Part One

Of the variety of festivals and other celebratory events on offer at this time of year, the one that possesses meaning for me is the solstice. And, being in the northern hemisphere, I am talking about the winter solstice.

Christmas is great for five-year olds, and New Year (Hogmanay here in Scotland) is just the ticket for people who enjoy getting severely inebriated, then spending the next two days in a headache-and-nausea filled haze. I don't really see the attraction of that nowadays. But the solstice.... 

It's not because of any specially pagan affiliations. There are things in 'paganism' with which I can resonate, but I have never considered myself a pagan as such. I like and respect the natural world, but have always fallen well short of idealising or worshipping it. The natural world and the human world (let's assume for convenience that we can separate them) both participate in a world of imperfections, of frequent brutality and cruelty, of ignorance, and manifest the broken side of reality.

My feeling for the solstice is pragmatic, we might say. Empirical. It is the shortest day of the year; and, living as I do in northern Scotland, around 58 degrees latitude, 'short' means short. In terms of latitude, we are halfway between Lands End in Cornwall and the Arctic Circle.

This being the case, the solstices take on great significance, psychologically and emotionally if nothing else more esoteric. During midsummer, it barely gets dark; but for the weeks around the winter solstice, the hours of light are few, and even on a bright day the sun can be seen to hardly peer above the southern horizon, before giving up and sinking beyond once again.   

If you are really keen, you can go to a sacred site like a stone circle or burial mound and engage in some ceremony or ritual activity to mark the return of the sun. The landscapes around where I live are littered with such places, but I have never made it for the occasion; not for the summer solstice, when weather conditions are (sometimes) more clement, let alone the winter. I guess I'm not sold enough on rituals for these events.

Nearby Clava Cairns would probably be the place to go; and there are probably folk who make the pilgrimage every year to mark the rising of the sun. The entrance to one of the large mounds there aligns precisely with the point on the landscape where the sun comes up on the solstice. Such alignments are common at such sites. Many people have their theories as to the reasons for this, but most will, I suspect, be wide of the mark, interpreting events from 5000 years ago with the mindset of modern humans. The one thing for sure is that the alignments have some serious purpose, and aren't there just for fun. 

Part Two

I was saddened at the beginning of last week to read of the death of David Icke's daughter, Kerry. She had apparently been ill for quite some time, but was a mere 48 years old, leaving her partner and two teenage children.

Unlike the other Ickes, Kerry maintained a low profile, getting on quietly with her life. I saw her on film twice. She appears in the Ickonic film 'Albion' with a sounding gong as part of a group raising the frequency at an ancient site; and I saw her embracing her dad joyously at one of the big gatherings in 2020/21 protesting the convid fraud.

In a brief but poignant post on his website, David Icke pointed out that, with the loss of a loved one, you realise the grief felt by all people as they lose someone who is close. He mentioned the humanitarian mess in Gaza, and how innocent families on both 'sides' will be grieving those who have been killed for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This observation syncs with a theme that David has talked about a lot of late - the folly of taking sides. Israel and Hamas, or Israel and Palestine: the general public is provoked into taking sides, the knee-jerk reaction as to who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Take a step back and you see the stupid and inhuman error of this move. You've got two sides who both appear to be happy enough to kill, maim, cause intense suffering and grief, to ordinary people just trying to get on with their lives. Who have done no special harm, inflicted no great pain and suffering. How can you cheer on one side while wishing the other into oblivion in such a situation? 

It is more serious than that. It is the entire good guys/bad guys dynamic which keeps the whole shithouse going on; up and down, round and round, getting nowhere (aside from for the inventors of the madness and their mad agendas).

Hamas and the Israel military is a transparent case in point. From where I am, it seems largely manufactured, fabricated, pre-planned. Hamas go into Israel, do some atrocities, and the Israel government declares death and destruction in revenge. Too few people stop to ask the critical question: how did it come to take place in the first place? How was it possible? Israeli intelligence and military is known as one of the most technologically advanced on the planet. As one former member of their Intelligence Services said: their systems are so sophisticated that they could detect a cockroach crossing the defences. So how on earth could they be breached in multiple places by a bunch of guys who aren't exactly carrying the most modern technology, and even drop in on parachutes? 

There is only one answer, isn't there? The entire thing was allowed to happen. You don't need to be a military genius to work that one out. It was permitted - probably encouraged - in order to provide the excuse for blasting the hell out of Gaza. And Hamas? What are they up to? Did anyone really think they could win any kind of victory against the might of the Israeli military? I wouldn't have thought so. I haven't investigated it myself, but I have read from credible sources that Hamas is in fact partly a creation of the Israeli government anyhow. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

'Allowing it to happen' is one of the oldest games in the book. People should learn to look out for them, and to recognise these things. Pearl Harbour: allowed to happen. Trump supporters storming the Capitol three years ago: allowed to happen. Plenty more besides. Things are allowed to happen in order to provide a (fake) reason for introducing new measures of oppression and control against human beings. 

So there's a choice. Do you play the old game, which has been going on for centuries, of taking sides, thereby putting energy into the universal killing game? Divide and rule, me against you, us against them, divide and divide and divide again? Or do you begin to see through it all, to see that it is a dynamic being played out across the face of the planet to maintain human beings in a state of perpetual warfare? That's what it is, folks. You are being played. You have been played all your life. Stand up, and stop. Just stop. That's all there is to it.

Part Three       

Another common theme in the life and work of David Icke at the moment is the alternative media. Some of it he is far from impressed by.

To some people it will be a surprise that there is such a thing as 'alternative media', let alone that there exist distinctions and differences amongst its constituent pieces. David's questions focus around the notion of 'thus far, no further'. He tends to go on about it quite a lot; but he has a point.

In recent years the so-called alternative ( is 'independent' a more suitable word?) media has blossomed, as more people have, at the very least, started to realise that there is something seriously wrong with the way that human society is run. This has been especially so since the convid card was played, which succeeded in introducing large numbers of people to the reality of what is going on in the world, and how much of it it is not nice, not at all.

The increase in popularity of alternative media has seen the rise in profile therein of a number of people, who constitute much of what David calls the 'mainstream alternative media': MAM, with its main participants being Mammies..... We are talking about names such as Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, and (especially) Elon Musk. 

David says that he is delighted to see the increased popularity of the alternative media, and admits that these people do say some good things. But he expresses concern about how what they say remains limited, as if it is ring-fenced within a wider narrative which, in the final analysis, fails to seriously challenge the foundations of the matrix world we seem to inhabit. In particular, if debate and information is confined to politics and parapolitics, and these are presented as providing any kind of solution to the ills of the world, we will get nowhere. These are real, but surface-level, issues. The root of the problem is far deeper and more way-out, beyond our five-sense world altogether.

I initially wondered whether there was an element of sour grapes about David's attitude. After all, he's devoted over three decades of his life to the topic, and now these upstarts jump on the bus and get all the kudos.... But I think there is more to it. He is correct, in my opinion. What lies behind the collective insanity which rules the roost over much of human affairs is outside the normal perception of things. Fail to address that, and the world will just keep on going round and round in an indefinite cycle of suffering. And he is correct: the Mammies refuse to go there.

There was quite a hoo-hah when Russell Brand was demonetised on Youtube. And it was definitely newsworthy when Roger Waters had hotel stays cancelled in Latin America, clearly because of his views on Palestine and Israel. This is all softly-softly totalitarianism, and is disgusting. But it pales in comparison to what has been done to David Icke. Firstly he was thrown off all main social media sites near the start of the convid fraud. And more recently he was banned from entering the Netherlands, a prohibition that has been extended to at least 25 other European countries - and he is already prohibited from going to Australia. He is effectively prisoner in the UK. And for no credible reason at all, other than 'authorities' across the face of the globe being afraid of what he has to say.

So, yes: he is more-or-less a prisoner in the UK; but hardly anybody in the alternative media has uttered a peep. Is this not shameful? I mean, freedom of speech is freedom of speech, isn't it? And freedom of movement. There is no reason to exclude Icke from this. The alternative should have been up in arms about it, but generally sidestepped the issue.

There is only one conclusion, it seems to me: they do not want to be associated with David. Not even to the degree of standing up for his basic freedoms. They are afraid that, by uttering the word 'Icke', they will lose some of their audience. If that is true, then that audience is not worth hanging on to anyhow. So David is correct in his evaluation of sections of the alternative. So far and no further. It is not an impressive show.

All best wishes to all readers, for any festivals that you choose to celebrate over the coming days! 

Images: Callanish stone circle, Outer Hebrides, at winter solstice; Clava Cairns in spring; beach tribute to Kerry Icke on Isle of Wight, where she lived, from 'Stand in the Park' friends; 'Musk is God' t-shirt (a great Christmas present...)