battle beneath the planet of the jackanapes

 

Rooting around in a book shelf at the chateau I found an old newspaper.

The Daily Express from Monday 8th December 1997.

How on earth did this thing escape me?

It should have been budgie cage fodder decades ago.

I plucked it out and began to leaf through it.

There was an article on page two about new Prime Minister Tony Blair unveiling proposals to help Britain's poor.

There was an article on page three headlined: "Family Love Helped Pull Linda Through."

That article began: "Pop legend Sir Paul McCartney can finally smile again - after two desperate years his wife Linda is recovering from breast cancer."

There were feature articles by famed witterers Mary Kenny and Peter Hitchens, both of whom would soon resign from the Daily Express after the paper was taken over by porn baron Richard Desmond in the year 2000.

I won a bet at the time with my brother that Mary Kenny and Peter Hitchens would walk. I was a good judge of character even in those innocent far off days. I knew my witterers.

Incidentally the porn baron ran the Daily Express into the ground up until 2018 when he is supposed to have sold it to the owners of the Daily Mirror, yes, the Dsily Mirror, the newspaper that in 2012 in a vicious self promoting exercise with a front company television station styled ITV 4, framed deceased broadcaster Jimmy Saville using bribes to persuade criminals to trump up child abuse allegations against him.

So the Daily Express is currently owned by something worse than Richard Desmond.

You couldn't make it up.

Truly that newspaper was accursed.

But I digress.

I continued to turn the pages.

There was a seedy enough interview with an actress attempting to cash in on having been with the singer Michael Hutchence the night he died.

Richard Desmond would have been proud of that one.

There were other seedy articles, one with a cover promo that declared: "I Love My Babies But They Destroyed My Life see page 26 and 27," and on page 26 and 27 there was the relevant piece banner headlined "Twins Ruined Our Life," complete with a half page photo of two happy enough looking kids and two cosmically goonish lookng parents. The parents presumably had no conscience and really wanted to see themselves in a newspaper.

There was a sad soulless article appearing to advocate unnecessary and invasive cosmetic surgeries for women. Presumably the Express was getting back hander payments for carrying this sort of advertisement disguised as a news feature. I would suggest that similar payments would have applied to their regular ads disguised as feature articles advocating the use of any number of pharmaceutical products.

There was a hopelessly wrong minded campaigning article headlined "Fears For Saudi Nurse," about Deborah Parry the British born murderess (with her accomplice Lucille McLauchlin) of Australian Nurse Yvonne Gilford, who were being detained in Saudi Arabia the country where they'd murdered Yvonne. The fears the Express had were of course for the safety of the murderesses in Saudi jails. Anything else such as being afraid the Saudis wouldn't execute them or that worse, the Saudis might let the bitches go, would have been real journalism. (After the Express campaign and similar pressure from other wrong minded British media groups, the Saudis did indeed let the bitches go.)

On the centre spread of the newspaper there was a banner headline asking: "Will The Titanic Sink Again?"

A sub headline warns: "Two hundred million dollar voyage of love and disaster could sink at the box office."

The article is about James Cameron's movie Titanic which was just due for release when the Monday 8th December 1997 Daily Express hit the news stands.

Clearly the Daily Express had a talent for prognostication.

Reliably wrong about everything as I used to say about the late Robert Fisk.

I leafed backwars to the cover of that seminal publication.

Oddly enough I'd dived in without really looking at it.

And lo!

The cover had a banner headline filling three quarters of the written page.

The headline declared: "WORLD FACING KILLER FLU BUG."

A slightly smaller secondary headline added: "British Experts Called In To Head Off Epidemic."

The text of the article was attributed to Helene Feger and Ian Gallagher. (Where are they now?) It began: "British scientists have been drafted in to analyse a deadly flu virus amid fears of a global epidemic. They will look at samples of a virulent Type A strain that has put health teams around the world on full alert. One expert, Dr Georgia Duckworth said it was vital that the new strain is defined as quickly as possible so that a vaccine can be developed. The government has already put plans in place to protect the nation from the threat of an emerging lethal strain of flu. So far the virus is feared to have killed two people and to have infected two others in Hong Kong. But concern is mounting that it could escalate into the worst epidemic in 30 years."

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ho  ho, hee, hee, ha, ha, ha,  ha.

Hilarious no.

Well bold readers.

I had a Charlton Heston moment as I read the above Daily Express Ur flu virus rubbish.

Seeing the present day flu virus propaganda in vitro as it were.

I collapsed on the sand near a half buried Statue Of Liberty which adorns the parrot's room at the chateau and began groaning: "The fools! The fools! They blew it up. They blew up my world. They blew up our freedoms. They blew up the dignity of the human being. They blew up our beautiful ancient church. They blew up our sovereign paliaments. They blew up social living. They blew up our love for each other. With their panic and their manipulations and their orchestrations and their atheisms and their anti depressants, and their abortions, and their contraceptives and their easy divorce and their assisted suicide and their sex change operations for children and adults and their legalised drug use and their pharmaceutical companies and their freemasons and their satanists and their Hutch gangs, and their Kinahanes, and their IRAs and their Cosa Nostras and their gain of function research turning viruses we couldn't catch into viruses we could, and their lockdowns and their face masks, and their vaccines. The fools! The fools! They blew it all up. They blew up our world."

Ho hum.

They've been getting us ready for a long time, haven't they gentle friends.