Today he died for us
By Patrick Van Roy On April 19th, 2019 at 10:12 pmFor over 2000 years we remember this day. The day he gave his life for our souls. He suffered so that we may not.
ATW FRIDAY NIGHT JUKEBOX
By Pete Moore On April 19th, 2019 at 7:22 pmBecause Friday night is Music Night
It’s Friday, though it feels like Saturday. It’s a good Friday then, one filled with warm weather and blue skies over Blighty. So I might be out and about this weekend. But not tomorrow afternoon, because Saracens vs Munster of course.
Have yourselves a cracking Easter weekend, whatever you’re up to. As always, feel free to share your top sounds down below –
Death of a journalist.
By David Vance On April 19th, 2019 at 3:36 pmDavid Vance live. The murder of Lyra Mckee. https://t.co/2x1fDMeLax
— David Vance (@DVATW) April 19, 2019
EASTER GREETINGS, FROM CREGGAN
By Pete Moore On April 19th, 2019 at 3:07 pmA journalist has been shot dead during rioting in Londonderry that police are treating as a “terrorist incident”.
Dissident republicans are being blamed for killing 29-year-old Lyra McKee during rioting after police searches in Derry’s Creggan area on Thursday night.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said the New IRA “are likely to be the ones behind this” and detectives have started a murder inquiry.
Security forces were conducting an operation. Locals rioted to defend the criminals. Lyra McKee was watching from behind police lines when a gun was fired from among the rioters. She was hit in the head and died in hospital. Yet another innocent victim of psychopathic terrorists.
As ever, it’s futile to hope that locals will do the right thing and tell what they know.
IT’S NOT ABOUT CLIMATE
By Pete Moore On April 19th, 2019 at 2:59 pmThey are communists, Marxist-Leninists and Malthusians. They hate those who want to work hard for themselves. They are are anti-wealth (for others), anti-industrial and anti-liberty. They would take away everything you have and make you live cold, dark lives. It’s a all about a sociopathic hatred of mankind. Climate is just the excuse, the fig leaf, the Trojan Horse to get there. Never forget that.
ATW QOTD
By Pete Moore On April 18th, 2019 at 7:16 pmToday, as the flood-tide of western power and influence ebbs, the illusions of European and American liberals risk being left stranded. Much that they have sought to cast as universal stands exposed as never having been anything of the kind. Free-thinkers who mock the very idea of a god as a sky fairy, an imaginary friend, still hold to taboos and morals that palpably derive from Christianity […]
The wellspring of humanist values lies not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in the past, and specifically in the story of how a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire emerged to become — as the great Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin has put it — ‘the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world’.
At Easter, my favourite contemporary historian reminds us that it is Christianity, not humanism, which is the wellspring of Western values, and that the West’s debt to Christianity is far greater than some imagine. Do read it all.
“THEY’LL COME BACK TO THE TORIES”
By Pete Moore On April 18th, 2019 at 7:09 pmI don’t think so.
YouGov and ComRes each have Labour ahead of the Tories in General Election polling. The numbers vary, but The Brexit Party is well into double figures in both. Remember the party is a week old.Momentum is now clearly against the Tories and it will only get worse.
Once Tory MPs realise that the party cannot stop Corbyn there’ll be defections. They missed their chance to survive collectively, so now it’s every man for himself. We have a short break from the Tory Remain chaos, but it’ll soon be back, just as Farage hammers the Tories in the European elections. And if Tory MPs think that passing May’s abomination will will back Leavers and turn the tide, they, they’re even more out of touch than they appear.
The Tories are done, and the sooner the party breaks up the better.
Are you ready?
By Patrick Van Roy On April 18th, 2019 at 5:46 pm
The report is in public…. frantically foam at the mouth mad dog democrats look frantically for everything they can Spin.
From now until the first indictments against Obama’s FBI come down we will hear 1000 different reasons why the Special Counsel got it wrong, and Trump is guilty as hell.
Mueller’s own words
“The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
“the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference”
Everything that you hear from today forward are the Rabid fantasies and delusions of those that suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
On This Day in 1775
By Patrick Van Roy On April 18th, 2019 at 1:53 pm
Massachusetts silversmith Paul Revere saddles up and heads off into the night to alert his fellow colonial militia members of the British force’s imminent arrival and their intent to commandeer the American’s arms as well as to arrest patriots Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,–
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”
Then he said “Good night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war:
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon, like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore.
Then he climbed to the tower of the church,
Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,–
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay, —
A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride,
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then impetuous stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height,
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!
A hurry of hoofs in a village-street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed that flies fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders, that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.
It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river-fog,
That rises when the sun goes down.
It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.
It was two by the village clock,
When be came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.
You know the rest. In the books you have read,
How the British Regulars fired and fled,–
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,–
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
Brexit Party killing the Conservatives
By David Vance On April 17th, 2019 at 9:09 pmThe Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage, is very new but also very fast growing. Just consider the latest polling;
As you can see, it currently tops the polling and all momentum seems to lie with it. Conversely, the Conservative Party is registering around half the support that the Brexit Party enjoys, and almost four times that which UKIP is attracting.
By any standard this is remarkable and if the polling trend is accurate then by the time the EU elections come around Farage’s Party will be sitting around +30% of the vote, a stunning achievement.
Having announced some fantastic candidates such as Annunziata Rees Mogg and John Longworth (the former head of the British Chambers of Commerce) Brexit Party is soaring in popularity. A deep connection with a large section of the UK electorate appears to be taking place.
Farage has pointed out that in terms of the policy on leaving the EU, there is no difference between the Brexit Party and UKIP but that in terms of quality of personnel there is a chasm. Farage seems to be choosing prospective candidates who have real depth to them, are squeaky clean, and carry no baggage.
By way of contrast, in the 2014 European Elections, the then Farage led UKIP topped the UK poll with 26.6% of the vote cast. This delivered 24 seats. It looks like Farage’s Brexit Party is going to even exceed THAT result in these elections.
In 2014 the Conservatives under David Cameron won 23% of the votes and 19 seats. Five years on, staggering under the ineptitude of Theresa May, support is almost HALF of what it was back then, and likely to recede even further. The consequence of this may be that the Conservatives get single digit numbers of MEPs elected, which is incredible given that it is the party of Government.
The Conservative Party is poised to suffer an immense humiliation next month. The chances are that it will also perform grievously in the local council elections held at the start of May. The Brexit Party is not standing in these, but UKIP looks well placed to benefit from the ongoing collapse of the Conservatives.
Given what the polls are saying, it seems odd that Theresa May would actually ALLOW these elections to take place. How could she survive as Leader if her Party is beaten into a very poor 3rd?
The only thing that can prevent this from happening is if Labour helps her get her Withdrawal Agreement over the line by May 22nd. But Labour’s poll rating in 2019 (22%) is only just slightly down than in 2014 (24%) so the scale of collapse is ALL on the Conservative side of the house. She has everything to lose, Corbyn has nothing to lose.
Former Conservative Leader Iain Duncan Smith went on national TV to plead with the Prime Minister NOT to hold these elections as it puts putative Conservative candidates (and the teams that are out on the ground campaigning for them) in an impossible position. She won’t listen to him. Her sole interest is to keep the UK mired in the EU unless Parliament agrees to accept her Treaty Deal which ..keeps us in the EU in all but name.
Her strategy is not just alienating core Conservative support, it is destroying it. The Conservative brand is now toxic.
Meanwhile, the Brexit Party is rising in the polls. In the event of a subsequent General Election, there has to be every prospect of the Conservative Party imploding and the Brexit Party entering Parliament as the standard bearer for what the people of the UK voted for in 2016.
Farage has stated that the aim of the Brexit Party is to change British politics.
Next month, we are likely to see record a massive step forward towards this end.
