Key: Rob’s comments are in italics. Derek’s comments are normal font.

As the world is rapidly changing around us, I thought we could maybe comment on some current affairs items on this episode...

Terrorism Under The “Anti-Terrorism” Act

Yeah, it's been quite a week. One bit of news that really struck me is that a journalist in London had their house raided by 10 metropolitan police officers from the anti-terrorist group, who arrested him and confiscated all his computers and phones and so forth. I don't know whether he's actually been charged yet, but he's been accused of offences under Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, which covers providing information in support of terrorist groups. I think what struck me is that we're rapidly moving into a surreal world that was depicted in the book 1984 by George Orwell.

They got very dystopian quite quickly, haven't they? Or have they always been like that and it's maybe just not been as obvious maybe?

Well, that was a point I was going to come along to later. It's a real case of truth is lies, lies are truth. Good is evil. Evil is good. He was reporting about the atrocities that have been carried out by the Israeli assaults on Hamas and Hezbollah and various aspects of those, which he's been doing fairly consistently. But there you have it. I don't want to say too much because I don't want to get raided by the anti-terrorist squad. But you have to ask who are the terrorists in this exchange.

Who are the bad guys? I'm hearing big echoes of the Julian Assange situation as well. Obviously, look how that played out.

This brings to at least five the number of journalists in the UK who've been arrested or harassed or accused under anti-terrorist legislation, including ones who were agitating for the release of Julian Assange a year ago. This is something that even five years ago, if you'd said Britain is going to be clamping down on freedom of speech in an draconian way, you'd go, no, no, that kind of thing was not going to happen here. I remember back in the 1960s, there were left-wing activists, friends of mine saying, well, there'll be a fascist state established in this country.

But there's certainly a case to be made that this is exactly what's unfolding at the moment. Now, your point about it always having been going on and we don't know about it, that more or less leads into the next observation I was going to make. One thing is that even though I've been highly skeptical about the government all my adult life, and I've been highly skeptical about the mainstream media my entire adult life, in the last three or four years, I have discovered things that never in my wildest dreams would I have. Just recently, I'm reading a book called Trading with the Enemy.

It's specifically about the major American corporations, various banking groups, particularly Chase Manhattan and JP Morgan, the Ford Motor Company, IT&T and most of all the Rockefeller's Standard Oil Group of companies. All of these were trading with the Nazis, not just in the run-up to the war, but also right through it. They were supplying products without which Hitler would not have been able to wage the Second World War. These were fuelling the bombers, providing the ammunition, providing industrial components, providing motors, providing trucks, providing communication systems, all of which were directly involved in killing their fellow countrymen and the countrymen of our allies.

It's really extraordinary that that happened. There were various people trying to reveal this. All of the people who were trying to reveal it were marginalised, discredited and ruined. Except that it's not working today in the same way. Some people have got a pessimistic view of the way it's going to work out. But the powers that be are almost openly bemoaning the fact that they've lost control of the narrative, as though that's something that we should sympathise with!

If you go back, this has been going on at least since the 1930s. And actually, if you go on prior to that, and you look into the origins of the First World War, the First World War was actually instigated, not by the way that it was told in the history books, but it was planned. Whether or not the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand really tipped it off, or whether that was just a convenient excuse, much like we've had various large-scale justifications for things that the plans had already been long laid in resonance.

So, interesting times indeed.

Pushback on mRNA Vaccines

One other thing that's hit the news in the last day or two, there's significant pushback against the latest generation of mRNA vaccines. They've been introduced in Japan and it's not the people who are in line for this are people who are having their eighth boosters.

After I (Derek) had my first two - for reasons of convenience rather than conviction that they were beneficial - I very firmly said, well, I don't seem to have been damaged by that, but absolutely no more without question of doubt! And apparently in Japan at least, they're up to eight. I've had numerous invitations to go back for more and the last one I think said “come in and get your flu vaccine and COVID vaccine in the same visit”, which strikes me as not a good idea anyway, even if they were effective and even if they were conventional technology vaccines.

Even when you look at conventional vaccines, what has transpired in recent years is that these things have not gone through the rigorous testing that any other drug would be required to do. They don't have to do long-term placebo controlled trials. Sometimes they're measuring looking for adverse effects for a matter of weeks. That's another thing that's transpired.

Well anyway, the point is that the latest ones are not even the same technology as the previous seven. They're what they call amplified or enhanced. Not only do they hijack your own cells for manufacturing the spike protein, which is supposed to prompt an immune response, but they actually stimulate your cell biology to produce more copies of the mRNA messenger strand itself. And this strikes me as utterly reckless. I mean, if there had been 10 years of testing I would still have misgivings about it, as there hasn't been time to do any of that, it's beyond belief.

Anyway, the interesting thing is it's being introduced in Japan first, and Japan has a famously obedient and compliant population. There have been several businesses have actually put notices on the door turning customers away saying, “if you've had this latest untested shot, please don't come in here!” That's a new level of protest, how effective it will be or how widespread it will be I don’t know. But the mere fact that people are saying things like that in public is, I think, something that hit me. Has anything in the news truck you?

Just coming back to journalists, I think we do need good independent journalists now more than ever.

It's even being admitted by part of the mainstream that it was very easy for them to control the narrative. It was very easy to control the narrative when there were a whole bunch of newspapers which have always operated within the Overton window of acceptable conversation, and a handful of broadcasters. And then bemoaning the fact that now there are all these other channels.

All these pesky podcasters and substacks and whatnot!

Substack and Rumble continue to provide a platform for free speech. And, you know, I don't think there's a single person that I regard as 100% reliable to the point that I would uncritically take as gospel everything they say. I'm prepared to listen to anybody, even to people that I might well have been inclined to write off as nutcases a few years ago. I've got confidence in my own critical judgment and my own ability to triangulate between different sources of information, and come to my own conclusion.

That's important and I think within the freedom movement there's a lot of accusations of so-and-so being controlled opposition, just because you don't agree with him or her on certain things, or they've said certain things in the past. It’s not helpful.

Escalating Financial Pressure

There's another observation that occurred to me this morning, which is the amount of sheer pressure that people are under for their time and money. One of the things that prompted it is that Gina went to collect somebody from the station car park and the strict regulation is that you can park there for 20 minutes to deliver or collect people from the train. She overstayed the 20 minutes either because she arrived a bit earlier than she'd intended or because the train was a bit late, which does happen.

Then she got a penalty notice for £85, reduced to £50 if you pay it within 14 days, which is pretty draconian. I mean, that would be a fairly stiff penalty if you'd parked the car there all day and not bothered to get the ticket! Anyway, she never got a prompt saying the 14 days have expired and you now owe £85, but this was the end of August, so that's been September, so coming up to well over a month and a half. Anyway, she got a letter yesterday from a debt collector saying there was also a £70 charge, so it's now £155.

Whether or not this is legally valid or not, we're looking into it at the moment. I've got a friendly lawyer. It's full of threatening rhetoric, and it's difficult to know whether this is a bluff.

Sometimes they need to prove that they own the land, and often they can't.

I think in this case since it was a railway car park the railway certainly do own the land so I don't think that is...

But yeah, a lot of these privately owned car parks actually can't enforce the fees they issue.

We'll see. I mean, worse comes to worst, we should ha...

Current Affairs Commentary - And Parking Costs Hyperinflation!