The Diagnosis of The Sickness

And now... The Prologue....

(Which, in the finest tradition of the ascended master of smutty innuendo and camp vocalisation par excellence, My Teacher, Frankie Howerd, will of course take up almost as much, if not more of the column inches and word count in this piece as the actual main point of me writing this article - if all you came here for is practical advice, organising tips or agitprop polemic (and 'ting) for post-Refferendum, pre-actual BreXit in Free Britania to give power and inspiration to those engaged with The Work - scroll down to the next place where you see my eye next to  "Does Anyone here like money...?", well done and good for you. Good soldiers, we're relying on you to carry us through.

Next time, try to bring a friend with you.

For anyone up for hearing me tell you all a story about equal parts Trendy Lefty 1980s Right-On GLC Gay Rights and Sexual Politics under Thatcher (and how everyone involved with it started out more or less totally barmy, and set out to drive all the rest of us completely insane, making them look more or less sane, rational and sensible (and it worked)), and equal parts how Margaret Thatcher and her Grantham Grocer Protestant Work-Ethic World-View of non-procreative sex of any kind (translation : Sodomy) came to be taught in every classroom in the land, preached daily from every studio or window of Auntie BBC (whilst making us pay for it), and posted, jn bald, stark tombstone plague-panic manifesto form through the front door letterbox of every home in England Scotland, Wales and Northernn Ireland - like State-Sponsored Jehovahs Witnessing. And how that made us all completely insane, because we Carrie around a facsimile copy of Margeret Thatcher's own sexual morality with us inside all our heads. And still do, some of us. I don't repress....Je ne regrets reins.)

For all of those people - Titter Ye Not. I present to you : 

The Prologue.

How the Thatcher Government, with the full, knowing and willing collusion and collaboration of Auntie BBC taught me to be afraid of sex and physical intimacy before I every really knew what it was....

Because IF you have unprotected sex (or if the bag breaks on you) WITH ANYONE, ESPECIALLY Girls, you WILL get AIDS and you WILL die. Here's how (in my head), that worked (works) :

Back at the very tail end, the fag-end, you might say, of the late 1980s, when I was very, very young and very, very, very stupid, when I trusted, believed, expected the BBC to tell the truth, the one, true, honest-to-goodness truth, and nothing BUT the truth (especially via the medium of television in the form of dramatic episodic fiction and situation comedy) back when I watched and learnt first from Rodney and Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, that the deadly killer AIDS Boogie-Man was associated with the blood and saliva of homosexual men named Jason who cut hair (sorry, they style  hair in Salons, heterosexual men cut hair, and get their hair cut (no-nonsense, 5 mins in-out, clippers, trim hot towel, Old Spice, no waiting, no rimming and no fanning about with gel) in Barbers'shops, a high street trade with a LONG and rich history of always being CLEAN, free from any complicated infections or diseases associated with a long and lingering, dehumanising process of living DEATH), and also Old Slappers who function as the council estate bike, (with a fabby like a wizard's sleeve or a cocktail chippolatta being thrown inside the Royal Albert Hall), but that it's spreading, anyone can get it, if you have sex or exchange blood with an "infected" person with "The Virus", you will become infected, you will go into a rapid and terminal decline within weeks or months of first seeing your Doctor about a purple rash, you will die for certain, and you will pass on this death mark, this death sentence if you EVER AGAIN know the touch of a beautiful woman....

Or a really hot man, obviously. But then, the things they get up to...

They Know the Risks - it's their decision to play with fire, Russian roulette, loving one another, physically, so much, and so many of them, so frequently, in rooms with SO many other people... 

DIRTY - What did they THINK was going to happen as a consequence of all their filthy bum-sperm habits....

That was BAD AIDS.

In contrast to Mark Fowler on Eastenders, who contracted this dread disease (which caused him to turn into a completely different actor), accidentally, through no fault of his own, or the result of a habitual pattern of poor life choices as a result of misfortune and, rotten timing and as tragic result of unfortunate circumstance, through a tragic, random twist of fate that resulting in his exposure to the virus on account of it being injected into him completely by mistake as the blood residue drying along the length of a pre-used hyperdermic needle shared with his INFECTED (100% Straight, FEMALE), living-in-sin girlfriend; the random, completely blind change horrible and lethal misfortune  being that they were both  filthy, stinking, good-for-nothing Heroin junkies living together in a squat and using the same needle and the same syringe to share their Horse-fix and shoot up together with a shared dose at the same time, sharing everything because, oh,  they "loved" each other, and shared the same two bodies and the sane two-in-one soul, it seemed for a while...

Anyway, at least he wasn't a poof - Auntie BBC was VERY careful to make sure that was made VERY clear, repeatedly, over and over again right at the outset, that Mark was NOT a shirt-lifter, a fudge-packer, a bender, a secret friend of Dorothy's, a  Man of Convenience, or a bandit.

Mark Fowler was ALL MAN.

He caught his Good AIDS from a WOMAN, without even having ever even had sex with her or anything 
(although, it's clearly the case that they also were quietly predictably sexually active anyway, clearly, largely one would assume, although we cannot say for certain, exclusively with each otherand probably quite a great deal, all the time. Without Johnnies.) 
it was tragic, horrid, appalling BAD LUCK (facilitated by a recurrent pattern of poor life choices (Taking Heroin, becoming a Junkies, STAYING a Junkie, sharing needles with a lover of unknown background, fidelity or status, who never bothered to get tested) that caused Mark Fowler to become infected with the Virus formerly Known as Human Tumor Lymphoma Virus-III (HTLV-III) in the same year it received it's official formaj (and current) redesigns ruin as "The Human Immunodeficiency Virus" (no-one thought to specify "Number-1") meaning that they weren't expecting anymore almost identical microphages, OR EVEN ANY MUTATION OF THE STRAIN in the Cellular RNA packets "The HIV" allegedly has/had/they SAY " it" has....

Just to drop TWO, absolutely WHACKING great big, glowing in the dark positiom markers there before moving on to the actual point: 

Number 1 : D'you see what they did with the names, there...?

This is basic, fundamental slight of hand and this is STILL fooling people,  MOST people, even a quarter of a century on.

MOSTLY people who SHOULD KNOW BETTER, and indeed in actual fact, DO know better - they just chose what glaringly obvious things presented right in front of them THEY DONT WANT TO SEE, because THEIR CAREER depends on them never seeing it, THEIR GRANT is made on the basis of presupposing that they will NEVER, EVER SEE IT, they insititutuion in which they have laboured and built a world class reputation with, who pays for all of theirs children's orthodontic correction, who pays their mortgage, that made them rich (in stock options and other worthless paper derivatives, like dollars), that august, solvent, rapidly growing private enterprise venture and the key, sole service user public  institution, the very, specific government agency tasked and commissioned to find the scientific reality of the underlying true has THE VERY LIE, AND THE ESSENCE OF THE LIE EMBEDDED RIGHT THERE IN THEIR VERY OWN NAME...

They won't spot it, what I am about to point your attention to and draw you a picture of what it looks like, so maybe you will just recognise it, kinda, as having overall some vaguely familiar shape - they  won't see it.

They can't see it.

That can't let themselves see it, so they refuse to see it, and so IT ISN'T REALLY THERE. Even though it really, clearly and obviously IS there. The curtains are moving, and there a big bulge there, in the area right around where it's standing NOT HIDING - plus, you can see its shoes sticking out, look..?

So alright - first off, what is the name they gave (in 1989) to this possibly non-existent phantom virus particle thing YOU THINK you (or they, if you're not Sciency) now suddenly have on the spot, in the hotseat, caught in the act, bang to rights doing its sinister dirty-work of Death, right by the short and curlies, finally, at long last...?

The/a.... No, THE definite article, the one and only, unique, never before recorded, described or dissected on a molecular genetic level in all of the history of The World....

THE Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

Just like Chesney Hawkes, the one and only, SINGULARITY of virology, molecular biology and "Random Darwinian Chancr Evolution, taking place to perform miracles right before our very own lying eyes"- which I mean to make clear, is absolutely nothing of the kind. Except or the lying part. Nor does it either resemble or behave like something that might actually be able to do that, NOR THE TINY CLIQUE OF ELITES AND HIGHT PRIESTS PERMITTED TO ACTUALLY HANDLE IT, TREAT IT IN FACT AS THOUGH IT MIGHT ACTULLY BE DOING ANY OF THE THINGS THEY CLAIM THAT IT EITHER IS DOING, MIGHT BE ACTUALLY DOING IN SOME WAY THAT THEY CLAIM IS ACTUALLY INVISIBLE (hence it appears to the laymen or the untrained eye to be doing absolutely nothing at all), OR THAT THEY LOGICALLY SHOULD BE CONCERNED (I.e. In actual tangible fear of their lives and the lives of all their families) THAT IT *MIGHT* DO OR BE CAPABLE OF DOING IF IT GETS OUT OR GETS ONTO THEIR HAND SOMEHOW while they were studying it and poking it to see what it does and how it works....

Lab accidents and spillage, accidental releases of viruses and other disease vectors or microbes happen ALL THE TIME... And you ALWAYS have to err on the side of caution and assumble it survived the physical act of the spillage, it got out by contaminating something else, or someone else 99.9 % of the time will either just kill it, act as a potential flat surface and/or growth medium which can be immediately either destroyed, sterilised, disinfected, bleached, pasteurised, put through fire, boiled or wiped completely clean - all of which would kill it. 99.9% of the time with 99.9% of infectious agents, most of which are completely undetectablt, harmless or easily overwhelmed by native immune responses, who probably already recognise it, or its kind.

But you HAVE TO ASSUME IT GOT OUT UNTIL YOU KNOW IT DIDN'T, with strict and rigourous protocols to follow up to and including Quarantine of anyone who may have been exposed to whatever the thing is;

I once had an ex- who worked (for money) as a lab assistant in a small private lab contracted to provide ongoing testing of certain food products distributed and sold by Tesco stores, not exactly completely direct from the farm and straight on the shelf in Cardiff or Birmingham by tea-time, but essentially, yeah - they would collect the end product for sale on the shelf to the British consumer direct from a regional hub facility there out in the countryside, who would divide up the thing to go on the shelf (I think it was something like pre-packed green leaf salads for people to pick up and eat right away as part of their lunch, maybe with some additional element added in there, like to make it a Salad Nicoisse, instead of just a pure/plain green leafy salad in a bag, but that's it in terms of processing or packaging of this stuff beyond just sealing and dating it inside a Tesco branded package made of plastic film and a few pieces of card with nutritional information, ingredients list ("salad" - just kidding) printed on it - you get the general idea.

So, the point about this was, the mighty Tesco retailing dragon-thing, essentially, was just talking delivery of this raw, fresh food product (that now has THEIR name, address and lawyer's details wrapped all around it),sending it straight out to dozens/hundreds of their stores, without having any time to check them out in any way other than cursory visual inspection, conduct any kind of checking in the area of quality control before putting it immediately, directly, straight away on-sale from their own shelves in the full expectation that, if bought, the customer will consume it more or less directly straight away that very same day, or at the very latest the day after that, realistically. Assuming that that generally quite enjoy eating salads, given that they have just gone into a supermarket at lunchtime to buy one, they can perhaps be assumed to have a good level of knowledge, common sense and previous salad-purchasing/eating experience sufficient enough to have a good sense in their own minds as to how long (or, not) they can realistically be expected to stay optically fresh, crunchy and edible.

No doubt there was certainly some kind of regular supply chain quality control more in the area of regular visits or inspections to the farms who supply the salad leaves, herbs and other incrgredients (croutons, maybe?) that the regional hub packing plant buys in from as the next link further along their supply chain, but if the sort of issue that could create real, genuine problems for everyone starting immediately, the moment it reaches tipping point and begins to make things go badly wrong, that kind of arms' length hands-off-type handholding supervision and oversight  is not going to be of any use in alerting regional head office that there is a mad elephant on the rampage on their patch, and it's currently on collusion course with them, everyone who works for them, everyone who buys fresh salad from them (or might), and they are mere seconds away from Letting everyone get trampled.

The Mad Elephant threating to trample everything, in this particular instance just happens, in actual fact, to be microscopic, quiet stealthy, aggressive and just as potentially deadly as Barbar the Mad King, but able to strike far more unexpectedly and without any prior warning anyone might potentially pick up on - at least by Elephant standards, certainly.

The Mad Elephant in the Room in question being Legionella, an extremely nasty, potentially lethal bacterium known for triggering serious, and deadly outbreaks of food poisoning in any general population or local community, many if not all of which have been cases historically when someone has eaten an off-the shelf unwashed green salad that somewhere along the supply chain came into direct contact with untreated human fæces - which is what will   happen when you bring in below-subsistence level minimum wage labour from one of the poor, and desperate European nations East of Warsaw on zero hours contracts, pay them only for the time in which the Forman ACTUALLY personally observes them hard at work on-line tending, digging or harvesting the fruit of the fields.

If you are going to knock of their paid hours total pay packet total hours worked for money tendered at the end of the the week things like time spent on toilet breaks, eating lunch, being driven to and from the actual workplace they signed on to be at to report for work by the boss colleague or co-worker who offered to car share with you or take you to work (as MANY farm labourer gang bosses/field overseers DO (which is illegal, as well as being immoral), then shitty behaviour begets other shitty behaviour, which begets shitty lettuce with human poo all over the leaves as a last, final, desperate scream raging against The Machine(s) and Machine Men with Machine Minds that made them and still operate them right up to the present - and one shitty Tesco salad lettuce, covered in poo, or two, or eight or ten of them (usually the same asshole will piss everyone working under him off at once, and the result may be a Dirty Salad Protest. Because for every previous cry out against the Machine system and its Overseer/OvaSeer/Officers, made direct from the heart and from out a world of hurt, abuse and exploitation has been met at the next management echelon up from them every time with precisely the same response : "Sorry luv - I don't speak Romanian."

That's in fact actually one main reason (of several BIG ones) why it's procedurally, far more than just simply merely ecconomically advantageous (at least on paper) for these people to have positively encouraged, more than merely just simply facilitated or accepted the practice of deliberately hiring a slave labour wages workforce even more downtrodden, broken, emmiserated, downtrodden and generally regarded with utter contempt  by Management, Capital and the Owners than what is left of the British Working and Non-Working Class Masses, and they had to go beyond the Carpathian highlands to find them.

Their parents and their grandparents learnt the hard way how it goes on the work gangs sent out to jack up productivity and yields through brutal and degrading years spent under the iron rod of Chauchescu's humourlessly authoritarian gang masters on Romanias old collective farm archipelago.

A different ex- of mine (honestly, I don't collect them or anything, just the good stories), a Romanian girl born in the Twilight of the Old System in 1988 would always speak of "the old days" with near pitch perfect politically correct ambivilance for the State Capitalist Zombie economic disaster of Chauchescu planned ecconomy - this is worth mentioning further here in respect of a couple of very specific historical footnotes  that have generally been either overlooked or ignored, or more often not correctly understood for what they actually are and what they mean to us in Free Albion, as we transition of the European Soviet Sphere of ecconomics and internal markets for cheap, cheaper, cheapest labour in the race to the bottom.

Even growing up, I can remember clearly, as the epic, tumultuous chain of world historical events of that strange, wonderful span of years I remember growing up in between 1988 and 1993, there was always a sense that was created in the minds of those watching from afar the collapse of the Warsaw Pact Governments and the end of their one-party rule Politburos and their supporting social infrastructure and institutions, the suggestion was always clearly made, very much via tonal shift in the way it was being covered, and for many years following that the Romanian application of modified Marxist-Lenninism to build a stable, fair and productive society of free peoples working in cooperation to try to achieve The Workers Paradise  Red Utopia was somehow... Well, the impression was created, again, largely via innuendo and on the basis usually of very little fact, that somehow, Romania was the REALLY bad one.... All pretence toward fairness and egaligerianism had been stripped away, Chauchescu was a brutal and merciless dictator who ruled with an iron fist, without consultation or power sharing via executive committee or inner party technocrats, he just squeezed his people without mercy or pity, enforcing total obedience to HIM via a reign of terror he enforced via his dreaded (personal) Secret Police monitoring any flicker of dissent and.... I could go on but having already enduring such a relentless volley of every Cold War clichè in the book several times over, all dialled right up to 11, it makes me exhausted just thinking about it.

I have to say, the intensity of various "Western" News Agency Eastern Bloc correspondents and region bureau chiefs (all jobs, and job titles that no longer exist in news reporting any more, let's just remember that for a moment, and mark their passing and the great price we all pay for their loss, now that Twitter is cited as being authoritative as a source of reporting on anything, on any topic at any hour, and given any slant); the level of serious competition, journalist dick-measuring and all forms and expressions of Four Yorkshiremen-style boasting and one-upmanship that drove those personal and professional rivalries during those short Years of Wonder and false hope sold short was just truly incredible to witness, even as a pre-teen child who previous to that had known less than nothing about nothing squared about politics or world events in any form prior to the day the Wall began to get dismantled by Berliners (ON THEIR OWN, which was the part that scared absolutely everyone in power absolutely shitless when they realised that thy were NOT witnessing a staged event of grand Street Theatre by the KGB or the Stasi, it was spontaneous and organic and unplanned and NO-ONE was in charge or secretly running it - and I certainly have not since seen one single, solitary scrap or piece of evidence, documentary or circumstantial to contradict the claims made both at the time and subsequently by practically every world leader, power player, kingmaker, banker, intelligence agency director, analyst, Maverick, critic, agent of influence, defector, military officer, diplomat, civil servant, peace officer, eyewitness or participant to the first wave of the Eastern thaw, starting from a mass picnicking action [?!?] on the Austro-Hungarian Frontier (when that was quite a thing to see), leading up to the sudden, total spontaneous combustion of the  East German Communist Party and entire government and nation-state supporting it for reasons which, even now, I don't understand and most East Germans alive at the time couldn't even begin to explain to you.

However - the Fall of the Romanian Communist Party was something very, and characteristically different, coming MUCH later on in the chain of events. 

That unmistakably and undeniably WAS a synthetic, planned stage managed and externally directed attack, destabilisation, a kangaroo court military show-trial and am extremely grubby, brutal and cowardly Presidential assassination th kind rarely seen at the time outside of Latin American Palace Coups, such as the overthrow of Allende - brutal personal violence, corpse desecration and gangsterism are its hallmarks, with executions in the manner of the street gang crime of the inner cities, in stark and directed contrast to the military form of execution usually favoured in that part of the world where the officer-class condemn and indict the dictator or generalissimo for Crimes Against the People, either real or fabricated - such was not the case, here. And they had a State Broadcaster Outside camera crew videotape everything - not that the process in fact ended up getting dragged out or lasting terribly long.... The pure hatred on display for the leader and his wife was palpable.

I really do have to wonder why -just as I have to wonder recalling Plato's dialogue on the relative merits and shortcomings of republics, tyranny and oligarchy, and which is by far the better for the common man to live under and pledge his lifesblood and fidelity to;

This Flanders 'Mare

The Blue Death

The Belgian Disease

This Flemish Pox

BE-NE-LUX Fever

Tyler's  Cramp

Mason's Elbow

Auditor's Pinch

Peoples of these British Isles, Your Attention Please : Having commenced my own study of the extent, breadth and fundamental nature of this Flemmish Malaisse, this Permanant, Rolling National Crisis of Confidence, and the promise of potential cures, my initial findings are now in and they are these : Things are indeed, as I had previously intuited, no nearly so bad or so severe as it may superficially have appeared to be, with our peoples, our nations and in our composite, unified sovereign Nation-State.

They are in fact worse. Far, FAR worse, than I ever dared contemplate myself to fear. 

You therefore leave me with no other options left - as of right now, I am going forward at RAMMING Speed, course locked in, Dead-ahead Full-Worf Factor 9.99 - You drove me to this...

"YOU ARE KLINGONS *WITHOUT* HONOUR..!!! I AM WORF, SON OF MOGH !! SIRE TO THE HOUSE OF MARTOK, FIRST SON OF THE HOUSE OF MOGH AND I SAY YOU ARE *NO* KLINGONS!!! YOU COWER, LIKE STINKING, WRETCHED P'TACH WHILE THE BLOOD OF OUR FALLEN WARRIORS LIES STILL WARM IN THE VERY COUNCIL CHAMBER LIKE SO MUCH TARG-FODDER WHILE THE HATED ENEMY OF OUR GREAT EMPIRE, THE ROMULAN P'TECHT'NICHT!! MAKE THEIR ESCAPE FROM OUR VERY THRONE WORLD !!!!

O PROUD AND MIGHTY KLINGON RACE - KHALESS CALLS TO YOU ALL, BLOOD TO BLOOD TO ANSWER THE CALL TO ARMS - TO AVENGE THE PROUD KLINGON BLOOD SPILT THIS DAY AND DIE WELL, FOR THE GLORY AND TO RESTORE THE NOBLE AND LAMENTED NAME OF HONOUR OF YOUR GREAT HOUSE AND OF THE EMPEROR KHALESS AND HIS NOBLE IMAGINE IN FLESH SO CRUELY AND SACRALIGIOUSLY CUT DOWN, SLAIN BY THIS RANK TREACHERY IN OUR MIDST !!

TONIGHT, WE  DINE IN STO-VO-KOR ON THE HEARTS OF EVERY FLAG OFFICER IN THE ROMULAN INVASION TASK FORCE AND THEIR FLEET !!!

BEWARE, O RESTFULLY DREAMING SPIRITS OF THE DEAD OF MEN OF LESSER RACES - THE FIRST KLINGON WARRIOR IS ABOUT TO ARRIVE !!! FIE !!

K'PLA !!!