YouTube - ALWAYS READING NEVER LEARNING

Just what I do, thirty years on...

ALWAYS READING NEVER LEARNING - Why You Forget Everything You Read and How To Fix It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Bt8SKmBhk

Then Spectator - ‘There’s been a vibe shift’: welcome to the new political disorder

(personal underlines) 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/donald-trump-and-new-political-disorder/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020250109%20%20AL+CID_82b26b6db140851ca6ddf14b8d21709a

‘There’s been a vibe shift’: welcome to the new political disorder

Katy Balls

 Photo-illustration: Lukas Degutis

Donald Trump isn’t back in the White House yet, but already his victory is being felt across the world. Greenland is pondering the prospect of an invasion after the President-elect refused to rule it out during a Mar-a-Lago press conference. In Canada, the last western leader from the days before Trump has just exited the stage. Justin Trudeau, the one-time liberal hero, quit earlier this week in the face of tanking ratings.

Nick Clegg, the former Liberal Democrat leader, is out at Meta and the billionaires of Silicon Valley are bracing themselves for what comes next. Mark Zuckerberg has announced sweeping changes (including an end to fact-checkers) in response to what he called ‘a cultural tipping point’. The last time Trump won an election, Facebook’s response was to increase censorship in a bid to stop a repeat. Now it wants to join the party.

The wave of change has also started to take hold in the UK, where Westminster politicians have spent the past week trading barbs about the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal as a direct result of Elon Musk’s tweets. ‘No. 10 thought they’d begin the new term talking about the NHS,’ says an opposition aide. ‘Now they look clueless and on the wrong side of public opinion.’

As Trump returns, politicians and voters alike feel emboldened to say the unsayable. ‘There’s been a vibe shift,’ notes a senior Whitehall figure. In SW1, young thinktankers have a new incentive to share their hard truths: they might be so lucky to get a reply or ‘like’ from Musk. This week, Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary and close ally of Kemi Badenoch, declared on X (where else?) that Musk’s purchase of the platform in 2022 may have ‘saved humanity’. It’s true that it has become a news source that can compete with – and overpower – parts of the legacy media. 

Leaders looking to benefit from the shift know they must challenge the old assumptions. ‘It’s time to question the cosy liberal consensus and examine economic nationalism and social taboos,’ says a Badenoch ally.

Trump’s meeting with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni this week at Mar-a-Lago (orchestrated by Musk, naturally) means she is seen as a potential power-broker between the White House and Europe. Left-wing leaders on the continent are crying foul – accusing Musk of tampering with democracy through his interventions on domestic politics.

The problem is particularly acute in the UK. Musk – whose grandmother was British – sees the UK as the Athens to America’s Rome. His intervention on the subject of grooming gangs is leading to a wider debate about multiculturalism, integration and British identity. As Keir Starmer struggles to grasp the topic, both Badenoch and Nigel Farage are fighting to control the narrative.

Musk has called for the release of Tommy Robinson, the activist jailed for contempt of court. After Farage condemned Robinson, Musk publicly questioned whether he has what it takes to lead Reform in an online post. His tweet took Farage’s inner circle by surprise – but they’re not too worried. They see it as a wrinkle they can iron out.

For the Tories, the Farage-Musk crack-up is a reason to feel optimistic. ‘We are enjoying Musk landing punches on Farage,’ says one Badenoch ally. ‘Not many can.’ However, Farage plans to use this month’s inauguration in Washington – where he is likely to attend the various evening balls as well as the official swearing in – to re-ingratiate himself with the incoming President’s allies. ‘He’s known Donald a lot longer than Musk,’ says one colleague playing down the idea of a rift.

Meanwhile, Badenoch is looking across the Anglosphere for inspiration. During the first shadow cabinet meeting since Christmas, she encouraged her team to look to the rise of other right-wing parties, such as Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative party in Canada and the Liberals in Australia. In what was pitched as the first of a series of strategies for the new year, Badenoch unveiled her ‘spring plan’.

Assembled ministers were given an in-depth overview of the plan for the first half of this year, focusing on how to ‘rebuild and renew’. Badenoch said her chief of staff, Lee Rowley, who led the presentation, had ‘unleashed his inner management consultant’ as the assembled ministers were given a lengthy presentation. The aim: to rebuild trust with British people and then rebuild the party. By showing their values and principles, the idea is that the Tories will show that they are under new management. However, some attendees were left wondering how best to do that: ‘What is our Clause IV moment?’

For Starmer, there is too much fire-fighting to do to focus on strategy. His comments defending Home Office minister Jess Phillips from Musk’s criticism landed well within the party, but there is a nervousness that they could further antagonise Trump’s team. The hope in Starmer’s camp is that Musk is not representative of the administration as a whole, and that cooler heads will prevail – such as Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, who met Morgan McSweeney late last year. Wiles has said she will have no time for ego and one-man shows in the White House.

The Foreign Office, alongside No. 10 and 11, is preparing responses on Ukraine and trade for different scenarios. The appointment of Elbridge Colby to Trump’s foreign policy team came as a relief to Labour as he has spoken positively about David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary. Yet the potential for trouble remains. There have been reports this week that Labour could even reassess intelligence-sharing if Trump echoes Musk in his criticism of the UK, but No. 10 has steered strongly away from such suggestions. Even the mention of the idea is dangerous in the face of Republican scepticism over Labour. ‘We can’t afford a war of words on security,’ says a government adviser.

That extends to defence. Trump has said that he expects Nato members to up their donations to 5 per cent of GDP. ‘That means the realistic amount is 3 per cent at least,’ says a former defence secretary. ‘By the next Nato summit, with Trump there, it will be the main focus – and that is a nightmare for Rachel Reeves.’ The Chancellor has little room for spending after borrowing costs this week surpassed their level after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget. ‘Well, politics looks set to be fully insane again,’ concludes a former minister.

The Spectator - Britain is frozen by fear

 

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britain-is-frozen-by-fear/?status=Active&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND%20%2020251021%20%20HOUSE%20ADS%20%20JP+CID_66ed9cd82ffb5bae7fdb2de97121b3a9

Britain is frozen by fear

Gareth Roberts22 October 2025, 7:19am

(Getty Images)

What do the following things have in common? The ‘Safety Advisory Group’ of Birmingham City Council banning the sale of away tickets to fans of an Israeli football team. The refusal of police to arrest ‘pro-Palestinian’ marchers calling to ‘globalise the intifada’ right in front of them. The reluctance of politicians to implement the law on separation of the sexes, made clear months ago by the Supreme Court ruling. The government’s unwillingness to protect parliament from Chinese spying. I think the answer is simple: plain, old-fashioned fear.

Yes, we often hear accusations that the institutions are squeamish about difficult topics, that individuals are guilty of moral cowardice. We toss this criticism about airily, as if all it would take to sort these things out is for our leaders to show some spine. But I reckon it goes deeper than that. This is genuine, personal fear with a capital F. Fear makes sense of it all. They’re afraid. And here’s the big thing: that fear is justified.

There are three levels of modern political fear. First, and this is serious enough, there is the fear of losing one’s social status and career, of ‘cancellation’. Taking a position against the consensus that dominates the progressive establishment still marks you out.

Then there is the fear of facing the truth, because it is overwhelming, and it would also mean accepting that you have been not only wrong, but have been proved disastrously wrong. (And even worse, that the people you despise were correct.) This applies across the board, to the Supreme Court foot-draggers, China avoiders and mass immigration enthusiasts alike.

And third, and this is the big unmentionable: actual physical fear for your life and the lives of others.

We can see this in the failure to find anybody willing to head up the rape gang inquiry. Survivors on the preparatory panel were told yesterday that social worker Annie Hudson, one of only two names left in the frame, no longer wanted to be considered for the post. Can you blame her? Her name would be associated forever with a massive truth bomb that would set a lion among the pigeons. The progressive establishment would despise her, and she’d be painting a target on her own back with what we still timidly refer to as ‘our communities’. Hilary Cass and Tony Sewell have suffered harassment – and, in Sewell’s case, professional censure – merely for leading inquiries on much colder, though still highly controversial, topics.

The fear of violence is the enormous elephant in the room of Britain. When you see, for example, Jess Phillips harassed at her election count last year by supporters of the local ‘Gaza independent’, you begin to see why she behaves in the peculiar way that she does. She is terrified.

The government’s own working party to define ‘Islamophobia’ is, we hear, in trouble. A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear. It’s taboo to admit that we’re actually frightened, to the point of inertia, by Islamism. None of us has ever had to square up to anything like this. We’d really rather not. So we look for crumbs of solace, chuntering on as Starmer does about diversity being our strength, our marvellous British values of tolerance, etc.

The horrors of the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 in Israel are so far beyond our modern western understanding of the world that we simply cannot comprehend them. Last year the Henry Jackson Society polled British Muslims and found that 39 per cent disputed the truth of the events, and that 46 per cent sympathised with Hamas. Only 28 per cent said it would be undesirable to outlaw homosexuality.

Demographic forecasters say the UK’s Muslim population could treble between 2017 and 2050. How is that going to turn out, when so many Muslims hold these kinds of views? Is being afraid of this really irrational? A ‘phobia’? When the police and other state agencies refuse to act, placing so-called ‘community cohesion’ above every other consideration, it is because they know they simply could not cope with the reaction, and it would also be a bad look, exposing the very uncomfortable truth.

It turns out the Met can ban protests, in the right circumstances. A recent statement tells us: ‘The prospect of serious disorder has prompted us to intervene to prevent a protest organised by Ukip’ – they’re still going, apparently – ‘from taking place in Tower Hamlets on Saturday. It was calling for “mass deportations” and had caused significant community concerns.’ But endless public calls over the last two years to ‘globalise the intifada’, and other blatantly anti-Semitic rallying, have been ignored. Why could that be? And this ‘serious disorder’ – from what or whom would it originate? Carrots? Presbyterians? Showaddywaddy?

In this context, Starmer’s pathetic wheedling about a ‘patriotic renewal’ of a united Britain begins to look more like the bargaining of the victim of a protection racket, for which the only defence is compliance.

Similarly, the threat of violence from gender activists has our establishment quaking in their boots. Green MP Sian Berry reacted to the vandalism and intimidation of a feminist conference by trans activists in her Brighton constituency with a tweet that blamed the women for ‘inflaming division’. The collapse of the Chinese spy trial was also very obviously motivated by fear of a different kind.

The first step towards defeating a problem is correctly identifying it. Over the last 30 years there have been historic errors made, on a horrifying scale, on uncontrolled immigration, on gender, and on China. It is very big, very scary stuff. I wish we didn’t have to face it, but we must. As it stands, we are terrified, and scared even to say that we are.

The Spectator - The Ultras: meet Britain’s new Islamo-socialist alliance

 

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-ultras-meet-britains-new-islamo-socialist-alliance/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020251023%20%20AL%20%20Virgin%20wines+CID_6ba4d0686502fb40d2b4ea41ca08b273

The Ultras: meet Britain’s new Islamo-socialist alliance

Angus Colwell and Max JefferyMonday 3 November 2025, 7:00pm

Ayoub Khan seemed delighted. Last Thursday, it was announced that fans of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv would be banned from attending their match against Aston Villa next month, an outcome that Khan, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, had been lobbying for since September. That night, Khan took himself on a broadcast round to celebrate. Keir Starmer had said the ban was the ‘wrong decision’, but on Newsnight Khan told him to back off. ‘The Prime Minister should stay out of operational matters,’ he said. ‘That’s not a matter for him, sitting in No. 10.’

It has been a satisfying 15 months for Khan since his election. Last year, he and three other independent candidates (Adnan Hussain in Blackburn, Iqbal Mohamed in Dewsbury and Batley, and Shockat Adam in Leicester South) unexpectedly won seats as the Muslim vote deserted Labour over Israel’s war in Gaza. The four MPs have since allied themselves with Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, the co-leaders of Your Party, formalising a quixotic alliance of anti-capitalists, environmentalists, Muslim voters and trans activists. Supporters think this new coalition could win 50 seats at the next general election. It would be the biggest hard-left presence in parliament’s history.

The Spectator has spoken to aides, parliamentarians, former ministers and government officials about this new alliance and the politics it represents. A single truth emerges: whatever Westminster tries to do about it, MPs like Khan are not going away.

The election campaigns of the Gaza independents were some of the most intense in British history. When a dripping wet Rishi Sunak called the election outside No. 10 last year, the Tories were already dead. Starmer had an easy ride to power, and few paid attention to what was happening in Labour’s safe urban seats. In Leicester South, for example, Jonathan Ashworth was left to fight a fraught campaign against Shockat Adam, a Malawi-born local from an Indian Gujarati Muslim family. Ashworth was assailed for abstaining on a vote calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in November 2023, branded ‘Genocide Jon’, and harassed in the streets by groups of men. His Muslim supporters were ordered by community leaders to remove pro-Labour posters from their windows. Many have claimed these attacks were done in Adam’s name. He denies this.

The nadir for Ashworth came two weeks before polling day, when he was campaigning by Spinney Hill Park in his constituency. He was confronted by a group of men, including Majid Freeman, a Muslim activist who shortly afterwards would be jailed for five months for instigating violence against Hindus during the riots in Leicester in 2022. The group followed Ashworth and shouted that he had the ‘blood of Palestinian men, women and children’ on his hands; he sought refuge from the men in a vicarage. ‘If you don’t want to be asked questions by the public when you are canvassing on our streets, then maybe you should just stay at home?’ tweeted Adam after the incident.

Other Labour incumbents, including Khalid Mahmood, Shabana Mahmood and Jess Phillips, were challenged by independent candidates in 2024. They also claim they faced intimidatory tactics during the campaign (there was a campaign of intimidation ‘geared against me from the start’, says Khalid Mahmood, who lost his seat to Ayoub Khan); but all of their opponents again deny involvement. Shabana Mahmood and Phillips held their seats.

The government know full well the details of what happened last year. A week after the election, on 12 July, John Woodcock, who was then the government’s adviser on political violence and disruption, sent a six-page memo to Yvette Cooper (then home secretary), copying in Dan Jarvis (security minister) and Michael Stewart (then director of Prevent, the UK’s counter-extremism programme). He outlined the abuse suffered by eight prospective MPs during the election – ‘car tyres slashed’, ‘masked men’, ‘faeces’ – and offered to conduct ‘a focused piece of work on the scale and drivers of this intimidation’. His proposal went unresolved.

Once in the Commons, sitting in the naughty corner behind Reform, the Gaza independents made a new friend in Jeremy Corbyn. For three years after resigning as Labour leader, Corbyn had been an irrelevance, but after the 7 October attacks in 2023 he was reinvigorated. Within a week of Hamas’s massacre he was addressing rallies against Israel’s response. On Armistice Day, Corbyn accompanied some 300,000 people from Hyde Park to the US embassy in one of the biggest marches since the Iraq war. He was a team leader again.

It was in this context, as a man on the rise, that Corbyn decided to start a pro-Gaza political party after the 2024 general election. Talks between Corbyn and the Gaza independents began in Portcullis House soon after the result, and continued over Zoom during that summer’s parliamentary recess. On 2 September, the ‘Independent Alliance’ was announced. The quintet could now share resources and money. They hoped their grouping would permit them more parliamentary time during questions and debates.

Conversations quickly moved on to the question of expansion. Jamie Driscoll, the socialist former mayor of North of Tyne, who was hounded out of the Labour party during one of Keir Starmer’s purges, was drafted in to fundraise and to formalise the grouping’s financial structures. Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s chief-of-staff when he led Labour, got involved too. Talks then began with Zarah Sultana, the Labour MP for Coventry South, about a defection. Sultana had lost the Labour whip less than three weeks after the 2024 election, for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap. She was promised that she could be co-leader with Corbyn.

Sultana joined, and Karie Murphy and her allies entered into factional warfare against her. Team Murphy wanted Corbyn to be the group’s only leader, and at an online meeting in June this year, they tried to move against Sultana. Alan Gibbons, an independent councillor in Liverpool and a friend of Murphy’s, tabled a proposal to put Corbyn in sole charge. The scheming backfired, and the organising committee ended up approving a rival proposal which cemented Sultana’s position as co-leader.

Murphy’s presence has continued to upset people. She largely manages the party day-to-day, since Corbyn is late to meetings, indecisive, and often doesn’t reply to emails. A source close to the Gaza independents (who does not want to be named because ‘it is well-documented that Karie seeks [political] reprisals’) says she is ‘a very divisive figure’ who ‘has a habit of putting people off’.

The source adds: ‘She has professed she just wants to get this thing off the ground and then she wants to retire. My personal view is that she wants her old job back. She wants another attempt at running the show.’

With Corbyn and Sultana bickering about who really runs Your Party, the Gaza independents have been lying low. As Your Party’s policies are being drafted at ‘regional assemblies’ ahead of its founding conference next month, it is becoming clear to members that the Gaza MPs are not socialists. All four of them voted against putting VAT on private schools – a key issue in the Sikh communities these MPs also court – and two of them are landlords. None of the four, it is safe to say, is particularly woke. ‘The Gaza MPs hate Sultana,’ a source says. ‘She’s a woman, and she will talk about trans rights. That won’t be their priority.’ Your Party officials have put pressure on the Gaza independents to sell their rented properties.

Ideological inconsistencies, however, will be glossed over. A powerful electoral alliance has been born between young progressives and a group of Muslim voters. Your Party and the Greens, now led by the self-declared ‘eco-populist’ Zack Polanski and his deputy Mothin Ali, who once called a rabbi an ‘animal’ for being a reservist in the Israeli military, are already in talks to have an electoral pact, where whoever looks most likely to win the seat will run unopposed. In this venture they will be aided by an organisation called Muslim Vote, which helped the Gaza independents at the last election. For 2029, Muslim Vote has offered to supply the Greens and Your Party with data on the voting preferences of local Muslims in each constituency.

Labour will be the party most damaged by these tactics. Despite a notional peace deal now in place in Gaza, the party’s traditional Muslim vote is unlikely to return. Crucially, a disproportionate number of the cabinet are in seats with a high Muslim population. Wes Streeting, in Ilford, is the most obvious example, with a majority of just 528 after the independent Leanne Mohammad ran him extraordinarily close in 2024. A source close to Ayoub Khan says he is likely to stand again at the next election.

Some in government fear sectarianism hardening and characters like Majid Freeman becoming more prominent in Britain’s politics. There is often a lack of will from Labour ministers to confront the challenge.

Comparisons are often drawn with France, which has been more proactive at dealing with Islamism. Following the murder of the teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, the French government began a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence, which was supported across the political spectrum.

There are rumours that the government is rehauling its counter-extremism policies, particularly after the Manchester synagogue attack. Robin Simcox’s replacement as commissioner for countering extremism has yet to be named, with one senior source suggesting things are ‘on pause’ since that attack. Aside from a 2015 initiative that fizzled out, the Home Office has been hesitant about developing a proper counter-extremism strategy – officials say that the department’s priority was to stop terrorist attacks – but some think that a French-style crackdown on political and radical Islamism is being planned. Civil servants are worried that pushing radical groups underground could have lethal consequences, though. There are those who suggest the work could be done more softly by the Ministry for Housing and Communities, through a social cohesion taskforce. Either way, the work will be low-key. Sources suggest the government is unlikely to want a media blitz, or a Spectator cover story. A Home Office spokesperson said: ‘All forms of religious, ethnic and racial hatred have absolutely no place in our society. We are working with partners and across government to tackle the threat and respond to growing and changing patterns of extremism across the UK, ensuring we have the tools and powers to keep people safe.’

Any such strategy will have been sanctioned by No. 10. Starmer’s appointment of new ministers at the Home Office and Communities over summer was a statement of intent. As one senior source said: ‘Nothing really happened with Yvette Cooper as home secretary and Angela Rayner as communities secretary. I think it will now be a live issue with Shabana Mahmood and Steve Reed.’

Westminster has talked endlessly, in apocalyptic tones, about the rising menace on the right, the carnage that Reform will wreak on the establishment. Yet the coming alliance on the left is every bit as dangerous. All eyes are on Nigel Farage and his gang, who have begun to look quite smug on their green benches in the corner of the chamber. People should be paying just as much attention to who sits behind them.

Cartoons - The Spectator

 

Reflexão - os perigos do phishing...

 Mais phishing..."go4mobility"!!

Para mais tarde recordar...

The Spectator - The Free Palestine mob’s shameful response to the Manchester attack

 (personal underlines) 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-free-palestine-mobs-shameful-response-to-the-manchester-attack/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020251004%20%20AL+CID_1a379c96638825d00bcd25f1ef39a81c

The Free Palestine mob’s shameful response to the Manchester attack

3 October 2025, 8:40am

Police scuffle with pro-Palestine protestors in Whitehall (Getty images)

As so often, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis hit the nail on the head over yesterday’s terror attack in Manchester. It was, he said, the result of ‘a tidal wave of Jew hated’.

Jews have spent the past two years highlighting the danger posed by the authorities’ refusal to take more than perfunctory action against the regular hate marches and gatherings. We have warned what was coming – and yesterday it came. It will, I dread to write, not be the last terror attack.

Palestinian statehood is a decent and worthy cause. It is no more intrinsically poisonous than the push for a Scottish, Welsh or Catalan state, or indeed Irish unification. But as with the latter, for all that there are those who are entirely decent in the way they advocate and campaign for their cause, the broader movement has indeed been infected with poison.

Look at what happened last night, hours after two Jews had been murdered and the deaths of many others prevented only by heroism. How did the so-called Free Palestine movement react? By staging an ‘emergency’ pro-Palestine protest organised by the ‘Global Movement for Gaza UK’ on Whitehall. Mobs gathered not just in Whitehall but also in London railway stations and in Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, Bournemouth and elsewhere. Is this how normal people react after a terrorist attack?

While the answer to that is clearly ‘no’, it is exactly how the Free Palestine mob react. It is, for example, how the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) reacted after the October 7 2023 massacre of 1,200 Jews. On the day itself, while the massacre was still in progress, the PSC contacted the Metropolitan Police to signal their intention of staging a march the following week – on October 14, before Israel had even entered Gaza. It was the very definition of a hate march. And it was the first of the many that have followed, on which Jew hate is openly displayed, from banners with antisemitic caricatures that could have come straight out of Der Stürmer, the Nazis’ propaganda tabloid, to chants calling to the ‘globalise the intifada’ – kill Jews – and ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, Ya Yahud! Jaish Mohammad sawf ya’ud!’, which means ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews! The Army of Muhammad Will Return!’.

Dismissing these examples as the work of ‘bad apples’ on the marches doesn’t wash. For one thing, all too often the organisers have utterly failed to condemn those responsible. Of course they have – because such behaviour is in the DNA of the movement. Look at the smaller mobs that gather regularly – such as one in London on Wednesday night, the day before the Manchester attack. It was not just physically threatening, launching fireworks and pushing its way through crowded streets. It was united in chanting for the destruction of Israel.

These mobs spring up across the country on streets, in malls, at railway stations – anywhere where they can be seen and intimidate. And, almost always, the police stand and watch (although yesterday’s mob in Whitehall turned so bad that 40 people were arrested, six of whom were for attacks on the police).

Back to October 7, and the idea of staging a march straight after a massacre of Jews. Guess what is now scheduled for this Saturday, two days after the murder of Jews? A rally for Palestine Action, the proscribed terrorist group. The police have asked the organisers to reschedule, given that they are on high alert for more terror attacks on Jews. Leave aside that pathetic phrase, ‘the police have asked’, and ponder why on earth a mob which harasses, frightens and intimidates Jews would respond to the murder of Jews by stepping back from its latest plan that will harass, frighten and intimidate Jews.

Reflexão - Nos 50 anos da Ponte Aérea – Obrigado, “retornados” (Nuno Gonçalo Poças)

 (sublinhados meus)

https://observador.pt/opiniao/nos-50-anos-da-ponte-aerea-obrigado-retornados/

Nos 50 anos da Ponte Aérea – Obrigado, “retornados”

Cinquenta anos depois, se calhar já podemos dizer o óbvio: a esquerda tratou meio milhão de portugueses com mais desumanidade do que agora acusa a direita, toda ela, de lidar com os estrangeiros.

Nuno Gonçalo Poças 

18 nov. 2025, 00:16

Chamaram-lhe “Ponte Aérea”, mas foi uma espécie de “aterragem forçada” de vidas inteiras. Há cinquenta anos terminava a maior operação de evacuação aérea da história portuguesa, com cerca de meio milhão de portugueses, caídos literalmente do céu, a chegar à capital de um império que então se extinguia.

Vieram essencialmente de Angola e Moçambique com pouco, e muitos com quase nada. Um cartão de embarque, uma pasta com documentos, caixotes com os seus bens que nunca mais viram, filhos ao colo e vidas às costas. Tinham nomes, histórias, profissões, raízes, cultura e vistas largas. Perderam quase tudo. Ganharam um nome: retornados.

Portugal, então recém-saído da ditadura e mergulhado na anarquia revolucionária de um PREC sem bússola, olhou para este meio milhão de concidadãos com desconfiança e hostilidade. Tinham sido colonos, diziam. Eram ricos, exploradores, “os do Ultramar”. Fascistas, naturalmente. Foram um dos inimigos fáceis da sede revolucionária, com a agravante de não terem sequer mecanismos para reagir.

Mas o mais notável em toda a história do regresso dos nacionais a Lisboa não foi a hostilidade com que foram recebidos, mas o que os próprios fizeram com a ostracização a que foram sujeitos. Não se tornaram reféns da vitimização, deitaram mãos à obra. Os portugueses que vinham das colónias sabiam que o mundo acaba num horizonte largo, e não ao fundo do Chiado. Trouxeram hábitos, capacidade de trabalho, cultura de gestão, formas de estar, até palavras novas. Abriram cafés, empresas, oficinas, fábricas. Reconstruíram-se contra a cultura hegemónica, sempre marxista, e fizeram-no sem pedir favores; sem subsídios, sem planos estratégicos. Fizeram o que faz quem não tem alternativa, que é sempre a maior das forças motoras, num país que estava habituado a não fazer nada ou a fazer muito pouco.

Os “retornados” continuam a ser uma ferida mal contada da nossa memória colectiva. Nunca houve um esforço sério para integrar a sua história na narrativa do regime. Continuam, talvez, a ser estranhos num país de gente amorfa. Talvez porque nos expõem as fraquezas, e exibem, sem contemplações, a desumanidade do progressismo revolucionário.

Cinquenta anos depois, se calhar já podemos dizer o óbvio: a esquerda tratou meio milhão de portugueses com mais desumanidade do que agora acusa a direita, toda ela, de lidar com os estrangeiros. Em Portugal, onde toda a gente aprecia apregoar a sua bondade e gosta de se compadecer de tudo, subsiste um manto de silêncio oficial e oficioso para quem perdeu tudo e recomeçou tudo. Talvez porque não aceitaram o rótulo de vítimas, a única categoria que um país injectado de vulgata marxista aprecia.

O 50.º aniversário da Ponte Aérea devia ser um marco nacional. Não para reabrir feridas, mas para agradecer. Para dizer obrigado a quem chegou com medo e ainda assim teve coragem. Obrigado a quem foi insultado e não desistiu. Obrigado a quem transformou a sua desgraça pessoal numa força colectiva.

Num tempo em que se debate tanto a identidade, o acolhimento e os direitos, talvez seja boa ideia começar por fazer justiça a quem sempre foi da casa e nunca teve direito a entrar pela porta da frente.

Desporto- Futebol (os 9-1 à Arménia)

Aos “experts”: ontem, 16.11.2025, demos 9 a 1 à Arménia e ficámos apurados para o Mundial do próximo ano. Pergunto, demos 9 a 1:

1-para provar que não precisamos do Ronaldo (ele não jogou porque foi expulso no último jogo)? 

2-Porque não respeitamos quem está na mó de baixo (o resultado é uma vergonha!)? 

3- porque somos muito bons (então porque não garantimos o apuramento antes?)? 

Quem perceber…

Já agora expliquem-me como é possível encarar-se, abordar sequer, ser "campeão do mundo"? A sério"?

Os nossos comentadeiros, bacharéis em banalidades, licenciados em faladuras, com master em frivolismo, pós doutoramento em pandeguice, e que conseguem encher (ai carneirada, carneirada...) os tempos de antena das televisões e rádios, já falam - ao de leve, claro -, na vitória final. São uns pândegos, uns pândegos! 

The Spectator - We’re all doomed if English literature students can’t read books

 

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-all-doomed-if-english-literature-students-cant-read-books/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020251006%20%20Weatherbys%20%20JO+CID_9c9f831350c115d341bee03cec070bf4

We’re all doomed if English literature students can’t read books

6 October 2025, 6:23am

English literature students are being taught reading 'resilience' in order to cope with longer books (Getty images)

The question has changed, as one Oxford don noted wanly on social media, from ‘What are you reading at university?’ to ‘Are you reading at university?’ Such is the state of undergraduates entering English literature courses these days, brains addled by scrolling on their mobile phones, that universities are now offering ‘reading resilience’ courses to help them tackle the unfamiliar task of reading long, old, sometimes difficult books.

We’re accustomed, some of us, to feeling gloomy about the sinking popularity of Eng lit – once comfortably among the most popular choices at A-Level and most applied-for at university, now very much not. We’re accustomed, too, to regretting the gobbetisation of how it’s now taught at GCSE and A-Level, and the drive to teach ever shorter texts in the face of dwindling teenage concentration spans. But it’s a whole new cause of gloom to discover that even those students who have actively signed up to study English literature at university are struggling to read books.

There are arguments to be had, heaven knows, about the value and purpose of English literature as an academic discipline. They have been being had since it first came into being. Did acquaintance with the great works, as F R Leavis (and before him George Eliot and many others) thought, improve you morally? Or, when that line started to seem a bit airy-fairy, was formal analysis – structural morphology, and all that jazz – the respectable way to go?

When literary theory swept through the academy in the 1980s and 90s, you could see dons latching on to it with a yelp of relief, as if to say: we’re doing something intellectually rigorous now, not just reading stories and poems and responding to them. Marxist and feminist critics corralled the literary canon into a branch of the social sciences; the deconstructionist mob tried to yank it into philosophy.

And the economic utility of it – as if that’s the point – has always been questioned. When I was an Eng lit undergraduate, the standard joke was: ‘What do you say when you meet someone with a PhD in English? Big Mac and large fries please.’ That joke, alas, has now become the organising principle for successive metrics-minded governments to sideline the arts in favour of STEM.

But, wherever the world may stand on the value of an English Literature degree, if you’re signed up to one as an undergraduate, you’re presumably on board with thinking there’s a point to it. And that means reading books. Often very long books. Sometimes difficult books. It is the entire point of reading English literature. You don’t join a parachute regiment and then decide that, on subsequent consideration, you’re not wild about the idea of jumping out of planes.

Eng lit, in this respect, is something of a bellwether. If we lose our ability to read books – properly read them, all the way through – we are cooked as a civilisation. Books are what made that civilisation in the first place. They are the best means yet devised of transmitting deep thinking and rich bodies of knowledge across generations. The internet is not a substitute. Memes are not a substitute. TikTok videos are not a substitute. Tweets, fun though they may be to send, are not a substitute. And generative AI – that Dunning-Kruger regurgitation machine entirely built on the theft of those texts whose readerships it is destroying – is certainly no substitute.

It seems to me that most of the ills that plague our public discourse – the polarisation, the binary thinking, the historical illiteracy, the narcissism, the privileging of emotion over reason where the only emotion to be considered is your own, the astounding impunity towards outright lies – are ills to which the main corrective is reading books. Only in reading books do you discover that this issue or that is more complicated than you thought, that propositions of the both-and type rather than the either-or exist, and that there are truths that it is not possible to express in a spicy tweet. Books, because (with a few admitted exceptions, such as On The Road) they are the considered and painstaking work of many solitary hours and much revision, supply the antidote to the hot take, the angry riposte and the overconfident assertion. They are the slow-food movement of the intellectual world.

I’d go further, too. To return to the original topic of English literature as a subject, I think that fiction and poetry have an incomparable value. Novels are empathy machines. They ask us (in an age when the dominant cultural impulse is to demand the admiration of others) to imagine what it might be like to be somebody else. Failure of the imagination is a species of moral failure; perhaps the worst. The first step on the road to atrocity is the inability to see your enemies as fully human. Cockroaches. Zionists. Orcs. Mussies.

‘Reading resilience’? Reading is what gives us resilience. Read some damn books, kids, or we’re all doomed.

Série - O imortal S2

 

Música - for KING + COUNTRY - Unsung Hero (Official Music Video)

 

for KING + COUNTRY - Unsung Hero (Official Music Video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Favk8UgilZI

The Spectator - What will the Israel haters do now?

 (personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-will-the-israel-haters-do-now/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020251011%20%20AL%20%20VIRGIN%20WINES+CID_0bfc81d2aa603b8b6f9bd684535fe939

What will the Israel haters do now?

Brendan O’Neill10 October 2025, 5:45am

A pro-Palestine demonstrator on the streets of London (Getty images)

Normal people are cheering the prospect of peace in Gaza. Some might even raise a glass to Donald Trump for his valiant efforts to end this horrible war Hamas started. But there are others who will be feeling forlorn. The anti-Israel mob, to be specific. Won’t you spare a thought for this tragic community that built its entire personality around hating Israel – what are they going to do now?

There is an eerie silence in anti-Israel circles this morning. The people who spent the past two years hollering ‘Ceasefire now!’ seem strangely downbeat about the prospect of a ceasefire. No doubt that’s partly because they would rather eat hot coal than credit Trump with a geopolitical win. But it’s also because they feel the rug of relevance being pulled from under their feet. The brutal truth: peace will rob them of purpose.

It’s been clear for some time now that the fashionable animus for Israel is more than a political position – it’s a religious crusade. These people see Israel not only as a nation fighting a war they don’t like, but as a demonic entity, uniquely barbarous, the poison in the well of humanity. Israel has become a Satan substitute for a godless activist class, the devil against which they measure their own decency. If this war ends, so might their false religion.

They wear the holy garments of Israelophobia so that others will know the depth of their devotion to the cause: the keffiyeh around the necks, the Palestine flag draped like a pashmina over their shoulders. They repeat Israelophobia’s mantras, with little thought but great bombast. Witness how ‘From the river to the sea’ usurped ‘Trans women are women’ as the mating call of woke’s true believers.

They have their ritualistic ceremonies. A solemn march every weekend, the purpose of which is less to shape events in the Middle East – as if – than to make a spectacle of their own ethical rectitude. There is a millenarian feel to these depressing weekly trudges. At some they’ve even held up baby dolls wrapped in bloodstained shrouds to let the world know Israel is a baby-killing machine. It’s a grimly medieval ceremony masquerading as political activism.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing for the genuflectors to Israelophobia is that Trump’s peace deal shatters the founding lie of their fake faith – namely that Israel is hell-bent on genociding the Palestinian people. In truth, Israel has signed up for a deal that envisions a ceasefire soon and which expressly says that not one Palestinian will be forcibly expelled from Gaza. And so their church crumbles under the weight of its own calumnies.

If the deal works, if Trump and Israel bring peace and banish the anti-Semites of Hamas from public life in Gaza, what will these people do? How will they get their moral kicks? By what means will they advertise to the world their implacable virtue? What will occupy their every waking thought and inform their every political utterance if not that dastardly Jewish State and its ‘genocide’?

Think of poor Sally Rooney – will she now have to pontificate on some other global calamity? Sudan, perhaps? Or, indeed, the Irish government, which is maniacally obsessed with Israel – will it now have to worry its empty head about more trifling matters, like Ireland’s housing crisis and migrant crisis? And the keffiyeh classes, those turbo-smug appropriators of Arab headgear who you see in every coffee shop and art gallery – which garment will they don now to let onlookers know how amazing they are?

And poor Greta! She’ll have to go back to talking about climate change, won’t she? Having failed to ‘Save Gaza’, she’ll have to content herself with that oh-so-Nineties mission of saving the planet. Boring! One thinks, too, of the YouTubers who have monetised their hatred for Israel, spending every hour of every day slamming the Jewish State for clicks and bucks. Blessed be the peacemakers, sure, but won’t someone think of the videomakers?

I, personally, am looking forward to the looming crisis of meaning among a left that foolishly and feverishly devoted itself to hating Israel. In the absence of this infernal war, these people will be forced to peer into the cavernous depths of their own souls. They will have to shake themselves back to reality, leave behind their half-formed faith, and re-engage with the world anew. It will be tough, but it will be good for them. And for the rest of us too, who might finally be spared their anti-Israel caterwauling.

Of course, there’s another possibility – that they will double down. That they will carry on traipsing against Israel, zombie-style, even when peace descends. Indeed, Your Party, the Zarah Sultana/ Jeremy Corbyn freakshow, is advertising a march in London this weekend. ‘We march on’, the flyer says, ‘until apartheid falls’. For two years, they screamed ‘Ceasefire now!’ – so why are they still marching? I’m tempted to go and laugh from the sidelines. Who’s with me?

Livros - Charlie Brown

 

The spectator - What makes a gentleman?

 

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-makes-a-gentleman/?status=Active&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020251006%20%20Weatherbys%20%20JO+CID_9c9f831350c115d341bee03cec070bf4

What makes a gentleman?

It’s more than simply opening doors or paying for dinner

6 October 2025, 4:59am

Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in 1981's Brideshead Revisited [Alamy]

The venerable magazine GQ, or Gentlemen’s Quarterly, has issued some 125 diktats about what it takes to be a gentleman in this world of Zoom calls and equality. GQ is, however, no longer quarterly, and some might say it hasn’t been read by gentlemen for some time. Ought we, then, to listen to it?

Many of its ‘expert’ pronouncements are baffling: what is ‘popping a Zyn’? Most of the suggestions are about bringing fancy olive oil or luxury candles to parties. (Note to readers, though you won’t need it: don’t.) It also suggests that gentlemen should beclothe themselves in ‘loungewear’, a word which ought to make anyone shudder. Well, I’m sorry, but unless it’s a silk dressing gown from Jermyn Street, I think not. 

The audience, though, is primarily American and internet-based, and once you understand that the intention of the guide is to prevent men from taking their shoes off on long-haul flights, then one looks a little more kindly upon it. 

But what, then, is a gentleman? It’s more complex than simply opening doors for others, or, as GQ would have it, picking up the tab for dinner. What isn’t gentlemanly is obvious: public transport brings them out, as rainstorms do slugs. The oik on the Tube who didn’t stand up for my pregnant friend is a case in point.

It isn’t, necessarily, to do with birth. ‘Gentleness’ can be learned and imitated, and always has been. Traditionally, the ‘gentry’ consisted of an untitled, landed class immediately below the nobility, and hovering just above the trades, distinguished by bearing arms. These boundaries, though, are more porous than you’d think. Think of the Guinnesses – brewer to baronet to earl in a handful of generations. William Shakespeare, the son of an alderman, with some tenuous connections to the ‘gentle’ Arden family via his mother, successfully achieved a grant of arms for his father. Heraldic doctrine prescribes that the grant did not confer gentility, but confirmed what was already there. Many a tradesman has become ‘gentle’; and it works the other way, too, as many a gentleman’s son has ‘fallen’ into trade. Gentility can be swiftly unlearned: oiks exist among the landed classes, too.

In the popular imagination, it is not easy to distinguish a gentleman from a snob. Yet there are marked differences. It’s true that there are correct modes of speech and behaviour. Some shibboleths can’t be helped, as they are deeply ingrained into the psyche: how to pronounce Featherstonehaugh, for example, or not wearing a wing collar for a black-tie dinner. That a gentleman should know these things is clear; that one should not think less of others for their ignorance is more so. Other ‘rules’ are idiosyncratic. I insist that anything which requires new ‘kit’ (apart, obviously, from riding) is infra dig, particularly if it involves bicycles.

While GQ is to be commended for trying to stem the loutish tide, being a gentleman is, like Confucianism, a way of life. It boils down, not to listicles and club ties, but to considering others before yourself. This is deeply moral, and, dare I say it, even Christian. That’s why, as has been the case since ‘gentleness’ began, its true forms are found everywhere. A real gentleperson understands instinctively, and will leap up to offer that pregnant woman a seat. And – even if the chap in question is covered head to toe in Lycra – he’s still, in my view, a perfect gent. Although not if he’s in ‘loungewear’. We must maintain some standards.