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Wednesday, 24 June 2015 22:33

Solstice

 

As the Prof has rescheduled the Summer Solstice till this Sunday (a Druid of his calibre can do that sort of thing you know), I’ve basically had a week of Solstice starting with midsummer Highland Games and Ceilidh in the hills above Loch Ness, putting the final touches to the sculpture of Flora, and preparing to hail the new official midsummer formally in a certain private circle of standing stones.

My part in the highland games came down to participation in three demented events that probably originated from military activities designed to break up medieval infantry formations, shot, hammer, and caber. The shot consisted of a stone larger than my head, the hammer of an eight inch iron ball on a hawser. I think that on one of my throws I managed not to come last despite throwing myself twice to the ground as well during the attempts. I had taken the liberty of a trying a couple of practise tosses with a couple of the cabers on the rack, and it seemed do-able. However when we got to the event the MC swept the cabers off the rack, ‘just the ladies ones and the practise ones’ he said, and it turned out that the real deal consisted of the rack itself, an intimidating twelve foot long, hundred pound plus spar. Nobody actually managed to toss it right over and nobody died. ‘The caber wins again’ pronounced the MC. Legend has it that someone in the village once accomplished it. They breed ‘em madly tough in the highlands, competition standard caber apparently involves 19 foot 175 pound cabers and men the size of bears.

As well as the delights of a family reunion I also enjoyed the sight of a rare Pine Marten foraging just outside the window of the croft, and the museum of Pictish art, weird stuff carved on stone that we still cannot decipher as their hieroglyphics or heraldry or religion.

Then back to my garage to complete Cloris-Flora the Greek-Roman Goddess of Gardens. In the absence of a block of white marble and the time and skill to work it, I started with a shop mannequin, concreted her onto a slab of bathstone, and then built up her headdress and accessories and surface detail with Jemsonite, a weatherproof sort of plaster like material, and then finished her with white masonry paint.

Meanwhile on Arcanorium College efforts to penetrate the Neconomicon Mythos of the Elder Gods by a team of intrepid psychonauts proceeds apace, we seem to have revitalised the old magical arte of Ars Notoria in this quest. 

Friday, 05 June 2015 13:11

Charlie Brewster

Along with a number of other survivors of the magical revival, I have for the last few decades wondered what became of Charlie Brewster, Frater Choronzon 333.

He cut an extraordinary figure amongst the London Illuminati of the seventies and eighties.

I met him after he got out of jail over a misunderstanding about a credit card. Whilst in jail he took a course in electrical wiring and somehow blagged his way into working as a wireman for Reuters. He moved into a squat near to mine in Deptford sometime after we met at Stoke Newington Sorcerers, (an experimental magic group based in Giles’s flat that included Gerald Suster). I distinctly remember he scrounged a door from a local derelict cinema for his squat which bore the legend ‘Projection Room’, nice.

Ah what we got up to in those days, whole spit roast goat party on the adjoining wasteground, pitched street battles with the gypsies and the national front, crazy metaphysical speleological expeditions to invoke Gwyn ap Nudd in the depths of welsh caves, some inadvisable experiments with deadly nightshade. All the usual follies of youth.

Then I set off for India and Australia for a couple of years, came back to Yorkshire for a couple more years, went to India for another year and finally wound up in Bristol and started my business.

In the meantime Charlie had a spectacular trajectory. From a Reuters wireman he blagged his way upwards till he apparently became one of their top technicians, by, he claimed, going to work in a very posh suit and carrying a combination lock pigskin briefcase (containing his soldering iron). He ended up buying a mansion, performance cars and motorcycles (his huge frame cutting a dash in what looked like a Dune stillsuit). At the height of the curve he funded extravagant OTO events, had a craftsman start building him a pearwood Enochian chess set, drank vintage Laphroaig single malt from pint mugs with his joints,  had a bizarre scheme going dealing futures on the Chicago stock exchange (inadvisably), and his own electronics company. Plus he acquired an enormous Tibetan Thunderbolt-Axe for magical purposes.

He created some interesting magical writings; see below. 

http://freespace.virgin.net/ecliptica.ww/book/contents.htm

Finally it all crashed bigtime, he went down owing some very impressive sums, and he retreated to obscurity in Wales and cut himself off from everyone he had known in London, including me. (Under pressure from his longsuffering wife I suspect). I had only a couple of brief notes from him thereafter mentioning some maths teaching and heart problems.

Then today I found this obituary today whilst googling for an image of him.

I count knowing Charlie Brewster as one of the great blasts of my early life.

 

http://www.art-science.com/Xmas2014/index.htmlhttp://www.art-science.com/Xmas2014/images/Charlie.jpg

DEATH OF CHARLIE BREWSTER

...on 13th December 2013. Charlie was one of Ken's most important friends. They first met at Reuters in 1978, a firm that grossly underused their talents, which in Charlie's case, were very great indeed. Ken would say that Charlie could do the sort of Higher Maths in his head that would take Ken a week with a pencil. More than that, Charlie & Jane were tremendously helpful to Ken when he lost his 1st wife Jane in an accident. We attended his funeral in Wales on January 6th. Our best wishes to Jane & his children, Emily, Victoria & Demian, not forgetting step-children Bethan & Dominic plus spouses & grandchildren.

Tuesday, 02 June 2015 15:03

Fighting the Synarchy.

So now, with the UK general election settled, the battle over the UK’s membership of the EU begins in earnest.

In 1973 the British people elected to join a Common Market. It seemed like a good idea at the time to dismantle trade barriers between the participating European countries. Some did warn us that it could eventually lead to some sort of federalisation of Europe and that some of the people behind it actually had full federalisation, or worse, on their agenda.

Now, four decades later, the British people find themselves increasingly subject to the diktats, laws, regulatory culture, and membership of a European Union that they never voted to join but which their politicians gradually signed them up to.

It has become increasingly apparent that the European Union heads towards government by Synarchy rather than by Democracy. We face ‘Ever Closer Union’ with a political entity over which we have virtually no democratic control.

Professional Politicians and Big Business much prefer Synarchy to Democracy.

Synarchy means government by a self-perpetuating clique of ‘Those Who Think They Know Best’ and who do not wish to subject themselves to democratic accountability. Rather they prefer to perpetuate their cabal by a system of appointing only those who agree with them.

The EU does in theory have an elected parliament but only a sham parliament; it raises no taxes, it originates no legislation, and it has no budget to spend except on its own extravagant expenses. It merely exists to rubber stamp the legislation created by the unelected European Commission and its vast unelected supporting Bureaucracy.

This Synarchic system suits professional career politicians and big business very well. Professional politicians can look forward to retirement appointments on the bloated gravy train of the EU if they lose elections. Many of the political class now choose to build their entire careers there, subject only to internal scrutiny and to zero public accountability. Big business loves the EU because the EU relies on big business to set so much of the regulatory agenda to its own advantage against smaller business competitors and external trade.

Synarchy depends on a self-perpetuating unelected clique and its clients; it maintains its position by assuming control of as many aspects of the populace’s lives as it possibly can by an ever multiplying set of rules and regulations. By passing laws and regulations about every imaginable activity it effectively gives itself the Arbitrary Power to criminalise any form of behaviour or dissent or opposition it takes exception to. In the EU most of this legislation gets passed under the ominous banner of ‘Public Safety’ or under the faux banner of ‘Internationalism’.

The strength and creativity of Europe has always lain in its diversity. The various European nations have experimented with just about every imaginable political, social, ethical and religious system over the centuries. Some became more scientifically and industrially oriented than others. They fought frequently and learned from each other’s advances and mistakes.

The EU Synarchists now seek to homogenise and rule the entire continent with a single vast set of rules and regulations about every aspect of people’s working lives, interpersonal relationships, the provision and consumption of goods and services, and acceptable beliefs and thoughts (secular political correctness trumps all tolerated faiths and political opinions.)

The hegemonistic homogenising ‘One Size Must Fit All’ philosophy of the EU Synarchists can only lead to a loss of diversity, experimentation, creativity, and competitiveness in the European nations that submit to it.  

The argument that EU membership will prevent war does not hold water. Democracies have rarely if ever declared war on each other, and nowadays the economic costs of war between European nations far exceed any possible benefits, and will likely remain so.

The economic benefits of EU membership remain highly debatable. The free movement of capital and labour within the EU has done more for free-market capitalism than social democracy. The richer areas have sucked in the investment and labour to the impoverishment of the poorer areas that merely receive subsidised and frequently useless infrastructure projects. Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Greece have had their economies wrecked by the EU, whilst Germany has massively profited from a currency union which makes its exports ridiculously cheap. Poland has lost a million of its youngest and most motivated people.

The argument that Europe needs to act as a single bloc when confronting the major powers of America, China, and Russia does not hold water either. None of those countries have territorial ambitions in Europe. Europe has abandoned colonialism, military intervention in the third world becomes increasingly pointless, and nuclear deterrence thankfully keeps the peace. The Germans really should invest in some instead of relying on ours. When it comes to economic confrontation, America, China, and Russia would find it far easier to apply pressure to a single homogenous block rather than trying to apply it piecemeal to dozens of self-governing nations.

David Cameron has stated that he will attempt to renegotiate the whole relationship between the UK and the EU and then present the terms of a new relationship to the British people in a simple in or out referendum.

The red line for renegotiation should have equal simplicity.

‘The UK reserves the right to ignore any EU legislation that it considers inappropriate for itself.’

If that proves unacceptable then we should vote to leave, and hopefully in a manner calculated to weaken or collapse the whole rotten structure.

Any nation that waives the right to issue its own law or currency or to issue or refuse work or residency permits to visitors, no longer has meaningful sovereignty over itself, or a meaningful democracy either.

The issue of free movement of population for economic reasons obstructs the entry of Turkey into the EU. If we went back to a simple Common Market this problem would dissappear. Turkey could trade more freely with Europe and this would strengthen Nato's flank and Turkey itself as a bulwark against the problems of the middle east.

As a wizard I revel in creative juxtapositions, contrasts, differences, and varied excellences. I want different countries with widely differing customs to take my holidays in.

I don’t want Greece forced into the same culture as Germany. I prefer to enjoy both places separately, and don’t wish Britain to homogenise with either.

The EU project leads only to enforced uniformity and mediocrity beneath a mountain of rules and regulations. A ‘European Identity’ does not exist because nobody outside the Synarchist wing of the political class really wants one.

Friday, 15 May 2015 14:11

Conspiracy Theory & Necromancy

After the exuberance of the last few posts, some rather negative stuff: -

Conspiracy Theory has become something of the half-thinking person’s alternative religion these days. The set of beliefs has gradually achieved some sort of canonical form these days, expect the inclusion of Zionism, Nazism, the Rothschilds, the JSK assassination, the CIA and MK Ultra, then add Area 51, Flying Saucers, Climate Change and Vaccination denial, weird interpretations of 9/11,  and the British Royal Family to taste.

Conspiracy theories tend to appeal to the extreme right and the extreme left and to the paranoid and the self-important. Some people also delight in thinking they know something that others don’t, although the internet now contains so much of this stuff in the public domain that anyone can fill their heads with it without actually encountering anything to question or falsify any of it. You can google yourself into complete and comprehensive ‘self-consistent’ sets of mutually supportive delusions by a simple process of selective attention.

Some people seem to prefer the idea that the chaos of the world lies under the control of something, even if malignant. What about the filthy rich nuclear armed nazi reptile pervert house of Windsor/Rothschild ruling the world from a bunker beneath Stonehenge? Obvious innit!

In practise Conspiracies have a fractal form. Conspiracies operate between nations and within nations, within workplaces and social groups and within families. We also have conspiracies inside our own heads, with some of our thoughts and fears and desires at odds with others.

Conspiracies exist all right, but Snafu’s, screw-ups, misunderstandings, mistakes, fortuitous accidents, and stupidity generally set the fairly random and unpredictable course of human life and history.

Conspiracy Theory always retrodicts; it has no predictive power. It should not form any part of so called ‘esoteric knowledge’ at all.

Thus I find Ray Sherwin’s latest book ‘VITRIOL’ a dismal disappointment. He goes whole hog on uncritical Conspiracy Theory, and it becomes a tiresome and predictable read in which the author commits literary and intellectual suicide at length. Then he further sours the mix with rants against former friends with whom he developed business disputes, and with scientifically illiterate neurotic rants about health issues. He once wrote a couple of reasonable books on magic, this latest offering will probably depress the market for them.

The Spanish translator of the E-Epoch just pointed out that we had mistakenly attributed the authorship of ‘The Imitation of Christ’ not to Ignatius Loyola but rather to Thessalonius Loyola. (Ray’s old magical moniker). Maybe that or the Fuerteventura sun and isolation have gone to his head.

And now for another negative: Necromancy.

The damned arte has reared its rotting head again, so herewith a counterblast from the annals of Esoteric Quality Control, new on this site.

http://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/173-necromancy-and-magic

Friday, 08 May 2015 08:56

Election Result

With some exhuberance I post a picture of my victorious MP. Unlike a lot of them she once had a real job, as you can see from her magnificent lifeguard's shoulders.

I felt no need to actually vote for her or to sit up for the foregone conclusion of a result.  The Sun and the bookies as usual called it right. The bookies had them neck and neck towards the finish, but bear in mind they offer odds based partly on their appraisal of the chances but partly on the money that actually gets placed, so you have to allow for the sort of people who actually go to the bookies, sample bias as we mathematicians call it.

So we have a sensible result for the UK, despite the simmering tartan romanticism north of the border, and we have avoided the dread Lab/SNP coalition of entropy.

I voted Green as promised in my electoral Pact with my eldest, a magical gesture for the future.

And now for a little light physics: -

Galaxies

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/03/more-old-massive-galaxies-found-in-the-early-universe-they-shouldnt-exist.html

March 15, 2014

Fifteen Old, Massive Galaxies Found in the Early Universe --"They Shouldn't Even Exist"

 

http://earthsky.org/science-wire/a-young-galaxy-in-the-local-universe

RELEASE DATE: SEP 27, 2014

A young galaxy in the local universe?

The nearby dwarf galaxy DDO 68 – only 39 million light-years away – looks young. But its nearness to us in space suggests it’s not as young as it looks.

Hypersphere Cosmology confidently predicts that astronomers will eventually discover galaxies of all ages at all distances, bright new ones are just easier to find at extreme distances. The Universe recycles everything.

 

Wednesday, 06 May 2015 11:17

Confessions of a Right-Wing Hippy.

Confessions of a Right Wing Hippy.

Daughter, didn’t you recently tell me you had concluded that the dread Loch Ness Monster was actually a STURGEON? I quipped.

Dad, have you always been a Right Wing Hippy? Retorted my eldest, who has recently become a Doctor of Biological Sciences.

These quips arose during intense negotiations for an Emergency Electoral Pact between us in advance of this week’s UK general election.

In the end we both solemnly swore to vote Green on wizard’s honour and scientist’s honour. So that’s one less vote for the Conservatives in a constituency where it won’t make any difference, one less vote for the SNP where it won’t make any difference either, but two votes to add to the Green national total as a magical act of protest and  long term enchantment for the future.

(Mind you, the Green’s policy of unrestricted population movement within Europe still seems profoundly ecologically unsound to me, but I guess they just put that in as a sop to the youth vote.) Nevertheless trying to conserve the environment satisfies my conservative instincts.

I think my moment of conversion to right wing hippiedom came on witnessing the ‘New-Age Convoy’ at Stonehenge. Children with matted hair and brown stumps for teeth, un-roadworthy vehicles full agricultural diesel stolen from farmers, surly feral men armed with machetes, scabby looking women selling themselves in benders, heroin on open sale, green hedgerows ripped down in failed attempts to light fires, human and dog excrement everywhere. Hawkwind still played well however. Peace and Love requires organisation and self-discipline you know man.

The overall level of human happiness seems more or less independent of ‘progress’ for the simple reason that anything ‘new’ or ‘progressive’ usually has as many downsides as upsides to it, most of them unforeseen. I find novelty profoundly interesting but not an unqualified good in itself. Science tends to improve over time, but architecture tends to get worse for example.

Politically I prefer a system that errs on the side of Liberty rather than Equality. (Fraternity has little effect beyond the 150 or so people that anyone can properly know). When it comes to Equality; equality of opportunity trumps enforced equality of outcome (socialism). I broadly support the Darwinian aims of STUB, stop the underclass breeding, or at least stop subsidising the feckless to do so. Yet I endeavour to practise benign capitalism as the most agreeable option available to me in current circumstances.

Like my daughter, most people seem to regard me as a mass of confusing contradictions. I would describe them as fertile juxtapositions. My appearance does not match my professional status and my opinions as a whole do not fall into any conventional category. I have left wing opinions about some matters, right wing opinions about others, conservative attitudes to some phenomena, liberal attitudes to others, and I currently hold some positions which have such a minority following that they don’t even have a category yet.

Whilst I have intense religious feelings I don’t believe in anything much except science, and a fair bit of that seems wrong; I suppose I merely respect the efficacy of scientific method in principle, although it often fails. Most ‘facts’ have fairly short half-lives. Official cosmology currently looks like a mistaken mess and as Richard Feynman said, ‘nobody understands quantum physics’ yet.

I respect the efficacy of magical method as well, despite its even higher failure rate. I value enchantment over divination on the basis of reasonably coherent quantum-theoretical reasons and personal experience. I dismiss the existence of ‘spirits’ as conventionally defined, and consider drugs and necromancy of limited or negligible value in magic.

In short, I Reject Herd Mentality.

Opinions shouldn’t come in exclusive boxed sets. (Prejudice by any other name.)

I value the antinomian perspective; we never really understand an idea until we also understand the conditions under which it ceases to apply. 

Wednesday, 06 May 2015 10:38

Beltane

Beltane passed with a splendid evening at Grove with a number of celebrity guests. The assembled magical firepower easily held off the rain for the evenings Beltane fire.

The pond at Chateaux Chaos now teems with tens of thousands of toadpoles, gazing into it reminds me of those schoolboy experiments examining semen under a microscope.

To mark the season I've started on a full size classical goddess statue of Flora/Chloris for the gardens. See above a practise version of a head. For this I've used Jemsonite, a water based ceramic-acrylic material over a polystyrene hat display stand and some cloth flowers. I have acquired a lifesize fibreglass shop mannequin which I shall attempt to cover with Jemsonite to give a white marble effect. The Jemsonite mixes to a paste more suitable for architectural moulding than handworking, and it sets like stone in about 5 minutes, so you have to get it on very quickly, then you can set about it with serious abrasives to give a stone finish suitable for outdoor use. 

The Hypersphere Cosmology paper now has publication in the viXra Online Scientific Journal, the home of papers too far out to pass the censors on arXiv.

http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0167

 

Saturday, 18 April 2015 17:59

Pan

Toadmass has passed at Chateaux Chaos with seemingly fewer visitors this year, they have left their strings of spawn adorning the weeds. However we have had a better year for Newts, most evenings we see half a dozen or so paddling amongst the reeds conducting their elaborate courtships, they tend to stay longer in the water than the grumpy toads who cannot wait to crawl back to dank solitude beneath their stones.

Above see a Puck/Pan figure fashioned to add a bit of classical grandeur to a garden, I do so abhor those mass produced garish garden gnomes, even the humorously rude ones. I made him starting with plasterer’s steel mesh which I overlaid with ‘Turdcrete’ an experimental clay-like mixture of finely sieved fibrous sheep’s wool and bracken compost, Portland cement, and black cement pigment, (handle with surgical gloves), he’s  verdigrissed to a faux-bronze finish with matte pale green patio paint.  Et in Arcadia Ego. ' A brief paean follows: -

The Great God Pan is Dead, Yet Again and Again and Again

The human godbeast comes and it goes, Et in Arcadia Ego

Pangenitor, Panphage, All Begetter, All Destroyer

The omnipresent reality of sex and death.

Rejected by the otherworldly philosophers

Lost by the citified Neoplatonist abstractors

Yet still sacred to the Pagans – the country folk.

The Hidden God, the Soul of the Wildwood

Faunus, Sylvanus, The Horned God, The Christian’s Devil

Herne, Cernunnos, Pan, Panic! – Witches!

Mahomet – Baphomet, God of Mistaken Identity

But full marks for Androgynous Deity.

Pan- the great All of life

Pan – Panpsychism, the magic forests live,

The world and the stars have life of a kind, but slower….

In the Romantic’s dreams of Arcadian idyll,

And to Neopagans’ delight

The Great God Pan Lives Yet!

- Always in our Genes and our Loins and our Hearts

Mind in body, body in mind, body and mind entwined.

As partly beasts, and partly gods we live.

Io Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan!

Project Pan-Epoch. Matt Kaybryn and I hope to release an e-read version of The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos in most of the worlds major languages within the foreseeable future. We already have volunteers for Polish, Spanish, Greek, and Portugese translations. If you would like to offer another please contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

 

Saturday, 18 April 2015 18:06

Puck-Pan closeup

Wednesday, 01 April 2015 10:47

UK General Election 2015

UK General Election 2015

We approach a General Election and most parties promise various paths to ‘Economic Growth’ and ‘Progress’, but do we actually want these things, and if so, in what form?

It seems that as ‘living standards’ rise, people often just become more dissatisfied.

Hitch hiking provides a very telling barometer of the social quality of life. In the seventies and early eighties huge numbers of people hitch hiked all over the country. I did London to Yorkshire, London to Lancashire, and London to Bristol countless times and on my holidays, London to the isle of Arran and London to the Orkneys, plus some wanderings in Wales and Ireland. Most motorway slip roads had queues of people with rucksacks and their destinations scribbled on bits of cardboard and most got away within half an hour with service personnel in uniform, and lorry drivers carrying their plates, taking precedence.

Nowadays you hardly see anyone hitch hiking, except perhaps in the Scandinavian countries and rural Scotland. People have become wary and fearful of each other. Sociologists have concluded that the more ‘mixed’ a society becomes, the less people trust each other. The urban English mainly live behind locked doors these days.

Immigration has much to answer for in this respect, it has led to a breakdown in the feeling that anyone you meet will likely turn out as more or less ‘one of us’ - with shared values. Hence it becomes apparent why you can still hitch hike in relatively culturally coherent societies like Scandinavia or rural Scotland. The success of the SNP in Scotland owes much to a desire to preserve a cultural identity in the face of the disintegrating ‘English’ identity.

A ‘Political Correctness’ which has virtually criminalised the criticism of any form of foreign behaviour or belief in the UK has only added to the fear. Few dare to speak out against cultural practices far beyond the norms of liberal society, or against religions with a basically fascist ideology.

Some economists opine that immigration boosts the economy. In the short term it does by increasing GDP, as we operate under the principle that all must eat and consume, but it depresses wages to the glee of the captains of industry, it swells the ranks of the indigenous unemployed underclass to the glee of the socialists, and it inflates the price of housing to the glee of property owners. However at some point it will have to stop; and the sooner the better. This small island cannot accommodate more without further degradation of the environment and further loss of social coherence which erode the quality of life. At least a billion assorted economic migrants and refugees from around the world would try to come here if they could.

Japan takes very few immigrants, its population ages and declines in numbers, and its economy remains fairly static, property prices have become sensible again, and as a result the average Japanese gets better off, and more cheerful now that they don’t work so hard.

In the UK we remain dementedly committed to economic growth despite that getting more stuff and money provides only a very temporary feeling of wellbeing and the loss of the more important life objectives. The sucking of foreign labour and capital into the system has created a situation where house price inflation now dominates the economy to the extent that a property price correction would cause the whole economy to collapse. Property insecurity has become a major factor in so many people’s lives; they now have to spend a huge proportion of their working lives merely securing a property that will effectively act as a tax on the young. Any party which dares not risk profoundly altering the structure of the UK economy will have to maintain a housing shortage either by immigration, a low building rate, or even demolition as a last resort.

London has become an alienating and depressing place except for the very rich. It has sucked in so much foreign labour and foreign capital that its traditional working class and its creative young bohemians have mostly fled elsewhere. Those big old north London houses where I used to visit student flats, squats, and witches’ basement covens back in the seventies, have now become sold to the banking and political classes for ten million quid each. Anyone earning less than 50K in London these days usually has to endure several hours a day of ghastly commuting to do so.

So, as I prefer the past to the present and to most likely futures, will I vote UKIP?

Probably not. Whilst I have immense sympathy for the cause of extricating this country from the ghastly mess of the profoundly undemocratic EU Synarchy and regaining the power to make our own laws, I don’t want to compromise the Conservatives chances of winning in my marginal constituency where UKIP have no chance. Plus UKIP’s environmental policies look cretinously uninformed. Okay so renewables may prove expensive and unsightly (although I quite like windmills), but the alternative of continuing to burn fossil fuel will prove catastrophic within the foreseeable future. I wouldn’t describe UKIP as particularly racist; I worked for them locally for a few years in the early days; I’d call them Culturalists. They would like to preserve or salvage a lot of the good stuff about the UK because it’s a lot better than many other cultures. I know because I’ve travelled widely.

The economic consequences of leaving the EU seem positive rather than negative, it will save £10 billion in contributions, burn kilo-parsecs of red tape, and trading will continue as normal, as indeed it does with Norway and Switzerland, two European countries that very wisely stayed out of the EU.

The EU benefits nobody except big-business against the interests of small and medium businesses, and the political class against the interests of the people.

I shall vote Conservative and hope for a Con-UKIP coalition that may yet grant us a referendum on the EU, and prevent further immigration.

I will do this not out of love for the Conservatives but out of dread of the alternative, the nightmare scenario of a Labour-SNP coalition which will try to boom and bust the economy again, even before the repair work undertaken by the Conservatives has finished.

The treacherous twerp who heads up the labour party sold out his own brother to gain personal power. It would come as no surprise to see him sell out the Scottish labour party to the SNP to gain more, and to sell out the whole UK to the EU to get himself into the EU commission later in his career.

As for the Illiberal Dimocrats, well I expect the party of busybodies which merely gathers the ‘Neither of the above’ vote, to sink without trace now that we face some real choices.

In the UK nearly everyone votes negatively, to keep out the party they dislike most, and turnout at elections remains low. Few people actively like any of the parties, political party membership stands at an all-time historical low, we have no room for charismatic leaders or demagogues here, and a more or less free press continually takes the mickey out of them all. Our police do not routinely carry guns.

I regard all of these things as signs of a fairly healthy democracy.

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