What are you doing while the world burns?

 

We still have a choice.
We either continue to self-medicate or we get off the sofa and fight. If we are financially able, we must give money
to those who need it more.
If we are physically able, we must resist and protest.

Tyranny

"So Theresa May will not promise to accept the will of our democratically elected Parliament when we vote on Brexit options - but she will carry out the result of an advisory referendum, won through cheating and lies, regardless of the cost to the country." David Lammy, 25 March, 2019

Lorenzetti THE EFFECTS OF BAD GOVERNMENT 1337 -39, Sala della Pace (Hall of Peace) Siena. Image: WGA

"May is making a very straightforward argument that the will of the executive is more important that the will of parliament. I had always thought that Oliver Cromwell had settled that argument with Charles I in a fairly conclusive manner." Craig Murray, 25 March, 2019

Lucas Vorsterman TRIUMPH OF POVERTY c. 1624 -30 Pen in brown, with gray and brown wash,
black and red chalks, and white highlights, British Museum, London. Image source: WGA

The Persecution of Love

Huguenot Lovers on St Bartholomew’s Day by John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1852.
Image: Wikipedia

If you are living in a mixed-nationality marriage in the hostile environment of the modern UK, true love and hard work are not enough to stop you from being forcibly separated from your family. “Oh, it couldn’t happen here”. Oh, yes it could, and it is happening now.
Only the rich will survive in Brexit Britain.

“FOR RICHER, FOR POORER by Lib Dem Immigrants

Many people who’ve not had cause to find out the hard way don’t realise that mixed-nationality couples can be forbidden from living together in the UK if they don’t earn enough. We want to raise awareness of this, and we’re proud that Lib Dem policy is to oppose it. If you’re married to a British person, you should be allowed to live with them. No means 

testing. For richer, for poorer.

 

Lina is a Dachshund from Munich, Germany; Jamie is an English Bulldog from Croydon. Jamie worries about whether Brexit will mean Lina can’t come and live with him.

Kuniko is a Shiba Inu from Kyoto, Japan. Gary is a Jack Russell Terrier from Bolton. Gary’s income is just enough for Kuniko to be allowed here — but not enough for their puppies too. They don’t know what they should do.

Malcolm is an Old English Sheepdog from Hexham; Brigitte is a Bichon Frise from Toulouse, France. Brigitte is looking forward to the country life, but first she needs to find out what paperwork she’ll need, and the Home Office isn’t answering her questions.

Maryam is a Persian cat from Isfahan, Iran. Tom is a Yorkshire Terrier from Leeds. Maryam expects to get a good job in the UK — but the Home Office won’t count that as income while she’s still in Iran. The stress is affecting both of them.

Rick is an English Bulldog from Solihull; Ernesto is a chihuahua from Ciudad Juarez in Chihuahua, Mexico. Unfortunately Rick lost his job as a security guard, and his benefits don’t come to enough for Ernesto to join him.

Rachel is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel from Southampton; Dietrich is a Bernese Mountain Dog from Bern, Switzerland. Dietrich is trying to sort out Settled Status but that needs an Android smartphone and his big paws aren’t good with phones.

Shirley is a Bearded Collie from Durham; Jane is a Shih Tzu from Shenzhen, China. Same-sex marriages aren’t recognized in China; Shirley and Jane wonder if this will affect their rights in the UK.

Morag is a West Highland Terrier from Ardnamurchan, and Paweł is a Pomeranian from Gdańsk in Pomerania, Poland. Morag hopes that Paweł won’t experience the abuse that many Poles in the UK have had.

Rhys is a Collie from near Aberystwyth; no-one is quite sure where Ziggy is from, but Rhys loves them anyway.

* Liberal Democrat Immigrants exists to represent those members of the Liberal Democrats who have chosen to come to live in the UK from elsewhere. It also seeks to represent the interests of immigrants to the UK in general and to highlight those issues that disproportionately affect immigrants.”

#hostileenvironment #FBPE #Remain

A King Charles Spaniel by Manet, oil on canvas, c. 1866

The look on a dog’s face that says people have lost their minds. They had happiness within their grasp and they have thrown the ball away. Stop Brexit. STAY!

Iridescence

 Natural pearl and diamond pendant, 18th century;
set with an oval diamond supporting a diamond bow motif
and a baroque drop-shaped natural pearl measuring approximately 16 × 18 × 26mm.

A natural pearl and diamond jewel of delicately wrought beauty once belonged to history's most glamorous scapegoats for the abuses and injustices of autocracy, the victim of nationalism and misogyny, reviled by women and men, the hated l'autrichienne, the Austrian bitch, Marie Antoinette, queen of France.

Political assassination is arguably justified, character assassination is not. Of all the offensive insults thrust at her, the most hurtful, far worse than all the salacious sexual slurs, the one that cut deepest, more humiliating than being deprived of shoes and false teeth in prison, more painful than beheading, was the Tribunal's allegation of incest with her son.

"If I have not replied it is because Nature itself refuses to answer such a charge laid against a mother. I appeal to all mothers here present – is it true?”

Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine, drawn by David, 16 October 1793. Image: Wikipedia.
She was 37 years old. Usually, press reports about celebrity women degrade them by mentioning their age, but in this case the vulgar habit of prejudging is justified by the shock of this woman's premature ageing due to suffering.

She, who was brought up to be a dynastic pawn, a bride and mother of kings, became the Eternal Feminine demonized. The modern perception of Marie Antoinette has shifted away from the inverted fairy story heroine, the romanticized narrative of an over-privileged but misunderstood star of the diamond-studded, blood-stained Versailles reality show, to the universal figure in women's history of wronged mother and foreigner.

 Marie-Antoinette and her children by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1787

While she was imprisoned, she was separated from her children. As she prepared for death, her chief anxiety was about their fate. An 18th century princess endured the kind of degradation and psychological torture that tyranny in the modern world still inflicts on female immigrants and their families.

And there's the jewel itself, the progeny of animals and human skill, that natural pearl of iridescence beyond price, a man-made thing lovely enough to be the symbol of our atonement for our sins against nature and each other, sold for silly money, £25 million that should be spent on environmental conservation and humanitarian missions to reunite migrant families and release political prisoners.

The Fifth Horseman

CLICK HERE TO READ FULL POST

LINKS TO PETITIONS:
The People's Vote
Final Say

What, in our house?

BRITAIN IS A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT,
IN DENIAL

Something has gone very wrong in our country, and like a terminally ill person in denial of their mortality, about half the British public aren’t admitting it. Such things don’t happen in Britain, they believe. It’s only other nations that commit atrocities, build concentration camps, persecute innocent people. “It wouldn’t happen here”. 

It is happening here.

“What, in our house?” enquired Lady Macbeth, on hearing of the murder of King Duncan, which she had just instigated.,,,Read full post

Global Britain, great and free

P.S. China’s largest trading partner is…the EU

The air in my country

“The air in my country is very foul”
Ian McEwan, at a press conference in Barcelona, March, 2017

 Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels 1562
Oil on oak, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Image: WGA

"Now is not the time to obstruct the will of the people" Theresa May in the House of Commons, 2017.

"Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs." Robespierre, in a speech to the National Convention, 1794.

Maximilien Robespierre, oil on canvas by Pierre-Roch Vigneron, 1786; in the Museum of French History, Palace of Versailles. Image: Britannica.com The embodiment of the people 's will, and the exponent of State terrorism: Maximilien Robespierre, smiling his sweet megalomaniac's smile, before the Revolution.

We are being bullied into acquiescence with a disastrous rupture with Europe. Our economy and civilization are being degraded, people we love might be torn from us, and we are told to be silent.

Brexit is being imposed upon us in a reign of Terror, in which dissent is suppressed and the rule of law threatened.

"Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil." Robespierre.

"Enemies of the people"
Daily Mail denouncing the judges of the High Court who upheld Gina Miller's case for parliamentary sovereignty.

Our centuries' old representative parliamentary democracy is broken, smashed under the weight of public opinion polls and political opportunism.

This is not democracy; this is authoritarianism.

If you don't like Brexit, and you love your country, don't shut up.  Never stop protesting.

“It is the right of those of us who voted to remain to continue to speak for what we believe is in our country’s best interest and not allow ourselves to be cowed into silence.”
Ian McEwan, March, 2017

Detail from The Rape of Europa, bronze by Il Riccio (Andreo Briasco), 1520.
Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest. Image: WGA

  Great Britain self-destructs:

IF ONLY IT WAS A BAD DREAM
DON'T LEAVE, TIFFANY
DOING THE MACARENA TO CATASTROPHE
ALFRED'S DOOMS
48-52

 

DOING THE MACARENA - TO CATASTROPHE

THE FATE OF THE UNITED KINGDOM AFTER BREXIT VOTE

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.

Jon Stewart

The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.
T.H.White, The Once and Future King