I’d intended to return today to what, in the face of intense competition, is the most burning question of all – will the USS Abraham Lincoln and its carrier fleet really strike Iran? – but I’m not there yet. Here instead are a few scattered observations on other matters.
Half a century ago US corporate media led by the New York Times ran a story they’d spent twenty months ignoring. Had they not, they’d have been scooped by an underground press to which a young journalist named Seymour Hersh, rebuffed and angry with it, was offering revelations of the My Lai massacre.
Is something similar happening now with Epstein and Israel? One swallow or even two do not a summer make but columnists at two British papers, Times and Telegraph, are asking not only if the suicided sex trafficker was a Mossad asset. They are even asking (a bit rich given their own papers’ record) why no one is asking!
So could the cartoon I’ve only just replaced after several days on my masthead …
… be about to be overtaken by events? Too early to tell. But having already featured Lowkey and The Young Turks on Epstein’s relations with a genocidal state backed unconditionally by my government and likely yours, here’s Novara Media in a twenty minute discussion; its starting point whether the elephant is about to charge.
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Like most of my social milieu, born into the middle class else raised up to it by postwar boom and Beveridge, I live in a leafy suburb. The only national flags I see, and these but rarely, are green, white, red and black in the windows of folk who don’t care for genocide. But the other day Jackie was driving through Parson Cross, the vast council estate I spent the first half of my boyhood on. Union Jacks were everywhere, she reported, and you don’t need me to tell you there’s an ocean of difference between the flags of looted nations, and those of the looters.
As to why The Jack now festoons the streets, lamp posts and houses of folk who, objectively and in tangible terms, have gained the square root of zilch from a crumbling status quo, I wonder when I might find time to write a post on turkeys, Xmas and the vexed question of ideology.
On that last, many a noble attempt to chart the seas of mind-bending complexity thereof have foundered on the rocks of the unreadable. As Elvis observed, fools rush in.
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Yesterday in Aldi, alongside Morissons and Co-op one of just three British supermarkets to have no dealings with the genocidal state, I reach for a 500gm pack of sultanas, at £1.29 where two years ago it’d have been £0.75. To me it’s worrying. To Desperate of Parson Cross, struggling to feed her kids, it’s devastating. The media are calling it “the cost of living crisis”.
Have you noticed how the big supermarkets, Tesco Extra and the like, have reduced the number of store exits? Maybe you, like me, have cursed the inconvenience. And maybe you, like me, know why they did it.
Which gets me wondering when I’ll find the time to pen the post, or series of posts, I’ve been contemplating for months now on the economic illiteracy of ‘austerity’.
On Epstein and the implications, you will have to go a long way to better Alistair Crooke’s output:
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/02/09/the-slow-epstein-earthquake-the-rupture-between-the-people-and-the-elites/
– “Western societies now face a dilemma that cannot be resolved through elections, parliamentary commissions, or speeches. How can one continue to accept the authority of institutions that shielded this level of horror? How can respect be maintained for laws applied selectively by people who live above them?”
– “[Young Americans] realise that their institutions are failing them, and they’re going to have to [save themselves] … you’ve got tens of thousand of people in Minneapolis, saying this is not any more about Constitutional issues, or the rule of law or democracy – which may sound good – but which is at a remove from the average person at the average kitchen table”.
“People are saying the Supreme Court is not going to protect us; Congress is not going to protect us; the President is the enemy; he is deploying his own army in our cities. The only people who can protect us – are: We ourselves”.
“It is ‘the billionaires stupid’” [a reference to the old amorphism: ‘It’s the economy, stupid’]”
– “If protest has no effect in changing the status quo, and elections remain between the Tweedle Dee and Dum parties of the existing order, the young will conclude that ‘no one will come to save us’ – and they may conclude in their despair that the future can only be decided on the streets.”
Being a frequent traveller through Parson Cross and as someone who spent twenty years on the tools climbing telegraph poles and another eleven years looking after the specialist engineers who test them, its probably best not to get me started on the subject of what is termed illegal attachments to street furniture and the public safety issues involved.
This report into the death of a Bristol man killed after falling from his ladder whilst attempting to attach a flag to a lamp post will have to suffice:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74ww90v9gyo
Leaving aside the fact that such a structure should only be accessed with an elevating platform vehicle and the absence of any gate guards and warning signage, the likely main contributing factor to this unnecessary loss of life will undoubtedly be the fact that the ladder was not tied to the structure at the bottom and the top along with him having no safety belt and lanyard. Fortunately no other member of the public was passing at the time – either on foot or in a vehicle.
The Cross is bad enough, but at least no one there has actually climbed not one, but four electric poles carrying high voltage overhead electric cables with large signs attached saying WARNING DANGER OF DEATH to attach these flags.
That was Lower Midhopestones between Stocksbridge and Langsett. They got taken down very quickly by the electric untility contractors.
Sometimes you just have to shake your head at the sheer lack of gorm.
‘Gormless’, like ‘ruthless’ and ‘uncouth’, is a word whose antithesis has fallen into disuse. You and I, super-endowed with gorm, need to reintroduce the latter into the vernacular. I did my bit recently with this sentence on Syria:
Alastair Crooke never fails to impress me.
“The young will conclude that. . . the future can only be decided on the streets.” Well, if the system can’t be reformed, (and I don’t think it can without demolition) logically the streets it is. I only hope that the tattered remnants of the Army identify with their class, rather than their (by then probably completely clueless and incompetent) officers.
In my area all these flags seem to be at the same height on the lamp post in a way that looks like they were all put up in the middle of the night by someone working from the back of a vehicle. There’s the cost of the vehicle (hire?) plus the cost of the flags to raise the question of who’s paying for it.
Reform UK looks like a psy-op, well funded and with no internal democracy.
I blame Palestine Action …
Seems reasonable to assume you mean a specialist vehicle with an elevating platform and retractable stabilisers, Johnny?
Which means trained/licensed operators with the relevant certification. Such courses can be found online, and you are looking, at a minimum of, at least £300+
The alternative with a vehicle is to stand on the roof.
A few around this neck of the woods are high enough to suggest a specialist platform – which is the legal safe method of access when working on small circumference hollow metal street lights, which should never be accessed with a ladder for obvious safety reasons. However, I’ll wager most of these are attached by people who are untrained in the necessary safety procedures, using a ladder with no rope ties and with no safety gear (safety belt with lanyard, hard hat, sturdy boots), gate guards, or warning signs.
Placing not only those numpties involved at risk of injury or death, but also members of the public who happen to be passing.
It is usually straightforward enough to guess the local culprit. They are the one with multiple flags attached to and outside their own house.
I was thinking of a flat back truck with a work platform secured to the back.