There is a very simple bottom line to this post: globalist business dictates to us as if we might be excrement on their shoes, bureaucrats conspire with them and get in the way, and the mainstream media try to con us with spurious "explanations" and infantile demonisation. We comply far too easily and complain far too rarely. We have lost the respect of those we pay, pay and pay again....and we have only ourselves to blame.

This is not a fair fight, because the Fat Controllers have been appeased for too long and they own all the "power" switchgear. We need new ways to fight on new heights of ground, we need to take the 'élites' by surprise, and we need to increase their fear levels in order to evoke a retreat.

Despite last Thursday being the Bad Day from Hell, it was instructive. I was due to cook lunch for a new friend, have the sewage system inspected by the regulator SPANK (don't get over-excited, spanking is not involved), get the dishwasher on early to clean dishes I don't often use, and choose some local cheeses.

The dishwasher, once turned on, sprayed grey water all over the galley kitchen in the gite here, which then travelled further down the waste pipe and shot up into my bathroom sink in the style of Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park. Men arrived with gigantic suction tanks but failed to shift the blockage. SFR chose this moment to switch off my internet connection (more G5 upgrading) said they were very désolé but didn't apologise for the 100% absence of notice about it.

I abandoned the gite, emptied the fridge contents into a large plastic bag, and legged it up to the main house which hasn't been inhabited since September. It was cold. I turned on the main oven and the boiler. The boiler's blood pressure shot through the roof and this 'state of the art' heat supplier switched itself off before starting to leak. The man from SPANK turned up and needed briefing about the layout of multiple fosse septiques involved. My garbled guide was interrupted by calls to the boiler service company and from the mobile suction tank chaps saying they were sucking away to no avail (I know the feeling) while I asked Mr SPANK if he might have a family sized bucket I could put under the boiler. He said no, so I did a full-on John Cleese running about performance and eventually found one. The regulator then said the system was triple-A and working perfectly, which couldn't possibly be true but I wasn't about to argue.

Jumping into the car on the way to buy bread and cheeses (with two large potatoes already baking in the oven) I also picked up a bottle of my favourite Corbières Red plonk, not without noticing that the price had leapt by another 35 centimes. I glanced at the headline on La Dépeche's front page speculating about whether Putin might be a rabid dog, riddled with cancer, suffering from tertiary Alzheimer's disease or all three. It was always going to take a lot for me to find some sympathy in my heart for Vladimir, but the Western media cabal has managed it with great ease.

Back in the Citroen and heading home, I slotted a blues CD into the player and was surprised to hear Abba singing "What's the Name of the Game?" It was an apt question; it felt like underwater baseball without the bats at that moment. Back at base, electric heaters were dragged up to the house and switched on. Shutting down the boiler entirely, I checked the electricity meter, whose consumption clock was racing like a one-armed bandit jackpot. I opened the oven to check on the potatoes. Two black cinders went into the bin and were hastily replaced.

Down in the gite, various experts were offering diametrically opposed theories as to where exactly le blocqage was, how much plasterboard would have to be ripped off and which side of the shower cabinet would have to be deconstructed.

I took you through my infernal day of eternal disaster because it represents a metaphor for our epoch, and how compliance with it has brought us to a terrible place.

SFR didn't bother to warn me about their upgrading work....their sole priority at the moment is flogging G5 at a hugely increased monthly rental - despite the fact they can't achieve the speeds they promise as it is. They're supposed to be in competition with Orange, but in fact it's a sleazy little club and the latter giant owns all the system hardware anyway. When a large French private or public concern says it is "désolé", it doesn't mean "sorry", but rather, "It is what it is - take it or leave it".

The boiler servicing contract costs me an eye-watering €240 a year, but promises solutions within one working day and a 24/7 hotline. They didn't get back to me yesterday. The boiler has had a pressure problem under and over the norm since the day it was installed, but seven years on they are yet to come up with any credible solution other than 'you must have radiator leaks' - which again, is Big Business code for "nothing to do with us, squire".

The three East European cowboys in charge of restoring the gite got paid in cash and then went to ground. They fitted the immersion heater so badly that the plumber who came to investigate the the mysterious hissing sound immediately shut it down. The threesome mucked up the Velux windows (all since replaced) the weatherproofing of the multifuel 'insert' chimney, which is therefore turning into a rust bucket, the electric CH system (only two out of five radiators work) and the connection of the grey/toilet waste to the septic microstation. That left only the basic plumbing, which looks all set to be ripped out too. All three have children born here and take full advantage of the welfare system. They don't pay a penny in tax. When asked to remedy their mistakes, they told my surveillant to screw off.

EDF's electricity meters effectively spy on you 24/7: the company thinks nothing of trespassing on your land to install ugly concrete pylons without either permission or warning - and destroying half your hedge in doing so. Two years ago, the regulator reported to the National Assembly that 13% of all EDF domestic supply bills were inaccurate, and 90% of this was in their favour. No action was taken.

Eighteen months ago I asked Butagaz to switch my payments to monthly in advance....with prices rocketing, this is a commonsense way to 'save and be prepared' rather than go into the red at the bank and face usurious fees. I rang Buggergas up after Christmas and asked for the balance I hold with them. "Nothing" they said. They simply hadn't done it. Three months later they still haven't done it.

My birthday card was due to arrive (a Moonpig delivery) on February 26th. It pitched up on the 14th March. All mail from the UK now takes on average 15 days to get here.

The inflation here is now batshit crazy. A twenty litre pack of paraffin was €14.99 in Spring 2021. Today, it's €34.90. Diesel fuel was €1.58 a litre, now it's €2.14. The "official" inflation rate is 3.3%. It's more like 13.3%.

France is replete with functionaries who are, quite simply, in the way, arrogant, ineffective leeches. The tax authorities are running a protection racket against every entrepreneur, and bowing regularly to grossly corrupt demands from senior politicians to protect their globalist donors. Think Emanuel Macron and his Pharma buddies at Sanofi, then do some digging. The details are unbelievable.

So here's the simple parallels list that ties yesterday's catastrophe to NATO, Brexit, Covid, vaccinations using mRNA, the Great Reset and the Ukrainian War:

  • After the fall of the Berlin Wall and George Bush Sr's easily broken promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev about "no NATO encroachments to the East", Brussels sold out to Washington pressure and made the Page One mistake of inviting largely bankrupt and outdated former Soviet Bloc economies into the EU. Unable to believe the generosity of the Sprouts, every Russian satellite's workers rushed towards Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Austria. While high quality Slovakian wood, Polish engineering, Romanian farm produce and every building material from paint to roof tiles undercut Western European prices by as much as 40% (exacerbating the North/South imbalance that already pertained) since around 2010 (and probably earlier) the US unelected State has stuck with its tried and tested technique of seeking out fascist sympathisers and fomenting nationalist dissent against anyone threatening UK hegemony.
  • As a result of this, the EU's welfare and infrastructural investment budgets ballooned out of all recognition. This was just fine as long as the British cash-cow was in place; but the UK's surprise decision to Brexit dealt a potentially existential blow to Brussels in general and France in particular. Further, it launched a cavalcade of Washington, NATO and EU propaganda misinformation, and ludicrous demands for a Second Referendum. This 'overdrive' style of infantile spin made a huge impact on the British Left....and the degree of erroneous belief about Brexit that still endures has not gone unnoticed by committed blocists like Sir Mark Sedwill and his current employers, Rothschild Bank. The media snow-job of creating the 'centrist' 2017 candidate Macron was a direct result of it. The President's anger about Johnson's achievement of Brexit has never abated - hence the 15 day postal delivery revenge.
  • The first UK attempt at a corporacratic coup d'état was foiled by the downfall of the MI6 candidate Theresa May...but not before she too had engaged with the ridiculous suggestion that her withdrawal deal would be seen as "faithful to the Brexit vote" by Leave voters - a little like saying that Hitler's genocidal policy towards the Jews would've found favour with Mossad. What we can see in retrospect is growing confidence of BS purveyors in their belief that dumbos and useful high-IQ idiots could be scared or coached into believing pretty much anything...but also, crucially, ignoring any and all empirical data that in any way threatened the belief system thus created.
  • The continuing forward march of unaccountable globalist monopolies is not just fully reflected in the behaviour of outfits like SFR, EDF, Butagaz and Sanofi, it also adds to the air of dishonesty, impunity and confusing contradiction that leads many citizens to succumb to 'analysis fatigue', whereby a neutral kind of acceptance is created: "My head hurts and I don't trust any of them, so I think I'll just go to bed, keep my head down, and wait for it to end".
  • My own fairly detailed recollection is that this (2018) was the point at which Davos and Schwab were given a degree of Centre Stage whereupon it was suggested that life had turned into an evil mess, and lots of Good Guys were required to join with "ethical wealth" to right the wrongs...about racial hatred, sexuality bigots, health issues, and poor little people with too many cares who could one day soon look forward to a life in which they would "own nothing" and thus be happily released from careworn anxieties about things they were too stupid to understand. Into this mix was poured the fluid concept of The Billionaire Philanthropist investing heavily in "public health" - alongside medical drug suppliers bankrolling "highly ethical" research projects which, for some weird reason, involved the Pentagon.
  • 2019 saw Bill Gates pointing out the danger from new viruses and introducing the idea of "gain of function" research to combat them...with seminars to foresee how international cooperation might achieve the objective.
  • The accelerator pedal from there onwards was floored until it quickly produced the Empire of Lies: Covid19 was naturally occurring (no it wasn't); we had a Covid recession (no we didn't); it was a deadly pandemic plague (it was neither); a vaccine was the only possible solution (the success of Ivermectin proves otherwise); herd immunity is impossible (no it isn't); mRNA is safe and offers full protection(no to both); the vaccines don't contain nanodebris of graphene (yes they do); Omicron would prove to be a highly dangerous variant (no it didn't); Putin wanted right from the start to annex Ukraine and expand westwards (no he didn't); The US Pentagon does not own the Ukraine biolabs nor does it develop dangerous bioweapons there (yes it does).

This is all relevant to a citizen existence where complaint seems futile, dangerously incompetent cowboys escape retribution, big media crushes any and every alternative view, telling lie from Truth becomes well-nigh impossible, there are no longer objective means towards the establishment of justice, and monied power always buys up politicians, cops, judges and bureaucrats.

But some institutions do not work for either side. For their starting point is the individual freedoms that should forever be protected beneath the umbrella of a civilised social contract.

I am indebted to the American online analyst Helena Glass for pointing me at one institution we can (up to a point) all trust to offer an objective critique.

There is an extent to which Amnesty International is a bunch of former Leftists skillfully rebranded, but they're nowhere near as bad as the twisted ideologues at Greenpeace. They do at least believe in empirical reality, and do study the recorded data/case histories. In 2020 they produced a fascinating survey of civil rights abuses, ceasefire violations and so forth in the period following the Minsk agreements of 2014 about Ukraine. Here are some sobering extracts:

  • No justice, truth or reparation was attained for any of the victims of enforced disappearance, secret detention and torture and other ill-treatment of civilians by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) from 2014 to 2016, and not a single suspected perpetrator was prosecuted.
  • The trial of a man and two women suspected of direct involvement in the killing of journalist Pavel Sheremet in July 2016 began in September with all three claiming their innocence. Meanwhile, an investigation into who ordered the killing was ongoing in separate proceedings, with no outcome reported.
  • Following his suspiciously swift election, members of groups in the St Kelenskyy controlled Ukraine continued to target civil society activists, political opponents, journalists and members of marginalized groups with harassment, intimidation and violence – often with total impunity.
  • On 12 June 2020, members of the Feminist Workshop NGO attempted to take down posters with discriminatory messages in the capital Kyiv and were attacked by fifteen men from a far-right group. The assailants pushed and verbally demeaned the activists, hit one of them in the face and threatened further violence. An eyewitness called the police, but none arrived within 45 minutes. The activists filed a report with the police and an investigation was launched, but no progress was reported by the end of the year.
  • In May 2020, a petition signed by 25,000 people was delivered to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling for ratification of the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty against violence against women and domestic violence. In September, the President signed a decree, "on urgent measures for prevention and combating domestic violence", which obliged the government to develop a state programme lasting until 2025, including measures to improve inter-agency co-ordination, further legislative amendments, and the adoption of rehabilitation programmes for offenders. However, and no steps towards ratification have been taken, nor are there any signs.
  • Progress was manifestly stalled in the investigation into the allegations by Lieutenant Valeria Sikal, the first Ukrainian ex-servicewoman who reported sexual harassment by a commanding officer in the Armed Forces in 2018. The Military Prosecutor of Rivne Garrison repeatedly returned the case file to the investigation to rectify purported irregularities, including for investigative activities that had already been undertaken. The case did not reach court by the year's end, nor was the officer indicted.
  • Territories in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russia-backed separatists remained beyond the reach of many civil society and humanitarian actors. Suppression of all forms of dissent persisted, including through arrest, interrogation and torture and other ill-treatment by the de facto authorities, and imprisonment in often inhumane conditions. Independent information from these territories was increasingly sparse.
  • In Crimea, a severe crackdown on human rights work and all dissent continued, as did restrictions on the media. Enforced disappearances from 2014, at the start of Russian occupation of the territory, were not investigated.
  • Russian authorities in Crimea continued to target human rights defenders, including members of Crimean Solidarity, a grassroots self-help group of ethnic Crimean Tatars. Dozens of its members faced politically motivated criminal proceedings, while arbitrary intrusive house searches, unofficial interrogation by Russian security forces, and intimidation were also widely used as reprisals against ethnic Crimean Tatars.

First up, let me be clear: there are causes featured above that aren't that close to my heart, but the point remains the same: even if I feel certain ideas are misplaced, providing those who hold them are happy to tolerate my ideas who the hell am I to variously censor, ban, smear and ridicule them with gratuitous insults?

Secondly, the balance offered by Amnesty International (in every sense of the word) is exemplary. It takes the pathetically one-sided blunt instrument of crude EUNATO propaganda and smashes it to smithereens with a single thought: neither of these combatants represent either the Second Coming of a heavenly saviour or Spawn of Beelzebub.

The warring factions dissemble and rearrange the natural hierarchy of freedom factors, while running fast and loose with the order of history. The last thing they represent is a fight between the virgin snow of holy Goodness and the sulphurous fumes of pure Evil.

The EUNATO -- banking -- media --permissive phalanx won't have this: it insists that Putin must be demonised and Kelenskyy sanctified. And the MSM whores happily go along with it. They willfully ignore the glaring, proven evidence that Three-Ys Kelenskyy is a greedy opportunist who has enriched himself to the cacophonous tune of $1.2 billion at the expense of the Ukrainian people, whereas Putin's entire life is a consistent catalogue of defending those who want respect for Russian achievement.

The EU bilge represented by the journal to your left disturbingly typifies the malign influence of US unelected State braindeath on EU thinking, and British attempts to achieve some form of geopolitical independence. Vladimir Putin enjoys a 70% approval rating among the Russian electorate, but NATO wants régime change. Britain's chief of defence intelligence says the Kremlin is now pursuing a war of attrition which "will kill even more civilians", and yet other sources available to me say the Russians are only hours ways from an encircling strategy that will cut off Ukraine's army from its vital supply lines. Some UK press titles give away their reluctant agreement with my analysis by saying that "the Ukraine is facing an imminent human relief crisis".

As always these days, the West wants it every which way regardless of cognitive dissonance: Putin's winning, he's a bully, Putin's losing, he's a nutter. But the posts here from AJC Boone give the lie to this spurious nonsense: what she wrote below was especially prescient:

'What Washington has needed Ukraine to be since the end of the Cold War – given President George Bush Sr's Administration's fateful and oft-quoted (by Russians) promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not extend itself "eastward by a single inch" – is a plucky little damsel-in-distress, a restless democratic republic yearning-to-breathe-free, who will invite the Americans in to rescue her from the big bad monster next-door. In rescuing the damsel/Ukrainian land-mass, the US-NATO alliance will be able to snuggle right up against the pancreas of its old Soviet foe. And everybody will cheer and hoist the FBI/CIA operatives on their shoulders'

We are - all of us - Russians, Hungarians, Americans, Britons, Slovaks, Poles, Italians, Indians and Africans or whoever - the largely unwitting victims of two-dimensional internet soundbites that offer only risibly simplistic presentations of what is.

Globalist energy and health dictate to us and poison us. Globalist media lie to us and social media censor us. Bureaucrats of every hue - from cops via judges to Sir Humphreys - both conspire with these elements and give them the impunity of carte blanche.

We can't win by merely batting back their opportunities to Unthink....because our Thinkpieces are outnumbered to a degree that makes the Alamo look like a level playing field.

Increasingly, the requirement for the 1in8 will be to change the rules of engagement in any and every way that offers us an advantage and/or the element of surprise.

Stay tuned.