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The war in Ukraine rumbles on. The imminent threat of another war between Taiwan and China is building to a climax. In Brazil there’s a real fear Jair Bolsonaro is planning to disrupt the upcoming elections and retain power, and in the Philippines the son of Ferdinand Marcos (Ferdinand Jnr) has brought the disgraced family dynasty back into ultimate power in that unfortunate nation.

The British government is on its knees, with the Prime Minister and his Chancellor both absent at a time of serious economic emergency.

Abortion is now illegal in most states of the USA following a political decision by the Supreme Court (a court corrupted by the three Donald Trump appointees who all pledged Congress they’d not interfere with Roe v Wade) that has split that nation asunder and given kudos to a Republican Party still led by the tainted ex-President Donald Trump, who aims to retake power in 2024.

These are just a few of the serious issues confronting the people of the world today, people at odds with each other, tribalized by social media companies who make billions of dollars by encouraging disagreement, argument, and vicious trolling among their users.

What Has Changed?

Surely the world has always been like this?

No, not in the way it is today. There have always been problems between nations, but in the past the law and moral code was always well defined, and when broken, action taken to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Today, those laws and that code are breaking down. Nothing is clearly defined anymore. Even supposed morally responsible nations like the United States assassinate with impunity.  They are applauded for actions, which by definition, are not short of premeditated murder. The rule of law is under constant threat.

Nuclear arms proliferate. Legally binding treaties, designed to keep a nuclear balance between nations, are dashed aside, broken, as the ghastly reach for ultimate power becomes the goal of despotic political leaders.  NATO nations find themselves hamstrung as Russia’s Vladimir Putin threatens global annihilation should NATO interfere in his  invasion and desecration of Ukraine.

The “Ultimate Deterrent” has become the “Ultimate Weapon” to blackmail the world. It’s one we can be sure that Xi Jinping will use when his People’s Army bloodily retakes Taiwan for the Chinese motherland.

The human race is today suffering more chaos than it has produced for itself since 1939.

Our Faulty Belief Systems

Fear, uncertainty, and chaos grips the human race. When that occurs, human beings turn to their belief systems to sustain them.  Negative beliefs, such as an inbuilt disdain for politicians, can surface and allow populists like Bolsonaro, Orban, Marcos, Trump and others (including the UK’s Boris Johnson) into power. These political fakes promise to make life better for their people. Their citizens cling to the lies they are fed, their belief systems categorizing them as truth.

Religion ranks high in the belief systems of many people. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the distorted, capitalistic, right-wing Christian religion of the USA, that allowed Donald Trump to win the presidency and brought about the withdrawal of nationwide abortion rights. Behind it all is social media to arouse and inflame those belief systems.

“Covid-19 was a hoax perpetrated by dark political forces for their own ends.” (no-one actually defined what those ends might be, though there were a few crazy theories). eu.usatoday.com

“The election was stolen from President Trump.” (A quarter of Americans, over 76 million citizens, still believe  Donald Trump is the legitimate President of the United States. That’s an awful lot of distorted belief systems).

“5G phone towers produce deadly viruses.” Some 50 fires targeting cell towers and other equipment have been reported in Britain this month, leading to three arrests. Telecom engineers have been abused on the job 80 times, according to trade group Mobile UK, making the U.K. the nucleus of the attacks.  ABC News April 2020

Russian propaganda, through it’s state-controlled media platforms, brainwashes and corrupts the belief systems of Russians into believing the deaths and suffering in Ukraine are justified because Ukrainians have been “Nazified” and need to be purged.

The human belief system is a comfort system that will believe what it’s owner wants to believe, even when it bears little or no resemblance to reality.

Climate Change

What is causing all this fear, uncertainty, and chaos gripping the human race? Rampant consuming fire, ravaging flood, deadly virulent germs. All these and more, the result of climate change.

The speed at which the climate is degenerating has shocked scientists, who until recently were talking “end of century”, or “generations to come.” Manmade disasters are already knocking at our doors today.  The human race is well used to disasters, but except on the rare occasion it actually happens to them it’s usually happening to someone else far away in the world.

“It’s a shame but, hell it’s not happening to us so let’s get on with life.”

Climate change now affects everyone to some extent, and it comes with a guarantee: that extent is going to get greater. Already, in Britain, the village of Wennington was almost wiped off the map in July by a fire that consumed nineteen houses, “like a scene from the Blitz” as one resident described it.

It was hardly a national disaster, such as the mega bushfires of Australia in 2019-2020, or the huge blazes that are now an annual event in the USA, coupled with a decade long drought in many parts of the nation that has seen reservoirs so low the debris and human remains from years long gone are now appearing in the shallowed waters.

Complacency

When the Third Reich began to re-arm Germany in the 1930s, no-one took much notice. The Western world, at least, was too busy celebrating nearly twenty years of peace after the “War to end all wars.” Life wasn’t too bad for most people and there was always the Rhumba, Samba, Balboa, Lindy Hop, and Jive…

…dance crazes to keep the populace entertained. Consequently, 1939 came as something of a shock to many.

There are millions today whose belief systems have succumbed to decades of anti-climate-change propaganda from the fossil fuel companies, and who still refuse to believe that the changing climate is a threat to their very lives. “Just a great British summer,” said one man basking on a beach in the UK as the temperature touched 43^oC.

He was not alone.

Unless those multitudes realize it’s not just another “great British summer”, or any great summer wherever they happen to be, then the politicians will continue to have their pockets lined by the fossil fuel companies, and any serious attempt to combat a manmade phenomena that is on course to kill off every living thing on this planet, will not happen until it’s too late.

Breakdown Of Civilization

Studying the world  as a whole, it becomes obvious that, slowly but with gathering pace, climate change is causing a breakdown in our civilization. Unless something drastic is done to curtail the effects of atmospheric pollution and CO² emissions, then it may not be climate change that wipes us out, but our own inability to maintain the frameworks of our lawful societies that we collectively label under, ‘civilization’.

Nuclear annihilation, by superpower leaders gone insane with power, is in a neck-and-neck  race with climate disaster to eliminate us, and may well be edging in front before the horror of the finishing line is reached.

We like to think we’re all individuals. In some ways we are, but in terms of a species we’re all very much alike. Human beings like to argue and bicker and disagree, but our communal psyche works best at pretending nothing untoward is happening.

That is, until it happens.

 

 

I never thought when I left the UK for America in 2002, that I would ever be ashamed of my country. I was proud to be British, proud of my EU passport.

Not any more. I am deeply ashamed of what my country has become. As if the Brexit vote, engineered through brainwashing and outright lies by men like Johnson, Gove, Fox, and Farage, wasn’t bad enough, the government is now led by Johnson who has surrounded himself with ass-lickers, useless at the jobs they’ve been assigned, but chosen for the sole purpose of keeping Johnson in power.

No-one is more useless at her job as Home Secretary than the unfortunately named Priti Patel. Unfortunate, not because of her harsh, cold, features, but for the harsh, cold, heart that dwells within them. She should be dumped on an uninhabited island in the South Atlantic, as once she suggested should happen to refugees seeking asylum in the UK.

Now the hell-bitch it bent on making it as difficult as possible for Ukrainians to enter the UK. Many have arrived at Calais, only to be told to access a  ridiculously long internet link.

“Oh, darn, in the rush to leave Ukraine as the bombs were falling around me I forgot to bring my laptop. I’ll just nip back and get it!”

Poland has taken 800,000 Ukrainian refugees. The UK to date: 300.

Who are these wankers, who have no idea of the suffering people go through. Above, is a notice pinned up at Calais by the British government stipulating these poor, overwhelmed, shattered, people must now trek hundreds more kilometres to Paris (182 miles/293 kms) or Brussels (122 miles/196 kms) in the hope they may be allowed into the UK. Even if they are granted a visa, they’ll probably need to travel back to Calais for a fucking ferry to cross the Channel.

Isn’t it time Brits started to get rid of all the thick, stupid, heartless bastards that have been running their country for too long. All the strutters, the peacocks in their fancy suits, with their fancy titles, “The Right Honorable,” “Lord Fucking So-and-So,” “The Home Secretary” (sooner she’s shut in a home the better!), and all the other gawks not worth a light, and certainly not the fancy salaries they pay themselves. They’re brainwashed in Oxford before being sent out to keep the peasants poor and feather their own fancy nests. There’s hardly a brain cell between the lot of them. Daddy’s money got them where they are, more often than not, or an education system they’ve tailored to suit themselves, and to hell with ordinary folk.

Brits are a laughing stock throughout the world and an embarrassment to English folk living abroad. I try to avoid telling French people where I come from, not because of fear of violence, the French are too polite for that, but for the look of sympathy that crosses their features as soon as the word, “English” is mentioned.

I used to be proud of my country of birth. Now, it feels like a millstone around the neck.

 

^{Polina, who was nine or 10 years old, was shot dead alongside her parents by Russian Military}

Alive one minute, dead the next. Can there ever be a valid reason or excuse for this barbarity? Why should Putin be allowed to be alive when because of his greed for power, this little girl is dead?

It’s not countries that start wars, it’s individuals.

It was March 16th 1935 when Adolf Hitler informed the world he was re-arming Germany in direct breach of the Treaty of Versailles . A modern air force, an army of half a million men, emerged from that declaration and Britain, France, and the League of Nations did nothing to stop it.

The world was too busy partying, enjoying peace after the war to end all wars was won in 1918. Twenty million dead and another twenty-one million wounded was truly something to party about. Meanwhile, Germany steamed ahead with its military buildup, while the West depleted its military, in the sure knowledge it was unlikely to be needed again.

But is was needed again, and the sloth-replicating governments of the rest of Europe and the United States were caught off-guard when Hitler made a fool of the then Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, and with Russian support, invaded Poland and massacred between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians.

When Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 2012 the West was busy partying yet again. This time the Cold War was over. The West had won yet again when Reagan and Gorbachev shook hands after signing the INF treaty in late 1987.  The USSR was being demolished and Russia was no longer a threat to the rest of the world. Germany was re-united, the wall had come down. Perestroika and Glasnost were the two words on everyone’s lips in the 1980s and early nineties.

Yet again, the West rested on its laurels, contenting itself with the relatively minor squabbles of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, to hone it’s ever-depleting militaries.

Putin entrenched his power as a Russian dictator over the years. No-one recognised the burning hatred and frustration in his cold heart at the loss of an empire that could have been his to control. Inflaming that hatred was the knowledge gnawing at his innards, that the United States had broken it’s promises to Gorbachev, and no sooner was he out of power than first Reagan, and later George W Bush, moved missile bases into what were once satellite Russian nations on that country’s border.

If Western governments were aware of the Russian military build-up ordered by Putin, they certainly seemed unconcerned. There couldn’t possibly be a war between two nuclear powers. It would end in mutual destruction. Wasn’t that the whole point of a nuclear deterrent?

The lessons of the 1930s had not been learned. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 on the pretext of claiming back territory once German.  Putin has now invaded Ukraine on the exact same pretext. Meanwhile, the rest of the world stands by and does nothing but make speeches of condemnation against the aggressor.

In 1939, Britain and France had a treaty of protection with Poland. When Germany, and two weeks later Russia, invaded Poland neither Britain, nor France, made much effort to assist the Poles.

There is no such treaty with Ukraine. It has asked repeatedly to join NATO and been refused on each occasion, no doubt in an effort to appease Putin, rather than for any genuine grievance. Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, are all NATO members. Only Belarus, under the harsh dictator and Putin supporter, Lukashenko, and Ukraine, a democratic nation, are not NATO members verging onto the Russian border.

Putin is now threatening nuclear war against the West, if so much as one Western soldier sets foot in Ukraine. The West sits impotent. Will yet another civilian massacre take place in Ukraine as it did in Poland in 1939?

And when Putin conquers Ukraine and turns his military against Latvia, or Lithuania, or Romania, or maybe for a second time in recent history, against Poland, where will the West be then? It cannot sit on its hands then. According to the NATO pact, “An attack on one is an attack on all.”

When power turned a man into a madman, we saw the effects in a major world war lasting six devastating years. The next one may be over much more quickly.

At least the little nine or ten year old Ukrainian girl, Polina, along with many of her schoolmates, won’t be around to suffer it.