Mismanagement worldwide, Israeli BS and other biosolids

12 July 2025

Only 20 years too late, last week saw the publication of Sir Wyn Williams’ inquiry into the attempts of the Post Office and Fujitsu to blame their own Horizon computer system’s faults on the people running their post offices for them.  It took Williams 225 days of hearings and evidence from 298 witnesses to discover that about 1,000 people were wrongly convicted, their lives destroyed.  Some of them were sent to prison, at least 13 of them of them committed suicide or self-harmed, and all of their families suffered alongside them – an estimated 10,000 people were affected by the corporate denials.

What makes it all that much worse is that both the Post Office and Fujitsu were aware of the problems with the Horizon system.  One postmistress made 256 calls to the helpdesk about Horizon problems but still ended up in prison, and many others had asked for help when the system produced inaccurate figures.

The report described the scandal as “profoundly disturbing” and said that those who had been unjustly accused were victims of “wholly unacceptable behaviour perpetrated by a number of individuals employed by and/or associated with the Post Office and Fujitsu”.  It has also opened the door to include families in the wider net of those eligible for compensation.

So far, not one of the managers of the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable but the next stage of Williams’ inquiry will look at the question of blame, and a police investigation is in progress.  Perhaps they’ll remember corporate manslaughter was made a specific criminal offence in 2007.

The government is taking another step in the right direction with its proposals to ban the use of non-disclosure agreements when somebody has taken advantage of their seniority to grope, hassle, patronise or otherwise discriminate against another person (usually junior to them).  Until now, if the employer felt a complaint is justified, they could give the person some money in exchange for their promise never to tell anyone else about the abuse, thereby supporting the abuser and risking a repeat performance;  it’s hoped the new proposals will delete this restriction from previous NDAs.

It would be nice to see the government also taking action to stop other abuses of ‘the system’ by organisations like Nationwide Building Society and Thames Water.  Nationwide, a mutual society owned by its member, has refused to allow us to decide if its chief executive, Debbie Crosbie, is ‘worth’ a 43% pay increase to £7m.  It’s argued that, since it took over Virgin Money, it should compare its executives’ pay with the big banks but it hasn’t said why it’s happy to live with pay controls that are less restrictive than banks.  Is Crosbie suddenly ‘worth’ 43% more?  Didn’t it even occur to anyone making the comparison that bankers are overpaid?

Thames Water is equally profligate but with government money.  Having been given an emergency loan to keep the company alive, they gave almost £2.5m of it to just 21 managers and plan to give them the same again in December, as well as a further £10.8m next year.  The chair, Sir Adrian Montague, claimed that creditors had “insisted” on these payments but it was then discovered he’d lied about this and the Guardian has seen and quoted from the minutes of a Thames board meeting defining payments as “retention payments” so as to avoid the legal ban on performance-related bonuses.

This, remember, is the company that is on the verge of bankruptcy and pleading to be let off paying huge fines for mismanagement.

In America, Amazon, the well-known tax dodger, is asking employees to come to work voluntarily (i.e. unpaid, but no pressure …) to help out with ‘Prime Day’.  Will anybody give me odds that managers and board members will be sacrificing several days pay to show solidarity with the people that do the work?

America’s chief executive consistently shows similar signs of incompetence, swaying like a pansy vin a hurricane.  His havering over tariffs has left most of the world in financial limbo, wondering what they’ll be.  The latest is his imposition of a 35% tariff on imports from Canada.

Luckily, or possibly not, the UK has already agreed a deal with Donald Trump that increases the costs of stuff we sell to America by 10%.  UK exporters are not lining the streets and cheering.

Trump still has to announce what tariffs he’s going to impose on imports from the EU but, if they’re more than 10%, Brexiteers can point out that we might have had to wait 9 years, but we’re now doing not as badly as the EU.  Errr ummm.  “Not as badly as …” is something to be proud of?

Trump and his former BFF Elon Musk have fallen out and Musk is now forming his own political party to oppose the Republicans, something that worries Tesla investors who wiped another 10% off the shares on hearing the news.  It’s rumoured that the Democrats are delighted about a new party that will split the Republican vote. 

Israel takes a slightly different approach to their repeated attacks on civilians and aid workers.  Medical officials, humanitarian workers and doctors in Gaza say they’re struggling to cope with thousands of people injured and 800 killed by the continuing Israeli attacks on Palestinians seeking aid.  Israel military has repeated it does not target civilians, takes all feasible precautions to avoid harm to non-combatants and abides by international law.

The UK has gone beyond bullshit and has been spreading human waste on farmlands, calling it “biosolids”.  It’s actually the sludge which is left in the bottom of the tank when the sewage has been treated, well, sort of treated.  They leave the smell unchanged and it still contains flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, microplastics, heavy metals and toxic waste as well as ‘forever chemicals’ which briefly enrich the soil before seeping down into aquifers and running off into stream and rivers.

Down here, the sludge is put in huge tanks that are towed along local roads by tractors that are so large the drivers don’t need any special training because they know they’ll crush anything they hit. 

An accident would be interesting, if fragrant. 

Book thefts, tax dodgers, assisted dying, odd churches, and unknown visitors

22 June 2025

I’ve been muttering away every week for about 10 years now (although they weren’t published here until mid-2018) and I’ve sent a weekly email about it to the local volunteers of the charity for which I started it. 

I will no longer be warning this hard core of readers that another bunch of my hang-ups has been published but I guess they can bookmark the site, or ‘like’ it, or Google ‘Lesser Mutterings’, or do whatever clever people do if they want to keep up with something.

This also removes my (self-imposed) weekly deadline so I can mutter when the mood takes me or when I need to vent my anger at some of life’s stupidities about things like [fill in your own words here].

So here’s a bunch of fascinating but useless information.

For example, did you know the Bible is the one book most frequently stolen from bookshops (presumably the thieves are people who haven’t read it) and one bookseller in Austin, Texas, has said “The average King James Bible with a zipper is about 35 bucks.”  I’ve got several translations of the Bible, including the King James version, and none of them has a zip.  Perhaps I should go with the flow and steal one with a zip.

Our own HMRC spends a fortune trying to catch thieves.  In 2016, they devoted the time of 2,700 staff to investigating possible tax losses but their priorities are worrying:  five times as many people were investigating benefit fraud, which cost them an estimated £1.3bn a year, as those checking tax evasion schemes which cost an estimated £35bn each year.  Tax avoidance is, of course, OK while evasion is basically fiddling the system so as to pay less tax (I over-simplify slightly …)

(Don’t you love the “estimated” losses?  It’s like saying there are 2,500 undiscovered murders in Britain every year.)

Take Amazon, for example, who seem to have structured their UK business so that, in the last reported year, it only paid £932m (including business rates, corporation tax and national insurance contributions) on UK income of £27bn.  However, we must remember that poor old Amazon has to shunt a proportion of its taxable income over to what it describes as its “loss-making” subsidiary in Luxembourg so not much profit is left in the UK for HMRC to tax.

Curiously enough, our friendly neighbour vet retired a few years ago and sold the two privately-owned practices to a subsidiary of a company also registered in Luxembourg.  This company owns almost 3,000 veterinary practices in the UK and has increased its prices by 80% in three years, including changing the crematorium to one which costs three times as much as the old one.  They refuse to answer simple questions such as whether the new crematorium is part of the same group, or even why their vets don’t know that dying dogs tend to void their bladders.  (Freedom of Information Act?  Not here, mate.)

The Assisted Dying bill has now been passed by the House of Commons and goes to the House of Lords so we humans will soon, subject to some very important controls, be granted the same powers as pet-owners to choose a comfortable death rather than suffer months of slow and painful decline.

We’ve also seen Louise Casey’s report into the influence of ethnicity in gangs of adults who groomed children for sexual exploitation.  Her conclusion was, much to the delight of racist bigots, that a disproportionate number of Asian men were among suspects in the North Midlands even though she made it clear that, at a national level, the data is incomplete and inconsistent so it’s not possible to extrapolate her findings to say that the same is true of all grooming gangs in Britain.

It seems possible that an organisation dedicated to the persecution of Asian men could be registered as a church in America where the IRS only looks at the paperwork, not at the organisation’s aims, so some people have taken the mickey by registering daft churches.  For example, you can become an ordained minister of the Church of the Latter-Day Dude online, for free.  Its beliefs are sort of based on Taoism and entirely unconnected with the film The Big Lebowski but take much the same approach to life as the Dude;  for more details, have a look at https://dudeism.com/whatisdudeism/ . 

One of my readers recently introduced me to the political campaigning group Led by Donkeys which was formed in 2018 as an anti-Brexit movement but has since broadened its base and contrasts what politicians (of all stripes) said in the past and the exact opposite they said more recently.

You know we all find our urine smells after we’ve been eating asparagus?  Well, not all of us do.  About 6 in every 100 people can’t smell the sulphur-containing compounds in the thiol family (which are also found in skunk spray), despite most human noses being able to detect the stuff in concentrations as low as a few molecules per billion.  Even curiouser, it’s thought that about 40% of these lucky people don’t produce thiols at all.  As usual (hem hem), I’m in the majority and am always amazed by how fast my body converts the asparagus I’ve just eaten into these thiols and then releases them with other liquid waste.  (There, isn’t that phrased with a delicacy for which I’m not renowned.)

And here’s a helpful hint if you’re alone in the house and nervous:  keep something impressive by your front door, like electric hedge-clippers or a hand-saw or, even better, a chainsaw.  Then, if somebody you don’t know rings on the bell, pick it up before opening the door and let them see you holding it.  But remember, if you have a chain on the door, stand to one side of the door when opening it because a good kick will tear out the screws holding most chains and, if you’re behind the door, it’ll hit you in the face.

On that cheerful note …

Autocracies, microplastics and speeding tickets

14 December 2024

Why are people who are attracted to positions of power inherently unsuited to such positions? Because power corrupts? Or because only the corrupt feel the need to seek power?

And why does it take so long to remove despots from power, particularly the political ones? Because they rule by fear? Or because they surround themselves by people who want to share their power? Or both.

After 25 years as leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad has been deposed in a swift and unexpected coup and the full horrors of his crimes against the Syrian people are being exposed. He fled to Moscow where he is now living under the protection of Vladimir Putin, which sounds a bit like being under the protection of a rabid hyena.

The rebels are led by the Islamist alliance between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and an umbrella group of Turkish-backed Syrian militias called the Syrian National Army. HTS was originally allied to al-Qaida but broke away, became an ‘Organization for the Liberation of the Levant’, and is now the single most powerful rebel group in Syria. America has labelled HTS as a terrorist organisation because it’s believed to have executed people for blasphemy and adultery.

The suddenness of the coup has further destabilised the entire Middle East, politically and economically, and many of the people who fled Syria are now watching the news rather than packing their bags to return home.

Iran is introducing new laws that could lead to the execution of women who send videos of themselves unveiled to people outside Iran, or take part in peaceful demonstrations.

In South Korea, the president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, which only lasted for six hours but gave time enough for Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s supreme leader and pot, to condemn Yoon, kettle, as a dictator. Kim’s only redeeming feature is that he provides immediate clarity for people who want to know what ‘squat’ and ‘stout’ mean.

It’s also clearly only a matter of time before Putin is replaced, which will lead to even greater uncertainties in how new alliances might develop. His ill-judged and continuing invasion of Ukraine may help precipitate such a change.

And all the while, China remains a wild card.

Joe Biden has issued more pardons and commuted more sentences this week, more than any other president in recent history, but hasn’t yet included any people serving federal death sentences. Donald Trump has promised to pardon people who took part in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol Building in 2021 when he takes over in January.

The archetypal autocrat Elon Musk, who seems to be lining himself up as the brains behind Trump, appears to be another with synaptic disconnects in his brain – he comes up with some good ideas, like space programmes, then shows just how unpleasant he is, particularly to women. Some gamblers are even making book on whether Musk will become president of America before Nigel Farage will succeed in dividing the Conservative party enough to become the UK’s prime minister at some point.

Somebody, possibly Franklin D Roosevelt, said you can judge a person by the quality of their enemies and a journalist in The Guardian has recently boasted that Musk has described the paper as “the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth” and “a laboriously vile propaganda machine” (and he’s in charge of X / Twitter!). Why should anyone so powerful express such a strong criticism of a foreign newspaper unless they felt threatened by it, which says a lot both about Musk’s feelings of self-worth and his fear of criticism and The Guardian’s influence internationally?

With all these uncertainties, it would seem prudent for ‘the West’ to gather together in front of blank sheets of paper and look at all the things that might happen, and how they could encourage an outcome that would lead to greater international understanding, acceptance and peace (or at least fewer corpses).

A recent cross-Europe poll of more than 9,000 people in the UK and EU countries, shows that even the Britons who voted for Brexit now appear to support a return to free movement of people between the UK and the EU in exchange for access to the single market. In the UK, more than 50% of ‘leave’ voters said they would now support this.

Brits who still care about concepts like national sovereignty might also like to look at the increasing loss of parliamentary control over the UK’s commercial and state services.

The Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský is in the process of trying to buy Royal Mail, giving a whole new meaning to the word ‘Royal’. Another Czech, Karel Komárek already owns the National Lottery and many of the major UK energy and water companies are owned by foreign interests.

I also believe that, in one of the myriad activities in which I can’t work up any interest, many of ‘our’ football clubs are owned by foreign plutocrats and some England sides seem to include people who aren’t English. I did even hear a rumour that one English side included a Scot but I might be wrong about this.

Suppose everybody worked together, perhaps starting with non-contentious projects like the recent discovery by scientists at the University of Wuhan of a sponge made of cotton and squid bone that appears to filter out 99.9% of microplastics from various water sources. We already know that even the deep oceanic benthic zones contain evidence of microplastics so let’s develop this filtration power on industrial scales. Then we can work on how to remove all the gunk with which humanity has already littered the planet.

Perhaps we could also stop wasting money on unnecessary research into things like “advanced laser detection technology” which picks up radar signals before these signals pick you up, letting drivers know there’s a speed camera ahead so they can slow down if they’re speeding. Having just seen an accident in a 40-zone involving several vehicles, one of them upside-down, and firemen with tin-openers, I’d support the other misanthropes who reckon the best way to avoid getting busted for speeding is to keep to the speed limit.

Small steps forward in the UK and elsewhere, and a Lesser Mutterings recommended supplier

7 September 2024

There are small signs that the UK is beginning to move on from the depredations of recent years.

David Cameron, first of the five prime ministers under the last Conservative government, committed himself to “a bonfire of red tape”.  The principle was of course widely applauded as necessary to “boost the economy” but he tragically failed to tighten regulations that were inadequate or ambiguous, such as fire regulations that are designed to ensure the safety of buildings.

In 2013, following the death of six people in a fire in the cladding of Lakanal House, a London council block, the coroner recommended that fire safety regulations should be tightened up.

Eric Pickles, housing secretary at the time, was keener on cutting back regulations and is reported to have “ignored, delayed or disregarded” matters regarding fire safety and risk to life.  In his recent examination under oath, Pickles still claimed, in the face of hard evidence to the contrary given by his officers and contemporaneous documents, that cutting regulations did not include building regulations.

Then on 14 June 2017, four years later, 72 people (of whom 15 were disabled) were killed in the catastrophic fire at Grenfell Tower, another London council block.

The 1,700-page report of the official inquiry into the latter disaster, which was published last week, has made it clear that almost everyone colluded in concealing the risks and must bear the blame.

The report found that three firms, Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex, “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to … mislead the market”;  the architects, Studio E, did not act as a “reasonably competent architect” and “bears a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster”;  the builders Rydon and Harley Facades, and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s building control department also share responsibility for the fire and the deaths it caused.

The inquiry also says the government was “well aware” of the risks posed by highly flammable cladding “but failed to act on what it knew” and, even worse, that some £250m more has been since been given to firms involved in the incompetent refurbishment of Grenfell Tower

The good news is that this report is likely to get so much publicity that firms are likely to be excluded from future government contracts and, with luck, key individuals will face corporate manslaughter charges.  The bad news is that this is likely to take years and they don’t sound like the sort of people who will die of shame..

More good news is that the new government has scrapped the one-word judgment on state schools after Ofsted ‘inspections’.  Why did it take so long after the suicide of head teacher Ruth Perry after her school was downgraded from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’ to get politicians to make the change to a system that was obviously fundamentally flawed.

The new government has also cancelled the VIP helicopter contract on which Rishi Sunak spent £40m so he could get from London to places like Southampton and Essex.  Not much quicker than the train but so, so much more comfortable my dear.  (Even E2R sometimes used a public train from Kings Cross to get to Kings Lynn on her way to Sandringham.)  The helicopter contract, which Sunak extended in December last year, expires this December and had already been put out to tender by the Conservatives.

Other good news is that, after a 2-month review, the Foreign Office believes there is a “clear risk” that exporting arms to Israel may allow them to commit serious breaches of international law, and the UK is to suspend some arms export licences to Israel. 

According to the Financial Times, our contribution only comprises 1% of Israel’s arms imports (or 0.02% according to GBNews, which has estimated that 98% of arms exports will still be allowed).  Still, we have to start somewhere and any reduction is to be welcomed.

Even better is the news that America is bringing criminal charges against at least six of Hamas’ top leaders for the 7 October attack on Israel which has since led to more than 40,000 deaths.  And no, I’m not one of those who believe that all Gazans are Hamas terrorists even though they elected a Hamas-led government.  Nor do I believe that Brits were all Conservative until very recently and are now all Labour even though they elected both the governments we’ve had this year.

This then made me wonder what would happen in America if Donald Trump was elected president before the various criminal charges he’s facing are resolved.  Can a president pardon himself before a case has been judged?  If they can, and Trump does, surely that’s an implicit admission of guilt.

Do presidents actually have the power to pardon themselves anyway?  Surely the writers of the Constitution couldn’t have intended that, after being elected in November, a president-elect could go on the rampage with a weapon and then pardon themselves after they take office in January.  Or didn’t it cross their minds that Americans might be stupid enough to elect somebody like Trump?

Labour is planning to remove the remaining 92 of the nepo babies from the House of Lords.  Whether that will significantly reduce the numbers actually attending and voting remains to be seen.

Although I conceal it well*, I’m a great believer in complaining about bad service in the hope it will encourage firms to improve their service for others so I think it’s only fair to acknowledge good service when I come across it. 

I recently decided to replace a couple of worn-out shirts with one offered by Savile Row Company and discounted to my price limit, but the discount code didn’t work so I emailed them asking why.  (Have you noticed how few companies now publicise their email addresses, presumably because they provide lousy services and then get fed up with people emailing them to complain?)

Anyway, they answered by return saying that code had expired but they had another which gave a better discount and the shirt arrived 2 days later, even more cheaplier than I’d expected.  Well done Savile Row Company!

*          Comparatively well?

Schadenfreude, Glastonbury, Gwyneth Paltrow, drugs and the election

6 July 2024

Out here in the sticks, there are a lot of narrow roads with high banks on each side and few verges.  There are also a lot of huge tractors that travel for long distances on them, normally towing huge trailers full of farming materials and sometimes, more unnervingly, huge tankers full of what smells like something our local water company is paying them to scatter over fields so it can then perfume the air for miles around before running off into our local rivers.

This inevitably leads to long queues of vehicles behind them and I have a theory that their drivers have a competition to see how many they can pile up behind them.  “When oi got to the top o’ the hill today, oi could see about ‘alf a moile of cars and vans stuck behind me, oi I reckon about 40 on ‘em.  How’d you do, moi lover?”  “Oo ar, oi only catched about 25 behoind me but one on ‘em were a bus.”

Anyway, I saw one on the edge of town on Tuesday that had taken the corner too fast (in a 30 limit) and its trailer had toppled sideways, scattering a huge pile of hay bales over the hedge into the field beyond.  Luckily, the tractor had stayed upright and the driver was standing by it, looking at the chaos and scratching his head, while the tourist cars full of fractious children and white van drivers with nails bitten to the quick made their way past it, waving thank you and other hand signals as they passed.  (That’s ‘passed’ as in ‘passed’, not as in ‘died’.)

Do you know that white vans (some of which are black) are limited to 60 mph on all roads except motorways, even dual carriageways?  Neither do their drivers.  I keep meaning to ask our local police HQ how many white van drivers were prosecuted for exceeding 60 mph on the county’s roads last year.  I reckon less than one.

Further up-country, roads have been busy with the traffic going to Glasto, which seems to have put on a good show with Seasick Steve playing to blues fans.  (A friend told me that he was asked why he called himself Seasick Steve and he replied “Because I get seasick”.)

It was also good to hear that the actor Michael J Fox played guitar with Coldplay.  What a brave man to show thousands of people how devastating Parkinson’s Disease is.

Also appearing was Janelle Monáe, wearing an outfit designed to look like a vulva.  The crowd loved it and shouted about vaginas.  What’s wrong with people?  The vagina is an internal muscular tube while the vulva is what you see from outside and … oh, who cares.

Coldplay’s lead singer is Chris Martin who was born in Exeter and spent 10 years married to Gwyneth Paltrow, an American actor and nepo baby (I noticed her first in the brilliant film, The Royal Tenenbaums, and she has subsequently won an Oscar and a Golden Globe).  Paltrow is now more famous for creating ‘Goop’, a company selling hugely overpriced goods claiming dubious health and well-being benefits that celebrate and enhance female sexuality.

One of her more famous products is, or was, a jade egg that is inserted into the vagina to … I’m not quite sure what it’s supposed to do but have a feeling you’d need to be very careful next time you go to the loo.  She also sold candles supposed to smell like a vagina (that’ll be $75 please).  Personally, I can think of several scents I’d rather candles produced, including that of tankers full of effluent being towed behind local tractors. 

There has even been talk of benefits to be gained from some of the drugs that are currently illegal in the UK despite increasing medical evidence of the benefits that some can offer, such as the analgesic effects that the psychoactive components of cannabis can have on the pain caused by Multiple Sclerosis.

In America, the Drug Enforcement Administration has proposed that cannabis should be considered a medication rather than a narcotic.  It is already legal in some states but its reclassification would mean that it would still need approval by the Food and Drug Administration and a doctor’s prescription in the other states and would remain more controlled than alcohol and tobacco even though cannabis is safer than either.  It would also make it easier to study its effects in the medical field.

We did of course have an election in the UK last week, on America’s Independence Day, and the choice of date proved gratifyingly accurate.  Its results were summarised using exactly the same words in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the i:  “Labour Landslide”.  This seemed a trifle unfair since, while there was undoubtedly an overwhelming shift to Labour, it was clear from the number of seats won by the smaller parties that the result was more a well-earned condemnation of the party that has damaged Britain so badly in the last 14 years.

Even Scotland followed suit and, after several uncomfortable years, the Scottish National Party was decimated.  Actually, it was worse than that because “decimated” originally meant to defeat one tenth of ‘the other side’ and the SNP lost a lot more than a tenth of its MPs.

Even the new Reform party got some seats, including Nigel Farage who, after changing parties several times over his career, was finally elected an MP on his 8^th attempt.  It’ll be interesting to see how the new parliament works with such a wide range of views because it seems closer to representing the views of voters better than previous parliaments.

My diehard Conservative friend and I occasionally discuss the de/merits of Proportional Representation and he recently asked if I was still in favour of PR if it let people from parties I don’t like become MPs.  I replied that he was missing the point because that was exactly what a properly constructed and regulated PR system would achieve.  Just because I don’t like some parties’ policies doesn’t mean that I think they should be excluded from debates and, indeed, I believe that the more different points of view are discussed, the better the ultimate conclusion is likely to be.

Still, its’s going to take a few years to rebuild Britain and I just hope that Labour realises many of us would be happy to pay more tax to rebuild health and social care services and, if it impoverishes the privateer contractors who’ve been ripping billions of pounds out of public services, tough.

LTNs, angry politicians, extremism and kindness

16 March 2024

Recent surveys have shown that the government misjudged public reaction to low traffic neighbourhoods.  Not all have worked as hoped but most of the schemes launched four years ago are still in place, making the government’s pledge to get rid of “anti-car measures” rather stupid.  A recent study commissioned by Rishi Sunak showed that support for LTNs in Birmingham, London, Wigan and York averaged 45%, with only 21% opposing them.  Curiously, this report disappeared into the bowels of Whitehall and only became public after it was leaked.

Israel doesn’t need surveys because Amicai Eliyahu, the Israeli Minister of Heritage, has unilaterally called for the Muslim month of Ramadan (which started last week) to be “wiped out”.  Do we need a clearer example of the gulf between Judaism and Zionism?  Ramadan Kareem to all Muslims everywhere.

The former Conservative Lee Anderson is just as prejudiced, describing a pro-Palestinian march as “an angry baying mob” and adding “This is a murderous, vile, wicked thing that we see on our streets, and the police are doing nothing”, blaming Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, for demonstrations taking place all over the country.  He also said “In the real world, my parents are watching this on TV every night and they’re disgusted.”  If anyone know this Anderson geezer, perhaps they could get him to tell his parents how to use the off switch, and where the Valium is kept.

Luckily, another nasty piece of work, Michael Gove (yes that Gove, the one who screwed the education systems for an entire generation of hapless children), is taking action against extremism.  Entirely the wrong action but he’s taking action. 

He’s planning to define extremist groups and individuals by their motivations rather than by their actions and is claiming this new definition will tackle the rise of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in Britain.  This was of course the Gove who described Israel as “a light to the world” at a Conservative Friends of Israel event in 2017 but he’s now defining extremism very widely as anything affecting “the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” or “the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights”. 

Just to cover all bases, he’s included anything that would “intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve” either of the above aims but he’s said the policy will be “non-statutory” and he’ll be preparing a list of extremist organisations and individuals, which is even more worrying, and irritating little groups like Stop Oil, Greenpeace and even Black Lives Matter could be included.

Another draconian power to be taken away from the justice system and given to the police whose objectivity is … er … good heavens, is that the time?

Even more worryingly, possibly as part of the government’s commitment to destroying the NHS and transferring its money to private business owners, it now seems they’re defrocking competent medics for their personal beliefs.

Talk about a barss ackwards approach to controlling extremism.

I wouldn’t mind being arrested for doing something (in fact I was once, on a peaceful sit-down CND demonstration a long time ago – fined £1 and given a week to pay since you ask) but I’d object like hell to being arrested for giving money to Greenpeace. 

I’ve always been much more concerned about the competence of a medic than whether they believe that Tommy Robinson is God and the ‘wokerati’ are Satan’s acolytes, or that the climate emergency is going to destroy the world our children will have to live in.  However, Dr Sarah Benn, who was a Birmingham GP, is intelligent enough to worry about this and has become an activist – sorry, ‘extremist’ – and has been arrested and imprisoned several times for trying to draw attention to the coming environmental crisis.

Doctors must tell the General Medical Council if they are charged with or convicted of a criminal offence but Benn went beyond this by telling the GMC and her local NHS employerevery time she was arrested, saying “There is no guidance as to any kind of protest or activist-related stuff by the GMC … but I wanted to be transparent.”

And on to an even nastier piece of work:  Frank Hester, the Conservative party’s biggest donor, who said that looking at Diane Abbott, Britain’s longest-serving black MP, made “you want to hate all black women” and said she “should be shot”.  In a subsequent statement, Hester said he admitted he’d been rude about her but “the criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”.  I worry about people who don’t understand what they say.

According to GBNews, “Senior and well-placed Tories have confirmed to GB News that the Tories are in talks about the additional £5million donation from Frank Hester, in additional (sic) to the £10million which the millionaire businessman gave to the party last year” so he hasn’t even got the entire party onside.  Rishi Sunak called Hester’s remarks “racist and wrong” but has so far refused to return the £15m to Hester, and he’s right not to do so:  the £15m shouldn’t be returned to Hester (for whom it would effectively be tax-free income), it should be given to charities working on feminist and racist issues, perhaps even Black Lives Matter because that would piss Gove off.

Coincidentally, Hester’s software firm has coincidentally been awarded lucrative NHS and prison contracts coincidentally by the government …

The BIG story of the week was that a mother had edited a family photograph before letting anyone see it and caused a tremendous fuss.  Elsewhere, photographers whose pictures have won prizes explain how they took them and how they had subsequently adjusted the images.

But, without doubt, the best story of the week was that Esther Ghey, Brianna’s mother, met Emma Sutton, mother of one of Brianna’s murderers.  “I don’t blame her for what her child has done” Ghey said and the two of them discussed “the challenges of parenting”.  Doesn’t the world need more people like her to demonstrate the power of kindness:  Esther Ghey, I love you.

Bad interviews, murder, crooks and the climate emergency

17 February 2024

Two bad interviews this week made the news.  The first one was Rishi Sunak’s Q&A session with members of the public on GBNews.  The introduction said that neither GBNews nor the prime minister knew what questions were coming but the presenter knew who was going to ask the next question so somebody somewhere had selected the questions.

I initially thought this was a brave thing for Sunak to do until I realised that he knew his frailties and had prepared answers that basically said “I obviously can’t talk about individuals but the government has achieved …”

Unfortunately, the camerawork was so bad, especially the camera that went round the floor in circles and showed Sunak’s back while he made his opening remarks, that I got very restless and went to do something useful when he said sending people to Rwanda would be “a deterrent”.  He’s trying to force through a law that would describe Rwanda as a safe place to send refugees so how can it be “a deterrent”? 

In Moscow, Tucker Carlson, a right-wing American journalist, interviewed Vladimir Putin.  Putin said afterwards he’d been surprised by the lack of “sharp questions” and wished Carlson had been more aggressive so he could have been aggressive himself.  Eh?  Putin can be tamed by gentle questions? 

In a later interview with Russian TV presenter, Pavel Zarubin asked him who’d be better for Russia, Joe Biden or Donald Trump.  Putin replied “Biden. He is a more experienced, predictable person, a politician of the old school [but] we will work with any US president who the American people have confidence in.”

The latest murder (presumably) authorised by Putin (presumably) is that of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny who was being held under a “special regime” in a prison camp inside the Arctic circle where winter temperatures can rise as high as -30^oC. 

Navalny consistently exposed and reported on fraud and government corruption and, in 2013, won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral election which was widely believed to have been rigged.  He went on to identify and report on a huge palace built on the shores of the Black Sea for Putin and, in 2020, fell into a coma after suspected Novichok poisoning by the Russian security service.  He was surprisingly allowed to go to Germany for treatment where he unexpectedly recovered.

However, Russia underestimated his bravery and his commitment to expose the corruption there and he returned in January 2021, knowing that he would be arrested and sentenced to a term in prison that he would probably not survive.

It’s also been revealed in the 2021 leak about a secret operation in 2016 that Putin had personally decided to support Trump’s election campaign because Trump was “mentally unstable” and such a leader would destabilise American society and weaken America’s negotiating powers.

Trump’s recent claim that he’d support Russia’s invasion of NATO countries if they didn’t contribute to the defence budget makes it look as if Putin’s assessment was right.  And yet Trump still seems to have the support of a frightening number of American voters who are happy to vote for someone who has already been found guilty in civil courts and is now being tried on umpteen criminal charges.

The most recent judgment found Trump, his eldest sons, and their associates guilty in the New York Financial fraud case and ordered them to pay more than $350m as well as banning him from running any New York business for three years (Eric and Donald Jr have only been banned for two years).  This is in addition to the $83m he had to pay to the writer E Jean Carroll for defaming her.

Judge Arthur Engoron wrote that, in the fraud case, the defendants’ “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological”.  What we’re now waiting to see is whether Trump, who must now pay the $350m into the Court even if he appeals, actually has that much in liquid assets.

A study by the University of Michigan revealed this week that 15% of Americans don’t believe that the world’s climate is changing and glaciers and polar icecaps are melting.  What I find encouraging about this study is that it also implicitly says that 85% of Americans do believe the world is facing a climate emergency.

Other scientists have found that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (known to its friends as AMOC) has slowed by 15% since 1950 and is heading for a sudden shift.  The Gulf Stream, which keeps temperatures in the British Isles and western Europe temperate, is part of AMOC;  if / when the Gulf Stream fails, we will be reminded that southern England is at the same latitude as Newfoundland, where it is not unknown for the sea to freeze, Edinburgh is at the same latitude as the south of Alaska and Shetland is at the same latitude as the south of Greenland.

AMOC is a complex system of waters moving around the Atlantic ocean and carrying carbon and nutrients in the warmer surface waters northwards from the tropics.  When it gets to the Arctic Circle, it cools and sinks to the bottom of the sea and returns southwards.  However, as the world gets warmer, the Arctic ice sheets melt faster and reduce the salinity of the surrounding sea water which affects the sinking of the saltier warmer water so the whole system will just stop.

There seems little doubt amongst experts that this will happen if things don’t change although there are differences about whether this will happen in the next decade or the next century but computer modelling indicates that if it does happen, it will happen very suddenly.

The volcanic eruptions in Iceland have produced lava flows that inexorably consume roads and houses show just how puny and powerless humanity is so perhaps we should open our eyes and start taking climate change seriously.  We can’t stop tectonic plates moving but perhaps we can make small personal contributions by avoiding foods that make us fart.

Billionaires, greed, sewage, Trump, fêtes, bells and trees

13 May 2023

It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism is a book written by the independent senator Bernie Sanders, the great white hope of the American left.  In it he asserts that billionaires shouldn’t exist and, when questioned by Chris Wallace on HBO Max recently, he was asked: “Are you basically saying that once you get to $999m that the government should confiscate all the rest?”  His reply?  “Yeah, you may disagree with me but, fine, I think people can make it on $999m. I think that they can survive just fine.”

Why are there so few of us who are tempted to cheer when we hear this said publicly and have no desire to be billionaires ourselves?  I too believe everybody could scrape by on $999m (we manage well on a tiny fraction of that), and I think it’s sad that so few otherwise intelligent people agree.

So many company directors seem to over-value themselves that it’s become acceptable for them to take obscene amounts of money out of the company.  This week pig-in-chief seems to be Ken Murphy, boss of Tesco.  Last year, Tesco’s profits fell by 50% despite charging customers 7% more, and dividends paid to shareholders (the owners) were cut by 12%.  The company said it’s been an “incredibly tough year for customers” (but failed to add the management had done very nicely thank you.)

Now these figures are known and the value of customers’ Tesco points is being cut by a third Murphy’s likely to get at least 15% more next year, around £5m.

But are all the accusations of irresponsibility and greed beginning to shame them?

The chief executives of Yorkshire Water and Thames Water and the owner of South West Water have declined bonuses this year because of the publicity given to their practice of dumping unwanted sewage into rivers and onto beaches. 

And the Post Office has reluctantly admitted it was wrong to have paid large bonuses to its directors after it falsely charged more than 900 local post office operators with theft between 1991 and 2015 because the PO’s own Horizon computer systems didn’t work properly. 

Nick Read, the CEO has now agreed to return some (not all, naturally) of the bonus he got last year and Lisa Harrington, who chaired the committee that approved the bonuses, has resigned (sorry, in a fit of optimism, I misread that) apologised.

Back in America, Donald Trump has finally been proved a sexual predator even though the jury didn’t think there was enough evidence to convict him of rape.  Nevertheless, he was fined a punitive $5m, about $2m for the sexual abuse and close to $3m for defamation by branding E Jean Carroll a liar. 

Almost 40 other criminal charges against him are currently being investigated, from fraud to theft (fiddling his taxes), including an earlier outstanding claim from Carroll but the more criminal he’s shown to be, the more popular he seems to become.  Are convicted criminals allowed to serve as president over there?

Last weekend, my younger son came down from London with my daughter-in-law and grand-daughter (known by my wife as ‘the pocket rocket’) to avoid the coronation so I took them to the village celebrations. 

As so often happens at these things, we were joined by a retired couple and started talking.  They said they were “Russian British” who had both been university lecturers until they moved here 9 years ago.  He turned out to be interested in Russian science fiction which is part of one of my son’s specialist subjects.

She’d taught applied maths and IT so we talked about AI and quantum computing;  well, she did while I prompted her with suitable questions about how ‘spooky action at a distance’ and the complementarity of electrons might affect technology. 

On Wednesday Big Ben failed to sound at 1pm when the clock stopped and it was 1.47pm before the hands had been moved forward to the correct time. 

When I was even younger than I am now, our local church didn’t have bells but it did have some large loudspeakers in its spire and a gramophone down below where they’d play records of bells to attract the faithful to worship.  I’m not going to say where it was but if any of you were ever woken late one evening by the Everly Brothers’ boogie rock rendering of ‘Lucille’ played very loudly, I hope you enjoyed it.

Some interesting work is going on in a Utah forest of 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens.  Scientists are wondering if they are actually just a single organism and the ‘trees’ are the branches of a single interlinked root system.

This week also sees the publication of a new book, The Power of Trees, by the German forester Peter Wohlleben who also published The Hidden Life of Trees in 2015.  It describes trees’ ability to help cool the earth with the volume of water released from the leaves:  a single beech tree can ‘breathe out’ 500 litres of water a day.  This release of water also lowers the atmospheric pressure round the tree, drawing in air as a slight breeze.

In forests, the change in air pressure sucks in air from the oceans which then returns water to the trees as rain in a natural virtuous circle.  On Primrose Hill, the air under a single tree can be 2^o cooler than in the open park and the temperature in an ancient woodland can be 15^o cooler than in the centre of a city.  Next time you’re passing a tree, give it a pat and say “thank you”.

Tuesday’s Guardian reported that, in June 2022, the then Prince Charles and the then prime minister Boris Johnson had argued because the “… Prince of Wales had criticised the plan to deport people travelling across the Channel to Rwanda”.  I’ve travelled across the channel quite a lot but have never yet come ashore in Rwanda.

I have to explain this because I showed it to a friend who didn’t see the syntactical problem.  Mind you, this is the same friend who heard someone talking about contraception and decided the best type of oral contraception would be to say “NO” very loudly and, in case this didn’t work, he offered a few choice phrases that might convey the message more strongly.

Lies, conspiracy theories and Intelligent Design

29 April 2023

“I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes”

Thus spake Bob Dylan in 1997 and, 26 years later, nothing has changed and conspiracy theories abound.

How to not-lie was demonstrated by Piers Morgan, a journalist I hold in about the same regard as I do Andrew Neil.  Prince Harry has claimed Morgan knew about the hacking of his mother’s phone while he edited News of the World which reported that Diana had once phoned Oliver Hoare “three times in 9 minutes and hung up as she heard Oliver’s voice”.  This seems remarkably precise a report to have been based on guesswork.  Also, the television presenter Jeremy Paxman, speaking under oath at the Leveson inquiry, said Morgan had once explained how a mobile phone’s voicemails could be hacked.

Morgan is on record as saying “I’ve never hacked a phone nor told anybody to hack a phone” which, without actually lying, carefully avoids saying he knew it was being done but, by avoiding a categorical denial, he seems to admit it.

America of course has Donald Trump who wouldn’t recognise the truth if it jumped up and tore his throat out.  Having been accused raping the advice columnist E Jean Carroll in 1996, Trump, the man who was recorded saying he could grab any woman’s pussy because of who he was, has denied it and said “She’s not my type”.  This probably wasn’t intended as a compliment but I’d have taken it as one.

His defence claims she’s only bringing the case to sell copies of her book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal but still has to explain why, if this is the case, it’s taken her over 3 years to bring the case because the book was published in July 2019.  When Trump’s team tried to say it was an anti-male treatise, the judge had to explain that it was a satire referring back to Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay entitled A Modest Proposal. 

Another American liar, the far-right Tucker Carlson, has been fired from Fox News by the Murdochs for repeatedly lying about Trump’s having been robbed of the 2020 election.  He hasn’t yet said “I was only reading the autocue.”

Not all lies are quite as obvious, as we saw with last week’s resignation of Richard Sharp’s resignation from the chair of the BBC.  Before he applied for the job, he’d made donations to the Conservative party and discussed the possibility of applying for the job with that year’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, who was also the person who would ultimately make the appointment.  Later in the process, he helped Johnson find a guarantor for a loan of £800,000 because he’d run out of money but he forgot to mention these facts to the appointments panel and has now been found to be in breach of the governance code.

The problem is that, after 13 years in power, the Tories find it difficult to find anything that’s better than it was when they took over (yes, including Brexit) and are constantly replacing incompetent leaders and having to chuck out the bullies and tax-fiddlers they’d promoted.

I think it’s sad that Simon Case, who was for a while his Principal Private Secretary, said of Johnson “I don’t know what more I can do to stand up to a prime minister who lies.”

Lying and obfuscation have become part of everyday life and old-fashioned concepts like honesty and integrity have gone out of the window.  Of course we have all lied at some point, sometimes not even for the benefits of others, but most of us try to keep our honour intact.  My Conservative friend, for example, came out of his box at me recently because he thought I’d said something misleading but he then discovered I’d been right, apologised and made a fulsome apology.

The trouble is that it all gets conflated with group loyalties and conspiracy theories and people would rather support ‘their’ people than step back and take a fresh look.

We’ve been conditioned to accept all of this as normal, just as the truth has been hidden behind weasel words:  we’ve been repeatedly told that the Illegal Migration bill (which the Commons passed last week) is about small boats crossing the Channel.  It isn’t – nobody actually cares about small boats crossing the Channel.  What some of us do care about is the people in the boats who are desperately trying to find a better life.  Talking about turning boats back makes it sound less horrible.

The same thing happened to Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, who supports the Palestinian people.  This has upset Israel who have wilfully accused him of anti-semitism even though Waters himself has repeatedly said he “disdains” the state of Israel not Judaism, which are two quite different things.

The curious thing about conspiracy theorists, and people who can’t admit that a group they support can ever be wrong about anything, is that better-educated people are more likely to believe in cover-ups and dubious motives.  This may be because they tend to be more prevalent at times of stress, national and international, economic and social, when the more intelligent people are wondering how we got here.

Our gullibility may also be affected by our decision-making styles.  At one end of the spectrum are people who do things because it seemed a good idea at the time while, at the other end, are those who don’t do anything until they’ve gathered and judged all the evidence.  Most of us are somewhere in the middle and would love to believe in, say, having a guardian angel but find it difficult to believe that alien civilisations have travelled vast distances to live in a cave under the Andes.

If they’re repeated often enough, false views of ‘reality’ can become more attractive until they become embedded in our belief systems which then refuse to consider contradictory evidence on the grounds that the evidence was fabricated, or due to bias;  and, in the case of conspiracy theories, evidence may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy, invented by people who are part of the plot.

In the absence of evidence for either view, its very absence is itself proof of the conspiracy.

Consider the ‘Intelligent Design’ theory which posits that some sort of intelligence was behind the creation of the universe because the whole thing is too complex to have arisen by chance or, in nature, by Darwinian ‘natural selection’.  Others believe in ‘creationism’ (which is different from Intelligent Design in that it tends to start from religious beliefs) but both believe in the existence of a Creator.

Most scientists tend to believe that the universe just grew, pretty much at random, with explosions and implosions, and life on earth developed from the first dandelion that crawled out of the ancient seas and evolved into Boris Johnson as it travelled round the world on continents that separated and collided.

William of Ockham’s view, 7 centuries ago, was that the most likely explanation was the one that involved the fewest variables (I paraphrase) so Intelligent Design seems less convincing because it requires the addition of a Creator.  But who knows?  There’s so much going on that science can’t yet explain, perhaps the answer really is 42 and we will, as we evolve further, begin to understand why.

Commercial days, dodgy builders, 1923, assisted dying and a DIY joke

18 February 2023

Valentine’s Day has bin an gorn with less than one card arriving here.  This is of course A Good Thing because it meant nobody wasted money on a day when you’re supposed to share what’s in your heart, not your bank account.  Mothering Sunday became commercialised donkeys’ years ago and some bright marketeer then invented a Fathers’ Day.  I’m waiting for a First Cousin Once Removed Day because 60% of mine are especially attractive and, compared with their bearded, muscular father, prove that an ability to build drystone walls is not genetic.

Another shout out for Jacinda Ardern – Nicola Sturgeon has followed her example and stepped down as SNP leader because, she said, it was the right time to do so.  Without wishing to be sexist, how many men can you imagine stepping down from anything because they felt they’d done all they could and it wasn’t enough?  Think of Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, both of whom thought they were brilliant and had to be pushed.  (I’m not including David Cameron because he resigned as soon as he realised he should have paid more attention to the words in the Brexit question.)  And it’s not just men:  Theresa May and Liz Truss both needed to be pushed.

Another interesting thought was raised this week when somebody pointed out that Richard Drax, the Conservative MP for south Dorset, said of slavery that “no one can be held responsible today for what happened many hundreds of years ago”, but failed to use the same logic to add that no one today should be able to benefit from what happened many hundreds of years ago. 

This is of course closely connected with my belief that nobody should be allowed to have the benefit of land that was stolen from ‘the common people’ or money that was ‘accumulated’ by their forbears.  So let’s increase a sliding scale of inheritance taxes (why aren’t they still called death duties?) which would rise to 100% over a certain total.

Our electoral system is sadly so unfit for purpose that any government that did this would disappear at the next general election but what a lovely dream to have.

It’s not often that Turkey takes the lead but, after the recent earthquake that is likely to have killed more than 100,000 people, a total that will never be known exactly because some of the dead could be removed with the rubble of collapsed buildings, they seem to be doing just that.  They’ve already issued 130 warrants for the arrest of people to blame for the structural inadequacies of buildings that collapsed;  cynics believe they only did this to protect the government from accusations of its own corruption but how many arrest warrants have been issued to those responsible for the Grenfell Tower disaster?

Turkish property developers built housing using the cheapest possible contractors who used the cheapest possible materials (sounds familiar doesn’t it).  Many of the properties were then sold as luxury housing “compliant with the latest earthquake safety standards” while the state turned a blind eye and even passed laws in 2011 and 2013 preventing civil engineers, architects and urban planners from interfering in the approval and inspection of building projects.

Japan has suffered from regular earthquakes for centuries and, while it’s impossible to prepare for such a large earthquake, their buildings can withstand a lot of quaking.  They have more modern science and techniques now but, in the old days, they relied a lot on wood, which could move and flex without collapsing.

Two of my great grandparents and two of my grandparents worked and live there so my mother was born in Japan and they didn’t return permanently to the UK until she was 13 so she had some experience of earthquakes (stand in a doorway to get the extra protection of the doorframe if you can’t get outside) and I still have the ring bought to replace my GGM’s engagement ring which was lost in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 that killed an estimated 140,000 people in the ensuing tsunami and fires, leaving the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama looking much like Hiroshima did after an atom bomb exploded over it 22 years later.

According to the US National Weather Service, 1,800 weather balloons are now launched worldwide every day but only one in five of them are recovered and the Chinese balloon that was finally shot down after passing over Canada and America followed a path that seemed to be very similar to the tracks of jetstreams that meteorologists show us. 

It seems that at least some of the subsequent objects were ‘sky trash’, things like used weather balloons and gadgets launched by governments and scientific researchers, and possibly even plastic bags that have got caught up in air currents that carry them round the world.

In Russia, Marina Yankina has been found dead after jumping from a window.  She was the finance director (!) of the Western Military District, one of the Russian army’s five geographical battalions.  The District’s leader has been replaced several times since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine a year ago. 

What a coincidence that so many senior Russian people have hurled themselves out of windows in recent months.  Perhaps it’s a new epidemic that’s transmitted by the Putin thugs who insist defenestration is the only cure, waving guns around to prove it.

Lee Anderson, the new vice-chair of the Conservative party, would like to see the death penalty reinstated.  Interviewed for the Spectator, he said “Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed.”  (He failed to add that many people had never committed a crime before being executed.)

Other forms of assisted dying came on Thursday evening when Channel 4 broadcast a programme on the pros and cons of legalising assisted dying for people with a terminal illness (which is supported by 77% of the British people).  They talked to people who wanted to die as well as some physicians who supported it and some physicians who opposed it. 

It was made especially poignant by being jointly presented by Prue Leith, a passionate campaigner for the legalisation of assisted dying in Britain, and her son Danny Kruger, a Conservative MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group, Dying Well, that opposes euthanasia.  It was also unusual that both of them actually listened to what people told them and were able to discuss their reactions in a non-confrontational way.  Neither of them had changed their basic beliefs by the end but it seemed that both had gained additional insights into the practicalities and Kruger remained worried about how a law could be framed to avoid risking the abuse of vulnerable people.

The final scene was of them sitting on a park bench, holding hands and agreeing to disagree, with Kruger saying that he’d respect his mother’s decisions if she chose to go that way at the end of her life.

A cancer patient in America recently developed foreign accent syndrome.  Similar cases are more common (or, rather, less uncommon) in people who have suffered a head trauma, including strokes, or have psychiatric disorders.  The cancer patient started talking with an Irish accent during treatment despite having no Irish blood and never having been there, and he continued to use it until his death.  No explanation has ever been offered for the condition.

Or for a headline in the Daily Telegraph last weekend that said “One-legged British crime boss arrested in Thailand after five years on the run”.  Insert your own joke here.