Sociopathy in leaders, the Peace March and Linnean classifications

11 November 2023

Why is it that the motivations of people who reach ‘the top’ are rarely obvious until it’s too late?  Looking round the world today, we can see that most so-called leaders are sociopaths, and can only guess which were born sociopathic, which learned sociopathy and which had sociopathy thrust upon them.  I wonder sometimes if their sociopathy is what makes them want to be low on the totem pole*.

One of the most recent and obvious examples is Benjamin Netanyahu who is happy to continue slaughtering civilians en masse, including children, until Hamas releases the hostages they’re holding.  He admitted earlier this week that he wants to retain “indefinite control” over the Gaza Strip followed but, two days later, he U-turned and told Fox news “We don’t seek to conquer Gaza, we don’t seek to occupy Gaza, and we don’t seek to govern Gaza.” 

Of course actions of the leaders of Hamas who ordered the 7 October attack are just as unforgiveable and their holding civilians as hostages and reportedly torturing and murdering Israeli people is condemned by all right-thinking people.  As are Israel’s claims – if they’re true – that Hamas leaders are sheltering in and under hospitals and refugee camps so it’s OK for Israel to kill hundreds of medics, patients and refugees in the hope of killing a Hamas leader.

Nor must we forget the sociopaths Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and the leaders of oppressive countries like Afghanistan and Myanmar and North Korea and rather too many in Africa.  At least in America and the UK, there are still enquiries and courts that expose the extent of the sociopathy and, in both countries, former leaders are being proved dishonest and untrustworthy.

However, in Donald Trump, America not only found the classic sociopath but elected him as president and, despite all his crimes and misdemeanours, there’s a terrifying chance they might elect him again.  We can only hope that, by election time, he’ll be in prison and bankrupt and something in the Constitution can be used to prevent a convicted criminal being president.

Our home-grown sociopaths pale into insignificance beside people like these but Boris Johnson came close – somebody who knows him well said they wouldn’t trust him to feed the cat – and Suella Braverman, our sociopathic Home Secretary, is emulating him with some the daftest comments we’ve seen for some time. 

All over the world, pro-Palestine demonstrations have taken place to plead for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza and today’s Peace March in London attracted an estimated 300,000 people (or tofu-eating, Guardian-reading, left-wing wokerati as Braverman might have said).  The organisers, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, had invited “all people of conscience to join us in peacefully marching” and confirmed they were working with the police to ensure public safety.

In an article in the Times on Wednesday, Braverman described the event as a “hate march” organised by and for “left wingers” and “pro-Palestinian mobs” and she told the police to prevent its happening.  Using suitably diplomatic language, the police reminded her of their operational independence and told her to piss off.

As I write, it appears a small counter-protest attracted a few burger-eating, Daily Mail-reading, right-wing reactionaries, more than 100 of whom were arrested for violence, but there have been no reports of any arrests on the march itself.

In defiance of the ministerial code, Braverman’s article had apparently not been cleared with Downing Street; various brown-nosed ministers have distanced themselves from her comments but Rishi ‘Never Do Today What You Can Possibly Put Off Till Tomorrow’ Sunak hasn’t yet fired her.

Not that this matters to a sociopath who wants to be prime minister next year;  or, if the Tories lose the election, leader of the opposition, and is probably one of those stupid people who believes that any publicity is good publicity (what about the Yorkshire Ripper?)

At this point, I must admit to a personal feeling of sympathy for the sociopaths who are so insecure that they need something like power or money or admirers to give them any sense of self-respect.  I also have great difficulty in believing that some people really are narcissists and wonder if they really think they’re wonderful when they’re constipated, or have diarrhoea. 

But I do find it difficult to name powerful people in recent history who didn’t tend that way and, after some thought, could only come up with Barack Obama and John Major.

I also wonder how much of the damage they’ve suffered is down to their parents.  For example, we know that Boris Johnson’s father never really achieved much (who’d even heard of him before Boris appeared on the scene?) and I suspect he’s one of those people who thinks it’s a compliment if somebody calls him ‘incorrigible’ which, while it seems to be used as a reluctant, semi-admiring description of somebody who is unable to change their ways, it actually means “incurably bad, or depraved” (OED) or “incapable of being corrected or amended” (Merriam-Webster).

Sociopathy and brown-nosing even enters the world of botany and zoology.  The naming of newly discovered plants and animals follows an internationally accepted two-word system set up by Carl Linnaeus on the 18^th century:  the first word identifies the genus, the second the species, often using the discoverer’s name or that of another well-known figure.  Some of these names are now being reviewed because their names related to people who have since been discredited, like a beetle named Anophthalmus hitleri in 1937.  Actually, since it’s brown and eyeless and looks rather like a very small turd, that one seems OK to me, as does a moth discovered in 2017 that was christened Neopalpa donaldtrumpi because it has blond head scales and small genitalia.

Then, last week, the American Ornithological Society said it was changing the names of birds named after racists, slavers and misogynists.  Perhaps Britain could follow suit and the Great Tit, currently Parus major, could become Parus Johnsoni.

*          Despite ‘a low man (sic) on the totem pole’ being used colloquially to indicate low status, the importance of people pictured on a totem pole actually increases downwards.  Well, you wouldn’t want to be the chief and have your image carved at the top where nobody could see it would you?

The Peter Principle writ large, and rocket science

21 October 2023

In 1968, Laurence J Peter published The Peter Principle which drew attention to the fact that, for as long as they do their job competently, people get promoted until they reach a job they can’t do and they become incompetent in the new role.  (He added the caveat that this wasn’t necessarily because they were intrinsically incompetent but because the new job required skills and experience that their previous job didn’t.)

So, he implies, there’s a tendency for people at the top to be incompetent, whether they’re politicians or directors / trustees, but their failings are concealed by the churn factor:  people leave and are replaced by new people, some of whom are competent and prevent complete collapse.

It’s not an anglophone monopoly and examples can be found all over the world, from Myanmar to Afghanistan, and it’s worst where incompetent dictators and military rulers are able to impose their incompetence on whole countries.

The most shocking example last week was when, Israel Katz, Israel’s energy minister, said in response to claims that Hamas is believed to be holding about 200 hostages in Gaza: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home. Humanitarianism for humanitarianism. And no one will preach us morality.”  Does Katz not understand what “humanitarianism” and “morality” actually involve?

He also seems to have swallowed the false syllogism:

• Hamas is a terrorist group
• Hamas is based in Gaza
• Therefore everybody in Gaza is a terrorist.

Over here last December, a senior civil servant formally recommended to Lee Rowley, the building safety minister, that he should order a formal investigation into crumbling concrete in schools and public buildings and social housing blocks (remember the Ronan Point collapse in 1968?).  Rowley returned the recommendation for a “substantial rewrite” and demanded it include the option of doing nothing.  Then a primary school ceiling collapsed.

China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has had Liu Liange, former chair of the Bank of China, arrested for taking bribes and illegally approving loans.  Ah well, bankers will be bankers.

The EU has U-turned on its decision to ban the most toxic chemicals in consumer products.  I wonder if the UK is ahead of the EU and has already banned them?  If so, there’s one real advantage of Brexit.

The first European to land in Australia was the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 (or, more likely, one of his crew whose name has been lost in time who secured the ship so Janszoon wouldn’t get his feet wet).  29 other European explorers followed in the 17^th century and it became known as New Holland.  Then, the best part of two centuries after the first landing, Lieutenant James Cook mapped the east coast, ‘claimed’ it for Britain and it became known as Australia.  Nobody thought of consulting the people who’d lived there for the previous 65,000 years and believed that ‘owning’ the land they lived on was as stupid as ‘owning’ the air they breathed.

Last week, Australians voted on whether the Aboriginal peoples should be recognised in the country’s constitution and be allowed to advise parliament on matters concerning the indigenous peoples;  the immigrants voted not to give them these rights.  It sounds barss ackwards to me; shouldn’t the indigenous people have voted on whether the immigrants should have a say in running their country?  (Interestingly, the only state to vote for the proposal was the ACT, which was created to house the immigrants’ parliament.)

In New Zealand, just across the water from Australia, many Pakeha New Zealanders (New Zealanders of European descent) were shocked by the result since Māori people participate fully in their country’s government.

Perhaps it’s because Britain populated Australia with its unwanted convicts and New Zealand with its aspirant kiwi-fruit farmers.

Forbes magazine publishes an annual list of the 400 wealthiest people in America and, for the second time in three years, Donald Trump isn’t in it.  Trump’s response summarises his whole approach to life:  “I demand a full apology from the failing Forbes magazine” he wrote on Truth Social, his failing social media platform.  What a sad man, to care whether or not he’s on a list, particularly a list published by a magazine he thinks is “failing”.

In Northern Ireland, pollution has poured so much waste into Lough Neagh that it’s covering of blue-green algae is so extensive it can be seen from space.

In the UK as a whole, accurate estimates of when people will be able to draw pensions can be made from the day they’re born* and allowances can be made for the proportion of them who will die before they reach retirement age.  In the same way, it’s not rocket science** to forecast the probable future need for ‘social housing’ from projections of demographic trends.

In 1980, most care homes were run by local authorities, the NHS and charities which provided 225,000 beds while the private sector provided 47,000 beds.  Last year, despite an ever-increasing number of older people, only 25,000 beds were provided by local government, the NHS and charities while the private sector provided 380,000 beds and people forced to live in homes run by the larger private companies donated between 8% and 42% of their fees to the homes’ owners.

In the same period the demand for social housing has grown while successive governments have reduced the number of units available by selling them to their occupants.  This has in turn contributed to the rise in house prices that has prevented so many people buying their own properties, thereby leading to an increased demand for social housing …

The Labour party has promised to build 1.5m new homes in the next 5 years, 300,000 a year, including a huge increase in the number of ‘affordable’ homes, and claims to be prepared to take on local opposition to do so.  However, its conference was sadly reticent about the need for low-carbon buildings and the environmental impact of new developments.

However, we must take all politicians’ promises with a grain of salt since another politician has recently reduced ‘promises’ to homeopathic levels by downgrading them to ‘pledges’, and then to ‘aspirations’, and then to ‘not a chance in hell’.

*          I’m not suggesting this is actually done, merely that it’s possible.

**        My physicist / engineering son says rocket science is a doddle – fuel, oxygen and a cigarette lighter – it’s rocket engineering that’s difficult.

Small boats in perspective, coincidences, and happy things

19 August 2023

After Lee Anderson, Conservative MP for Ashfield and Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party and a GBNews presenter had a powerful message for asylum seekers who didn’t want to move from basic hotel accommodation to the Bibby Stockholm, a three-storey barge that had been refurbished and towed to Portland for their exclusive use:  if they didn’t want to live there, they could “fuck off back to France” he said. 

The aim is to save money but the Daily Telegraph has seen an internal document, written in March, showing there would be savings if 1,000 asylum seekers were moved to Portland.  So Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, encouraged 500 asylum seekers to move there, leaving some 49,500 asylum seekers still in hotels.  Braverman is still refusing to reveal the cost of each place. 

We then learnt that officials already knew its water supply was contaminated with Legionnaires’ Disease and the fire service subsequently described it as a firetrap so the 39 ‘residents’ were evacuated.

Then Downing Street signed Braverman’s death warrant by insisting that the prime minister retained confidence in her.

However, it’s important to get into perspective the widespread paranoia about people, adults and children (i.e. ‘small boats’) risking their lives to reach a country where they think they’ll be safe.  In the last 5½ years, the Home Office has detected almost 100,000 migrants who crossed the Channel to the UK in small boats, 53% of them under 30 and 77% male. 

In that time, it’s estimated that 200 people died in their search for refuge.

In 2022, long-term immigration into the UK was estimated at 1.2m people, with asylum seekers and refugees accounting for just 18% of them. Government figures show that some 24,000 people were granted “protection and other leave through asylum and resettlement routes” in the same year.  (Refugees from Ukraine have been dealt with separately since the Russian invasion.)

Of the 2022 applications, 40% were made by people from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and Syria and more than 80% of applications from these people were approved, with only 8% of the total from all countries subjected to slavery referrals.  (More applicants came from Albania but only half of them were approved.)

In Afghanistan, for example, it’s two years since the Taliban seized power and Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban supreme leader, announced a general amnesty which excluded those who had served in the former military forces or the police.  Surely we should welcome the thousands of women who are now forced to live in hiding as well as the other local people who had helped the British but were abandoned there because we filled one escape flight with stray dogs*.

So let’s not allow politicians and extremists and comspiracy theorists prejudice how we see asylum seekers – the numbers are small and shouldn’t those of us who remember when we lived in ‘Great’ Britain show a little humanity and magnanimity to those less fortunate than we are?

Like those on Liz Truss’s resignation honours list.  Imagine being the type of person who would agree to be on a list submitted by a prime minister who set a record by being chucked out after only 7 weeks (it’s believed that 16 names were proposed and only two of them refused to let their names be put forward). 

And before you all gang together to recommend me to the Cabinet Office for an OBE, you should know that I’d refuse it.  Though it would be rather satisfying to register my contempt by only refusing it after I’d got the invitation to be nominated …

What’s more shocking is that Truss had the gall to submit a list at all and we can only hope that Rishi Sunak rejects the whole thing.  Interestingly, neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown submitted resignation honours lists.

At a more parochial level, Adam and Carly Taylor have recently benefitted from the most amazing series of coincidences.  Carly controls ATE Farms Ltd which bought the (closed) 18^th century Crooked House pub in Himley, Staffordshire, famous for having slipped so far down at one end, it had to be shored up and its slope could convince watchers’ brains that marbles rolled uphill. 

The first, possibly small coincidence is that another company, Himley Environmental Ltd, is registered at the same address as ATE Farms Ltd and operates the 37-acre quarry and landfill site next to the pub.  (Neither of the Taylors is listed as a director and the address might just be that of a firm that provides secretarial services.)

Carly’s husband Adam has a history of upsetting planners with applications for inappropriate developments elsewhere and ATE Farms Ltd has so far failed to answer questions from the media.

But then came a series of more astounding coincidences.  After planners had restricted what demolition the new owners could do to ensure its structural integrity, and within days of the purchase being completed, ATE hired a large digger and moved it onto the site.  Then the access road was blocked by a huge heap of earth, 2½ metres high.  Then the pub caught fire and the fire engines couldn’t get close enough to dowse the flames because their access to the site had been blocked.  Then, before the police enquiry into the cause of the fire could be completed, the serendipitously placed digger demolished the whole building.  If Carly offers you a drink, get her to drink half of it first.

But let’s look at some of the better things in life, like a picture on the front page of last Sunday’s Observer.  Taken after a football World Cup quarter final, a player from the winning side is consoling a player from the losing side as they leave the pitch together.  Now guess if this was men’s football or women’s.

One of the performers at this year’s Edinburgh fringe is Janine Harouni, who is Very Pregnant and has been suffering unpleasant side-effects.  Writing about how she feels, she says “Honestly, being pregnant with my husband’s baby feels like we’ve been paired up to do a school science project where I have to do all the work for nine months but he gets the same grade because he brought the pen.”

And one of the best jokes this year came from Ginny Hogan who said “Everyone says your 20s are all about finding yourself. If that’s true, your 30s are about wishing you’d found somebody else.”

*          Yes, I’m sure they were really all immensely valuable KC-registered thoroughbreds but the principle’s the same.

Another anointment, broken records, an underdressed climber and winning insults

23 October 2022

What a wonderful week for cynics – if you didn’t finish reading any day’s paper, you could put it out for recycling and go straight on to the next day’s paper because so much had changed again overnight.

What we tend to forget is that all MPs work for us as public servants and we pay their salaries and fiddled expenses.  They have no right to our respect, they need to earn it by doing what’s best for the country.  Which is not what they’re doing at the moment and why, when my wife called out “She’s gone!”, our cleaner punched the air and said “Yeah!”

By resigning, Truss can now claim two records by becoming Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister ever and by reducing support for the Conservatives to the lowest level ever seen in the polls.  At least she had confirmed to parliament on the previous day that the triple lock on pensions would remain, although she failed to confirm disability benefits would also rise in line with inflation;  which just goes to show the priorities of a government that relies on the geriatric (sorry ‘grey’) vote and couldn’t care less about people with disabilities.

Until she resigned, the shortest-serving prime minister was George Canning whose sole term lasted 119 days in 1827 but he at least had the excuse that he died of TB.  (The BBC website originally reported that “Canning had served for 119 days after dying in 1827” but, sadly, somebody spotted the error and corrected it.)

With their recent repeated failures in choosing competent leaders, even the Tories must now be beginning to wonder if there’s a better way to choose them.  It’s a pity their rules don’t have an emergency clause to cover the loss of a leader within (say) three months.  This would cover the sudden death of a newly-elected leader and could allow the person who came second to take over as prime minister.  It would also help avoid yet another undignified scramble for power.

Actually, a general election would be the fairest way of finding one that a majority of the electorate actually wants but the Conservatives daren’t do this because they’ve made themselves so unpopular that they might disappear up their own ballot boxes.  What they are doing this time, with their usual blithe disregard for everybody, including party members, is abbreviating the process to leave only three possibles, each of whom will know only that almost 75% of their MPs didn’t want them and voted for somebody else. 

With their backs to the wall and all polls showing the Conservatives would be obliterated at a general election, this would seem the ideal time to change the electoral system from ‘first past the post’ to proportional representation.  A PR voting system would almost certainly give Conservatives more seats than the polls are suggesting they’d get at the moment and it would ensure fair representation of Tory (and other) voters for the foreseeable future.

However, they’re now so desperate that there’s even talk, apparently serious, of resurrecting the compulsively deceitful Boris Mimi MiToo Johnson, the man who fractured the Conservative party, dithered throughout his term, made stupid decisions, abandoned some 50,000 people in Afghanistan, was ultimately fired for having been caught breaking the law and whose conduct is still subject to another investigation.  So he’s scuttled back from a beach in the Dominican Republic with indecent haste to round up the loonies.

May it please all the gods anyone can think of, don’t let them be so stupid as to let Boris loose again.  

The health secretary Thérèse Coffey has admitted (as she puffed on a fat cigar) giving leftover antibiotics to a friend and has been accused by one doctor of “monumental stupidity”.  Even I remember that we’re told to complete the course so how come she had any spare?

The only saving grace they managed to find this week was when Jeremy Hunt, the latest Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked a reasonable question in parliament and just said “I don’t know but I’ll find out” before sitting down again.  What a brilliantly honest response, something even his greatest critics can surely accept as a point in his favour.  He’s not standing for PM but wouldn’t be nice if whoever gets the job feels able to show the same honesty?

Other news included Ghislaine Maxwell saying of Prince Andrew “I accept that this friendship could not survive my conviction. He is paying such a price for the association. I consider him a dear friend. I care about him.”  With friends like her, who needs enemies?

She then went on to complain about the service offered by her prison …

In South Korea, the Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi shinned up a wall without wearing the headscarf ‘required’ by Iran’s male theocracy (who are so insecure they think they’d lose ‘their’ women if other people could see how beautiful they are).  She said her not wearing a hijab was “unintentional” but, on her return to Tehran, she was hailed as a hero by people demonstrating against the arrest of Mahsa Amini for being improperly dressed and her subsequent death in custody.  Rekabi’s friends and supporters now fear for her safety and her brother has been summoned to an intelligence agency office. 

British protestors from the climate action group Just Stop Oil blocked a motorway and were attacked by Suella Braverman, who was still home secretary at the time, who said “I’m afraid it’s the Labour party, it’s the Lib Dems, it’s the coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, wokerati* – dare I say the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today.”  The patronising berk then had to resign after she admitted sending classified material from her personal email account.

Truss had invented and condemned an “anti-growth coalition” that she thinks lives in North London and takes taxis and Boris Johnson dissed the “Islington remainers”* in an attempt (which seems to resonate with many on the right) to blame Brexit remainers for failing to accept the vote and causing the covid pandemic and the economic chaos that helped him onto the slippery slope to dismissal.  All the remainers we know regret the stupidity of Brexit but accept we have to live with it and try to find ways of minimising the economic and political problems it’s caused.

How sad that senior Tories have to stoop to pointless soundbites in their attempt to regain popularity.

A letter in the next day’s Guardian asked if King Charles III might have more prime ministers than his mother.

Now, to take our minds off the Westminster shitstorm, here’s a thought for you:  I (and probably you) have more than the average number of legs for a human.

*          In the interests of full disclosure, I must say I have never voted Conservative, I read the Guardian, I like tofu, I once lived part-time in Islington and I voted remain.

By-elections, Boris’s triumphs, more greedy pigs, Afghanistan, guns and choosing clothes

26 June 2022

The Tories were trashed at both this week’s by-elections.  Crocodiles are weeping salt tears all over the land.

Oliver Dowden, chair of the Conservative Party resigned saying “Somebody must take responsibility” in a carefully worded statement emphasising his continuing support for the party, leaving us to guess who doesn’t have his continuing support.

It’s actually hard to believe that so many Conservative voters changed their party allegiance;  it’s much easier to believe that many die-hard Tories have finally had to accept that Boris Johnson is the UK’s worst prime minister in living memory and it’s time for him to go.  (I’m sure that, by the time you read this, he’ll have accepted responsibility and stepped aside.  Not.)

My Conservative friend said on Friday he hadn’t yet “analysed the figures but I am pretty certain that in Wakefield, the turnout was low and the swing largely attributable to people not voting.”  He said he was disappointed that the winners attributed their victories to Johnson than to their parties’ policies and he “would have preferred it if more Tories had voted.”

He also doubts if Johnson will go and thinks he will lead the Conservatives into the next election and, unless the various opposition parties can get their act together, will win it.

One has to admire his unquestioning optimism in the face of party grandees urging Johnson to step down but those of us who believe the ‘Boris-effect’ did influence Thursday’s results are hoping his optimism is justified.

Politically, the two of us are on the opposite sides of the governmental midden, but he’s obviously upwind of it.

Johnson himself was in Ruanda at the time to prove that, given 4-deep security cover, the country is tremendously safe for people the UK doesn’t want living here. 

This week, he refused to deny having tried to get Carrie Symonds, who is now his wife, a job in the FCDO when he was Foreign Secretary and still married to Marina Wheeler and he’s now threatening to stay for a third term.

I mean, look at all his earlier triumphs.  Their happened to be some clever scientists in the UK who were first with an effective covid vaccine, which allowed Johnson to claim credit for this even though he’d caused an estimated 10,000 deaths by delaying the first lockdown until (quite coincidentally he has assured us) after his wife’s baby shower. 

And “We got Brexit done” he says.  What a man!  Apart from the problems caused in Northern Ireland, the disruption and delays at other borders and the extra paperwork, increases in the costs of shopping and fuels, lying to the queen about the legality of proroguing parliament, and being fined for breaking his own laws, he’s clearly the right man to destroy the UK’s international reputation;  and what a brilliant job he’s making of it.

The Daily Telegraph really did do well this week by getting its website blocked by Russia for “disseminating false information about a special military operation by the Russian armed forces in Ukraine”.  On 23 February, the day before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it published a report on Russia’s use of “mobile crematoriums” (crematoria?) that can incinerate troops killed in wars – sorry, special military operations – to conceal the number of soldiers killed.  “Ivan Ivanovich?  Nah, sorry missus, never ‘eard of ‘im”.

The consumer price index showed that annual inflation approached 10% in May, its highest level for 40 years and the highest in the G7 group of wealthy nations.  We’re lucky enough not to be scraping the bottom of the barrel yet but our usual milk has gone up from £1.15 at the beginning of the year to £1.45 now, which seems a bit excessive.  Perhaps we should all be buying supermarket shares since I’m sure their directors and shareholders won’t be sharing the pain.  

Which inevitably leads to this week’s Greedy Pig awards:  Simon Arora, chief executive of B&M who was given £5m last year, 270 times the pay of the average worker.  Despite B&M’s having a market capitalisation only ¼ that of Tesco, Arora got more than the £4.75 given to Ken Murphy, his oppo at Tesco (who also qualifies for an award).

What’s wrong with these people?

Independent experts, the Pay Review Body, are recommending that NHS workers should receive a pay rise of 4-5%;  the government has said they can only afford 3% and any more would break the bank.    Their message is clear:  money is more important than you and me. 

What’s wrong with these people?

In Afghanistan, the Taliban are appealing for international aid following at least two devastating earthquakes which have killed hundreds.  Should we ignore their appeals because Taliban men are really horrible, or should we help them because the people who are most affected are just ordinary people?

The week’s most devastating (but unsurprising) news was America’s Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade.  Although Americans may still consider themselves ‘free’, just six people (5 men and 1 sort-of-woman, all muppet Republicans, two of whom had recently said they would not vote against the precedent set by this case) ignored the wishes of 75% of the population and removed the right to choose abortion from the country’s 170 million women.

They also over-ruled a New York law that had, since the early 1900s, required people to demonstrate a need before they can get a licence to own a gun before they can carry one in public places …

What’s wrong with these people?

However, the Senate did approve a bill that goes some way towards curbing the licensing and sale of guns.  Softly softly catchy monkey?

Ukraine is withdrawing its troops from Sievierodonetsk, leaving Lysychansk the only city in the Luhansk region of the Donbas area still in Ukrainian control but its formal application to join the EU has been accepted.  The EU isn’t NATO of course but it’ll be interesting to see Vladimir Putin’s response in the light of the rumours that Russia’s lost very large numbers of troops and equipment.

There are reports that small groups of Ukrainian military are creeping into Russian-occupied areas and stealing their tanks.  Isn’t that wonderful!

Even more enchanting is an article I read recently on how fashionistas choose what they’re going to wear each day.  Some people decide the night before, others choose their footwear in the morning by the shape of their trouser (“A darker, slimmer leg calls for a more streamlined sneaker, whereas a wider pant in a lighter shade might match back well with a tan sandal or loafer.”)  Others start with a single piece of clothing and build everything else around it or “intuitively” choose colours that they feel suit the energy of the day, while others choose them by mood.

My wife and I once saw Karl Lagerfeld (well, she recognised him but then had to tell me who he was) in a shop in Paris.  He’d probably made a conscious decision about what to wear that day but he looked a right prat.

Nobody asked me how I choose what to wear each day.  After doing the washing, I put clean smalls in the back of the drawer and shirts on one end of a rack.  Then, in the morning, I take smalls from the front of the drawer and a shirt from the other end of the rack.  I don’t even have to turn on the light.  Footwear and outerwear depend on the weather but I’m generally barefoot in the house and garden when it’s warm. 

Some people would no doubt say this accounts for a lot about me but that’s their problem not mine.

There was a puzzling report from China this week that two people were killed when a Nio electric car, being developed in China as a potential rival to Tesla, fell from the third floor of an office in Shanghai.  The report details of various reactions to the crash, including a defensive statement from the manufacturer saying the accident was “not caused by the vehicle itself” (i.e.  it wasn’t the first recorded case of AI suicide) but the version I saw entirely failed to explain the obvious question:  how did it get up the stairs?

Hobby horses, international news, singing fish, outrage and a dog blanket

9 January 2022

Somebody left the stable door open and several of my hobby horses cantered out this week.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that the richest households in the UK have at least £3,600,000 while the poorest 10% have £15,400 or less, and 40% of those are actually in debt so have negative assets.  What’s wrong with the people who could do something about this and don’t?

On the first anniversary of the Trump-inspired attack on the Capitol, Joe Biden accused Trump and his allies of holding a “dagger at the throat of American democracy” and there are real fears that Trump’s actions could lead the country into another civil war.  Some elected law enforcement officials are already breaking federal laws and some states are using their powers to make new laws that defy them.

But a judge in Georgia has sentenced three white men to life in prison after they’d hunted down a black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, and murdered him in cold blood.  Only one of them will be allowed to request parole, and then only after 30 years.

Meanwhile, groups of potential revolutionaries are forming armed militias and spreading their creed through local radio and TV stations, working on the Lewis Carroll’s claim (in ‘The Hunting of the Snark’) that “What I tell you three times is true”.

Fox News naturally leads the way and has been pushing conspiracy theories that the FBI or the Capitol police or Black Lives Matter were the real instigators of the 6 January riot.  One of their far-right hosts, Sean Hannity, called Biden a liar for claiming that Trump did nothing to stop the riot and seems unfazed by the texts he sent at the time urging Trump to intervene.

Even some Republican members of Congress and the Senate who had previously shown commonsense are now unwilling to alienate people and risk losing their jobs at the mid-term elections.

In Kabul, a bunch of Taliban officials emptied barrels containing about 3,000 litres of alcohol into a local canal.  Fifty metres downstream, a shoal of rebel fish were heard singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

I can understand why the Taliban think intoxicants are bad but I don’t understand why they don’t also shut down the opium fields that occupy large areas of ‘their’ country.

Over the border in Pakistan, a woman judge has been nominated to the country’s Supreme Court for the first time, another small step for womankind worldwide.

In Fukuoka prefecture in south-west Japan, Kane Tanaka, the world’s oldest person has celebrated her 119^th birthday saying she is determined to live another year to raise the record.  To the disappointment of Japanese dentists, she allegedly has a weakness for fizzy drinks and chocolates.

In Israel, the 2018 ‘nation-state’ law alienated Israeli Arabs (who account for 20% of Israel’s population), Palestinians, liberal American Jews, and many Israelis who denounced the law as racist and undemocratic.  Now the actor Emma Watson has been accused of antisemitism after she posted a message of support for a pro-Palestinian protest but we must remember that antisemitism and antizionism are two completely different things, and that it’s in Israel’s interests to conflate the two.

In California, deputy district attorney Kelly Ernby, a vocal anti-vaxxer, has died of Covid;  Axel, her husband, said “She was NOT vaccinated. That’s the problem.”

Elsewhere in America, Bob Dylan’s lawyers have formally rejected a lawsuit filed last August from a woman calling herself JC claiming child sexual abuse over a 6-week period in 1965 when she was 12.  Last week, her lawsuit was amended to refer to a period of “several months”.  Both Dylan’s lawyers and Clinton Heylin, a music writer and Dylan expert, have said this wasn’t possible because he was touring and recording and writing.  Dylanologists spend their lives obsessively picking through every minute of his life so it’ll be interesting to see what proof JC has other than that they might have been in the same city during that period.

Here in the UK, Boris Johnson has admitted he forgot to give Lord Geidt’s inquiry into the source of funding for the work some texts that had asked Lord Brownlow for money to refurbish his flat.

Having seen the ‘missing’ texts, Geidt wrote to Johnson on 17 December saying that their omission was “plainly unsatisfactory” and “I doubt whether I would have concluded, without qualification … that ‘at the point when the Prime Minister became aware, he took steps to make the relevant declaration and to seek advice’”.  On Thursday, Johnson offered a “humble and sincere” apology for omitting the texts.  Cynics still have some difficulty associating Johnson with either of those two adjectives.

The four people who admitted relocating Bristol’s statue of Edward Colston, one of Britain’s most notorious slave traders, into the harbour have been found ‘not guilty’ by 11/12 of a jury after the defence had successfully argued the presence of statue was so indecent and potentially abusive that it constituted a crime in itself (a plaque on the plinth had described Colston as “one of the most virtuous and wise sons of the city”).

Suella Braverman QC MP, Attorney General for England and Wales, supported by fellow Tory MPs and others on the far-right declared themselves outraged by the verdict and claimed it was “a vandal’s charter”;  they were supported by the Daily Mail who derided the group’s post-verdict remarks as “woke* platitudes”.  Where were these outraged enforcers when Jimmy Saville’s grave was vandalised?

It now appears that the Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, were connected with a company she recommended to the Cabinet Office for the supply of masks and surgical gowns at the start of the pandemic, some weeks after the company been set up but a few days before it had even been registered.  The company, PPE Medpro was awarded more than £200m in government contracts in May and June 2020.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, got nearly $100m last year, 1,447 times the median employee’s pay of $68,254.  In 2015, he said that, having provided for his (now 16-year-old) nephew, he planned to give all his wealth to charities.  Ah, if only we all knew when we were going to die. 

Stella McCartney’s fashion company claimed more than £800,000 in 2020 under the government’s furlough scheme.  McCartney herself took almost £2.7m out of the company.  All perfectly legal, just immoral.

As Covid numbers continue to increase and more NHS staff aren’t able to work, 999 call-handlers in some areas are telling people having a heart attack to make their own way to hospital.  Down here, there’s an hourly bus service on weekdays (none on Sundays), followed by a 20-minute walk to A&E from the bus stop.  I think I’d rather die at home where it’s warm and comfortable than on a cold pavement in the middle of nowhere.

Stephanie Matto used to bottle her farts and sell them, reputedly making $50,000 from them, but had to stop after she ended up in hospital with problems caused by eating too many high-fibre foods.

The reduction in healthy microbiomes in western diets can lead to problems with our physical and mental health.  One of the treatments for a depleted microbiome is the use of faecal transplants which have proved effective in the treatment of some intestinal conditions, including C difficile.  Researchers are now working on the production of the same stuff in easily edible pellet form.  (Did you see how carefully I worded this paragraph?)

And finally, Grga Brkic, an injured hiker in the Croatian mountains was kept warm for 13 hours by his dog, an 8-month old Alaskan Malamute, who lay on top of him until rescuers arrived.   If Malamutes are anything like Labradors, I hope its snoring didn’t keep Brkic awake.

*          Rhian Graham, one of those on trial in Bristol, defined ‘woke’ rather well:  “Woke is actually a colloquial term for being aware of social injustice – it’s been appropriated by the right as a way to demonise young people who care about equality and making the world a better place.” 

Post-mortem laughter, Maxwells, predictions and fears for 2022 and fact v fiction

2 January 2022

Sadly, 2021 ended with the death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the world’s religious leaders who, along with the Dalai Lama, didn’t think it beneath his dignity to laugh.  Let’s hope more religious leaders all over the world can give us hope that, if there is an afterlife, it permits laughter.

We heard last week that a passenger flying from Chicago to Iceland developed a sore throat mid-flight, rammed a cotton bud up her nose and tested positive for Covid.  With the crew‘s permission, she then isolated herself in the loo for the rest of the flight.  Yes, that’s right, a loo inside a pressurised metal tube all of whose air is circulated and distributed through the rest of the plane for everyone to share;  and closing your punkah louvres doesn’t help.  Still, it’s the thought that counts.

The other year-end news was the sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell’s being found guilty on 5 of 6 charges.   I never met her but I did meet her father a few times and I didn’t like him.  After her father’s death, Ghislaine made her own way into ‘society’ and has paid the price of notoriety (and having dodgy friends).

After daddy’s demise, her brother Kevin went into business on his own and succeeded in becoming Britain’s largest ever bankrupt.  The interesting sibling was actually Philip, the clever one, who won a scholarship to Oxford’s Balliol College when he was 16 and later left the UK saying he wanted to get as far as possible from his father.

I wonder how 2022 might be different from 2021?  My first reaction is “probably not much”, except nobody will be playing cricket for an urn reputed to hold the ashes of a cricket ball (second prize was two urns).  We Brits invented cricket but, like other British inventions that foreigners took over, like jet engines and hovercraft and deep-fried Mars bars, others do them better now that manufacturing is considered a bit infra dig in the UK and financial services are all that matter.  Actually, now I come to think of it, I’m not sure anybody else does actually deep-fry Mars bars (I had one once and couldn’t move for 3 days).

It seems likely that Rishi Sunak’s promise of “whatever it takes” when the Covid pandemic first took hold almost two years ago will turn out to be another exaggeration driven by political ambition rather than common-sense.  The NHS is even closer to collapse than it was last year, its underfunding over the last 10 years exacerbated by staff having to self-isolate.  And self-testing kits have run out.  And we don’t seem to realise that sharing vaccines worldwide is best for everyone while keeping vast stocks here until they’re out of date is fatally counter-productive.

Prices seem likely continue to rise due to the effects of the pandemic or Brexit (depending on which way you voted in the referendum) (or both) leading to increases in interest rates that benefit those who have savings at the expense of those who have debts.  Supply chain problems won’t disappear overnight and the new, tighter customs checks at borders that came into effect yesterday are likely to increase delays and the costs of imports and exports.

Prices of imports from the EU will also increase and the consumer price index, which rose by 5.2% in November, is expected to top 6% in in the spring, helped by huge increases in energy prices.  More failures of small businesses, redundancies and bankruptcies are likely to follow.

House prices could continue to increase although, for those of us who are lucky enough to own our houses, it makes no difference unless we’re downsizing (or dying):  the more money we get from our sale will have to be spent on paying a higher price for our new house.  So the only beneficiaries will tend to be older, or dead, and estate agents.

At the other end of the market, it’ll become even harder for first-time buyers to find a house they can afford which will give rich landlords the chance to buy and let more properties and become even richer with the rents paid to them by people who can’t afford to buy their own properties.

Luckily, Boris Johnson is on top of all these problems and, although he omitted to mention Northern Ireland or the continuing problems of how to implement the Brexit agreement, he proudly announced that we could return to selling stuff in pounds and ounces and engraving crowns on beerglasses.  (My own favourite glass, which I use every day, is crowned and inscribed GVIR and came from the bottom of the river Cam, but that’s another story.)

He also said that “… from Singapore to Switzerland, we’ve negotiated ambitious free trade deals to boost jobs and investment here at home.”  Can anybody think of any significant countries, perhaps even larger than Singapore or Switzerland, that he didn’t mention?

Stockmarkets worldwide are nervous and are likely to continue over-reacting (up) to news such as the Covid omicron variant being “less lethal” and (down) to problems with China’s property sector, with Evergrande having missed a bond repayment of $255m on Thursday despite huge and costly support from the state.

The investment market will continue to become dominated by hedge funds who can make money even when a stock price falls by betting on its doing so.  By the way. the cognoscenti like to call this ‘selling short’ not ‘gambling with somebody else’s money’.

Further financial uncertainties revolve around cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and the energy needed to ‘mine’ them, and the ever-increasing power wielded by Big Tech (5 companies – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla – accounted for more than a third of the top 500 American companies’ returns).

Jo Biden and Vladimir Putin have discussed Russia’s fears that ‘the West’ will control more and more of Europe and America’s certainty that increasing the West’s control of more and more of Europe will frighten Russia.  Substantive progress seems unlikely.

The UK government is following the tainted precedents set by Donald Trump’s and Boris Johnson’s confusion of fact and fiction.  The Order of St. Michael and St. George honours diplomats and spooks.  James Bond, a fictional character, was a CMG (a ‘Companion’ of the order).  Daniel Craig, a real actor and the seventh to play Bond, was awarded a CMG in the New Year’s Honours List.  Next?  Olivia Colman will be given powers to stop and search people in the street because she played a police officer in Broadchurch.

Elsewhere, the stability of Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Myanmar, North Korea, Syria, Taiwan, Ukraine and umpteen others countries is threatened by power-seekers and, as ever, it’s the normal people trying to live normal lives who suffer and die.

I asked a friend what he thought 2022 might bring and his eminently reasonable reply included saying “there are too many uncertainties” to make sensible guesses but he did say that “the refugee/immigrant/terrorist problem/disgrace will get worse and tensions will continue to rise communists against the non communists [and] Islamic problems will remain much the same”.

He also suspects that Joe Biden will go before Johnson.

My own hopes for 2022 include that Iran will release Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and that Shamima Begum’s British passport will be reinstated so she can return to the country of her birth and childhood;  removing it was spiteful and guaranteed not to reduce any radicalism she still has.

I hope that Jersey States’ landslide vote in November in favour of the principle of assisted dying, which paves the way for it to become legal, will encourage the dimmer members of the London parliament to follow suit.

I hope that the COP26 nations (and all others) don’t do a Johnson but actually meet their commitments to reducing carbon emissions.  (We know we will see more fires and floods this year – what a pity they can’t happen at the same time in the same place, thus killing one stone with two birds.  Er …) 

Some scientists reckon that a lot of London, including the Houses of Parliament, will be underwater by the end of the century so their refurbishment, which could take 40 years, will need to incorporate changing rooms so MPs can don scuba gear and staff can be given snorkels.

I hope that they start means-testing the winter heating payments made each year.  We give ours to charities or to friends who need it more than we do;   and I hope they also introduce a maximum wage and raise taxes and state benefits.

I hope that everybody starts seeing others just as people regardless of their politics, religion, gender, age, sexuality, skin colour, BMI, etc etc etc.

The paradigm has changed.  There is no ‘normal’ to go back to.  We have to learn to change to live with it because it won’t change for us.

I hope we can do it.

Broken promises, Taliban, sleazocracy, UK dictatorship, Scottish coal, guns, camels and kindness

12 December 2021

My Brexiteer friend objected to last week’s reference to his defensiveness and said he “could say that a defensive remainer friend of mine still refuses to take positive action by starting a movement to rejoin the EU”.

I replied that, while I’d love the UK to rejoin the EU, the pandemic should be focussing countries’ efforts elsewhere and, anyway, I would be worried that “any request to rejoin would now be met by a refusal … because we are apparently a chumocracy riddled with sleaze, corruption, lies, U-turns and a refusal to honour a legally binding document.”

The worst broken broken promise was to the “tens of thousands” of Afghan soldiers, politicians, journalists, civil servants, feminists, aid workers and judges who we’d promised to evacuate after the Taliban re-took control.  A whistleblower has blamed bureaucratic chaos in the Foreign Office and, in the end, we only managed to bring back a planeload of dogs and about 15,000 people (filling an aeroplane with dogs instead of people was allegedly cleared by the prime minister).

America gave such short notice of their withdrawal that the FCDO didn’t have enough time (or, apparently, the will) to deal with thousands of applications and, when the then Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, was asked to give his personal approval of individuals, it took him “several hours” to get down to it but, when he did, he delayed things further by demanding that the files be reformatted because their presentation was “not quite right”.  Quite?  He had the power of life or death over real people and very limited time and he thought the formatting wasn’t quite right.

When challenged last week about why so many had been abandoned, Raab said 15,000 was quite a lot of people, which was a huge comfort to the friends and relatives of all the people who were no longer alive enough to cheer him because the Taliban had, as promised, amnestied them and freed them from reprisals but they had then died suddenly of a bullet in the back of the head.

One of Johnson’s better reactions was to demote him.  Raab has since justified his downgrading by saying the police wouldn’t investigate an illegal party that took place a year ago.  People who actually know about these things say there is no legal reason to prevent prosecution and it was the Metropolitan Police who decided not to investigate.

A former head of the Met said the police seemed to be acting as judge and jury which is, of course, exactly what the government wants as it tries to introduce a law that would allow the government to overrule judgements of the Supreme Court.  Still, we could save a fortune on lawyers and just get the prime minister to decide who’s guilty – it works in Afghanistan and Myanmar – though I’d rather cases were judged by experienced lawyers and not the government.

Johnson’s own problems include the 2020 Christmas party in number 10 and the still unanswered question about who paid to redecorate his flat.  He actually offered parliament his apologies at PMQs for the party that he said didn’t take place and Keir Starmer went for the jugular, to Johnson’s obvious annoyance.  If only Starmer could be so forceful for more of the time, Labour might win some more seats, particularly with their current showing in the polls and Barack Obama’s help.

In the North Shropshire byelection next Thursday, the Conservative candidate has been ordered not to speak to the media because he lives in Birmingham and knows very little about the area.  His attempts to replace Owen Paterson, who resigned after being outed as a member of the sleazocracy wing of the Tory party, might not have been helped by the Conservative MP for Walsall North, Eddie Hughes, saying how the people of North Staffordshire should vote for him.  Well, Salop, Staffs, what the hell, they’re both north of Watford.

A number of less traditional candidates are also standing, including one for the Official Monster Raving Looney Party and Drew Galdron, a Johnson impersonator, who is standing on a ‘Boris Been-Bunged, Rejoin EU’ platform.  An amusing 2:19 minute interview with Galdron, dressed in the union jack and little else, has been tweeted by Richard Hewison of the Shropshire Star.

Thank heavens there are still some people willing to lose £500 to entertain others.

The redecoration problem has been going on for months but Johnson’s now accused of misleading his own ethics adviser, Lord Geidt:  he sent a WhatsApp message to Lord Brownlow asking for more money for the refurbishment and later said he didn’t know who had given money for the work, which lie could lead to his suspension from the House of Commons. 

After the UK’s commitment to cut carbon emissions, Nicola Sturgeon pressed the button that demolished Scotland’s tallest freestanding structure, the chimney at the former coal plant in Longannet, Fife.  The power-generating plant had been closed in 2016, but the tower’s destruction symbolically ended of the nation’s coal age.

South of the border, England is still havering over opening a brand-new coal mine in Cumbria!  The Planning Inspectorate’s report hasn’t yet been published but the final decision will be made by the Communities Secretary, Michael ‘The Shiv’ Gove.  To his credit, Boris Johnson said at the Cop26 climate conference that he is “not in favour of more coal” but one wonders how much Gove needs his support.

Another problem has been voiced by Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, who said recreational drug users, such as casual users of cocaine, are “the final link in the chain” fuelling the international criminal business.  He then announced an additional £780m of funding (over ten years) for the drug treatment system.  Presumably, police will now go round busting middle-class dinner parties offering lines of coke bought with bankers’ bonuses.  Punishments being considered include removing their driving licences (seems sensible) and passports (well, it’ll stop weekend tours of the poppy fields of Afghanistan).

But there’s good news from America where the last president has finally admitted he’s “very stupid, or very corrupt” or, of course, both.  In a statement last week Donald Trump said “Anybody that doesn’t think there wasn’t massive election fraud in the 2020 presidential election is either very stupid, or very corrupt!”  (His exclamation mark, not mine.)

And the usual bad news.

According to a National Public Radio study of deaths per 100,000 people since May in 3,000 counties across America, people living in counties that voted for Trump by at least 60% are 2.7 times more likely to die of Covid than those who voted heavily for Joe Biden.  Keep it up you Democrats:  if you die, you take three Republicans with you.

Shortly after a 15-year old in Michigan shot and killed four teenagers and wounded seven more, Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, tweeted a Christmassy picture of himself and (presumably) his family in front of a decorated Christmas tree.  All seven of them are wearing happy smiles and cradling automatic weapons;  the message sent with it says “Merry Christmas! PS: Santa, please bring ammo.” 

I’m not alone in finding this frightening:  Bob Dylan wrote almost 60 years ago “I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children” …

Priorities are different in Saudi Arabia where more than 40 camels were disqualified from a beauty contest because they’d been botoxed.  Why do I find seeing ‘camels’ and ‘beauty’ in the same sentence as disconcerting as I do seeing ‘Boris Johnson’ and ‘integrity’ in the same sentence?

But there are still kindnesses in the world:  the actor Michael Sheen has said he’s now a “not-for-profit actor”.  He founded the End High Cost Credit Alliance to help people find more affordable ways of borrowing money in 2017;  two years later, he organised the Homeless World Cup in Cardiff and, when the £2m funding fell through at the last moment, he sold his own houses to pay for it.

Sheen told the Big Issue he’d be “paying for it for a long time” but he realised he could do things like this and still earn money from acting.  A new hero.

Children’s questions, how we learn, panic buying and charity discounts

26 September 2021

“Where do people go when they die?” asked a 3½ year-old child of a friend.  She said she’d given the usual “Well some people think this and some people think that but nobody really knows”.  When the child saw a picture of one of our dogs who died earlier this year, he looked thoughtful and asked where she’d died. 

We explained that she’d died here at home so we could be with her when she died and, after he’d processed this, he asked what happened to her after she’d died.  We said the vet had zipped her into a black canvas bag and taken her body away and his mother said her body would have been buried or burnt on a big fire.

Isn’t it wonderful watching how young children learn things, and when they’ve got all the answers they wanted!

It reminded me of when my eldest was 9 and we were on what was not then called a glamping holiday in France.  He was wrapped in a sleeping bag with a hot water bottle (no normal English person goes glamping that close to home without one), sitting in one of the chairs in the tent, his face ashen grey after a particularly unfortunate encounter with some dodgy mussels at lunchtime.  Out of the blue, he suddenly asked “You know babies are made when a sperm meets an egg?”  I said “Yes” and he continued “How does it get there?”

So it was that, on a rainy tent on the Cherbourg peninsula, I told him about love and erections and lubrication and what went where and ovulation and ejaculations and contraception (though I used child-friendly words) until it was obvious he’d got enough information and lost interest.

Several years later, his younger brother asked about masturbation so we talked about that for a while and, at one point, he said “You’re not embarrassed are you!”  I said “No, should I be?”.  He just said “Mum is”, to which there was no answer, however accurate, that would have helped him as a young teenager.

My own sexual education came from my father who, in his typically clinical way, produced some scientific charts when I was about eight and explained the physical process.  It made little impact and left out so much that I had to take a ‘Teach Yourself’ / “Learn as you go” course over the next 20 years.

We continue to learn other, less interesting things all our lives.

Some we learn by rote, like arithmetic, some by instruction, like how to write legibly (something I never mastered), some by applying guidance, like learning how to drive, some by a sort of cultural osmosis, like what accents we grow up using, some by exploring and extending what we already know, like scientific research projects, some by avoiding a mistake we made last time, some by unexpected inspiration, like when Isaac Newton was hit by a falling apple etc. 

(Did you ever add “etc” at the end of a list of everything you could think of about something to give the impression you actually knew lots more examples but just couldn’t be bothered to list them?  That’s not what I did there but I was beginning to get bored so I stopped.)

And, though we go on learning all our lives, there are some things we never learn, either because our abilities are constitutionally limited (like cooking in my case), or because of a lack of opportunity or interest, or because we don’t think they’ll be helpful to us, or just a lack of curiosity.

My own learning this week has included:

• there’s a new, third ‘Tebay’ service station north of Carlisle on the M74 in the Borders

• how difficult it’s going to be to replace EU’s most powerful leader when Angela Merkel steps back after today’s election

• Boris Johnson has realised just how insignificant Britain now is on the world stage and the trade deal with the US that he thought they’d be enthusiastic about is so far down Joe Biden’s list of priorities it’s below “Remember Jill’s birthday”

• the government’s telling people not to panic-buy petrol is guaranteed to get all the more stupid car-owners to queue at service stations to transfer our huge stocks of petrol from one big tank to lots of little ones, using petrol to drive to the garage and leave their engines running in the queue …

• that Johnson’s consolation prize was the Labour party’s opening its conference with an attempt to self-destruct, squabbling publicly over internal election procedures with a side offer of old left versus centrism

• the person in Afghanistan’s new regime responsible for prisons, Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, has said “Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security”, claiming it had a deterrent effect (it would certainly deter me from scratching my back) but he didn’t say if he thought it would make people more sympathetic to the Taliban’s interpretation of the Quran in the 21^st century

• charity volunteers can get discounts – I was buying something the other day and was asked if I worked for a charity so I naturally said “yes”, which charity it is and how many hours I do, and they knocked 10% off the bill for me;  if you’re interested, there are probably sites that say which companies do this …

The moral of all this is to keep an open mind about everything, even if you file it as “unconfirmed” or “dubious source”, until you can check it, unless it came from a politician, when you can immediately flag it as the latter.

Multi-culturalism, political integrity (not), being British, wetlands, King Cnut

19 September 2021

After my piece on Emma Raducanu last week, I was shocked to see how many people were getting exercised about multi-culturalism.

Apparently, the US Open women’s finals was no longer about two brilliant players demonstrating outstanding tennis skills, it was about a Brit with a Romanian father and a Chinese mother playing a Canadian with an Ecuadorian father and a Filipino mother.  Raducanu’s Twitter bio apparently says “london|toronto|shenyang|Bucharest” or, in plain English “Up yours”.  I feel proud to live in the same country as somebody who answers critics so simply and unassumingly.

Predictably, Nigel Farage was one of the first out of his cage, picking on her Romanian blood to claim that Londoners would be “concerned” if “a group of Romanian men moved in next to [them]”.  We’d happily swap the man in the house behind ours, who is almost certainly of Anglo-Peasant stock, for a bunch of Romanians.

To be fair, Farage doesn’t seem to be pureblood racist:  his first ex-wife was Irish, his second German, he has some German and French roots himself, and he has always maintained he’s anti-EU, not anti-Europe or racist (apart from the Romanians of course).

Whatever, I wouldn’t want him as our neighbour.

(My DNA shows I’m of Anglo / Celtic / Scandanavian stock, something that inspires me with complete indifference.)

My only slight worry about Raducanu is that, at 18, she’s become world-famous overnight and won £1.8m.  The pressures that this puts on anyone must be immense but she comes over as being well-grounded and had enough insight to pull out of this year’s Wimbledon championships to deal with the stress rather than crash and burn in the tournament, so let’s hope she can return to as normal a life as possible.  She’s said she’s going to let her parents look after the money and hasn’t yet bought anything special, so she’s made a good start.

We can only hope she can live with people in the street recognising her but, if she’s seen the film ‘Hard Day’s Night’, she can use the John Lennon defence when people say “Aren’t you …?” and say “No, she’s six inches taller / shorter than me”.

On this week’s cabinet reshuffle, I can’t top Lucy Mangan’s wonderful summary:  “a variety of ministers are redeployed to stress-test the theory that things can’t get any worse”.

Other worries this week include two more rejections of promises in the manifesto on which the Conservatives were elected.  They’d already reneged on their foreign aid commitment and have now broken their pledges not to increase taxes and to retain the ‘triple lock’ on pensions.  This is on top of Boris Johnson’s pledge last year that there’d be a border in the Irish Sea over his dead body (another promise he still has to keep) while the deal he finally agreed with the EU effectively does just that.

I’d always thought that people voted for political parties because their manifestos said what they would do if elected and breaking such commitments has traditionally been considered a fundamental betrayal of voters’ trust.  Of course circumstances change but manifestos don’t include a clause in small print saying that none of this manifesto will be binding if they do.  Surely any honourable party would now fess up, admit the world has changed beyond their expectations and call a general election with new manifestos?

They’re also insistent on reducing universal credit by more than £1,000 a year on the grounds this was only intended to provide temporary help during the pandemic which they obviously want to believe is over, ignoring the medical experts who disagree.  This loss will plunge an estimated 800,000 more people into poverty (according to the Legatum Institute, a charitable think-tank set up by the Conservative Baroness Philippa Stroud “to create a global movement of people committed to creating the pathways from poverty to prosperity”) and has been condemned by the UN’s poverty envoy.  Johnson still has to explain how this is “levelling up” rather than down.

Shamima Begum has made another appeal following the removal of her British citizenship for a decision she made while still a minor and now regrets.  Why can’t we give her back her UK passport, allow her to return to the country of her birth and let the UK courts decide what should happen to her.  I, for one, have more faith in our justice system than in the judgement of our politicians?

Let’s also get back Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, another Brit the government has abandoned.  Her husband has already contacted the new foreign secretary but, since her predecessor achieved nothing positive and another, earlier predecessor contributed evidence (in Iranian eyes) to her support her original conviction, I’m not deeply optimistic.

And, while the Taliban men have taken one small step forward, Afghan women have taken a Great Leap Backwards and are now to be denied secondary education, presumably in case they turn out to have studied the Qu’ran and prove the Taliban’s oppression of women wasn’t actually ordained by Allah.  (Thinks:  why don’t we give all Afghan women UK passports and bring them over here?  That would finish off the Taliban within a generation.)

On a cheerier note, rewilding projects at Cwm Ivy on the Gower peninsula and the River Tamar have opened areas previously farmed behind embankments, allowing them to flood at high water and revert to sedimentary marshland.  Since the Gower project started in 2013 when it was decided not to repair a breached sea wall, the area has become rich in varied wildlife and attracts migratory birds such as passing ospreys.

So King Cnut was right and, 900 years later, the Victorians who built the sea wall were wrong.  Contrary to the story I first heard about Cnut being seen as weak (or stupid) because he couldn’t stop the tide coming in, it’s generally believed that he was showing people that not even a powerful king had any effect on the sea.  “Out damned tide, out I say”, he shouted at the waves, which didn’t affect them at all but did give Shakespeare a good line to adapt 500 years later.