If you haven't met Mike King yet, you've been missing some sharp perceptions lightened with his personal sense of humour. I'm glad to see that St. Sugar is still present. :-)
Sonar
NY Times: ‘This Is All We Can Afford’: Shrinking Lives in the English Countryside
In Cumbria, a bucolic landscape masks growing poverty and isolation.
REBUTTAL BY Mike King of Tomato Bubble
Poor Unjolly Old England. It wasn't all that long ago that this island seat of a vast global empire -- upon which "the sun never set" -- for all its heavy handedness and exploitation -- brought stability, civilization and progress to much of the Turd World. But today, the conquerer is now the conquered -- a pathetic captive province of the communistic European Union (three bloody long years since the "Brexit" vote and still no action!) mired in moral degeneracy, weighed down with crushing levels of debt; taxation and regulation: and, as a result, plagued with deepening poverty rates for many of its Aryan natives.
Of course, the article blames the despair of the featured English townspeople as the result of "austerity" budget cuts put in place by England's "Conservative" Party. But a close reading between the lines of this sad story about the sad lives of the mostly older rural residents of the northwest county of Cumbria offers us a hint of the related true "root causes" of the decline of Cumbria and greater England as a whole, namely, an aging population (due to decades of low birth rates) and no jobs -- the standard rotten social and economic fruits of Marxism / libtardism.
Scenic Cumbria County, England -- no place for old or young men.
More and more, modern England, much like the rest of the dying West, is beginning to resemble the England of George Orwell's "Oceania" from his classic 1949 novel titled, "1984." Orwell's nightmarish vision of the future depicts a sick society in which the ruling elites acclimate the impoverished masses ("proles") to their wretched state by the deliberate promotion of immorality, alcoholism and unremitting propaganda. Orwell's spooky foresight was either one of great intuition -- or, perhaps he knew the playbook in advance. At a time when the English were still famed for being "prim and proper" -- Orwell, in Part 1, Chapter 7, prophesied the following for how the "proles" of "Oceania" would be dumbed-down, demoralized and controlled.
"Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they (the proles) had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern... They were born, they grew up in the gutters... petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds.
To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, ... marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary.
"And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. .... Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code."
Mr. Orwell nailed it, didn't he?
More at link below!
