I wouldn't exactly say I have a surplus of skills in life, and indeed, lack many of the most basic aptitudes common to people just a couple of generations ago (such as being able to make clothes, grow food, and immediately discern the gender of young people on television).

But if there is one thing I'm good at, it's this: staying calm in a crisis.

This was ably illustrated quite recently when (Mr. AF) Mark and I went to a concert that a friend of ours was playing at. The concert was in central Manchester, with attendant exorbitant parking costs, so our friend advised us of a residential street just outside of the city centre where we could park for free. The street was called something 'Crescent'.

We parked the car, walked to the concert, had a jolly good time, and then when we returned to the Crescent later that evening... the car was gone!

*Cue dramatic shocked faces and expostulations of expletives*

Well, from the driver (not yours truly) at least...

"I knew we shouldn't have parked here," fulminated Mark furiously. "I knew this area was dodgy. We'll have to call the police."

Although I conceded that on the surface, the situation didn't look good, something wasn't quite adding up...

"Wait, wait, just hang on a minute," I said, surveying the street upon which we stood, "I'm sure this isn't where we parked."

"It is!" Declared Mark, pointing pointedly to both the Sat Nav on his phone and the nearby street sign. "This is exactly where we parked!"

"But it doesn't look right," I insisted. "It doesn't match my memory of the street we got out on."

"Well, what would you know," muttered Mark darkly. "Your eyesight is terrible."

"I know," I agreed equitably (and I deserve credit just for resisting that bait alone, right?). "But my memory isn't. I have a clear picture in my mind of where we got out of the car and this isn't it."

"Look Miri," said Mark, white-faced and thin-lipped. "You're just going to have to accept the fact that the car has been stolen. We're going to have to call the police. This is the last thing we need. How the hell are we going to be able to afford a new car? And God knows how we're going to get home tonight. We'll have to stay in a hotel. And what's that going to cost? This is a total disaster..."

"But I'm sure this isn't where we parked..." I continued to insist.

Mark started to look very annoyed indeed at this point (there was pacing), and just as he was about to put a call into the local constabulary, I said.

"Just before you call them, can I call Jo?" (Jo being the friend who had advised us to park where we had, and whose concert we had just attended.)

"Alright, but I can't see what that's going to achieve, because the bottom line is that the car is gone."

"Well, I just think it's worth letting her know what's happened..."

So I called her, and explained the situation.

"The thing is, though," I said, after detailing the car's apparent absence. "Even though the street sign and Sat Nav say we're on the Crescent, it doesn't look at all like I remember."

"Have you checked both sides?" Asked Jo.

"Of the road? Yes."

"No, of the Crescent."

"What do you mean?"

A pause.

"Erm... you do know what Crescent means, don't you?"

"Yes. It's a posh word for street."

Another pause as a realisation started to dawn (on Jo if not me).

"No... It refers to the shape of the road - like a crescent moon? It curves 'round. Go to the bottom of the road and turn to your right and it curves up in another direction."

"Oh...."

I relayed this information to an entirely disbelieving Mark ("I'm telling you it's been stolen and you're just going to have to get used to getting the bus!"), but he nevertheless agreed to walk to the bottom of the road - where we'd thought the road had concluded - then make a right turn, up a different road, and... there, safe and sound, was the car.

Naturally, I dealt with this discovery extremely graciously and didn't even begin to issue any smug "I told you so"s (ahem...).

The general point however (which I may also have been known to remind Mark of on one or three or multiple annoying occasions since) is that I tend not to panic, knee-jerk, or jump to too-obvious conclusions in a crisis situation.

When emotions are high, it clouds rational judgement, so what can seem 'obvious' in the heat of the moment ("we're definitely on the right street and the car has definitely gone!") is - when one is able to assess the situation with a cool head - actually not true at all.

That was my (admittedly somewhat perambulating) introduction to my thoughts on the Southport stabbings that have so dominated the news and social media over the past few days.

The first thing we have to acknowledge is that none of us really know for sure what happened. I don't and you don't, but if the event has provoked a strong emotional response in you, then you're even less likely to be able to assess it impartially and accurately.

"What do you mean impartially, you monster! Don't you know that children have just died?!"

No, I don't know that, actually, and nor do you. We only know the media has told us they have.

Did they really die?

Of course it's entirely possible and plausible that they did. Devastatingly, children die every day, and sometimes in horrific, brutal circumstances. This is - obviously - always an unspeakable tragedy for them and their loved ones.

The stark truth is, however, that every time a child meets a violent death - and children who are murdered are most often killed by parents or step-parents - the whole nation isn't up in arms about it.

That's because we don't generally know about it, and we don't generally know about it, because the media doesn't generally tell us, and when it does, it's usually a few short paragraphs on the back pages, not sensationalist front page news everywhere.

Consider the tragic case of Finley Boden, a ten-month-old infant murdered by his parents on Christmas Day, 2020.

Or the horrific murders of brothers, Blake and Tristan Barrass, 13 and 14 years old, committed by their incestuously abusive parents.

Or the appalling recent case, which occurred locally to me, of 'sad, quiet' schoolboy, Sebastian Kalinowski, who was tortured to death by his mother and step-father.

The horrifying truth is that, in the UK, at least one child is murdered each week.

Yet we are not deluged with constant, high-profile media coverage about these murders. There are no huge, police-clashing riots to avenge them. Social media isn't consumed with ire-filled rants about justice and retribution and who's to blame.

So, why is that happening now?

Why has the UK suddenly decided it cares about the murder of these particular children so much - so much more than Finley Boden or Blake and Tristan Barrass or Sebastian Kalinowski, or any of the hundreds of other children murdered every year? (Most of whom's names we never know.)

It's because the media has told us to care more: it's as simple as that.

The media is an expert, military-grade mind control weapon, and it is whipping people up into incoherent fits of rage and hysteria for a reason.

That's why I refrained from having any immediate public reaction to this situation. It's patently obvious the media wants a strong emotional reaction from the entire populace, and one far beyond, "children have been killed, just as hundreds tragically are every year, and it's always a terrible travesty and injustice, whoever is responsible".

That reaction won't do at all. The desired reactions are one of the following:

1. Children have been killed because of uncontrolled immigration and unassimilated foreigners who hate our country (meant to whip 'the right' up into a frenzy)
2. Children have been killed, but the real problem is the far-right who have weaponised this situation and are now behaving like lawless thugs (meant to galvanise the ire and indignation of 'the left')

The media wants you to react in one of those two ways (and it really doesn't care which one), because it wants to create maximal division, hostilities and tension that will ultimately lead to unrest and violent confrontations - as is already happening.

To charge and inflame this situation as much as possible, the establishment even planted the fake news story that it was an asylum seeker responsible for the murders. The "right" immediately leapt upon this, lashing out in fury.... which enabled the "left" to retaliate with reciprocal fury when it turned out this story wasn't true.

So even if this event isn't "staged", you can bet people's reactions to it are being expertly "stage-managed".

The media is manipulating and directing our emotions in this way because the establishment that owns and controls the media can then use people's reactions against them to usher in its desired social changes.

It's typical "problem-reaction-solution".

Firstly they're using fear to further control people ("our streets aren't safe! Our children are being murdered! There are rioting gangs everywhere! Better stay home and stay safe"), and secondly, high-profile events like this give the state the excuse it requires to bring in further invasive and restrictive measures "to protect" us (more surveillance, less privacy, etc. "It's for your safety!").

The media never (ever) gives blanket, sensationalist, front page news coverage to any event over many days unless that event is being used to advance key parts of the agenda. And, in the interests of honest and comprehensive commentary, we simply have to acknowledge that it is certainly not without historical precedent that sometimes these events are staged for the very purposes of manipulating us and advancing an agenda.

There are many high-profile terrorist attacks that diligent researchers have credibly questioned the veracity of: The Manchester Arena bombings; the Boston Marathon attacks; Sandy Hook.

So it is not crazy, irrational, or insensitive to ask:

Was this event staged?

I really don't know, and nor do any other commentators, although inevitably, whenever I question the veracity of high-profile 'murders', 'shootings', etc., some random person says, "how dare you, I know the family personally" - but please understand that anyone can say anything on the internet (that's free speech), and this isn't actually evidence of anything (and nor is trying to shame someone into silence with finger-wagging).

To reiterate, I do not know whether this event was staged or not.

I do know, however - and as veteran political journalist Dr. Naomi Wolf has told us - "we have entered an era in which it is not crazy to assess media events to see if they're real or not real. In fact, it's kind of crazy not to."

Dr. Wolf advises that, the more dramatic and theatrical an event is portrayed as being in the media, the more likely it is to be actual theatre - staged, scripted, not real.

As such, I reserve my right to question the validity of this event, and to note it bears several hallmarks of a psy-op, including the highly lucrative Go Fund Me's set up within literal hours of the alleged murders, and that were instantly picked up and promoted by MSM.

As I've covered in other articles, when media events are staged to fulfil an agenda, you almost always see the pattern of:

1. Go Fund Me's "for the families" set up instantly (quickly enough to cause suspicion as to whether a blindsided, grief-stricken community really managed to produce a compelling, coherent fundraising campaign so immediately - or whether this campaign had in fact been prepared in advance);
2. The media giving lots of promotion to these fundraisers;
3. Huge sums raked in within days (one of several fundraisers currently stands at over £275,000).

We saw that pattern with Nicola Bulley, Jay Slater, and the alleged murder of Corey Comperatore - and now we see it with the Southport stabbings.

It would very much appear that, when the media stages crisis events, these fundraisers are how crisis actors are paid.

Also, typically, when a murder event is staged, the culprit is almost always a very improbable 'lone wolf' (often a skinny, gawky adolescent), with no clear or credible motive, and often with no direct links to the victim/s.

This flies in the face of how murders actually generally happen, as murder is overwhelmingly more likely to be committed by a person known to the victim, and, where children are concerned, the perpetrator is, in almost all cases, a parent or step-parent of the child.

A random teenage boy bursting into a dance class and savagely slaying children he has absolutely no link to is something that is very, very, very unlikely to happen in real life.

It's something far and away more likely to happen in the movies, and that's something we have to bear in mind when assessing whether dramatic, theatrical media events that everyone's talking about are real, or acted.

In fact, the chances of being killed in this kind of 'terror attack' are infinitesimally small, and, although parents will predictably (and understandably) react to these attacks by being more cautious with their children, experiencing anxiety about dropping them off at events such as dance class, the fact remains that children are far more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the class, than from a terrorist attack at the class itself. The risk of a car crash death is about 27 times higher than the risk of a terrorist death.

Despite this being the case, the media doesn't engage in wall-to-wall fear-mongering and crowd-provoking every time there's a fatal car crash.

So, what it's doing now with the mammoth coverage of these (alleged) deaths is all political, all agenderised, and all designed to make you feel strong emotions that the ruling classes can then exploit to their advantage.

And that is true whether this event is staged or real.

The point is to make you feel both angry and fearful: both vengeful and at risk - because all of these emotions disable your rationality and ability to calmly assess the situation and decipher what's really going on. Things are not always as they initially appear, including and especially when the mainstream media is all over them.

Accepting the mainstream media's portrayal of events at face value, and reacting accordingly, is rather like looking for a "stolen" car on the wrong side of a crescent...

You do not have the full picture yet, and are allowing strong emotions to cloud your perceptions and persuade you of the veracity of what may well be an illusion.

So, take a deep breath, let your emotions subside, and take the time to walk around the proverbial crescent, to see what's really there.

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