In my previous blog (Wednesday/Thursday) I featured a BBC news report about the supposed planet-destroying heatwave reportedly by the BBC ‘tearing’ across the Southern United States and the Mediterranean. And I highlighted a typically useless, dopey BBC reporter who, while telling us about the supposedly devastating heatwave in the USA, possibly inadvertently mentioned that this heatwave followed ‘more than 260 days of unusually cool weather’.
The report also featured the BBC’s climate-catastrophist reporter, Justin Rowlatt, who was in Alicante (Spain) telling us about the soaring temperatures there and how the temperature in Alicante was expected to hit the ‘late thirties’ over the next few days. Well, here’s the BBC’s weather forecast for Alicante:
I guess arithmetic wasn’t Justin Rowlatt’s strongest subject at primary school otherwise he would know that 31°C to 33°C was in the low thirties and nowhere near “the late thirties”.
Here’s the report again. Justin’s total bollocks comes in around the one minute point
But what about the supposed heat inferno in Rome? Well here’s the BBC forecast for Rome:
Temperatures of 33°C to 38°C are expected. But Rome is a city and so, due to the urban heat island effect, will always have temperatures several degrees above the surrounding countryside. But no sign here of the 40°C to 45°C the media have been screaming about.
Oh dear, let’s try the supposed cauldron of hell – Athens – where key tourist sites had to be closed due to the life-threatening heat:
Athens might actually manage to hit 40°C over the next few days. But Athens is a city covered in concrete with almost no trees or parks, so it’s going to get pretty hot in the summer.
Well, surely heat hell will destroy Sardinia where the BBC told us record temperatures of up to 48°C could be possible. Well, the BBC’s own forecasts show that temperatures are actually not even going to hit 40°C:
Hopefully you’re all utterly terrified of the Earth spontaneously combusting as heat apocalypse Cerberus roasts Southern Europe:
Apparently, it’s the same weather system which is heating the Southern United States:
It’s apparently something to do with an unusually long (3 years) La Nina being followed by El Niño which has affected the positioning of two main jetstreams and nothing at all to do with human activities and increasing atmospheric CO2 levels.
Well, amidst all the exaggeration and panic and doomsday predictions, I’m afraid that the current hot temperatures are nowhere near temperatures in the boiling hot 1920s and 1930s – the years of the U.S. dustbowl described in John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’:
And here’s some more proof:
Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, atmospheric CO2 levels were just over 300 ppm (parts per million) compared to around 415 ppm today.
The BBC seems to be leading the charge in trying to scare us all witless about our imminent demise due to scorching weather. But a dopey BBC journalist gave the game away when she told us that the current U.S. heatwave came after ‘more than 260 days of below average temperatures which is a cool record for Las Vegas’. Oddly, during these ‘more than 260 days of below average temperatures which is a cool record for Las Vegas’, the BBC and all the other mainstream media didn’t warn us of unusually cold weather and the possibility of a new Ice Age. But as soon as we had a couple of weeks of above average temperatures, the BBC and all the other mainstream media started screaming about us all dying in a fireball due to our selfish use of fossil fuels:
Maybe Pfizer and the ludicrously-misnamed World Health Organisation will conveniently and lucratively come up with a jab to protect us all from climate change? I hope so.
It’s all propaganda and nonsense and should be ignored.
And here’s the video in which the BBC reporter mentions the ‘more than 260 days of below average temperatures which is a cool record for Las Vegas’. The blunder comes at around 5.20 minutes into the video. I’ve not seen that anyone else has noticed this:
There are two small points I’d like to make: Firstly, the best bit about my article are the readers’ comments. Secondly, as regular readers will know I’ve had my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS adapted and translated by a Korean university professor and published in South Korea:
In order to try and help sell a few books there, I’ve written four or five articles which the university professor has translated for a South Korean newspaper. Last week, I sent him two more proposed articles. One was about the climate change hoax which he really liked. The second one was the piece I had published on The Conservative Woman website about the World Health Organisation pontificating about the supposed difference between gender and sex. The university professor couldn’t understand what on earth I was writing about in the second article. You see, in South Korea they believe that there are just two sexes – male and female – and just two genders – male and female.
It’s amazing that a supposedly advanced country like South Korea can be so backward that its citizens don’t know there are 72 genders (and counting). They really need the BBC in South Korea to educate them.
The defenestration of climate grifter John Kerry
To cheer us all up at the start of another summer/winter (delete as appropriate) week, here’s the useless private-jetsetting climate grifter (sorry, I meant ‘climate tsar’) John Kerry getting taken apart by a U.S. congressman:
I had actually planned this blog before the previously un-named BBC presenter was named. What I was going to suggest, before the name was made public, was that as soon as the individual was named, we would be told that he had ‘serious mental health issues’. After all, isn’t this what all celebs do when caught snorting cocaine, using one or several (male or female) prostitutes, kiddie-fiddling, displaying their privates in public, getting blow-jobs in the back seat of a car or suchlike? The celebs’ PR agencies and crisis management advisers tend to propose that the best way to respond to embarrassing exposures is to quickly make yourself a victim. Claiming ‘mental health issues’ is probably the best way to do this. And, of course, if the celeb involved is rather well suntanned, they can also claim racism is the real reason their peccadilloes are being exposed in the media. Incidentally, as Mr Edwards is a rather white Welsh person, he and his gang probably can’t really play the racism card.
We’ve seen so many times celebs caught in compromising activities claiming to be suffering from PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) or else to have (suddenly and conveniently) been disgnosed with ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). And, when they’re really in trouble, many claim that they had considered committing suicide. Though a surprising number who have announced their suicidal intentions are still surprisingly healthy, surprisingly rich and surprisingly still with us. This is a bit like all those lefty luvvies in the USA who said they would leave the country if Trump was elected. But surprisingly they all remained in their Californian and Hollywood mansions in spite of Trump’s four years in the White House.
Which brings us to Mr Huw Edwards. Just as I was going to predict, we have been told that he is suffering from ‘serious mental health issues’. So, he is immediately and magically transformed from being a (IMHO) powerful and influential ageing predator chasing after possibly nubile and possibly vulnerable young men on Internet dating sites to being a totally innocent victim of an anti-BBC campaign run by the evil Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper. I’m not a psychiatrist, so I’m unclear which generally-recognised mental health condition causes married men with five children to chase after young males on Internet dating sites. But I fully accept the story being put out by our trusted and impartial BBC about Mr Huw Edwards’s mental health problems as I don’t want to be cancelled, deplatformed and debanked.
However, I could also understand that there might be nasty, cynical people who think the whole story of Mr Edwards’s mental health issues has been cobbled together by over-paid, over-pensioned managers in the BBC’s well-staffed Arse-Covering, Cover-up and Perv-Protection department. And the icing on the cake is that this story of Mr Edwards’s tremendous psychological suffering, while pocketing almost half a million quid a year of our money for reading an autocue, was announced by Mr Edwards’s ‘brave’ and ‘courageous’ wife. I feel tears of sympathy welling up.
It’s all quite clever really. Huw Edwards is now portrayed as an innocent victim of BBC-hating media persecution, his wife is seen as noble and brave and heroic and angelic and so on and his BBC colleagues are all circling the wagons to protect Mr Edwards and themselves. Moreover, anyone daring to criticise national treasure Mr Edwards is seen as bullying a mentally-fragile victim of circumstances beyond his control. Just imagine the howls of self-righteous fury from the BBC bien pensants had the person involved been a presenter on GB News or (even worse?) Murdoch’s Talk TV.
I’m glad I’m not a cynic. Otherwise I would believe that the whole tale of ‘serious mental health issues’ is a load of tosh, balderdash, monumental BS etc etc, that Mr Edwards is not the kind of person you would invite home to meet your family and certainly not any young sons you may have in case Mr Edwards wanted some ‘souvenir photos’ (nudge nudge, wink wink) and that the BBC is lying to us yet again and again and again.
Oh, and by the way. If you were wondering why there seem to be so many empty seats at key matches at sold-out Wimbledon over the last few days, apparently some were due to the fact that parasitical, grifter BBC managers had to do some work trying to sort out the Huw Edwards mess and so missed their usual licence-fee-paid, champagne-fueled Wimbledon freebies. Though the BBC managers wouldn’t be missing much. Since the departure of the colourful (am I allowed to write that?) Christopher Eubanks, this year’s Wimbledon has become excruciatingly boring.
There has been quite a lot recently in the media about Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially since a deepfake video appeared on-line supposedly featuring financial expert, Martin Lewis, recommending some investment or other.
In this blog I just wanted to give a glimpse of the Kafkaesque nightmare that may await some of us as companies replace human beings with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.
I believe I may have recently come into contact with an AI programme and it wasn’t a terribly pleasant experience. About two years ago, I self-published my most recent book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS as a paperback and ebook using Amazon Kindle. Even though I have had seven or eight previous books published by mainstream publishers, this time I had to either ditch the book (the result of months of research and writing) or self-publish as my literary agent explained that no publisher would dare publish a book questioning the climate-catastrophist cult for fear of a backlash and boycott from the cyber-pitchfork-wielding twitter mob and similarly no bookshop would dare stock it.
Although the book has been sold on Amazon for two years, a couple of weeks ago I got a warning from Amazon that my book might be withdrawn from sale due to a typo (typographical error) and that I needed to correct this error if Amazon were to continue selling my book. In a chapter about the utter uselessness of supposedly ‘renewable energy’, I had written “build and install wind turbines. And obviously the amounts used depend on the size of the turbine.” However Amazon ‘helpfully’ informed me that “the amounts used depend on the size of” should be “the amounts used depends on the size of”. I may not be the most literate person. But I do understand that the word “amounts” is a plural and therefore the following verb should be “depend” and not “depends” as suggested by Amazon. I used the plural form ‘amounts’ as I was referring to the quantities of different raw materials – concrete, copper, steel etc – needed to build a wind turdbine. So I had two options, either stick with what I had written and risk having the book removed from sale, or make the change recommended by Amazon which would make most readers think I am an illiterate idiot.
Given that the book had already been on sale for two years without any problems, what I suspect has happened is that Amazon have recently implemented a new all-singing all-dancing AI programme to review its Kindle books to pick up any errors which need to be corrected. Somehow an error has got into the exciting new AI programme used by Amazon and the AI hasn’t understood when to use the singular form of a verb and when to use the plural form. Amazon does give authors the facility to respond to problems its AI programme raises. I have written back to Amazon several times explaining the grammatical rules governing the use of singulars and plurals, but each time I get a response insisting I change the text to the grammatically-incorrect ““the amounts used depends on the size of””. Given that it’s probably the same AI programme reviewing authors’ responses which made the grammatical mistake in the first place, I may be caught in a trap from which there may be no escape.
Now, you might be wondering what this trivial incident has to do with you.
Well, imagine that you run a small business – say a chip shop or a newsagents – in a relatively deprived area. And imagine that many of your customers pay with cash. One day your bank decides to replace most of the staff in its usually ludicrously-misnamed ‘customer service department’ with a wonderful new AI programme. The AI programme reviews all the customers’ accounts looking for any anomalies and discovers cash is regularly being paid into your account. The AI programme, being smart, immediately suspects that your account is being used for money-laundering for local drug gangs in the deprived area where you have your business and blocks your account. Normally, there is no right of appeal against this decision. But if you do find some way to appeal, your appeal will probably be reviewed by the same AI programme which blocked your account in the first place. And as the AI knows it cannot make mistakes, it naturally concludes you are a liar and rejects your appeal.
Or imagine that you have a long and unusual name. The AI programme checking for possibly fraudulent bank accounts reviews all bank accounts held in the UK and finds one belonging to a person with exactly the same name and the same or similar date of birth as you. The AI programme then calculates the probability of this happening and concludes that this is so unlikely that you must be a fraudster using someone else’s details for your bank account. So your bank account gets blocked and you are told by the bank (the AI programme) to verify your identity. You comply. But as it’s the AI programme, which originally decided you were a fraudster, that checks your answer, it rejects your proof of identity. You decide to phone your bank to get this sorted out as your direct debits are not getting paid and you are getting all kinds of grief from the organisations which you normally pay by direct debit. After many hours waiting for your call to be answered by one of the few people left in the customer service department, you explain the situation. But then your problem will be whether the person you are speaking to has the authority to over-ride what the AI programme is telling them – namely that you are a fraudster.
Hyperventilating, ill-informed media journalists may witter on excitedly about all the benefits AI will bring:
But for some people, AI will just be Authoritarian Idiocy – the beginning of a Kafkaesque nightmare from which there is seemingly no escape.
I have actually written a new blog. But I thought it better you used your valuable time listening to the latest Neil Oliver video rather than reading anything I might write.
I wonder how long it will be before Neil Oliver will be Ofcommed by the UK-loathing, migrant-hugging, BBC-loving, perv-promoting, Tory-hating libtards at our supposed ‘media regulator’ just like happened to the brilliant Mark Steyn?
It seems that if you’re GB News, just one questionable comment about the ‘safe’ and ‘effective’ untested fake vaccines can get you fined and banned. But if you’re the BBC, years of sexually abusing children like Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris and the latest unnamed star did, then Ofcom thinks you’re great.
I wanted to write about the Captain Tom Foundation which has featured so prominently in the press this week
First let me make it clear that the Captain Tom Foundation (Charity number: 1189808) is a separate charity from the one which raised £38.9m and handed this over to the Association of NHS Charities (registered charity number 1186569). The Foundation was established by the late Captain Sir Tom Moore and his family, shortly after he completed his record fundraising objective for the Association of NHS Charities.
The Captain Tom Foundation hit the news due to the building of what I believe was meant to be an administrative office, which miraculously also seems (according to the Daily Mail – see link below) to have contained a 50ft by 20ft pool house with changing rooms, showers and toilets.
But I had a bit of a problem. The latest financial accounts I could find were for the financial year 5 May 2020 to 31 May 2021. So, that’s quite a while ago and not terribly useful.
However, I did notice a few things looking at the 5 May 2020 to 31 May 2021 financial accounts:
Firstly that two members of Captain Tom’s family were trustees of the Foundation
In the period mentioned, from what I could see, the Foundation raised £1,058,676
In the same period, it paid out (from what I can see) £160,000 in four grants of £40,000 to the Willen Hospice, MIND, the Royal British Legion and the Helen & Douglas House
While paying out £160,000 to four charities, the Foundation incurred £162,336 of management costs and £37,097 in administration and governance
£695,89o was retained for future use
In the summary of the charity on the Charity Commission website (link below), the Foundation seems to claim that it used £369,433 for ‘charitable activities’. These ‘charitable activities’ included the £160,000 in grants. But they also included £162,336 in management costs, £6,542 in office costs, £8,280 in information technology and £32,275 in governance costs. So, as far as I can see – and I ain’t no accountant – just £160,000 of the £369,433 supposed ‘charitable activities’ were real grants to real charities and the rest – £209,433 – was used for management and administration.
For legal reasons, I would never suggest that there is anything amiss here. But when researching and writing my 2015 book – THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL – I found many charities which seem to get confused between the difference between what most of us would consider genuine ‘charitable activities’ and what most of us would consider management salaries and administrative costs.
An out-of-control monster?
There are over 200,000 registered charites in Britain supposedly regulated by The Charity Commission for England and Wales and local regulators in Scotland and Northern Ireland. I believe that there are so many charities that the (IMHO) useless regulators haven’t a clue what’s really going on. But then, when you look at other supposed regulators – Ofwat, Ofgem and Ofcom – all you’ll see is incompetence, bungling, bureaucracy, arse-covering and greed.
Meanwhile, one of the fastest routes to getting rather rich in Britain nowadays seems to be to set up a charity and then pay yourself a huge whack for running it.
One of the most egregious cases I came across was a ‘charity’ which paid around £41,000 in charitable activities in the year I looked at while paying companies owned by its three founders around £90,000 each in ‘consultancy fees’. Evidently the charity regulator saw nothing odd about this arrangement. Similarly, I found many other ‘charities’ where the rewards the founders paid themselves and family members seemed rather generous compared to the modest amounts they used for what I would consider as real ‘charitable activities’.
The Daily Mail recently reported that ‘the Charity Commission turned down an application from the Captain Tom Foundation in 2021 to employ mother-of-two Mrs Ingram-Moore as chief executive on a £100,000 salary. It ruled that the income, was ‘neither reasonable not justifiable’. Businesswoman Mrs Ingram-Moore was later allowed to act as interim chief executive on an £85,000-a-year salary, on a three-month contract for a maximum of nine months. A new chief executive took over in June last year.’
Another game played by many charities is to inflate the amount of money they actually use for real charitable activities. For example even some of our best-known and most loved charities have a tendency to shove administration and other costs into the category of ‘charitable activities’ to make it look like they’re using a lot more of our money for ‘charitable activities’ than is actually the case. One of the most respected charities in Britain puts the £4m-£5m cost of administering its membership scheme into ‘charitable activities’ rather than into ‘administrative expenditure’.
The Charity Commission claims that £9 out of every £10 we give to charities is used for ‘charitable activities’. But according to my calculations almost half of the billions our 200,000+ charities rake in every year never gets anywhere near those it is supposed to help. However, many charity bosses seem to have quite enviable lifestyles and those running international charities can usually be found near the front of the plane enjoying the food, drinks and comfort that most of the people donating to the charities could never afford.
The unelected bureaucrats at the World Health Organisation (WHO) are busy working on a new treaty to be presented to the WHO’s 194 member countries in March 2024. This treaty is proposed to be legally-binding on member countries and will give the WHO massive new powers in the event of a new pandemic or any other situation the WHO considers what it calls ‘a public health emergency of international concern’ without consulting member countries; to impose local and international travel restrictions; to mandate what treatments should be given to people including possibly new and untested vaccines; to instruct countries to implement lockdowns and even to force richer countries to pay for medical treatments and vaccines for poorer countries.
In short, this proposed treaty would take away countries’ sovereignty to make healthcare decisions based on local needs. Instead the WHO would seize control of healthcare decisions from elected local, regional and national bodies and move it to an unelected centralised system of global conformity, compliance and top-down control.
On 27th May 2022 British government announced its intention to sign up to the new WHO treaty: ‘To protect lives, the economy and future generations from future pandemics, the UK government supports a new legally-binding instrument to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.’
As our government imposes this new treaty on us, it might be worth reminding ourselves of how the WHO performed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Realising that there was a new infectious disease spreading, the Chinese Communist Party banned all internal domestic travel by the end of January 2020. On 23rd January, Wuhan city was placed under quarantine. Two days later the whole Hubei province was locked down. In the last week in January domestic flights from Hubei to other parts of China were stopped and restrictions on traffic in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai were imposed. This was the time of the Chinese New Year when offices and schools are closed and which is also the peak tourist season for the Chinese.
On 31st January, Italy fearing a major outbreak of Covid from the many Chinese workers and tourists travelling between China and Italy closed all flights to and from China. The Chinese were furious and China’s vice-minister of foreign affairs, Qin Gang, met Italy’s ambassador to China, Luca Ferrari, to protest about the travel ban. While restricting flights within China, the Civil Aviation Administration of China stated: ‘In order to meet the needs of passengers in and out of the country and the international transport of supplies airlines are required to continue transport to nations that have not imposed travel restrictions’.
Moreover, on 2nd February when the U.S.A. under President Donald Trump did start to advise against travel to or from China, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hua Chunying, criticised the U.S. travel advisories saying: ‘The U.S. government hasn’t provided any substantial assistance to us, but it was the first to evacuate personnel from its consulate in Wuhan, the first to suggest partial withdrawal of its embassy staff and the first to impose a comprehensive travel ban on Chinese travellers’.
China’s claim that all was well and that there was no need for international travel restrictions was supported by the WHO’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. At the opening of the WHO’s Executive Board meeting on 3rd February 2020 – a week after the Chinese Communist Party restricted internal travel within China – the WHO’s chief was quoted as saying: ‘There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade. We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent. The WHO stands ready to provide advice to any country that is considering which measures to take’.
On 11 March 2020, the WHO belatedly declared Covid a global pandemic. But by that time the number of cases globally has grown thirteen fold. By then, according to the WHO’s own website, more than 118,000 cases had been reported in over 100 countries and over 4,000 people had died. But it wasn’t till 27 March 2020 – two months after China imposed domestic travel restrictions – that Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to limit international flights from China. China’s Civil Aviation Administration announced that: ‘ninety percent of international flights would be temporarily suspended and the number of incoming passengers cut from 25,000 a day to 5,000 a day’. But by then it was too late as Covid had become a global crisis. By the end of April 2020 the U.S. had lost around 60,000 lives and Italy, Spain, France and Britain around 20,000 each. Worldwide, there were over 200,000 deaths and that was doubling every two weeks.
By the time the pandemic was brought under control, over seven million people worldwide had died and many millions more had their lives ruined either by lockdowns or by the inability to get medical care for other conditions because hospitals were overwhelmed by Covid sufferers.
In addition, China blocked any international investigation of the origins of the Covid pandemic – whether it came from an infected animal or a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And the WHO hardly made any attempt to demand openness from the Chinese authorities so we will never find out how the pandemic really started.
Given the WHO’s astonishing mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the apparent willingness of the WHO to bow to the Chinese Communist Party’s influence, we in Britain really need to understand why our political leaders are so willing to sign up to the new WHO treaty handing over so much power to the China-controlled WHO. This is especially important as there is nothing to stop the WHO declaring, for example, that climate change caused by human CO2 emissions is ‘a public health emergency of international concern’. After all, the WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, already warned jn May 2023: ‘The climate crisis is a health crisis, fuelling outbreaks, contributing to higher rates of noncommunicable diseases, and threatening to overwhelm our health workforce and health infrastructure. Climate change is emerging as one of the greatest health challenges of the 21st century.’ Declaring climate change as ‘a public health emergency of international concern’ would allow the WHO to demand drastic cuts in CO2 emissions from China’s competitor countries like the U.S.A., the European Union, Japan and South Korea to supposedly ‘save the planet’, while no doubt allowing countries classed as ‘developing countries’ like China and India to continue increasing their CO2 emissions in order to grow their economies to improve the health of their citizens.
This may sound like yet another wild conspiracy theory. But as we’ve learnt over the last few years with questions about the origin of Covid and the safety and effectiveness of certain vaccines, yesterday’s conspiracy theories often turn out to be today’s reality.
I guess I’m a bit slow on the uptake as I’ve just discovered that there is a ‘Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’ (DESNZ).
This confused me slightly as, from what little I understand, ‘energy security’ and ‘Net Zero’ are two mutually exclusive concepts. If you want energy security, you need lots of locally-sourced coal, oil and gas with a bit of nuclear thrown in. If you want Net Zero, you need loads of solar panels, which are useless when the sun doesn’t shine, and loads of wind turdbines, which are useless when the wind is either too weak or too strong:
Just a note for any of our good-for-nothing, expenses-fiddling, parasitic, UK-loathing politicians reading this, the sun doesn’t shine at night so you’re not going to get much energy from solar. And even during the day, Britain and Northern Europe are not known for having quite as many sunny days as say Spain or Morocco or Timbuktu. That’s why the boss of Germany’s largest energy company said that trying to get electricity from solar in Germany was like trying to grow pineapples in Alaska. As for wind, well you don’t get much wind on the coldest winter days when energy demand will be at its highest. So where will our electricity come from then? These are just some of the reasons why supposed ‘renewables’ – wind and solar – can never provide energy security.
This (IMHO) absurd incongruity of a department is run by possibly Britain’s most gifted and trusted politician – the right honourable Grant Shapps – and reminds me of the fantasy animal from Dr Dolittle – the push-me pull-you which apparently believed it could walk in two opposite directions at the same time:
Dr. Dolittle’s two-headed wonder is an obvious metaphor for the problem of trying to provide energy security while closing down all the sources of energy security to achieve the ludicrously-unnecessary and economically-ruinous Net Zero. If both heads want to go in opposite directions, nothing happens. If one head wins out, you get more of one thing (energy security or Net Zero) and less of the other.
It seems incredible to me that anyone with even the slightest hint of a few brain cells could take this absurdity of a government department seriously. Moreover, I fail to understand why nobody in the mainstream media has spotted the more than striking inherent contradictions in this preposterous department’s supposed aims.
Here’s a photo of two employees of this fatuous, farcical excuse for a government department hard at work:
I recently wrote a short article for The Conservative Woman about how all our supposed experts have repeatedly misjudged what is happening in Russia.1 All our mainstream media have claimed that the Wagner mutiny had weakened Putin. Typical headlines were ‘Ukraine can now end Putin’s crumbling regime‘2 and ‘How Wagner’s mutiny left Putin catastrophically weakened‘.3 But I argued that the rapid demolishing of the Wagner revolt and the exile of Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had actually strengthened Putin’s position.
However, the recent claims about a supposedly weakened Putin are just the latest examples of Western media’s dubious reporting of what is really happening in Russia. After all, ever since the start of Putin’s misjudged invasion of Ukraine, we’ve been assured that Putin was suffering from a long list of possibly fatal medical conditions. These included cancer – ‘Putin suffers breakdown after changing cancer medicine‘4: dementia – ‘Vladimir Putin has dementia and is being driven insane by paranoia‘5 and Parkinson’s – ‘Vladimir Putin does have Parkinson’s and pancreatic cancer‘6 It does seem that for a while Putin did suffer from some kind of nervous condition as his invasion turned into a disaster. But he has looked fairly sprightly recently, especially since the Wagner mutiny collapsed. So it may be that media reports of Putin’s imminent demise from a variety of illnesses are more than slightly premature.
I believe that the latest misreporting by our media concerns Putin’s statement that the Russian State paid the Wagner Group over $1 billion in just the last year. This was called an ‘admission’ in most Western media as if it was a sign of weakness.7 One typical Western media report claimed that Putin said this ‘in an apparent attempt to take full credit for earlier battlefield successes of the mercenaries‘.8
But yet again I believe our ‘experts’ have completely misjudged what Vladimir Putin is really doing. When Putin revealed how much money Russia paid the Wagner Group, he added that he hoped: “no one stole anything — or, let’s say, didn’t steal much. But we will certainly get to the bottom of this.“9 These additional remarks don’t appear to have been widely reported in any of the British mainstream media. But it seems clear to me that Putin is about to launch an investigation into how the Wagner Group used the money they were paid and I’ve no doubt that eye-watering levels of corruption will be revealed giving Putin the excuse to persecute Wagner bosses. So, while Western media interpreted the announcement of massive payments to the Wagner Group as another sign of Putin’s weakness, I think they’ve (probably deliberately) got it wrong yet again. What Putin was really saying is that he’s going to get revenge on Wagner for what he perceives as their treachery and he’s going to use a financial investigation to bring down what remains of the Wagner Group.
Of course, I may be wrong and all the ‘experts’ claiming Putin is a gravely ill despot fatally damaged by the Wagner incident may be right. But I suspect that our ‘experts’ have all along been guilty of at best ‘wishful thinking’, but more probably have deliberately worked to mislead us about what is really happening in Russia.
David Craig, on July 21st, 2023
