Righteous Among the Heathen

It is vital to remember, lest we fall into the pernicious error of racial stereotyping, that certain Arab breeds are a moral cut above the Palestinian Untermenschen. A case in point is provided by His Majesty's Government's favourite Islamic fundamentalists, among whom British values are once more splendidly rampant. Border forces beholden to the head-chopping House of Saud are taking a bracing no-nonsense approach to Ethiopian migrants, who are very selfishly and underhandedly taking illegal advantage of the fallout from the legal, moderate and sensible Saudi rampage in Yemen. Popular deterrents include beatings, rape, indiscriminate machine-gun fire and bodies left to rot; although, as with the gangs small-boating economic migrants across the Anglo-American Channel, it remains unclear how effective such measures are against the innate good taste and compassion of the traffickers. Fortunately the illegal Ethiopians tend to be from areas affected by civil conflict, poverty and the climate crisis, and therefore unworthy of British aid; so His Majesty's Government's military and diplomatic ties with the head-chopping House of Saud are unlikely to suffer any significant reduction in profitability.

Unhealthy Associations

In yet another regrettable instance of unelected officialdom's indifference to hard choices and economic growth, a Surrey coroner has expressed concern over the use of unqualified and inexperienced personnel in the NHS even though such personnel tend to come cheaper. "Physician associates", whom the Government intends as a sustainable substitute for doctors until AI can take over medicating the expendables, receive limited training and are expected to get by on clean British pluck and gumption as opposed to all that nasty non-profitable expertise. In this case a woman was misdiagnosed with a nosebleed and subsequently died of complications from a hernia; her relatives accepted the misdiagnosis because they were under the impression that it originated with someone merely qualified to diagnose. However, since importing experienced immigrants is a self-evident moral impossibility and inadequate training costs less than the other sort, a degree of attrition among the social class whose lifestyle choices don't include private healthcare is clearly a price worth paying.

Weighting the Barbarians

They're savage, with strange deities,
And merit death from our disease;
So those our own God cannot save,
We humbly slaughter and enslave.

They're simple, noble, frank and free
Of civilised hypocrisy;
We've much to learn, they've lots to teach,
Provided they don't over-reach.

Though quite impressive in their time,
They've lately turned to drugs and crime.
The lower orders of our race
Should look to them, and know their place.

Their complex tribal culture stays
In harmony with Nature's ways;
Alas, their fund of social health
Adds little to our conquered wealth.

Extinction's coming for us. How
Might we best make use of them now?

Mia Kapoialysis

Media Magic

Since history, myth and literature are devoid of intrinsic interest, it is customary for reporting journalists to spice developments up a bit and so facilitate consumption. Britain's leading liberal newspaper has smoothly applied this technique to the Myrddin Poetry Project, which has spent the past three years editing and translating mediaeval Welsh poems about the figure most commonly known as Merlin. While obviously incapable of holding a journalistic attention merely upon its merits, this achievement has been expertly packaged for modern values by presenting the character as an early environmentalist; and although one cannot fault the intention, yet the interpretation seems a little behind the times. In one text Merlin expresses fear that an orchard will be cleared by woodcutters, which surely makes him less an early environmentalist than a partisan of farmer-landlords over industrialists. In another piece he warns a white sow to be alert against one of his personal enemies; which, once appropriately construed, might easily qualify Merlin as a forefather of the Farage Falange.

Hire Learning

Though occasionally a factor in teaching students to think clearly and in broadening their cultural horizons, higher education does have one or two legitimate advantages. Despite years of budgetary slashings and staff sackings, British universities still retain their snob value as producers of prestige graduates. While the little people content themselves with attending the Academy of Hard Knocks, future world leaders are purchasing courses at Oxford, Cambridge and the LSE, always provided their national treasuries can handle the tuition fees. Nevertheless, the university industry continues to fail in its primary purpose, that of assisting the country's economic growth by turning an adequate profit. Accordingly, the Minister for Human Resources Training has announced the inevitable "tough decisions" to sack more staff and slash more budget.

Spot the Red State

Communities in the South Plains region of the Christian state of Texas are celebrating the appointment of the Kennedy brainworm as health secretary with the largest measles epidemic in thirty years. Despite large numbers of citizens denying their children vaccination and trusting in God to protect them, ninety cases have been identified in the past month; although at least sixteen of those cases indulged in sufficient backsliding to permit themselves the impiety of hospitalisation. Additional cases are likely to occur according to experts, however, it must be borne in mind that their expertise is likely to be merely medical and epidemiological; so they probably failed to take into account the copious quantities of thoughts and prayers which are no doubt present in the region, and the purifying effect thereof.

Don't They Know Who's the Colonial Power Around Here?

International waters are awash with subtle and treacherous doings, as the Heathen Chinee have most provocatively and non-genocidally carried out a live-fire exercise while abiding by international law. So insidious was the naval task force's conduct that several airlines were able to change their flight plans because the junks and sampans gave, of all things, sufficient warning via a civilian radio channel. This low cunning outraged the Australian shadow defence spokesbeing, the trigger-fingerishly surnamed Andrew Hastie, who suggested that the Heathen Chinee were engaged in "gunboat diplomacy" and thereby usurping the prerogatives of the master race. For its own part, the Australian defence department claims that it was not formally notified, although by the grace of Providence some of its personnel apparently happened to be listening to the civilian channel in question at just the right time.

You're Still Not Poor Enough

Somehow or other, despite treading with gossamer lightness on the lives of the overseas tax-dodging community while letting all those pensioners freeze at home, the Chancellor is facing unexpectedly low tax receipts. On top of that, the Trumpster régime seems to believe it's about time Europe did its own wog-bombing; and despite the oozing diplomacy of Team Starmer and Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring, the minions of the head-tribble seem to regard the mainland as somehow part of Europe. What can have gone wrong? Fortunately, since running a large capitalist economy (albeit slightly shrunken through making Brexit work) is meaningfully akin to balancing a household budget, simple solutions will doubtless be bountifully forthcoming.

Blood Money

Local authorities in the Philippines are attempting to combat an outbreak of mosquito-borne disease by placing a bounty on the nefarious insects. Five mosquitoes fetch one Philippine peso, those captured alive being summarily executed, and villagers have responded with entomoclastic alacrity. Nevertheless, there are some who still urge caution, and the possibility has been raised that the more entrepreneurially inclined might start breeding mosquitoes in order to turn them in. What nasty, scheming minds some people have. A governmental spokesbeing even went so far as to suggest that communities should be rewarded for cleaning up stagnant water: a nightmarish mirror image of the civilised world, in which communities pay to have their water turned into sewage, and where any bounty on brittle, blood-sucking, droning parasites would result in the elimination of virtually the entire political and media caste.

Devolution Debased

In a telling indication of how far England's first colony has fallen behind the mainland, politicians in Wales may soon be invited to legislate against saying the thing that is not in public office. A law against deliberate lying has been ruled out as too complex; it's true that Britain's leading liberal newspaper regularly proclaims what politicians "believe" and "hope," but apparently the necessary psychic powers have yet to manifest themselves in Cardiff. Nevertheless, the parliamentary standards committee has drawn up recommendations to tighten up the code of conduct and sanction the kind of people who claim Cabinet-level expenses at Westminster. With an access of insular complacency worthy of the proportionally-represented Euro-wogs, one commentator has even called on Westminster to emulate the Welsh example; and this despite the changes being at least partially driven by the possibility of electoral gains for Team Starmer's own favourite policy advisors at Farage Falange Incorporated.

Orange Letter Day

Mere weeks into the second reign of the Trumpster and his head-tribble, the sycophancy of the courtiers is already a credit to Republicanism. A congressbeing from the gesturally-named Finger Lakes region of New York has used the occasion of George Washington's birthday to propose that the occasion of the Trumpster's first policy statements should be conscecrated in similar fashion. "His impact on the nation is undeniable," she proclaimed; which is undeniably true, and it is to be hoped that proposals for national holidays memorialising George III, John Wilkes Booth and Osama bin Laden will soon be forthcoming on the same grounds. In the meantime, the prospects for a Statutory Trumpster Day, or STD for short, appear less than promising, despite likely enthusiastic support from the Farage Falange, Ambassador Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring, and the more bipartisan reaches of the Democratic Party. Not least among the difficulties will be that the Imperial Doge and Supreme Car Salesman of the Nation is unlikely to approve of the little people being given more time off work. Whether the head-tribble has been approached for comment remains as yet unclear.

Vive la Différence

An encouraging new trend in intra-Semitic racism may have emerged in Miami Beach, where a Jewish man apparently saw a couple of what he believed to be Palestinians and proceeded to impose an Israeli ceasefire with the aid of the Second Amendment. In fact the victims were Israeli tourists who promptly denounced their attacker as one of the Arab Untermenschen, thereby further demonstrating the perils of insufficient diversity. We can only sigh for what might have happened if Europe's Jews, instead of colonising the Levant, had simply consented to let the Nazis carry out their early plan of deporting them to Madagascar. In an African setting their God-given superiority to the natives would have been self-evident on sight, and they would have been able to evolve a form of racism considerably better adapted for shootings in the United States.

Move Over, Talleyrand

During the halcyon days of the nineteen-fifties, when everyone knew who won the war and everyone knew their place, the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan proposed that post-imperial Britain's role in the world might be that of an "honest broker," the first word presumably sans the knowing snigger that would now be de rigueur. During the halcyon days of the nineteen-eighties, when all was gumption and get-go, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher rehashed the idea under the rubric of a "special relationship" between Washington and London, as opposed to the common thug-and-sidekick bond that actually existed. In keeping with its programme of Change™, Team Starmer has now trotted out the same old fantasy, with the business secretary expressing hopes that Britain can act as a "bridge" between an EU that has no reason to trust it and a US that openly disdains it. Whether the Trumpster and his head-tribble or the recalcitrant Euro-wogs will be receptive to such hard-headed realism remains as yet unclear.

Set a Fraud to Catch a Fraud

The Church of Rome, whose own eye is noted for its scarcity of beams, has set itself to perform an ocular motility cleansing upon a woman who claimed that a statue of the Virgin wept tears of blood. She also claimed that the statue was talking to her, which may have been what prompted the Church to anathematise her as a fraud, and to proclaim a clear and scientific distinction between real and fake supernatural phenomena; viz. that the Pope approves of the one and not of the other. A DNA test on the blood in question has determined that it was the woman's own; which may, as her lawyer pointed out, indicate merely a miraculous mingling of earthly sanguination with the heavenly sort. Even if the Virgin's DNA profile should prove troublesome to access by prayer alone, a copy is presumably stored somewhere in the Vatican archives; and even if no match is found, that might mean only that God is making a point after His usual whimsical fashion. Alas, the lady herself, who has a prior record of Vatican-style financial probity, seems disinclined to rejoice and be exceeding glad at her persecution, and has absented herself from the vicinity of the miraculous presence.

Our Moral Progress

Apparently there was a time when profit-making companies, even British profit-making companies, made profitable use of legal technicalities to circumvent the law. After Britain abolished slavery and British values paid compensation to the owners, the Empire's biggest shipping company continued using slave labour in the Caribbean, where the woke mind virus had yet to take hold. Even so, the private sector's characteristic efficiency ensured that the company failed to survive the financial crisis of the early nineteen-thirties, and despite some creative accounting by its noble chair it was taken over by the government. Such was the Communistic and un-British tenor of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour administration that the shareholders were not even compensated at the taxpayer's expense.

Lowe Quality

As with the National Johnson (remember him?), the appeal of the Farage Falange for the great British public is presumably that they offer simple solutions in words of one syllable, with open season on wogs thrown in as a bonus. Strangely enough, their straight words are sometimes accompanied by clean and direct actions on the order of a left-handed corkscrew at a Thames Water board meeting. In a move eerily reminiscent of all those wealthy Brexiters who celebrated British independence by shunting their assets into the EU, one of the Falange's parliamentary nano-rabble has installed solar panels on his farm, even as the First Subfarage goebbeled that renewable energy was a "massive con" and one of the two or three things in the country that would be taxed under a Falange thousand-year plan. Given that the Falange has only five expenses claimants in the Commons, a policy split is quite an achievement; especially a policy split that can elicit accusations of hypocrisy from the Deputy Conservatives and of incoherence from Team Starmer. Nevertheless, despite its paltry parliamentary presence the Falange must still be given its due as a political bellwether: it belongs to the hallowed private sector, so His Majesty's Government and His Majesty's Loyal Opposition are straining to out-ugly one another in pandering to its base.

If Muroids be the Food of Love

Conservationists in British Columbia have come up with a novel campaign for Valentine's Day: for the price of a few dollars, a dead rat named after an ex can be fed to a northern spotted owl, and photos and videos provided as a souvenir. The scheme is called No regRATS, a lapse into tabloidese which is perhaps the least tasteful thing about it; but that aside, the combination of Gallic sentimentality over animals with Anglo-Saxon erotic proficiency should ensure its appeal across the whole nation. Whether the programme will be sustainable beyond Valentine's Day remains as yet unclear; although few would deny its potential should its popularity extend to Canada's noisy and extremist southern neighbour. If indignant northern rodent-lovers were to set up a few ratlines into the homes of some meaty Republicans, the resulting food chain would arguably border on the paradisal.

Evils Necessary and Unnecessary

Appropriately enough for a stalwart of the Great Orange Party, the chairbeing of the doubtless optimistically named Senate intelligence committee is stirring up simultaneous red and yellow scares. Attempting to drive a wedge between the Trumpster and his best boy for now, the senator accuses the squillionaire manbaby of dealing too civilly with the Communistic Heathen Chinee. Self-evidently, the Trumpster's favourite is undermining the very basis of capitalism by taking his business where the money is. The senator, who is surnamed Cotton and represents the state of Arkansas, has referred to the use of slaves by nice people as a "necessary evil" on which the master race built its manifest destiny; this doubtless explains how he also came to notice the complicity of numerous US companies with Heathen Chinee slave labour and genocide, which are notoriously inferior to those varieties sponsored by the American taxpayer.

Realism At Last

In a refreshing departure from the world-beating rah-and-blah which the CEO of Team Starmer has been squeaking forth on the subject of AI, a Government minister has modestly recused the master race from leadership. Given the prospects for depriving great swathes of the population of their living and using up resources which might otherwise be wasted powering and watering millions of homes, the advantages of AI technology for moderate and sensible governance are self-evident even to lesser breeds such as the Heathen Chinee. Nevertheless, the secretary for Musk and related matters celebrated the opening of a summit in Paris by proclaiming that the race to AI supremacy must be led by "western, liberal, democratic countries," thereby eliminating the UK from the running on two counts out of three.

Authentically Krapp

An amusing counterpoint to the post-truth nature of reality is the apparently widespread belief that the art of acting should on no account involve people pretending to be what they're not. The usual manifestation of this doctrine is the idea that non-heterosexual, transgender or disabled characters should only be played by non-heterosexual, transgender or disabled actors; the logical end point of such reasoning would presumably be that characters who are not themselves performers should always be played by non-performers, an arrangement already happily present in the career of Keanu Reeves.

The literalist superstition has once more emerged in a gimmick by the organisers of the Beckett Biennale, who have proclaimed long-term plans for a performance of Krapp's Last Tape to feature an unsimulated sixty-nine-year-old interacting with unsimulated recordings of his voice as a thirty-nine-year-old. The result will be "true vocal authenticity," that all-important attribute of stage performance which has been sadly missing in other quarters since the Scottish Play had the misfortune to be penned by William Shakespeare instead of by William McGonagall.

Performative Culture

Those supreme arbiters of Murcan national taste, the Trumpster and his head-tribble, are to take over the chairbeingship of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and thereby usher in a golden age with extra-glory orange tint. Apart from sacking people and cleansing the repertoire of non-heterosexual performance, it appears that the Trumpster will be pushing hard to drain the script-writing swamp and restore the Founding Fathers' ideal of unlimited use for Caps Lock and exclamation marks. While doubtless merely the first of many battlefields in the tangerine revolution, the Kennedy Center has clearly been carefully chosen: it was conceived by a woman and then appropriated in the name of a war criminal, which cannot help but be auspicious for its new life in the pussy-grabbing hands of an insurrectionary felon.

The Past is a Foreign Country

Apparently there was an age, far off in a previous millennium, when the Christian church in Britain stored up earthly treasures for itself and assiduously buried its talents whenever the privilege of martyrdom approached. The Galloway hoard, discovered a decade ago in Scotland and featuring a rock crystal jar bearing the boast of an evidently rather materialistic bishop, has now yielded up signs of a yet more archaic and uncivilised practice. From a runic inscription on a silver arm-ring, which was found alongside others bearing personal names, it seems that the holders of at least some of the hoard's spectacular wealth claimed to be mere guardians of communal property, rather than rich and privileged magnates in their own right. That persons of blatant and ostentatious privilege could abscond with vast quantities of treasure and still claim to be acting in the interests of "the community" speaks eloquently about the barbarity of the times.

They Don't Need Reminding

Some of those who survived or lost loved ones in the Grenfell Tower disaster have reacted angrily to the announcement that the remains of the block are to be demolished. Since the track record of the British establishment indicates little chance that anyone significantly responsible will suffer consequences comparable in gravity to those that routinely befall benefits claimants who show up late to an interrogation by the Idleness Police, many understandably believe the tower should continue to stand as a reminder. In a generous spirit of compromise, officials have expressed willingness to use parts of the tower in a memorial, subject no doubt to the emotional needs of whatever corporation eventually builds its shiny non-riffraff accommodation on the vacated site. As to any danger that the ruin's disappearance may let the culprits remain ignorant of what happened, it's unlikely that the survivors and the bereaved need worry overmuch. The culprits know perfectly well what happened, and they don't care.

Sustainable Scum

Defying the potential risk to revenues, the Murdoch scumbag press is to make selected gobs of its output accessible only to those who can count to two and back a bit. Absorbers of toxic waste who wish to avail themselves of the wit and wisdom of Rod Liddle and Harry Cole will have to pay £1.99 per month for the privilege, and I am sure we all wish them joy of it. The enterprise is called Sun Club, which appropriately evokes a holiday with bludgeons. The Supreme Leader and his minions have tried charging for access before, but lost too many patriots to the online Rothermere Stürmer, which has itself recently introduced a kickback scheme for access to some of its luvvie-baiting, Meghan-bashing and "investigations" sections. It seems that the Supreme Leader's former papers of record, the Murdoch Times and the Murdoch on Sunday, have managed to make a success of their own paywalls, although it remains as yet unclear whether their readers aspire to the level of sophistication that will characterise the patrons of Sun Club.

À l'orange

One of the Trumpster's offspring has been doing manly things in Italy, and has chosen a special conservation area near Venice to try his strength against the local ducks. Living up to his illustrious family's competitive spirit, the Trumpster spawn donned combat camouflage and mounted his assault from the shelter of a foxhole in case any of the ducks shot back and injured his hereditary bone spurs. One of the casualties appears to have been a ruddy shelduck, a protected species with plumage of a hue only slightly more tasteful than the complexion of the Trumpster himself. However, thanks to the smoochy diplomatic relationship between the heirs of Mussolini and the host of the head-tribble, the bird's conservation status seems unlikely to result in much trouble for the Trumpster spawn; so any Oedipal aspects to the shooting will probably remain mercifully unexplored.

On the Tragic

Thanks to writers such as Thomas Ligotti and David Benatar, both of whom contribute brief prefaces, the author of On the Tragic has received increasing attention in the English-speaking world. His magnum opus of pessimistic philosophy was completed, in "eccentrically conservative" Dano-Norwegian, just before the Nazi invasion, yet has nevertheless contrived until very recently to escape translation into English.

The stylistic whims of Peter Wessel Zapffe extended to idiosyncratic use of italics and quote marks, as well as to occasional footnotes querying the grammar; all of which the reader of Ryan Showler's translation has been mercifully spared. Latin phrases are unpatronisingly retained and conveniently glossed, while the English is clear and concise; although the usage of the pronoun one requires some acclimatisation. Whether or not this results from the translator's rendition of a Zapffean quirk will take a better and braver scholar of Riksmål than I to determine. Many of the references are from Scandinavian and German sources, and therefore possibly not widely known or readily available to English readers; but the translator has been compassionate enough to include an index, which the original did not.

Some of On the Tragic is heavy going, at least for the philosophically untrained; and there is a lengthy legalistic digression (Zapffe was also a jurist, as well as scaling mountains merely geological) which may try even a philosophical patience. But all through the book Zapffe drives home his points with sharp little parables, among which the antlers of the Irish elk, the tree destroyed by its best fruit, and the cats stranded on an isle of jumping beetles are merely three of the most memorable. No less worthy of mention is the theorist who seeks to sum up and transcend his two hundred predecessors only to find himself classified as Theorist No.201.

The analysis and classification of tragedy in its many variants and combinations culminates with an examination of tragic literature and criticism, including detailed and interesting readings of Prometheus Bound, the Book of Job, and Hamlet. I was gratified to observe that Zapffe reached a conclusion similar to my own concerning a certain resident of Pandora's box. In Job Zapffe finds "a fanatical will to intellectual honesty, and a poet who combines the ability to give his abyss-deep hatred of God a dazzling satirical form with cascading cosmic pathos ... a blasphemous masterpiece;" while in Hamlet he sees a great man whose ruinous "tragic flaw" is not a vice like Macbeth's ambition or a weakness like Othello's jealousy, but the very strength and virtue of his moral and intellectual courage.

Ryan Showler and Peter Lang deserve our gratitude. No philosopher with a name like Peter Wessel Zapffe should be allowed to languish in obscurity, any more than he should be permitted to escape becoming a humourist.

Our Intimate Companions

With more and more species becoming extinct and endangered, it's refreshing to see that at least one continues to thrive. The urban rat population is on the increase, and growth is particularly healthy in those cities where temperatures are rising fastest. Aside from Amsterdam and Toronto, most of those surveyed were in the realm of the Trumpster, where the climate catastrophe doesn't count; so the rodent surplus and any resulting plagues will doubtless be considered a Canadian import or the wrath of Baby Jesus against un-American sexual practices. London did not deign to provide data; but given the presence of both the Square Mile and the Houses of Parliament the facts rather squeak for themselves.

By Grace of Nigel

Farage Falange Incorporated will not be suspending a parliamentary flunkey who was convicted of assaulting his girlfriend. The conviction was eighteen years ago and the flunkey in question did not see fit to mention it before some nice people in Essex elevated him to the House of Expenses Claimants, despite its obvious potential for increasing his vote among those unafflicted by the woke mind virus. Fulsomely redemptive blah-blah has been forthcoming since the Murdoch Times snitched about the matter, with the Falange's First Undernigel proclaiming that we're a Christian nation (we aren't) and that Christianity is about forgiveness, which is true in approximately the same sense as the one about the Nazis being socialists. Translated from the sanctimonious, the flunkey is a well-fleshed white investment banker who has learned his lesson in British values: namely that if you want to kick someone when they're down it's cheaper and simpler in the long run to do it through the proper channels.