opportunities. My permanent Twitter suspension, however, does suggest that while Lineker is allowed free speech, I very much, am not.

If he comes back after a brief period off-air, he will not have learned anything, but then neither has Campbell. Being labelled a Nazi – and yes, I know everybody on his side has argued, semantically, that this is not what he did even though it is exactly what he meant – is just what you have to get used to when you don’t ascribe to the open borders, ninety-several genders, race-baiting, Tory-hating free-range communism, espoused by the notional left.

Gary Lineker was unavailable for comment.

What won’t happen is progress. If you agree with Lineker then you won’t budge an inch from your view; if you disagree with him then you are still a Nazi and there’s an end to it. You will just have to content yourself with carrying on as you normally do; go to work every day, obey the law, love your family, support your team and just try to keep the embroidering of swastikas on the down-low. Just accept that Gary Lineker is a decent human being, and you are a vicious, baby-eating storm-trooper, but don’t make such a fuss, okay?

Britannia says what?

As the Labour wolf pack takes down the old, lame beast and when the Lib-Dem vultures have finished picking at the carcass, not much will remain of the Conservative Party. Labour will be in power and the Cons may well be the third party in Westminster, but will anybody really notice? Had the once honourable and patriotic party enacted the entire Communist Manifesto, as espoused by Jeremy Corbyn, would we be in any different situation from where we are right now? I somehow doubt it.

We are, it turns out, crap at science, engineering, innovation, leadership… and even that last gasp of the fantasists, wide-eyed optimism, has become myopic and thick with cataracts. The entire country seems to blunder from one crisis to another; health, education, gender idiocy, infrastructure… we fall foul of some international law or another every time the government tries to do anything at all. Controlling immigration is merely one of the currently highlighted failures befalling the administration.

With near a third of the country’s adults functionally illiterate, innumerate, or often both, where is this vitalising, buoyant, vibrant boost that the pro-immigration lobby insists would be the result of open borders? Our defences could not be more porous were we to build a six-lane bridge to France and declare it a one-way trip to ghettoised paradise. Except, like HS2 the bridge would cost a thousand times what was budgeted and take several lifetimes to be not quite complete.

I’m afraid – and I do mean afraid in the literal sense – that it no longer matters who governs this country, we are already sunk. Up to our eyeballs in debt and an economy that runs on gambling, gaming, fired chicken outlets, Turkish barbers, Albanian car-washes and over-priced coffee. The high streets are dead, the bank branches are closing, the Post Office has pretty much shut up shop and, if the government is to be believed, most of the nation’s repository of skill and knowledge has gone into early retirement.

You may be able to run a kibbutz on youthful ignorance and energy but a modern economy needs deep engineering and science specialists, not hundreds of thousands of leisure and fashion graduates. And while designing a new computer- based game may make a fortune for a geeky few, most of our under-40s are barely capable of doing anything other than downloading a spyware app and selling their souls to the Chinese.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”

So, as far as I can see, it matters not whether Ayatollah Starmer or Comrade Sunak are in charge, our fate is no longer in our own hands. In thrall to the forces of globalism we have sold off everything of value, encouraged our brightest and best to up-sticks and leave, and buried our collective heads in the sand while whispering Rule Britannia and being afraid to wave our own flag. Brexit should have been the opportunity to change our fortunes, but we had no captain equal to the task of steering us to the promised land, and like slaves shackled to the oars we are all going down with this ship.

Hhh-hancock

When I detected the signs of the feeding frenzy over the Hancock malarkey I thought at first they had discovered some more old tapes in a BBC backroom. But in this case, the boy himself is not the esteemed but tragic Tony, it is in fact the creepy Matt edition. But, seriously, who cares? I commented recently on how individuals in the public eye dare not say a word unless it has been scrutinised and sanitised by media advisors at any hint it might be weaponised. Thus it is little wonder that people are getting excited over nothing.

Covid, schmovid, as far as I’m concerned. Nobody is getting any of those days back and we can't resurrect the dead. And in any case, flu-like viruses have always taken away the elderly to their often overdue rest, and will continue to do so. Hancock is not in government any more, every country in the world seemed to struggle to cope with the pandemic and the really important thing to remember now is that everybody is an expert after the fact.

Not me, though. I claim no expertise in pretty much anything. In fact the more I learn the more I recognise what I do not know, to the extent of realising that my unknown unknowns exceed by an incalculable amount the sum of everything I know I know and everything I know I don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld, eat your heart out. Apart from playing the utterly pointless, bird-flown, horse-bolted blame game what is to be gained from this rather uninspiring ‘scoop’?

Sometimes I think the collective press needs to pack up and spend a few years living among the people they write about. They would find that real people are neither ‘amazed’, ‘astonished’ nor ‘incandescent’ about very much at all. The emotive words used by reporters to make what is often a non-story into some sort of scandal is at best childishly naïve and at worst fomentive of unrest in people who were otherwise disinterested.

So I genuinely don’t care about the trillions of  words in billions of WhatsApp messages; messages that would have been sent, ad-hoc, in the heat of the moment, between people I know little about and respect even less. Of course there were fuck-ups; and many of them. We hear today that Dominic Cummings had to explain percentages to Boris Johnson, but really, is anybody surprised? Project Boris was always about the aggrandisement of the straw-barnetted buffoon, but he would have got away with everything had the pandemic not struck and had Brexit ever actually happened.

Surely nobody, by now, expects any better from the UK government? After years of mocking the Italians and the Belgians and their corrupt ways is it any wonder that we find the exact same farces being played out over here? Haven’t commentators across the centuries warned that you simply cannot trust a single person who actively seeks power? Until the professional politicians are replaced by a meritocracy based on actual competence in the areas that matter we can expect no better.

Just a little prick...

The areas that matter? Oh, you know, just the minor things. While world leaders argue about pronouns, science none of them understand, global economies beyond the power of politicians to influence positively, journeys to the stars and whose god is top god, we little people busy ourselves with the almost trivial matters of eating, working, keeping a roof over our heads, not dying… little things of little consequence. Not that the media will ever notice.