The deceptive road from nostalgia via Independence Day to digital dystopia

In 1953 - when I was five and my brother was nine - treat of the week was to go with Dad to his office and warehouse on a Saturday morning. While Pop processed some cloth orders and dealt with the post, Mike and I would play hide and seek in the warehouse between mountainous bales of 2113 Indian satteen, Singapore 2010 Denim and Hong Kong 2111 shirt cotton.

Such definitions of cloth quality predated twenty-first century year numbers: they were long ago replaced by metric web and weft definitions. But in the Elizabethan Coronation year, every cloth dealer in Cottonopolis (aka Manchester) knew the difference between 2008 overall workwear cloth for the toiling classes, and 2217 fashion garments for the catwalk models.

My father was that rarity, a Catholic wholesaler in the Rag Trade. [If you want to take a peek at the Jewish archetype of Mancunian schmutter at that time, this weekly sitcom from the BBC archives will be something of an education].

Because Dad was years ahead of his time, part of this was a treat for my Mum - that is, a morning off from the kids on a Saturday; whereas the major thrill for his two sons was a visit straight afterwards to the Manchester News Theatre to see the midday cinema show, Laurel & Hardy plus Six Cartoons.

It's hard seventy-three years later to explain precisely what a News Theatre was. In 1953, almost no home had a TV set, so the news came from "the papers" and the movie theatres. In the latter, the newsreel was the boring prologue kids had to sit through before Stan and Ollie delivered hilarious slapstick, and then Popeye and Olive Oyl fought against the unwanted attentions of the bearded lothario Bluto.

Bluto would say to Olive, "You're awful pretty" and Olive would reply, "Hmmm well, you're pretty awful yourself". Week after week, Popeye's gallantry and can of spinach would combine to protect his skinny girlfriend's honour.

We loved all of it. Babe Hardy would tell Laurel, "Well Stanley, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into", and Stan would tearfully protest his innocence with, "But gee Ollie, I was only tryin' ter help". Olive would screech at Bluto, "You keep your hands to yourself that's what you are", while Popeye would sing, "I'm strong to the finich cos I eats me Spinach, I'm Popeye the sailor man" and then emit a poop-poop from his ever-present clay pipe.

Far from bowdlerising Popeye's song, Grammar School kids added risibly naive naughtiness to the lyric:

I'm Popeye the sailor man

I live in a pot of jam.

The jam is so sticky

it sticks to my dicky

I'm Popeye the sailor man.

God save us all from pubescent boys.

Pretty much all of Laurel, Hardy, Bluto, Olive Oyl and Popeye were brought to us by the US* during those Good Old Times when America was funny for all the right reasons. Today is the Fourth of July, and Britain's former colony is thus celebrating Independence Day. I wish all Americans a well-deserved long weekend, but "independence" is a pivotal term these days.

*Stan Laurel was, like me, a Lancastrian. He emigrated to America in 1910.

As I write in 2025, four deadly alliances threaten the independence of not just every US citizen, but almost all of the 8.3 million human beings populating Planet Earth

1. Drug traffickers, corrupt politicans who tolerate them, and the addicted Class A drug victims who steal from the innocent in order to feed their habit. The consequences are a boom in security technology and property surveillance. The obvious outcome is majority compliance with TOTALITARIAN 24/7 CAMERA MONITORING
2. Globalist Pharmaceutical chemcos, corrupt health bureaucrats who exaggerate their product efficacy and Pandemic fear-mongering by World-Health power freaks. The consequences are anti-libertarian mandated jab-cures with bioweapon potential. The obvious outcome is the potential for TOTALITARIAN GENOCIDE
3. Banker criminality and Silicon Valley hitech products. The consequences are digital currency that devalues personal wealth, and Smartphone control of all citizen access to money where such access is based on 'good behaviour'. The obvious outcome is AN OBEDIENT POPULACE SUBJECTED TO TOTALIARIAN IMPOVERISHMENT
4. Ballooning Sovereign debt and a subservient media pack censored by investment house ownership. The consequences are State theft of Civil Rights and non-stop exposure of citizens to mendacious brainwashing via propaganda. The obvious outcome is TOTALITARIAN OPINION DESTRUCTION DISCOURAGING ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION

Just to put some personal experience onto this as a reality 'overlay'....

My girlfriend's apartment suffered an attempted burglary two nights ago - by a guy who tried to kick the entrance door in while she and her two kids were asleep in the flat. The landlord doesn't care and the police no longer investigate such things.

My cleaning lady's compound suffered the same experience last week when thieves tried to gain entry via a side window.

I am paying for both domiciles to be made safe because the Government here no longer gives a damn, and innocent people need protection

The WHO and serial pervert Bill Gates (who lied about his friendship with paedo-pimp Jeffrey Epstein) continue to predict a new pandemic, and as predicted by the Slog in 2022, Covid19 jabs have been revealed as, without question, mortally dangerous bioweapons.

I continue to be dicked around by banks who deliberately hang on to legally transferred funds for seven to ten days when transfers can be demonstrably completed [using SOL] within five hours. Banking app AI failures now account for 67 per cent of cases where customers are left without funds, but no legislation exists with which to punish heartless bank greed.

As most Slog followers know already, the UK Dept of Work and Pensions continues to lie about illegal State Pension confiscation, continues to claim that I have failed to comply with their arbitrarily invented 'rules', and continues to persuade citizens that their National Insurance Civil Rights are in fact "benefits" they 'do not deserve'...but is shamefully bonused by Whitehall for denying pensions to those who have every right to them.

Forty years from now, the only people likely to feel nostalgic about the third decade of the Twenty-first Century will be those sociopaths not torn to pieces by the eventual anger of those they spied upon, murdered, impoverished and silenced.

I am far from losing hope, however. We are now closer than most people understand to breaking all the barriers to quantum interstellar travel. When the true nature of metaversal contact is understood, the troubles our species faces now will pale into insignificance. I doubt very much if I'll be here to witness it. But I will see it from afar.

Don't pooh-pooh divine intervention. It has nothing to do with pharisees, clerics, mullahs, imams, churches, temples and mosques. But it does have everything to do with Godness.