Midnight CET today is meant to have been the culmination of Theresa May’s premature invoking of Article 50 to leave the EU. She did that, without really having much idea what success looks like with Brexit, in an unforced error which seems to have played into the hands of the other side, who naturally looked after themselves and their own interests. Not sure we are any closer to knowing what a successful Brexit does look like. I am of the opinion that there’s no such thing, which explains why the search party keeps returning empty-handed.
The Brexit crew seem to be channelling Thomas Edison, but they seem to lack his talent
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work
Thomas Edison, on the electric light bulb
Why you need Financial Independence – The Sovereign Individual
Let’s take a deeper look a Jacob Rees-Mogg, headbanger at the end on the left. Hopefully his crew are unwittingly acting more as useful idiots in weakening the No Deal ultra-case, but it ain’t done yet.
The Latin in the title is a hat tip to JRM’s tendency to break out into Latin, to confuse the bejesus of of those not drug up right in some elite British public school. Fortunately the proles have Google on their side
Where did he get his twisted ideas from? Maybe his Dad, who wrote The Sovereign Individual, basically Thomas Hobbes updated for the 21st century. Let’s hear it from JRM’s Dad
Nation-states will experience a sharp drop in revenue…but retain the unfunded liabilities and inflated expectations and social spending inherited from the industrial era…tax consumers will be the losers.”
The Sovereign Individual
To summarise, it’s a libertarian manifesto, Ayn Rand updated. Look after yourself and your own, and may the devil take the hindmost.
The Sovereign Individual was written in the last years of the last century, but its predictions do track some of what has come to pass in the ensuing twenty years
Rhys on Medium has a good summary. The SI looks at the metamorphoses of society through the intustrial revolution to now through the lens of capital, the capacity to impose your will on others through capital and violence on the one hand, and information and myth on the other. Daddy Rees-Mogg’s analysis bears witness on today’s world.
You need financial independence to be less enslaved to those with more. Violence isn’t a fist-fight in the street, it is the ability of the church, nation-state, or sovereign individuals like Jacob Rees-Mogg to make you do their bidding. The Church used the Inquisition, the Nation-State police forces and armed forces (in connection with other nations states) and Jacob Rees-Mogg and his libertarian ilk will use their superior capital assets.
I’m not saying this is an ideal state of affairs, but it does seem to be the way we are going. The sovereign individual detests taxation and the welfare state. The Sovereign Individual the Thomas Hobbes’ war of all against all written from the point of view of today’s winners.
The Brexit connection? Well, to swing the narrow victory of the 2016 referendum the bad boys of brexit used their capital and control of information to sell a powerful story, despite most of it it not being true. That’s how the rich Eton boys got votes for their story. Beats me how it’s going to pan out.
As for you lot reading this, well, you have a chance of financial independence. The takeaway is summarised by another Medium writer
There is a positive overriding message independent of whether these arguments have convinced you or not. And that is rather than being riled by President-elect Trump’s Twitter account or frustrated by the hardness or softness of Brexit, focus on your own life, your skillsets and improving the life of your family and friends or people you encounter in your daily life. You can have a much greater impact here than you can on discussions in Downing Street, Trump Tower or the Greek Ministry of Finance. You can be your own sovereign. You might just do a better job of it.
Michael Folkson
What Michael is saying if look after yourself and your own. Ignore the homeless in the doorways of your cities and the things going wrong in the news. Let it go, whistle a dancing tune and look the other way. Be master of the space you stand on and the space between your ears.
He’s probably right – if you have potential. Not all of us have, and the bar is being raised all the time. I was bright enough to advance myself and have a decent career i nthe world of the 1980s. If my younger self were starting 30 years later, I am not bright enough to work for Google in London, I wouldn’t have had the capital to intern for free.
The trouble with the Sovereign Individual is that humans didn’t get where they were today acting is isolation, we are a social species. Maybe I am a wuss, but the increasing homelessness in rich cities like London and Oxbridge disturb me as I pass ’em by. I walked by the river in Cambridge and passed gated communities, that disturbs me in another way. Let’s hear a summary of the problem from old Leonard, rest his soul:
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody Knows, Leonard Cohen
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets …
Simple Living In Somerset 
I think it’s important not to conflate capitalism with free markets. Thatcher did in the 1980s, and just about got away with it. In terms of political economy, they’re opposites: capital always and everywhere seeks to maximise its rents, whereas genuinely free, contestable and participatory markets seek to compete them away.
Viewed thus, the rich-nations’ protectionist bloc and cheap labour exchange area that is the EU is capitalism to a tee and Brexit is the remedy.
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> Viewed thus, the rich-nations’ protectionist bloc and cheap labour exchange area that is the EU is capitalism to a tee and Brexit is the remedy.
I guess we will see, eh? Glad I don’t have a job at stake in this experiment, though I am not JR-M rich enough to survive say serious inflation as an outcome
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I accept there’s an argument that some of the very wealthy backers of Leave will prosper no matter what, though the same’s true on a much grander scale for the likes of Branson, Soros and Goldman Sachs, all of whom have donated to the initial or vote-reversal Remain campaigns.
However I think it’s widely accepted on both sides that Remain voters tend to be more affluent than Leave ones, which may be indicative of where the economic interests fall. Myself, I’m among Marx’s rentier class, living on dividends generated by capital, but I voted with my class origins rather than the position in which I now find myself.
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I’m sorry but I disagree with this, ‘genuinely’ free markets are a chimera. They take no account for externalities or morality (how do free markets deal with polluting global commons? or children working down mines?), and they will produce monopolies (see big data co.s/network effect). Once you admit of any form of regulation (even to preserve the ‘free’ in the ‘free market’, the argument ‘but free markets’ ceases to be legitimate and it becomes a question of the mix. Sure, government intervention (‘regulated capitalism’?) facilitates rents, but it’s better to be aware of them and fight them with a fierce competition authority than forsake all of our decisions about how we want to live to the wisdom of ‘the market’.
The ‘protectionist bloc’ that we are proud members of is what prevents standards, be they food or financial services, from a global race to the bottom (indeed it often leads the world), and a Ricardian specialisation in which e.g. agriculture is destroyed everywhere except where it is cheapest to produce, for whatever reason (most likely monocultural, mechanised mega-farms swamped in pesticides).
From an economic/trade perspective Brexit is the remedy to nothing, except the owners of capital in the UK and outside the EU being better able to milk the labour force and the public commons of the UK, and snap up some bargains to boot with the currency move/uncertainty/privatisation of public services.
This rant makes me sound like a massive lefty socialist but believe me I am not (I’m an ex-banker [hangs head]), this current bout of unopposed free-market fundamentalism has just radically shifted the argument to make anyone who believes in a ‘mixed economy’ sound like a Marxist.
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I think we may disagree mainly about terminology. For me, there are two types of ‘free’ market: Ayn Rand’s, and Adam Smith’s. For Rand, the most successful are necessarily the most able and worthy, and they should be free to do as they please. Any attempt by government to intervene in the market is interference, and should not be countenanced. In contrast, for Smith, whoever wins in the first round and thus enters the second round with the most capital always and necessarily seeks to entrench its advantages, using its capital (which may be political and cultural, as well as financial) to rig the market. It is therefore a fundamental duty of government to police markets so they can be free – ‘free’ meaning fully contestable by all.
If we accept my preferred, Adam Smith definition, then clearly we must either recharge negative externalities to the market participants who cause them or legislate against such behaviours (I prefer the latter, since there’s no perfect mechanism for transferring any fines to the victims, since they may not be easy to identify, and the costs may be hard or impossible to quantify). This applies whether it’s pollution, child labour or monopoly, oligopoly or monopsony. So I strongly support strong regulation, but it must be by and for the people, and not captured by corporate interests.
Apropos which, did you see the shenanigans by which the European Parliament managed to trick MEPs into passing Article 13 this week, subsequently denying a second vote to those who accidentally voted the wrong way? Or this week’s revelation that the FCA was tipped off about the failed mini-bond provider London Capital & Finance in November 2015 and failed to act? I’ve campaigned for the victims of a failed financial services product and generally for improved regulation in that sector and can tell you that the FCA is as incompetent, captured and crooked an organisation as I’ve seen anywhere. And ESMA, the pan-European body that sits above it, is no better.
Your ‘race to the bottom’ argument is interesting. What’s your view on chlorinated chicken? I say bring it on. There’s more chlorine in our tap water than you could ever consume in American chicken. By depriving ourselves of the harmless washing of poultry we expose ourselves to unnecessary risk of infection and also force ourselves to pay more for the product than would be the case if we welcomed US imports. I accept that some people fear chlorine – presumably they avoid tap water – and I have no problem with requiring foodstuffs washed in it to be labelled as such. Empowering consumers so they can make informed decisions seems to be preferable than either forcing them to buy products they otherwise wouldn’t or preventing them from doing so seems to me a good way to proceed.
Brexit will result in consumers having more choice, which will lead to lower prices, even before you factor in lower tariffs. That harms the owners of capital, rather than benefiting them. Taking the example of a rich landowner who lets farmland to a tenant poultry farmer, increased competition from cheaper American chicken drives down the income of the farmer and hence the market rent of the farmland. An economic rent is thus reduced, in return for enhanced consumer welfare.
Conversely, the owners of low-skilled labour will profit as we switch from mass, mostly low-waged immigration from the EU under freedom of movement from targeted, high-skilled, nationality-blind immigration from the entire world. Starve employers of cheap, imported workers and you force them to bid up wages and conditions for the settled working class. Meanwhile, flood the market with the high-skilled – Big Four accountants from Australia, consultant surgeons from India and the like – and you start to deflate wages at the top, especially if those people find it’s less easy than it once was for them to transfer to jobs in, say, Frankfurt or Amsterdam. Raise wages at the top, trim them at the bottom, and you get a more equal society. You also get a bunch of entitled metropolitan graduates intent on reversing the ballot result…
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I worked on building sites from the 90’s onwards and experienced first hand the European immigration policy. Decimated the indigenous trades people in the UK. Eventually force me and many tradespeople I know to leave the industry. Shameful
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hmm, JRM a useful idiot – have you been reading Dominic Cummings blog by any chance? (if not you should, its a right laff)
My feeling is you should treat yourself like you are a libertarian, and everyone else like you are a socialist.
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@markb: re chlorinated chicken, I am happy to eat a chlorinated chicken that had a life on the free range. Sadly I think one will fnd they rarely need chlorinating; so one has to ask the questoin why are they chlorinated?
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In a perfect world, all chicken would be fully free-range and organic. Sadly if we applied that standard across all food types we might have to cull the poor as a Waitrose existence is beyond the means of most of the world’s 7.3bn people. Instead, farm cheaply and treat the meat to ensure nobody gets infected.
You may disagree with this, and it should be your right to eat non-chlorinated food. But the rights of those who want cheaper food should be respected too.
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I have no problem with anyone choosing whatever they want to eat in whatever price band suits them. I was just trying to highlight that there is usually a reason why some food is processed in ways that some find unacceptable.
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I, however, do have a problem with anyone choosing whatever they want to eat, if I’m going to be asked later, through the mechanism of taxation, to cover their medical expenses.
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Fair comment. So I guess we should make chlorine washing of chicken mandatory, as we do the use of chlorine in drinking water treatment.
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I know I shouldn’t, but WTF.
Won’t somebody think of the chickens?
I’ll get my coat…
The reason they have to chlorine wash the chicken in the States is because there’s shit in the meat. It’s part of a trend across time though. Time was you only had chicken once a week, and it was dearer. When I started as a student in Imperial the electric cookers were on the blink, though operator error in my 18 year old self could also have been an issue. A pal an I decided to split a family size chicken pie. Two hours later, this was lukewarm, and basically raw. Humans really don’t have the teeth for raw chicken, but we had no ill effects.
Nowadays you look at the way they sell chicken in hermetically sealed plastic bags with great big warnings that this is a major biohazard, don’t even think about washing the bugger and ideally don a hazmat suit to wrangle raw chicken. How the hell did the humble chicken turn from being a weekly treat to being a major biological weapon in four decades? We must be doing something wrong, somewhere…
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I do wonder how many people in the general public (as opposed to the 130,000 swivel eyed lunatics making up the conservative party membership) would actually vote for a Lord Snooty/Howard Roark mash-up like Boris Johnson or Rees-Mogg when it came down to it. Uxbridge and North East Somerset are hardly representative of the UK as a whole.
Then again I can constantly surprised by people voting against their own interests just because a newspaper owned by an oligarch tells them to…
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The false consciousness trope again. Leavers as mindless idiots conned by the media. In fact newspaper circulations are now far below the level at which any one of them could have a material impact on a General Election, let alone a binary referendum in which 17.4 million voted to quit the EU.
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You do realise that 17.4 million are a minority, right?
Right?
Jesus.
I’m not proposing to change how voting works in a democratic process, but I am fucking sick and tired of hearing of the 17.4 million.
46.5 million were eligible to vote on the matter (and yes, I do have some objections on how that was determined), 17.4 million voted to leave the EU, and 29.1 million didn’t.
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Actually I was referring to people voting conservative. But since you bring it up, experience has shown that leave voters were pretty delusional/gullible as was pointed out ad naseum in advance of the referendum
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There has been research going the other way, suggesting that Remain voters were less knowledgeable. And even those who were fully informed about the status quo could never know how the EU would evolve. The extension of qualified majority voting, an EU army etc were denied at the time but are becoming a reality now.
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‘I do wonder how many people in the general public’ ……..would actually vote ‘against their own interests just because a newspaper owned by an oligarch tells them to’
Based on the Dunning-Kruger stress test performed on them in 2016, I’m guessing ~52% or 17.4 million.
So it seems like you really do get the rule you deserve and on that basis, our democracy is on stonking form.
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True! But a majority of those who voted.
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If one can’t be arsed to get out of bed to vote can they really complain (or be counted) when they don’t like the result?
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Maybe now the result can be seen to not be the nirvana promised we should get another vote about it dontcha think?
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PS: I guess one could turn it other way and say about 16 million voted to remain and about 30 million did not vote to remain.
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WTF? Where’s my unicorn? I gave them nearly 3 years to get the order right and they still can’t get it here in time; I mean its not as if it’s a white elephant rail project with guaranteed budget overruns and delays ! It’s enough to make a person want to join the gammon army marching around parliament chanting for their magic self-replacing cake, honestly I’d go right now if I had their free bus pass. How did this circus happen? I thought the vast minority voting for what came out of Eton had to result in the best politicians in the world, I’m shocked, shocked I tell you ! But still, if we crash out in a fortnight, that great deal with Fiji has definitely been sewn up, so we’ll be sorted out for sweet potatoes, anyone saying there’s anything to worry about is just scaremongering for project fear again. It’ll all be fine.
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«walked by the river in Cambridge and passed gated communities, that disturbs me in another way.»
I guess that you are retired an affluent, and perhaps you give for granted something about other people like you.
The success of the socialdemocratic 50s to 70s has meant not just longer lives, especially for women, but also good final salary pensions, and cheap housing, that in the following thatcherite era bubbled up in price many times, and good final salary pensions usually have surviving spouse benefits and houses get inherited by the surviving spouse, and this has meant increasing prosperity in old age, especially for women.
The result has been a boom in the number of older voters who are on a comfortable fixed income plus massive capital gains. These people as a rule are afraid, very afraid, of everything, in part because of their age, in part because they no longer have opportunities, they only see everywhere threats of losing the good lifestyle they have been given first by the trade unions and then by thatcherism.
What these older affluent voters, in large majority women, usually want is simple: turn the whole country into a gated community, or at least their manicured suburban areas, keep out the rabble and hang-and-flog anybody who looks a “bad one”.
Their guiding principle is “absolute safety at any cost to someone else”, and they vote relentlessly for bigger property rents and lower wages; yet these older affluent women voters are also often mawkishly sentimental about individual sob stories, and politicians find out at their peril that it is not just fascism that they want, but also the hypocrisy of humbug.
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That’s quite an astonishing attack on older women. You are describing a tiny subset of people, if indeed they actually exist outside your own imagination.
In reality, older women bear the brunt of poverty. Please read https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/06/inequalities-among-older-people-especially-women-shameful
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Bit of a bizarre comment imo…
Actually, there used to be a greater disparity (in favour of women) in terms of life expectancy between the sexes but that has now significantly reduced. I’m a 60-something woman and I don’t have a final salary pension. The state pension that I have paid into since I was 17 was supposed to arrive at age 60, but like all the rest of my cohort I now have to wait until I’m 66.
And, gated communities required by older women – wtf?
Jane in London
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It looks like the silver spoon brigade will keep trying to ram their way down parliament’s throat until judgement day while they’re still in the game, with round four coming up next week. I wondered why they’re demonstrating Einstein’s theory of madness in repeating an action endlessly and expecting a different result, then had a thought: if you’ve had your way your entire life because you are the powerful elite, it must be incomprehensible that what has always worked no longer seems to be doing so now. It might be a totally new experience for many of them, colliding with reality in finding out that you can’t buy, bully or bludgeon your way to victory every single time on this planet; statistically, once in a blue moon, the worm turns and David really does beats Golliath, like the irritating sharp pain that turns out to be a humble ant biting your toe.
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@markb, I’ll stick to the economics:
Ok so we agree that strong regulation is required – but like I said originally, once you admit to govt. interference/regulation, the prima facie argument for ‘free markets’ doesn’t exist, you have to argue on a case-by-case basis why the intervention is/isn’t desirable – even if the intervention is to keep markets ‘fully contestable to all’. Child labour law/patent law/immigration law all limit the ability to contest in ‘free markets’ so we can’t appeal to free markets without context.
I’m not going to defend here every real-world regulatory action of governments, nor the EU in particular and we could both rattle off our favourite government regulation failings – indeed I have been the *victim* of mini-bond fraud, and I was licensed by the FSA/FCA for many years so I’ve seen how the sausages are made.
But the case you make against the EU based on ideology is flawed, both logically and empirically.
You champion consumer choice and lower prices, but only when it originates from chlorinated US chicken and not builders from Katowice, or fruit pickers from Sofia, when suddenly the free market becomes a ‘cheap labour exchange area’. Your example of the landlord losing some rent is very quiet about the fate of the chicken farmer himself. Presumably the landlord will find another tenant, but once the UK is swimming in American chicken what about the wages of the chicken farmers?
You question the race to the bottom, and again I’m not going into the merits of any particular example like those dunked chickens (and I think that it isn’t the chlorine that scares people, rather the filth that necessitates it), but rather empirically what we know and can game out from quite simple observations:
The UK government is currently not doing what is obligated by law to do to stop **poisoning the very air that our children breathe**, just let that sink in. The EU is suing the British government over its failure to tackle air pollution. You take away the EU you think the British Government would have a change of heart? Give me a break.
The EU is currently **forcing** Apple to pay taxes due to a national government (Ireland, who have won the race to the bottom in corporation tax – at least until the post-Brexit Tories get another run at it). The billions of euros in tax that end up in the pocket of shareholders (of which I am one – woohoo!) rather than the people of Ireland is not an example of a national government captured by corporate interest?
It’s fairly simple to show that regulation/strength only gets weaker at the national level – look at Murdoch’s quote “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice”. The EU can force everyone in the Stag Hunt to stay focused on the Stag. Those corporates interested in seamless cross border integration and friction free trade favour the EU, those that seek power and influence seek to destroy it. The EU even rejected the merger of Alstom and Siemens on competition grounds rather than create a (supra)national champion (like Article 13, possibly a mistake but hardly the result of being in thrall to corporate interests…).
Finally on your labour market points. I agree that more equity in income is desirable… but the ability to issue these visas to qualified foreign accountants and doctors to push down top-end wages is already well within the competencies of our sovereign government! If this was an issue they would do it already, it’s got nothing to do with the EU! As for the low-end, there is little evidence of EU immigration holding down wages, rather productivity has stagnated, but even if there was a small case of that, there’s a free market for you.
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Wow, elegant, indisputable sense; the headbangers wont ever change tribal allegiance, but still, the beauty of intelligence is wonderful for those who appreciate it.
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Think I posted about JRM and the Sovereign Individual in a comment a while back. I think it absolutely explains his world view.
Google, Facebook etc. pay their interns extremely well. I know quite a few computer science undergrads who had their pick of several summer jobs this year offering £40k+ pro rata, which seems astonishing to me. And I don’t think those students are any more or less smart than the people who did electronics at university with me 30 years ago. Pretty much the only place where you’d need to be wealthy enough to do an (unpaid/ now in theory illegal) internship is the media.
Cambridge city council spends a great deal of money on homelessness, working with several charitable groups, one of whom my wife works for. One of the obvious side-effects is that the city is a magnet for the homeless – easy pickings from tourists and (mostly) guaranteed bed and food should you need it. Wasn’t aware that there were any gated communities in the city – where did you see that?
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> Think I posted about JRM and the Sovereign Individual in a comment a while back.
Indeed, this is why I researched him further, since it appears he was made a sociopathic punk rather than congenitally being born one. I confess as a Remainer I have fondness for the ERG now. Not because I have seen the light and share their despicable aims. More that the blazing purity of their vision makes them the blessed wreckers that they seem to be. Personally I’m of the view May’s agreement was a serviceable exposition of the referendum result, but hey, a second referendum between something defined (May’s thrice-rejected deal) and something defined (not leaving) I am personally all for. At least a vote leave in that case would be actionable. I see JR-M’s purity of purpose was beginning to falter when he saw the prize drifiting away but there are enough other headbangers to cleave to the One True Way and help wreck Practical Brexit for Theoretical Pure Full Cake and Unicorns Brexit
I walked from where Stanley Rd meets a road along the Cam Google confusingly calls 11 towards the A1134. One of the more modern developments were several groups of apartment buildings and the side road for vehicular access had a gate, and pedestrian access also seemed to be via entryphone. It reminded me of driving in pre-satnav America and coming up a road to a gate barring the road to a residential development and a sentry with a sidearm (it was not a military compound to my eyes). It seemed wise to turn round.
The Cambridge one didn’t have the dude with a sidearm, but it surprised me and struck me as un-British. OTOH you could argue most Cambridge colleges are gated communities too. Perhaps I just haven’t kept up with changing times.
Didn’t realise that unpaid internships were a media-specific thing. It’s heartening to hear our future engineers don’t have to be drawn from the aristocracy and be rich enough to work for free in their first years!
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The issue with chlorine-washed chicken is not the chemical, it is the efficacy.
The scientific position in the EU is that chlorine washing allows sloppier food hygiene standards in the food chain. The goal of risk management in the food chain it to prevent contamination, not to clean it up afterwards.
The US has about 10 times the incidence of food poisoning compared to the UK.
US estimates 380 deaths a year from salmonella infection, England and Wales recorded none over the 10 years from 2006. US reports about 1600 cases of Listeria poisoning a year, England and Wales reported 135 in 2017. FSA now advises that UK produced eggs are safe when soft-boiled, US FDA advises US consumers to hard-boil eggs due to risk of salmonella (79,000 cases of illness and 30 deaths from contaminated eggs).
There is some evidence that chlorine washing does not kill all bacteria, but renders some dormant and able to recover and be infective later.
Whether it is due to reliance on a chlorine wash or not, there is clearly something wrong with the US system for keeping the food chain free of bacterial contamination. I am very unhappy with the idea that we would swap our current food hygiene standards for US ones in pursuit of a general trade deal. Not a good idea at all.
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Glad the chlorine straw-man has been addressed. It’s not the treatment, it’s the (literally shitty) conditions and welfare such treatment allows.
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That’s certainly the position of British poultry farmers, as they feed their chickens antibiotic-laced food to get round restrictions on injecting them with the same to mitigate the worst effects of the conditions in which they’re raised…
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And they use 3 times as much antibiotics in the US http://www.saveourantibiotics.org/media/1791/comparison-of-us-and-uk-farm-antibiotic-use.pdf
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@Ermine, this deeply thoughtful, short interview explaining how the international corporates’ grip on the levers of power in the countries of the world with influence, have now taken over our world and why it’s causing a seismic shift in our way of life. Their autocratic style of rule is disguised with various clever tools so we can’t work out how they’ve sidestepped democracy to disenfranchise us and distracted us into fighting each other or other forms of self-destruction stemming from desperation, like engaging in the magical thinking that’s roiling a lot of politics today.
A good watch if you enjoy an intelligent, interesting lecture:-
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Someone sharing a conspiracy theory you like does not necessarily mean it is intelligent and interesting.
The Sheeple/Bildeberg conjecture: I exist in a thin strata of society that is highly intelligent and capable of seeing the truth in the society around me. To my left are a mass of sheeple; the unthinking and highly malleable proletariat. To my right is a wafer of Bildeberg elite that does all the thinking and moulding on the sheeple’s behalf to further their own Machiavellian ends.
The dead giveaway of a Sheeple/Bildeberg advocate is the use of far too many conjunctions in their sentences.
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PS when I say thin strata, I mean FI Warrior, Survivor and Norfolk..
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Wait, what? Are we saying that simple solutions to complex problems doesn’t always work out? Damn….Thats where we’ve been going wrong then.
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Where is H.L.Mencken when we need him, eh?
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Well, maybe we’ll have The Boris conducting this opera soon and you know he’ll lie in front of a bulldozer to make them let his people go. He’s been accused of a lot so far, but on this one he has previous. He lied in front of a lot of other things, so there’s no reason to disbelieve him now.
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