19 April 2025
The really big news this week is that Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceflight programme launched one of their phallic-symbol pods ‘manned’ entirely by ‘chicks’ into space for 11 minutes so they could patronise show the world how enlightened they are. Blue Origin is, of course, targeted at the tourism industry rather than any serious exploration of spacei.
Wouldn’t it be better if space programmes were crewed by the people who could contribute most to scientific research regardless of what gender was assigned to them at birth (which is known to be an arbitrary judgement in some cases)? Sadly, as Bob Dylan said “I don’t think it’s liable to happen / Like the sound of one hand clappin’.”
Donald Trump has of course banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs so they can happily exclude females, with or without penises, in future unless the PR justifies it.
Bezos’s Amazon gave $1m to Trump’s 2024 election campaign and Bezos himself stopped the Washington Post publishing an editorial supporting Kamala Harris. By a complete coincidence, Trump’s gang has just awarded a $2bn contract to Blue Origin.
(I’ve a friend who, as far as I know, doesn’t have any particular problems with his own penis but gets tremendously agitated about where trans women should be allowed to ‘wash’ if they haven’t undergone a full physical transformation; I can only think this is because he thinks he’s a traditional man who knows how to protect chicks better than they do themselves.)
The same friend also seems to think that I must support Labour because he’s sussed I’m not a great fan of Trump or Elon Musk – why does my computer keep printing Muck when I’m trying to write Musk? – or any of the 22 Conservative leaders we’ve had in the last few years (fact checkers should note that I have guessed how many leaders the Tories have consumed in the last 35 years and 22 might be wrong).
In fact, I think Labour’s proposal to reduce benefits is stupid and their decision to take the gender assigned at birth as definitive reminded me of the old saw “For every complex problem, there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong”.
Last week, I also came across a quotation from the 20th century economist Walter E Williams who said “Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.”
More interesting reading is likely to be found in Corinna Lain’s book Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, which is to be published on 22 April. She describes her motive in writing this as “I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day”, something I’ve often wondered.
Her answer is that a significant factor is who performs the executions and she offers Missouri’s chief executioner from 1995-2006, Dr Alan Doerhoff, who was responsible for 54 of the state’s 65 executions, as an example; he has since boasted that “Nobody will ever do as many [executions] as I have.” There are a lot of words that describe such people, most of them ending in ‘pathy’.
Prisoners on death row were allowed to employ lawyers to carry out a (limited) inquiry into Doerhoff’s experience and, under oath, the executioner testified that that he had problems mixing the drugs “so right now we’re still improvising”. He also said that he “sometimes transpose[d] numbers” and that he was dyslexic (he later denied this saying he just sometimes just got numbers muddled).
In Arizona, one of the ‘IV team executioners’ had once been a nurse but their licence was suspended after they’d been arrested multiple times for Driving Under the Influence while impaired by alcohol or other drugs. In one 10-day period in 2007, they were arrested three times in Arizona.
Another member of the team had no medical licence and also had a record of DUI as well as bouncing a cheque. Their only relevant experience was once serving in a military medical corps (although they hadn’t actually inserted an IV for 15 years).
Aren’t these people on the wrong end of the needle?
As at 1 January 2024, 2,241 people were on death row in America; 58% of them are not classified as ‘white’.
Not all states use injections for executions so perhaps frustrated British shooters who are being stopped from killing wildlife on peatlands over here would like to satisfy their urge to kill by applying for these jobs?
For some reason, this brings to mind a recent article in Which? magazine on the different types of parking tickets issued in the UK. This was all new to me and I can do no better than quote from their article:
“Most parking tickets will be one of these three:
Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) or Excess Charge Notice (ECN) – usually issued by the council on public land, such as a high street or council car park.
Parking Charge Notice – issued by a landowner or parking company on private land, such as a supermarket car park.
Fixed Penalty Notice (FPN) – issued by the police on red routes, white zig zags or where the police manage parking.”
They are enforced in different ways and the private parking companies have the empathetic public-spiritedness of Hitler’s Waffen SS. Even when they allow people 20 minutes free parking, if you spend 10 minutes there, then spend 9 minutes finding a working payment machine and queuing behind people trying to get it to work, then take 2 minutes getting back to your car and leaving the car park, tough. Leave it and £1.90 goes up exponentially – the highest I’ve heard of so far is £180.
Which? also offers advice on dealing with usurious increases, but there are no guarantees of success.
Lesser Mutterings 