Now is the Winter of our Disinterment 699


The researchers had a hunch he was there. ATOS pass Richard III’s skeleton as fit to work.

Joking aside, the discovery of Richard III’s body is fascinating and wonderful. Aside from Shakespeare’s brilliant play (which is evidently not as physically inaccurate as we have been told for years), and the question of who killed the Princes in the Tower, there is a romance about lost dynasties which appeals to a deep human yearning for a golden age when things were somehow better, and for “lost futures”. What might have been, had those evil Stanleys not turned on Richard at Bosworth and put their miserable Welsh accountant on the throne?

Richard is described in today’s newspapers as the last English King. The Plantagenets were of course Angevin. The last English King – indeed the only English King of all England – was Harold Godwinson. Now there’s a lost dynasty for you.

We now know that Richard’s “Claim of Right” was almost certainly true and Edward IV a bastard, as his father was nowhere near his mother for months around the purported conception. But the so-called Royal line is, I am quite sure, sprinkled with bastards and no line at all. Not to mention that George I was 39th in line to the throne when given it 300 years ago, but the first Protestant.

Monarchy is bollocks, and something we should have outgrown a long time ago. Nice to see that today’s Prince Harry retains the tradition of remorseless homicide though.

Leicester University deserve congratulations on a genuine achievement. I hope Richard can now be reburied as soon as possible – as a Catholic, which is what he was. He was a human being. The degradation and display of his fresh corpse were horrible; but there is a danger of repeating it with a po face and feigned serious intent.


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699 thoughts on “Now is the Winter of our Disinterment

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  • karel

    halibaba,

    you are getting somewhat pedantic. Begnini or Benigni what does it matter. It is the same as hahababa or halibaba or habacock. If I were you I would concentrate your “intelectual firepower” on things of some substance. Do you want me to send the beefburgers to your concentration camp or noT? I am awaiting a clear answer. Have you found your “coda di paglia”? I fear not you are probably too stupid even for such a simple feat.

  • Mary

    INTELSAT headquartered in Luxembourg and owned by Madison Dearborn Partners, Apax Partners, Permira and Apollo Management (Website
    intelsat.com) under instruction from Amerika, have taken Press TV off their transmission satelite Galaxy 19.
    http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/02/20132913263566603.html

    Look up the four owners and see what else they own and then read the above news in conjunction with:

    this review of America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy
    http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/02/william-blums-cri-de-couer/

    and this litany of the vilest propaganda
    Iraq, Iran, Redlines, and Headlines
    http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/02/iraq-iran-redlines-and-headlines/

  • Mary

    I returned from a wonderful concert to see that the bile and venom was still being spewed out by our visitors.

    The soprano Katherine Crompton was a young graduate from the Guildhall School of Music and her thrilling and pure voice produced Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate with its top C’s and two arias, one by Mozart and another by Rauzzini. The good orchestra who accompanied her also gave us an Thomas Arne overture and Mozart’s Symphony No 25 in G Minor.

    The young animated conductor Joseph McHardy is an organist and a harpsichord player and is a young black man born in Dundee. He is a RCM graduate with a large body of work behind him. He has some resemblance to Obama, although more slender, and it crossed my mind that he was born and raised to create beauty and art in company with other musicians whilst Obama kills and makes war.

    Readings from the works of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney who both have local connections interspersed the music. It was a very pleasant and interesting evening.

  • Kiefer

    Villager,

    I remember “A Pattern of Islands” with a certain fondness. I especially remember the author being described as a “pusillanimous prig” – by a priest, I think. This expression has come in handy over the years in many contexts.

  • Mary

    I hope that Gove is not given free rein to enact his plan before the next election when he and the ConDems will be booted out. In the meantime with the appalling Milipede led faux Labour opposition anything is possible. Look what has happened to the NHS, now awaiting the imminent implementation of full privatisation. Mr *unt is on Marr later to talk about the need for care and compassion!

    “The full extent of Michael Gove’s plans to revolutionise education are revealed today in a secret memo showing he is considering outright privatisation of academies and free schools. All academies and free schools in England, which are the Education Secretary’s personal obsession, would be free to become profit-making for the first time, and be entirely decoupled from Whitehall control.

    Leaked documents of the minutes of a meeting of top Department for Education officials on the future of funding the academies programme have alarmed teaching unions and the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg last year ruled out any expansion of the private sector in state schools.”

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/secret-memo-shows-michael-goves-plan-for-privatisation-of-academies-8488552.html

  • Mary

    No irony but the BBC gave the job of making this programme on Orwell’s 1984 to their in house shill for the Iraq war, Aaronovitch.

    ‘What led avowed socialist George Orwell to write a novel beloved of the Right?

    David Aaronovitch traces how a decade of political chaos shaped Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian future.

    He explores how, after the war, the threat of the new atom bomb played a crucial part in the birth of Nineteen Eighty-Four – and how Orwell coined the term ‘cold war’ in the process.

    He traces the impact on the novel of the provocative ideas of an American ex-communist, James Burnham, who predicted a world dominated by three tyrannical superstates.

    He finds out why Orwell saw some form of Western European Union as the best way to prevent Britain being swallowed by Big Brother.

    And he asks why, if Orwell was an English socialist, the totalitarian party ruling ‘Oceania’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four is called ‘IngSoc’ – which is short for ‘English Socialists’.’

    With Peter Davison, Frances Stonor Saunders, DJ Taylor, Hugh Wilford
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01qhb8b/The_Real_George_Orwell_The_Road_to_Nineteen_EightyFour/

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    @ Dreoilin : you’re right, but it’s partly out of frustration at being caught out so often (insults and nicknames substituted for factual back-up of arguments) and partly because they’re bored (there’s a lull in real events to spark off their usual half-baked theores, rants and conspiracy theories). Notice also how some of the Eminences tend to post in the middle of the night (insomnia? indigestion?).

    So it’s essentially just me and the Saintly Mary 🙂

    OK, time to get out into the real world (the 99%), lovely weather outside!

    La vita è bella, life is good!

  • John Goss

    Thanks Mary again. I started listening to Aaronovitch (avid supporter of Blair’s war on Iraq) but never even got two minutes in. He started with a crass lie about his thoughts on 1984 as a schoolboy in the sixties. “It was, it seemed to me, deployed as the great warning of what could happen if the radical left with its pro-state tendencies were to come to power”. Aaronovitch started off on the left and these opinions show how he has distorted his current views into believing he held them as a schoolboy. I could hear no more, though I may go back to it.

    Talking about crass lies, well just Crass actually, brings me to another classic of English literature “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” by Robert Tressell. There is a lot of nominal symbolism like the crass character Crass, and Nimrod, “a mighty Hunter in the eyes of the Lord” but the parable of “The Great Money Trick” sets this book out on its own as a description of the capitalist system. However, in spite of its success as a working-class novel, it has never appeared on an ‘A’ level reading list, as far as I have been able to ascertain. So I’ve started a petition on Causes.

    Please sign and share. Thanks.

    http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/michael-gove-secretary-of-state-for-education-introduce-robert-tressell-onto-the-a-level-syllabus

  • A Node

    Having a lie-in before you get out of bed in the morning is a great time for creative thinking. Your thought train is able to remain ‘submerged’ longer, able to drift longer in a cloud of possible links, finding new ways of associating familiar concepts, before being dragged to the surface for examination and thus breaking the chain.

    At least, that’s what I tell my girlfriend.

  • Rose

    Sounds like a lovely evening out Mary – nothing like beautiful music beautifully interpreted to transport you above the sturm und drang – gosh better not get into that vipers’ nest – strain and stress.

    Thanks Village for the link to Steve Vai – that too was beautiful.

    John Goss re The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – yes it jolly well ought to be on school reading lists; it would be a fitting tribute to the man who died before the book was published and who probably felt depressed by its rejection.

  • A Node

    The Richard lll stories are full of “DNA proof” headlines.

    If we estimate a generation as 25 years, there have been 21 of them since Richard lll died in 1485. Doesn’t that mean that Dickie boy’s DNA has been diluted up to 2 ^21 = 2097152 times? To take it a stage further, allowing for the fact that the world population has increased 20-fold since then, aren’t there are a potential 41943040 people carrying the same DNA? If we include a factor for inbreeding, say divide by 5, we still have more than 8 million descendents of Richard lll.

    Am I missing something, or are reports of “conclusive proof” exaggerated?

    Perhaps someone with better a better grasp of maths and genealogy can tell me where I’m going wrong.

  • John Goss

    Thanks for the support Rose. I know this is a book that Craig Murray has favoured in the past and his high-profile signature would be more than welcome.

  • Mary

    Habbadabbado can’t decide whether to call me a saint or a virgin. I fit into neither category. It reminds me of the childish giggles when we said the words of the creed…. born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate….. and any other reference to her. Grow up H why don’t you.

  • guano

    Black musician ‘ born and raised to create beauty and art in company with other musicians ‘
    All in the best possible taste, Mary. Please feel free to cross over your legs Kenny Everett style. Our human tendency to ride our fanytasies is one of the reasons we have arranged marriages in Islam.

  • Fred

    A Node

    Yes Richard III will have a lot of descendants by now. I don’t know much about DNA but I know a bit about genealogy. There is a portion of the DNA which is only passed from a mother to her children and a portion which is only passed from a father to his children. They have found a number of people who think they are direct descendants from family trees and if this portion of the DNA is the same in them and the remains then it’s fairly certain they are all descendants of the remains.

  • guano

    Just more male bile and venom Mary. I must have spent too long lieing in in mental submarine mode this morning. That was an involuntary spelling mistake which smellcheck did not pick up.
    If you are in a … stop digging. STOP. Joking not jeering Mary. Bad case of male jealous vomit on my part. Really bile and venom is what we do best.Best just to leave us to it.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    @ Mary (11h59) :

    “Habbadabbado can’t decide whether to call me a saint or a virgin”

    Memory loss again, Mary, or the usual bad faith?

    Resident Dissident was pleased to call you the Virgin Mary (remember? You said this was an offence to Christians and I assured you that as a Christian I didn’t feel offended at all).

    I thought that “Saint Mary” would better reflect your countless qualities.

    “Grow up H why don’t you”

    Rich from somebody who throws around Agent Cameron, Shillery, Obomber and many like such!

    La vita è bella, life is good!

  • John Goss

    Arbed, my theory as to why Marianne Ny appeared not to know of the Ecuadorean ambassador’s offer to interrogate Assange in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy is due to everything having to be approved/disapproved both sides of the Atlantic. Only then would Ny get to know. She’s a pawn, a dispensable pawn (up for retirement). She has been offered something pretty big if she can deliver Assange to the Yanks, because she’s already put it on record that even if she had proof that Assange was innocent of any of the claims made against him she would still pursue the case. What kind of a woman is that?

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    @ John Goss to Mary

    “Sensible mackerels leave the sprats alone”

    Unfortunate choice of image, John, because it recalled to my mind another fish-related expression which could be used as a description of Mary. But I shall restrain myself.

    @ Mary : I don’t think you would call me a creep if you knew me. We’re only kicking on this blog and this isn’t the real world, is it (luckily)….

  • Arbed

    John Goss, 1.41pm

    Not sure I’d agree about Ny being an unwitting pawn. I mean, she writes back to Assange’s Swedish lawyers “I have seen in the media that…. I am not sure where this information came from” in reply to their very own letter to her on exactly the same subject six days previously!

    That kind of sleight of hand is not unwitting idiocy in my book. Don’t forget she took six days to write back – waiting for instructions from the American section of the FO perhaps?

    The scream-it-out-loud question from Rixstep’s article is what the hell has Assange’s extradition for questioning about sexual misconduct allegations in Sweden got to do with the American section of Sweden’s Foreign Office?

    How many times have we been told – by Victoria Nuland, the US State Dept spokeswoman, by our own beloved William Hague, by the entire Guardian knitting circle and their colleagues in Sweden – that Assange’s fears about US extradition are groundless, that the case has nothing to do with anything other than him “manning up” to “face charges” of “serious sexual assault” in Sweden?

    So, why the hell is Sweden’s Foreign Office passing Ecuador’s formal offers to facilitate his questioning in their London embassy to its American Section? Hmmm?

  • nevermind

    Thanks for that excellent link to CCC Hamburg, dreolin, and a must watch. This so-called special relationship is based on the assumption that we are playing to the same tune, but its obvious to these three whistle blowers, that the US has violated its own Constitution and should expect a public backlash.

    All three from within the system they once served, with a sense of reality which cuts through politicians mustard.

    We do well in Europe to be careful and on our toes when it comes to allowing more US prime targets to being sited here. Thanks for the RT snippet, but pardon the question why a drone that can go supersonic and break sovereign airspace, when you can send one by post and assemble at point of use?

    Cue next…. antidrone drones, with ECM/ECCM capabilities fighting other drones and shooting them out of the sky, a whole new arms race in front of us….the arms producers are loving it…swarms of minidrones, camera operated, with homing capabilities attacking and/or assassinating selectively, the mind boggles.

    robot wars are us, any mission goes, borders are now non existent, no international regulations are asked for or wanted so it seems.

    Who is asking/promoting to debate the legality of drone wars before the UN security council as an urgent matter?

  • Mary

    Some of the many readers’ comments on a good piece about a very important matter.

    Last week MPs revived the corpse of the ‘Secret Justice’ Bill. Here we spell out the full terrifying implications of life in… Secret Britain
    Vote on Bill took place at same time as gay marriage vote
    Bill could give power to cover-up details on events such as Hillsborough
    Legal system would be weighted in favour of the powerful
    :::

    Western Civilization Is Dying.
    – tarik , amman, Jordan, 10/2/2013 14:21

    If this is how they treat the British Public they should never be voted in again Not long to wait until we get rid of them
    – hightown , Oxfordshire, 10/2/2013 14:20

    in other words, we the government can do what we like, when we like and you cannot stop us. I think its time for a revolution in all honesty.
    – Glynn , Kent, United Kingdom, 10/2/2013 14:19

    Democracy is dead…
    – Rusty , England, United Kingdom, 10/2/2013 14:09

    I see the treasonous parasitic so called Members of Parliament are at it again. They are all treasonous criminals, part of a bigger criminal gang that will be bought to justice one day, I certainly look forward to that day.
    – Muggles , Wolverhampton, 10/2/2013 14:06

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2276327/Last-week-MPs-revived-corpse-Secret-Justice-Bill–debating-gay-marriage-time-noticed-Here-spell-terrifying-implications-life–Secret-Britain.html#axzz2KUoSsTOB

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