Reform’s Uniparty wing v the nonWoke in general

In the wake of Yusuf Farage’s latest stunt against Rupert Lowe:

… following all the others, inc. the gun collection, plus the latest stunt on James McMurdoch, it’s probably time to look at how blinkered Reform supporters are deliberately being, plus the normies not being aware in the least, hence they’ve heard that Reform are THE protest vote these days … I’ve seen this at ground level, with Farage cast as the bold warrior taking on the Uniparty, esp. Labour.

I tweeted earlier this week that I’m all for grassroots Reform and in an election, if no Rupert approved indie was on the paper, then yes, I’d put my mark in the Reform box.

So how can I reconcile that with our constant calling out of the gang of three … Yusuf and his acolytes Farage and Tice?  The answer is … with difficulty.  Yet there are indications of where the divide truly lies:

Someone writing that was possibly a C&UP voter back before all this blew up … might have been UKIP, Tory leaning.  A Douglas Carswell or Roger Helmer. Even using the word Tory is loaded … it brands you immediately, whereas if you run a Union flag in your profile … that in turn has connotations.

Then there is the Sarah Pochin type … LibDem, having been typical leftwing-Conservative, almost social-democrat. Good job in the city or home duties, property, respectable but playing the radical, a conservative kipper sort of person, maybe even libertarian.  None of this low class Tommy Robinson “nonsense” … shops at Waitrose, civic-minded … a middle to upper-middle centrist.

Rupert?  He’s still quite loaded at this point before Labour steals it, he’s not really “of the street people”, is not really the demo-going type to see Tommy.

There’s yet another divide: 

And therein lies the divide … almost the class divide. In my case, I was public school, ra ra, Boat Race, cricket, rugger, sailing, Conservative voter for decades, a good address … but my beginnings were humble … a Yorkshire builder father and visiting nurse mother … not exactly east end or Gorbals but not in line with my education either.

Point is that I can feel at ease in either social situation, happily living in this Labour stronghold, with a nice abode with nice views.  I’m not sure everyone is of that mind and thus Tory 2.0 is a nightmare scenario.  For other antiWoke, the notion of Rupert leading these forces is anathema … what’s the resolution?

Well, under FPTP voting … there is no resolution, even in the face of the invaders en masse. One half of us antiWoke do not want to even hear such far-right talk from me.

In some ways, we can get around it by calling ourselves Brexiteers … that was pretty broad in definition.

Hmmmmm.

But It’s The Type Of ‘Reduced Functionality’ That’s A Good Thing!

Elon Musk formally exited his role in the Trump administration on Wednesday night, ending a contentious and generally unpopular run as a senior adviser to the president and de facto head of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge). Though he promised efficiency and modernization, Musk leaves behind a trail of uncertainty and reduced functionality.

Good, because it’s in all the areas where increased functionality is a bad thing!  All the places where we’d rather the government was a little less effective.

The timing of Musk’s departure lines up with the end of his 130-day term limit as a “special government employee” but also plays a part in an effort by the billionaire to signal a wider shift away from Washington as he faces backlash from the public and shareholders.

So the departure isn’t the gotcha moment the progressive press thinks it is?

Musk’s initial pitch for Doge was to save $2tn from the budget by rooting out rampant waste and fraud, as well as to conduct an overhaul of government software that would modernize how federal agencies operate. Doge so far has claimed to cut about $140bn from the budget – although its “wall of receipts” is notorious for containing errors that overestimate its savings.

Errors like the ones governments always make, you mean? 

Doge’s cuts have targeted a swath of agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization, which handles weather and natural disaster forecasting, and plunged others such as the Department of Veterans Affairs into crises. Numerous smaller agencies, such as one that coordinates policy on homelessness, have been in effect shut down. Doge has brought several bureaus to their knees, with no clear plan of whether the staff Musk leaves behind will try to update or maintain their services or simply shut them off.

When Doge staffers entered the General Services Administration agency that housed the 18F Office, former employees have said they appeared to fundamentally misunderstand how the government operates and the challenges of creating public services.

Well, yes, clearly - they thought these organisations, drawing as they do on US taxpayer funding, should work to provide the US population with improvements to their lives, when in reality their function was to ptovide sinecires for the useless sons and daughters of politicians, or provide people inforeign countries with things or services US politicians thought they should have, but which their own governments wouldn't ptrovide for them. 

Is there something wrong with that?

While Musk is returning to his tech empire, (Ed: errr, not quite) many of the former employees and inexperienced young engineers whom he hired to work for Doge are set to remain part of the government.

So the experiment begins - will they go native? 

What seems farther away than ever in the chaos, however, is Musk’s promise to make the government more efficient and better serve the public. “You don’t need that many people to decide to just cut things,” 18F’s Young said. “But if you actually want to build things, that takes thought. It takes effort.”

It takes the effort to stop funding the things you shouldn't have been funding so that you have the resources to build those things, though... 

The moment Grok went MAGA

(1311) There seems to have been an issue with some readers seeing the text below the intro earlier today.  I've gone back to the start and what appears below was the sshot below the intro. The intro itself I'll leave out.

But It Is Affordable – It’s Just Not As Convenient

And far too many people are lazy:

The government’s policy on obesity, announced on Sunday, sounds as though it’s tough on the supermarkets: they really must do better on the health front, ministers say

Calorie for calorie, a basket of healthy food costs more than twice as much as a basket of less healthy food, according to a report by the Food Foundation. That statistic sounds stark until you engage your brain.

If you engage your brain, that statistic just sounds like absolute bullshit. 

Even if supermarkets didn’t have racks of ‘buy it now’ yellow sticker meat, fish, fruit and veg, the cost of an average trolley full of processed ready meals is always going to be more costly than a trolley full of fresh meat, fish, fruit and veg. The missing ingredient here isn’t cash - it’s knowledge and desire to cook from scratch rather than stab a few holes in a film lid and stick it in the machine that goes ‘ding’. 

Processed food is cheap because that is the “process”: the relentless prioritising of the profit margin over every other consideration, such as nutritional value. What else are you going to use all that big, capitalist brain power for? Making food more colourful?

The range of breakfast cereals available on shelves suggest they long ago exhausted that option! 

The missing plank in this raft of suggestions is the only one that would make any difference: addressing the price of food. There is a reason that one in three children in deprived areas are overweight, compared with one in five in the general population – people on low incomes cannot afford healthy food.

Not at all - they can, easily. Countless tv shows have pushed this point, even Jamie Oliver (the Chav’s Chef) has tried, and to no avail. The simple fact is most people don't care, and cannot be bothered to cook - they want the convenience of processed ready meals, and to hell with the side effects of this attitude.

The chasm between the self-appointed rulers and the ruled

Consider these three screenshots:

I’m assuming you’ll know what each is about.  It’s all about appeasement but even as you go to comment, the govt is preparing blasphemy and other legislation on you.  Plus, whether LC is actually in prison or not for 31 months in uncomfortable conditions, the belief by those on this island is that she is and it’s a lesson from public school bullies (with rent boy overtones) that it’s dangerous to complain … just bend over and take what’s coming … just as in prison.

How do politicians get like this?  Who is controlling them to develop mindsets like this?  Or was it that they recruited only those with such mindsets, Dunning-Kruger types, capable of flat-out lying to constituents?  Anyone halfway decent is cut out at earlier stages of the preselection?

And the eternal question … by which process can it all be stopped, reversed?

Mahmood Needs To Watch Better Sci-Fi Movies...

Tracking devices inserted under offenders’ skin, robots assigned to contain prisoners and driverless vehicles used to transport them were among the measures proposed by technology companies to ministers who are gathering ideas to tackle the crisis in the UK justice system.

Surely we can do better than that?  

Those present included representatives of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir, which works closely with the US military and has contracts with the NHS. IBM and the private prison operator Serco also attended alongside tagging and biometric companies, according to a response to a freedom of information request.

Given the fact that very little of this tech works as intended are we sure we want to go down this route?

Mahmood told the tech companies she wants “deeper collaboration between government and tech to solve the prison capacity crisis, reduce reoffending and make communities safer”. She invited them to “scale and improve” the existing use of tagging “not just for monitoring but to drive rehabilitation and reduce crime”.

You can onlt rehabilitate those who wwant to change - just what percentage of the offendfer population does? 

Human rights campaigners called the ideas “alarmingly dystopian”...

Of vcourse they did. It's what they do. It's time they were ignored. 

The fundamental interconnectedness of all things

At Unherdables, the Higham hosted tavern accessed through the link James in the sidebar, look for post item Saturday 15.

I wrote:

Going to run this at Orphans now in lieu of a post Sunday morning … there’s way too much text, too many pics, too many links to double up in both places … one readership goes there, one comes here.

Plus I’m not keen to be too plainspeak here on it all.  Sorry for the cryptology.

Are these the only barbarians?

There are few, imho, who’d not condemn reprehensible imported practices:

… but do we turn a blind eye to another, among the European and black females of the west … the globopsycho full term abortion?

The spectacle of that sleb the other day on X, laughing about not knowing just how many abortions she’d had … I wonder how many were late term … or were they drug induced?  Charming.  Who’s the savage here?

Then there was the whistleblower in America who spoke of the baby … not foetus but baby … who was crying as he was thrown into the incinerator … just who’s the barbarian there?

The decision, for those at libertarian sites or at least liberty sites such as Orphans, is just how much liberty?  Carte blanche on those mentioned above, saying nothing in the name of “liberty” … or some limit just back from that red line?  Where is the red line then?

Remember What The Blessed Margaret Said – Sooner Or Later They Run Out Of Other People’s Money

The Labour government’s abrupt U-turn on winter fuel payments – restoring the benefit to more than three-quarters of pensioners – reveals less a change of heart than a sobering realisation in Westminster: after years of austerity, the public no longer gives politicians the benefit of the doubt.

The irony is hard to miss. Labour set out to prove that “grown-up” economics means difficult decisions – only to find that once trust is lost, voters won’t accept vague promises without tangible results.

Sadly, Labour forgot to staff their front bench with grown ups! 

It turns out many are sceptical that sacrifices will produce better results for society. That’s why ministers are struggling to justify cuts to disability benefits as a way to “fund” public services – or to convince the public that Britain can’t afford to lift the two-child benefit cap even as ministers claim they will reduce child poverty.

It’s not for government to do that, though; it’s for prospective parents to do it, by not having children they can’t afford.

Today’s class politics has been built on culture wars and channelled through identity and belonging. The warning by the former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane that Nigel Farage is now seen by many as the closest thing Britain has to a “tribune for the working class” should be taken seriously. Citing Reform UK’s surge in the polls, he pointed to a “moral rupture” between voters and mainstream politicians, accusing Labour of fuelling disillusionment through a weak growth strategy and unpopular decisions on benefits.

Those decisions were only unpopular with those dependant on benefits - they were wildly popular with those paying for the benefits! 

Labour’s spending review this week looks like an attempt to reframe its offer around extra cash for frontline services such as health and education. That is welcome. Less so will be the real-terms cuts in unprotected departments that Ms Reeves’s fiscal rules demand to account for such commitments. If this reset is not visible and felt by voters soon, the door swings open wider to Mr Farage and his hard-right politics.

'Hard right politics'? It's pretty soft right politics, at the moment, but keep on with the progressive nonsense, and you'll soon see some real hard right politics!

The arrogant criminality and indifference to humans …

… during the 2020 to 2023 Covid and Vaxx scam.

Yes, there were the major crimes, from Pence/Gates/Fauci/Brock/Birx to Ferguson/Whitty/Hancock … but there so many minor ones too … the iconic picture of the mum and two small daughters on a beach with a uniformed, gun toting enforcement officer standing over them … I’ll never forget that one.

The snuffing out of the elderly was one of the major crimes, whether here or Cuomo in NYC … plus the sheer arrogant grinning of Johnson and Hancock, plus that Tik Tok choreographed dancing in wards as we were meant to come outside from our homes and clap like performing seals.

And then there were the Karens everywhere, weren’t there, e.g. Piers Morgan, so many others.  And then there was this: