Politics from the sublime to the ridiculous, and conspiracy theories

19 July 2025

Donald Trump has turned against Vladimir Putin, one of his former BFFs, and has agreed to send arms to Ukraine.  His eyes seem to have been opened by the patient efforts of other NATO leaders who have opened his eyes to Putin’s true nature.  One European diplomat admitted that, when talking to Trump, “there is a line between flattery and self-abasement, and we happily crossed it”.

In Israel, Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009, is brave enough to speak out about his country’s intentions for Gaza and its ongoing attacks there, describing them as war crimes, saying that building a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Gaza to house the surviving Palestinians would be “a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing”.  He also said “In the United States there is (sic) more and more and more expanding expressions of hatred to Israel … we call them antisemites [but] I don’t think that they are only antisemites, I think many of them are anti-Israel because of what they watch on television, what they watch on social networks.”

Xenophobia is also spreading in Britain and former Tory MP Douglas Carswell recently wrote in his regular column for the Daily Telegraph that “low-skilled, non-western immigrants” are a “burden” on the country and what is needed is “a detailed plan to take foreign nationals off the benefit system and remove them from the country”.

Other disillusioned politicians include those on the far left of the Labour party who support Jeremy Corbyn and are forming a new party for disappointed Labour voters.  Nigel Farage has done the same for disappointed Conservatives by setting up the Reform party, and many Labour voters have already moved to support the Lib Dems and the Green party.  With a head start, Farage’s gang has made surprising progress and, if Corbyn’s gang follows suit, we could have four large parties as well as various minority parties, which will make future elections in England and Wales tremendously exciting (or is that an oxymoron?)

The Scots blew their chance to join the mêlée by forming the Scottish National Party which sounds too much like a single-issue party and dissuades voters whose main interest in maintaining ready access to deep-fried Mars bars.  (I had one once and it was delicious but I couldn’t move for 48 hours and, three days, later, all my teeth fell out.)

Wouldn’t it be fun if even more groups broke away and split the vote ten ways, leaving Plaid Cymru with a majority in the House of Commons.  I realise you could claim they too look like a single-issue party but only if you speak Welsh, which 70% of the population of Wales don’t.

Following in Farage’s footsteps, another of Trump’s former BFFs, Elon Musk, is setting up the America Party to compete with the Republicans.  It hasn’t published a manifesto, nor is it clear what it will stand for although, when he announced it, Musk said “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

As well as exploding rockets, Musk made headlines when his association with Trump led to a devastating fall in the price of Tesla’s shares, which was helped by the news that the cheaper electric cars made by the Chinese company BYD (an upmarket Kia) are outselling Tesla cars in the UK.  Musk’s latest problem arose when his AI-based chatbot company Grok posted antisemitic replies and praised Hitler.  They grovelled and blamed a faulty software update but Grok still sounds unpleasantly like somebody retching.

Travis from Texas, a man described as “large” by an interviewer because they couldn’t bring themselves to write ‘obese’, used to tell another chatbot called Lily Rose about interesting things that had happened to him and, as time went by, he fell in love with ‘her’ and, with his human wife’s approval, married her in “a digital ceremony”.  And he’s not alone.  It’s probably the result of aliens subtly manipulating humans through the software we use.

While the latest news is that faults in the Air India plane’s systems had been reported shortly before the accident, there’s still plenty of scope for conspiracy theorists in the partial release of information from the black box of the flight that crashed last month killing 260 people in the plane and on the ground.  Both the switches that send fuel to the engines were turned off shortly after take-off.  One of the pilots asked why the other had turned them off and he said he hadn’t but we don’t know which pilot said what.  They managed to switch one of them back on again but it was too late and they died.

So were there any passengers on board that a terrorist group wanted to kill?  Did one of the pilots hold a grudge against the other one?  Both passed the routine pre-flight breathalyser test but did one of them have personal problems?  Was one of them sleeping with the other one’s partner?  Was there a target in the student building they hit?  Had a mechanic sabotaged the controls?  Were the gods angry? 

My brother knows someone who works in crash investigation and says the last words recorded are often “Mayday Mayday oh shit” but he was disturbed by the recordings from the fatal crash of one flight whose pilot didn’t want to stop for fuel on the way home.  The co-pilot said there wasn’t enough fuel to do it without stopping but the pilot insisted.  Some time later, the co-pilot said “I think we should put our uniform jackets on now”.  “Why?” asked the pilot and the answer was “So they can identify our bodies”.

But, to end on a cheerier note, I didn’t know much about Mae West until I saw a piece in Commonplace Fun Facts recently and it seems she was … feisty … and wore silk lingerie when she was sent to jail – see https://commonplacefacts.com/2025/07/13/mae-west-career-bio/.  For others like me, who are always finding something more fascinating than doing the washing, this site is a godsend …

Armed worship, Donald v Francis, BOTB, big city and lost keys

3 May 2025

Last week started with a sobering moment on TV last Sunday evening Louis Theroux had to ask an Israeli soldier not to point a gun at him while he was filming The Settlers, a documentary about the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.  He suggested to one of them who was trying to sneak into Gaza to decide where the new Jewish settlements should be that their philosophy sound more like sociopathy.  The programme included a film of an unarmed Palestinian being shot and seriously wounded;  we were told that his gun licence was subsequently revoked by the Israelis but he was never arrested.

Some of the settlers had even come from America to build homes in the land they thought their God had given them, and they all carried guns.  Theroux didn’t ask if their God thought carrying lethal weapons was a good idea even though one of the settlers took Theroux into a synagogue and, still fully-armed, showed him the Torah scrolls on which their faith is based.  He seemed almost surprised to be asked if weapons were allowed in the synagogue, presumably because he hadn’t actually read the Torah, or the sixth of the ten commandments in Exodus which forbids killing people.  ‘Commandments’, not polite suggestions.

Perhaps when the settler heard that Jewish tradition says the Torah actually contains 613 commandments, they just gave up and said “Praise the Lord and pass the ammo”*.

As Benjamin Netanyahu becomes more and more desperate to stay in power, he seized on the worst wildfires for years burning near Jerusalem to declare a national emergency.  Several people have already been injured and hundreds more were at risk so the Israeli military has sent in the troops to help.  Meanwhile, in Gaza, tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured by the Israeli military – let’s hope they remember they’re supposed to be saving people from the fires not killing them.

At Pope Francis’s funeral, Donald Trump, showed the world to see just how crass he is.  Having insisted on sitting in the front row in full view of the cameras, he was all too obviously the only person at the ceremony who was so discourteous that he wasn’t wearing black, his blue suit and tie standing out like a spare thingummy at a wotsit.  During the service, he chewed gum, checked his phone, and waved at people until he fell asleep.  Interesting that he chose the colour of the Democratic party …

Just as insensitive, but not as well reported, was a press release from Al Kennedy, the head of Trinity School, Croydon, who wrote that “The governors of the school and of the John Whitgift Foundation, along with the Senior Management Team, have unanimously agreed that Trinity will become fully co-educational … by 2031.”  Finally catching up with the times, except that Kennedy signed off as “Headmaster”.  You’d expect him to have known his union is called the National Association of Head Teachers. 

Slightly less worrying, at least to me, was my tracking down BOTB, an acronym which sometimes appears uninvited while I’m on the computer.  Google says it’s the name of a gambling company so some targeting cookie has selected me as a likely customer and shown me their advertisements, not knowing I never click on advertisements (or bet).  Sad really because I though BOTB was an abbreviation of ‘Back of the Bus’ or ‘Bottom of the Barrel’ although, thinking about it, I wonder if I wasn’t that far out.

I also now know which is the largest city in the world.  I’d have guessed at Tokyo which, I’m almost sure, used to be the largest city, and I wouldn’t have been that far out.  It’s Chongqing in central China (no, me neither), and has a population of 34 million people**. 

However, it’s not one homogenous conurbation and takes in several discrete urban areas so I guess one could argue its claim to be one city is more due to its administrative classification as a single municipality than from its being a clearly identifiable urban sprawl.

Anyway, it manufactures more cars than England and France together, one in three laptops and one in ten of the motorbikes sold worldwide, and covers an area the size of Austria.

From the pictures I’ve seen of Chongqing, I’d rather live in Austria.

I didn’t know that dozens of countries had agreed a decade ago to ban the production, storage and use of landmines but they are being used by both sides in Russia’s war on Ukraine and five European countries that share borders with Russia are now planning to withdraw from the treaty because they’re worried about the increasing unpredictability of Vladimir Putin.  Actually, I suppose he could be doing a Netanyahu and keeping the war going because he’s worried about being deposed, a form of paranoia shared by rulers at least as far as Henry IV Part II who said “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (it’s not known if his predecessor, Henry IV Part I, had the same fears).

While I’m not talking of dogs, I read an interesting article on how many words dogs can recognise and it mentioned a collie whose owner told their partner they couldn’t find their keys, following which the dog ran off and came back with them in its mouth.

What an opportunity I missed!  We used to play ‘hide and seek’ with ours and shut them out of a room where they waited patiently while we hid a dog toy.  When we opened the door, they’d rush in and sniff round the room until they found it.  Just imagine if we’d thought of training them to find specific things, like keys or a phone, and then told them what to look for instead of just saying “Seek!”

*          A phrase said to have been spoken by a chaplain on a US gunboat in the Second World War

**        About half the population of the UK

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.

Israel, Ukraine, North Korea, Australia, HS2 and our ancestors

26 October 2024

I wonder how much of Israel’s murderously disproportionate response to Hamas’s unexpected attack last year was due to shame at the failure of their intelligence service to have anticipated it, and how much is due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to delay criminal charges for as long as possible?

Latest reports from the UN’s humanitarian office warn that Israel’s undiscriminating bombardment of northern Gaza is “rapidly exhausting all available means for [the Palestinians’] survival” there.  Coincidentally, Netanyahu is now planning to ban the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians from operating in Gaza and West Bank and is covering his back by attacking and antagonising a lot of other countries in the region, with attacks like air-strikes on targets in Iran, so he’s got other strings to his bow if international pressure finally succeeds in getting him to back out of Gaza.

Meanwhile, Russia’s war on Ukraine continues without any obvious signs of a solution and is threatening the existence of NATO.  Vladimir Putin is increasingly isolated and unstable and he compensates with ruthlessness so it’s vital ‘the West’ presents a calm and united front but Keir Starmer seems to be havering over missiles and other military support for Ukraine.  

This isn’t helpful when another Donald Trump presidency in America seems terrifyingly possible: polls show so small a margin between the two candidates that the Washington Post and the LA Times (which traditionally give their editorial backing to one of the parties) aren’t supporting either of them.  Why?  Because both papers are owned by billionaires who don’t want a vindictive Trump to take revenge if he wins.

Both Russia and Ukraine are suffering from battle-fatigue and, according to the UN Population Fund, Ukraine’s population is now 25% less that it was when Russia invaded the country in 2022 due to war deaths, people fleeing as refugees to other countries and a reduction in birth rates.

North Korea is now planning to sending two units (12,000 troops, 3,000 of which are already being trained) to help Russia’s war efforts.  Kim Jung Il’s support for Russia may not be entirely thanks to his unbounded generosity but because he wants his army to have experience of killing foreign people, which they haven’t been able to do for a long time.  But it’ll give the braver ones a chance to defect …

More news came recently about the future of HS2 and I couldn’t resist the headline in one newspaper (not the Sun):  “Euston, we have a problem”.

The line is currently planned to terminate in the sunny uplands of Willesden Junction and the curiously named Old Oak Common but the Treasury is reconsidering whether the original plan to extend it to Euston should be resurrected.  Rail industry leaders have claimed this will make more money for the government from leasing out the line.

Opponents have pointed out the Euston is already one of the worst designed and most crowded stations in London and offers passengers almost the same rewards as changing trains at Birmingham New Street (anybody who’s ever done this with a heavy suitcase will know that ‘joyful’ is rarely the first word people use to describe the experience.)

More amusing was the rumpus caused in Australia when an indigenous senator heckled the king on his recent visit, saying Brits had stolen Aboriginal land.  Of course we did:  we did the same in North America and committed, or attempted, genocide elsewhere in what became the British Empire, from Africa to India.  America rebelled against Britain’s colonisation and, after a civil war, ultimately became the United States of America, though it’s difficult nowadays to understand what made them think they were ‘United’.

Other European countries also built their own empires and we all kidnapped people and used more than a thousand ships over many years to transport more than 12 million of them overseas;  those who survived the crossing then became slaves of the white occupiers.

I don’t feel any responsibility for what my ancestors did or didn’t do but I would be perfectly happy to offer my apologies and regrets for what was done by them, or with their knowledge, and admit to a feeling of embarrassment that we Europeans are so primitive that we thought ourselves superior to others.  Sadly, it’s not so far from what our own monarchs (and the brown-nosed ‘aristocracy’ who were appointed by monarchs) stole from our own peasant ancestors, including the land from which they had previously made a living.

Isn’t it curious that some ‘aristocratic’ families claim to be able to trace their roots back to William the Conker as if it’s a big deal, even though he was French;  how many people claim they’re descended from Harold, who was ‘English’ before W the C? 

Do the sums:  if we assume average families grow by four generations a century, 958 years ago we had over a trillion ancestors, far more than the population of the entire world (which is, even now, only 8.2 billion people).  This, of course, raises another interesting question which I won’t answer now but, if we also allow for the comparatively limited movements of people which means we’re less likely to be descended from Japanese emperors than we are from King Harold, the chances are we must all be able to trace our roots back to Harold (and William) so we’re all related and you, dear reader, are probably my 18^th cousin twice removed.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this.

One pleasure this week was to learn that scientists have discovered that a massive dust cloud in the centre of our own galaxy contains ethyl formate.  I actually knew that this chemical is contained in rum essence but apparently it can also smell like raspberries and, when combined with other chemicals, smells like horse pee.

If and when this dust cloud coalesces into a planet, its inhabitants will smell fruity, be permanently drunk and keep dashing off behind bushes.

IgNobel contender, Stonehenge, Shetland’s big bang and English class boundaries

31 August 2024

Scientists have been researching the learning experiences to be gained from licking an ice lolly / popsicle and have called for this to be included in the national curriculum for primary schoolchildren because it introduces them to the concepts of heating and cooling on a personal level.  Surely this must be at least long-listed for an IgNobel prize this year.

Archaeologists have gotten excited recently by the discovery that the ‘altar stone’, now mostly covered by two of the fallen sarsen stones, originated in north east Scotland, Orkney or Shetland rather than the Welsh quarry where a lot of the other big stones came from.  Detailed analyses of the chemicals in the old red sandstone of the altar stone are consistent only with the northernmost sandstone in the UK.

While the Welsh rocks only had to travel some 200km from Wales, this stone came from about 750km away and raises the question of how it was transported.  An ‘easy’ suggestion is that it was carried much of the way by a glacier during one of the ice ages, except that it’s thought that the movement of ice sheets in the far north tended to ‘flow’ northwards, rather than south.  It’s therefore thought that it was probably moved south by a bunch of very dedicated (or stupid) people because it’s known that neolithic peoples did transport stone by sea, but very rarely so far and, even with tea breaks in Stonehaven and Skegness, it would have taken a long time.

It could presumably have been floated up a river to get comparatively close to the site of Stonehenge (even in medieval times, the River Cam was navigable as far as Cambridge) but there was a still some distance to drag the thing overland.

The question that fascinates me more is why anybody bothered to do this instead of using stones available closer to home and I have a wonderful vision of extra-terrestrials lifting it from an outcrop in Orkney and dumping it in the middle of Stonehenge, then giggling all the way home about the theories humans would produce some 3-5,000 years later.

There are also some clever (and funny) answers on the Quora website to a question about why it wasn’t built on the continent. 

In Shetland, during a test firing of nine rocket engines by the German company Rocket Factory Augsburg at the SaxaVord Spaceport in Unst on 19 August, at least one of them exploded.  The resulting fire was impressive enough to make the national news but nobody was injured and the launch pad was saved.  RFA said it was due to “an anomaly” and has said it will return to normal operations as soon as possible.  It added ““We develop iteratively with an emphasis on real testing”.

Why don’t these people speak English?  What all this corporate bullshit means is that they don’t know what happened but they’re going to carry on lighting the fuses again and again until they get it right.

To be fair, the accident did follow a successful test three months ago when they fired the engines for 8 whole seconds without mishap.

For those who are thinking of popping up to Unst to watch the next 8-second test, it’s worth remembering that it costs more to fly there from London, hire a car to drive the last 80 miles (over two RORO ferries) and book accommodation than it does to have a 4-day all-inclusive holiday in Turkey, or Spain or North Africa.

The recent references to Keir Starmer’s describing his background as “working class” started a friend wondering how accurate he was being, which then started me wondering what ‘class’ means nowadays. 

Back in the old days, when we still had mines and steam railways and manufacturing industries, I assumed references to ‘blue collar workers’ were to people who did dirty jobs and whose collars were more likely to show the dirt than if they’d worn white collars.  ‘White collar’ workers were therefore those who worked in offices which were cleaner so they could wear their shirts for more than one day.  This in turn was loosely linked to ‘class’:  ‘blue collar’ workers were working class and ‘white collar’ workers were middle class but such distinctions clearly applied only to the hoi polloi and not to the ‘aristocracy’ who often had no attributes except inherited money and didn’t have to work for a living.

The middle class then decided there should be an upper middle class and a lower middle class but it all seemed pretty arbitrary.  I once helped a market researcher friend who was looking for an AB person about my age to answer some questions for a poll and, when I asked, they said I’d automatically be downgraded to E when I retired.

Generally, the language people used and their accents would immediately disclose their class but as national broadcasts became less picky (it was rumoured that, after reading the news, Wilfred Pickles was disciplined by the BBC when he rhymed ‘Newcastle’ with ‘tassel’ instead of ‘parcel’), accents tended towards estuarine English as glottal stops and tortured vowel sounds tended to be played down.

In the mid-50s, Nancy Mitford took the mickey in an essay that differentiated between the vocabularies used by the English who spoke properly, who were U (‘Upper class’), and them as talked proper, who were non-U. 

Jilly Cooper then added to the fun by writing Class in the 1960s and, as computers made communications more anodyne, the distinctions dissolved even though somebody I knew, who was brought up in the Marches, moved away and still spent a long time trying to lose their ‘working class Erryf’d accent’ to acquire the speech and vocabulary of what they saw as ‘middle class’, thereby becoming ‘middle class’. 

Other distinctions arise from slang and the influence of foreign languages and my mother, who lived in Japan till she was 13, always used the word “spai” (if that’s how you’d transliterate it) for that sharp, dessicating feeling you get when biting into a sloe berry, a word I used for decades before realising it isn’t an English word at all.  Which probably just confirms my ‘E’ classification at the bottom of the class hierarchy.

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.

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?

Kakistocracy, Brexit failure, BBC, ESG hypocrisy, body language and a new typeface

20 May 2023

Far too much evidence this week for the fact Britain is a kakistocracy*.

On a flight to Japan with a bunch of journalists, Rishi Sunak said there were “lots of signs that things are moving in the right direction” and that official estimates indicated real household disposable income was “hugely” better than earlier predictions.

He then added insult to injury by saying “That’s a very important measure of people’s living standards – hugely outperforming what people thought”;  the first ‘people’ refers to you and me but not him, the second refers to him, not you and me, making it clear that he and the common herd are quite different.

Coincidentally, he said this at about the same time that carmakers Ford, Jaguar Land Rover and Stellantis (Vauxhall, Peugeot and Citroën) warned that their UK operations may have to be cut back unless the Brexit tariff rules are renegotiated.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was briefly Minister for Brexit Opportunities (when reports of opportunities offered by Brexit were conspicuously absent), had wanted all EU-imposed laws to be scrapped because they came from Brussels, not because they were necessarily bad for the UK.  This week, he claimed reducing the number of laws to be scrapped from 5,000 to 600 was “pathetically underambitious”.  Well, who needs to think about babies when throwing out the bathwater? 

It’s thought that most, if not all, of the 600 laws now on the list to be scrapped are defunct so nobody will miss them.  Some of them have already gone, like the UK’s access to the EU-wide criminal database which includes details of convictions of third country and stateless people and was lost when Brexit happened.  This leaves Suella Braverman free to feed the conspiracy theorists with her opinion that grooming gangs are “almost all British Pakistani” and that small boat migrants are drug and prostitution dealers.  Even some loyal Conservatives are saying she’s “normalising” the politics of Nigel Farage and is a “real racist bigot”.

(Most normal people see immigration as a benefit to the country rather than an invasion.)

Other things for the chop include a directive limiting money laundering and terrorist financing in certain third countries and a “control programme” testing the dangers of pesticides and their residues.  Since London is already one of the world’s most popular money-laundering centres, criminals will probably welcome the first and the second will relieve the English water companies that are under pressure for poisoning our waters.

The crowning glory came this week when Farage himself, Boris Johnson’s co-conspirator, confessed in an interview that “Brexit has failed” (not necessarily, he claimed, because the principle was wrong but because of its disastrous implementation which has left Britain the worst-performing economy in the G20, behind even Russia).

But we live in a world of inconsistencies.  A convicted killer has recently claimed to have murdered Elizabeth Chau, who disappeared in Ealing in 1999, and has marked the place he buried her on a map.  The police have said the area has identified is too “vast” to start digging.  Meanwhile, in Corrèze in France, French and German police are digging in a forest searching for the mass graves of German PoWs who, according to a 98-year old former French resistance fighter, were executed there in 1944.  They’re using ground-penetrating radar.

Insert here a suggestion for the Met …

And the chair of the BBC, renowned internationally for its valiant attempts to report impartially, is appointed by the government.  Their latest appointment, a friend of Johnson’s, didn’t last long but should never have been appointed in the first place.

Why does the government appoint the BBC chair anyway?  If the BBC is to preserve its international reputation for unbiased reporting (except with Brits on the far right), shouldn’t the board comprise people with no publicly-known political affiliations?

As any fule kno, ESG stands for the “environment, social and governance” measures used to evaluate a company or investment’s sustainability in an attempt to encourage responsible investment.  Is anybody surprised that the US fund managers BlackRock and State Street and the UK-based Legal & General invested $1bn of funds carrying an ESG label in fossil fuel companies between February and April this year?

The recent leak of highly classified military documents from the Pentagon was made by someone who had been “warned” repeatedly about mishandling classified material.  “Warned”?  Didn’t it occur to any of his ‘intelligence’ superiors that suspension might have been more prudent than a slapped wrist?

Canada’s Justin Trudeau met North Korea’s national assembly speaker, Kim Jin-pyo, at this week’s G7 summit in Hiroshima.  Trudeau’s 20cm/8” taller than Kim so, for the photographs, he spread his legs widely to make the height difference less obvious.

To Western eyes this looks silly but, in South Korea, this position is known as ‘manner legs’ and is perceived as polite and empathic and Trudeau’s gesture was widely praised in the Korean media.  Which just goes to show that some body language is culture-specific and can be misinterpreted.  There will now, no doubt, be more claims from Canadian right-wingers who aren’t aware of this subtlety that Trudeau is the wrong person for the job.

And for the ‘Ponce of the Week’ award, I nominate an article about a new typeface called Neutraface which “has an open, almost airy feel” and in “the capitals A and N, the lines meet and form sharp peaks”.  It also attracts users who want a “typeface [that] fits neatly within trends like stealth wealth and quiet luxury, or the general idea that understated design is a hallmark of cultural restraint, taste and money”.  And it leaves a pleasant aftertaste of cowpats and rhubarb.

By the way, did you know that, when Al Capone was in prison, the governor allowed him to form a band.  His drummer was ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly – the audience would hide under their chairs when he played a solo.

And an insurance company have finally coughed up for the damage caused by eight water buffaloes frolicking in their swimming pool.  Where?  Essex.

*          I rather hope the word stems from the same root as the French expression faire caca.

Language, Shakespeare, Bowdler, sitzpinklers and DEC’s earthquake appeal

25 February 2023

Of course Roald Dahl was anti-semitic and prejudiced in all sorts of other ways but children love his books and, as far as I know, don’t automatically grow-up as fascists or Tommy Robinsons.  Nevertheless, to the delight of the anti-woke movement (who invented ‘woke’ so they could condemn people they think are stupidly over-protective of minority groups*), Penguin decided this week to edit his books for language that would now be considered offensive by some people.

The reaction was surprising with all sorts of people from other writers to politicians criticising the decision to delete words like “ugly” and “double chin”.  Salman Rushdie said “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship” and that the publisher and the Dahl estate “should be ashamed.”  Philip Pullman took a more moderate view, not criticising the editing but saying Dahl’s work should be allowed to fade away.

By the end of the week, the publishers had decided to republish the stories in their original form alongside the new versions.  It’ll be interesting to see which versions sell best.

The curious thing is that it was Dahl that caused such a fuss.  Editing and cleaning things up has been going on for centuries but perhaps the anti-woke brigade are being taken seriously when they take the mickey out of well-intentioned avoidance of words that might offend or belittle certain groups of people.

Much of Shakespeare was bawdy and, as far as I know, nobody has yet replaced “whoreson” with “illegitimate child of a woman of easy virtue”, possibly because it would unbalance an iambic pentameter.  However, in the 18^th century, Thomas Bowdler published a 10-volume expurgated version of Shakespeare “in which nothing is added to the original Text;  but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a Family.”  He said his aim was to remove “some defects which diminish their value”, clearly believing that he was a better writer than Shakespeare. 

Curious then that Shakespeare’s words and phrases are still in common use while all we remember of Bowdler is that he gave rise to the verb ‘bowdlerise’, meaning to edit and rewrite things that might be considered offensive, which is not usually used as a compliment.  (What’s also interesting is that it seems OK for editors to read unexpurgated writings and make personal judgements about which words and phrases might offend others.)

Similarly, Cecil Sharp did wonderful work collecting old folk songs and traditions that might otherwise have disappeared but was brought up a Victorian and edited out ‘dirty’ words like ‘maidenhead’ (meaning virginity or the hymen) which became ‘maidenhood’ or even ‘maiden name’.

Even in 2010, Enid Blyton was being edited by publishers.

However, cultures and societies change and what was acceptable in the past may not be acceptable now.  What’s written now should reflect these changes but surely language and attitudes that were acceptable when they were written can’t be invalidated by subsequent changes.

I read a lot as a child, unselectively and uncritically, and devoured almost everything. I read Billy Bunter books (which now have ‘faded away’) and, later, adventure books Captain W E Johns, Sapper, John Buchan and the Saint books, all of which I would now see as having old-fashioned notions of racism, sexism, classism, fat-ism, empirism and all sorts of other isms that might detract from the excitement of their plots.  But I don’t think they affected how my world view developed and there isn’t a racist bone in my liver.

Perhaps we should go the whole hog and edit everything every 10 years, starting with the Bible whose King James version includes words that were considered acceptable at the time, but not now.  Leviticus would be a good place to start but please leave the Song of Solomon till last.  (Yes, I know some Christians are critical of some of the translations in the KJV and there have been other versions since that they feel are more accurate but I’m intentionally using an extreme example to illustrate the difficulties of ‘updating’ language to conform with current prejudices.)

But the times they are a-changin’, even in other countries.

German has a lot of fascinating words and the latest I’ve come across is ‘sitzpinkler’.  Used metaphorically, it describes feeble behaviour in men, the nearest English equivalent being something like ‘wuss’.

Literally, it means a man who sits to pee but, and (this is my own understanding only) it is implicit that it only applies to indoor micturition and, when taken short in a forest, a man may stand behind a tree without letting the side (or his trousers) down.  My mother used to suffer from penis-envy on long car journeys when we’d stop for a break and the males would find just enough cover to avoid shocking passers-by while the females would have to tramp for miles to find a suitable wall or bush.

A survey in Japan in 2020 showed that 70% of men sit, compared with 51% five years previously, so it’s a growing trend.  It’s also healthier for two reasons.  The first is that some 2014 research by Leiden University Medical Centre showed that sitting has a “more favourable dynamic profile” so the bladder can void faster and more efficiently;  the second is that “post-void residual volume” is reduced so less urine stays in the bladder and breeds whatever bacteria are on the menu that week.

An American professor who specialises in fluid dynamics has used a urination simulator and a high-speed camera to record the dispersal of the liquid after it’s gained its freedom, and the news is not good if the man is standing.  It starts off in a nice solid stream but then breaks up into drops, then droplets, then very small ‘satellite’ droplets which go off in all directions and can travel up to 2 metres.

I’ve a feeling it might be better to stop here and just suggest you keep your toothbrush in another room.

I can’t bring myself to go into any detail of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission decision not to reinstate Shamima Begum’s UK passport even though Mr Justice Jay said that while “many right-thinking” people would take issue with the home secretary’s decision, and there was credible evidence that she had been “recruited, transferred and then harboured for the purpose of sexual exploitation”, the case wasn’t about Begum but about decisions on security.  The Commission therefore could not overturn the home secretary’s decision that she posed a threat to national security.

Another step on the road to autocratic devaluation of the law?

But I was encouraged to read that the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Turkey-Syria Earthquake Appeal has raised more than £101.5m in a fortnight, including £5m of aid-matched funding from the government.  Wouldn’t it be great if Big Oil matched the total funds raised by all the earthquake appeals.

They could double the money raised by giving less than 1% of last year’s profit.  Isn’t it sad that we know the people who could make this decision aren’t the sort of people who would, and that most of the individuals who give to an appeal got an average of about one millionth of the £30,000,000,000 Shell and BP each pocketed last year.

Back at the ranch, I finished a packet of Waitrose Paccheri Rigati last night and, as one does, read the blurb on the packet as the water heated back up again.  Our pasta was “Made in the hillside town of Gragnano, near Naples, by our specialist supplier who has been making pasta since 1789”.  Their specialist supplier will be 334 this year – they’re going to need a bigger cake.

*          If you think about it, we are all members of some minority group in some way:  even those proud of being ‘English’ are vastly outnumbered by people who aren’t ‘English’, and are themselves are descended from Celts, Picts, Romans, Scandanavians, Angles, Saxons, Scots, Welsh, Irish, French and Neanderthals (especially Neanderthals).

Football, police, hemp, more government mistakes, and the OED

26 November 2022

Some of the most fascinating news this week comes from the world of football (and that’s something I never thought I’d say).

Apart from the disappointment some have felt over the World Cup being hosted by a country that thinks human rites are eating and sleeping, the banning of the sale of alcoholic drinks by one of the competition’s major sponsors, and FIFA (which stands for Fédération Internationale de Football Association – isn’t Franglais wonderful!) ruling against the wearing of OneLove rainbow armbands by players who believe consenting adults should be able to do what they want (but not necessarily in public).

The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, also said he feels “like a migrant worker”.  Poor old sod.  He’s only getting about £2.5m this year while actual migrant worker security guards at the stadium appear to be getting as much as 35p an hour, which is almost £7,300 a year!

FIFA even went so far as to threaten the German side (and six other nations) with a yellow card if they wore the armbands.  So the Germans lined up with their hands over their mouths to show they’d been silenced, and wore rainbow-coloured laces in their boots and the supermarket chain REWE dropped its planned advertising campaign in protest.  (I’m sure you already knew that REWE stands for Revisionsverband der Westkaufgenossenschaften – no concessions to Deutslisch there.)

Even more courageously, the Iranian players bowed their heads and didn’t sing their national anthem to show their support for the people back at home protesting against the government’s rules proscribing what female people can wear in public.  However, they then got postcards from home so they sort of sang it before their next match, but they sang with such a lack of enthusiasm when compared with the Welsh male voice 11 that it was at least as impressive a protest as their earlier silence.

As one commentator put it, “Standing up for universal rights, for tolerance and freedom, matters far more than 22 people kicking a ball around”.

Here in England, we don’t seem to have any understanding of tolerance or freedom.  In Hertfordshire, police unlawfully arrested four journalists reporting on the climate protests that closed the M25.  All because a senior officer sitting somewhere in a comfy office said “Arrest the nosey bastards” (I paraphrase).  Whatever you think about the ‘Just Stop Oil’ protests, it’s worrying that the police were authorised to arrest everybody because it hadn’t occurred to the idiot cop who wrote the policing plan that the media might be there. 

The official review (requested by the Herts constabulary and carried out by the chief superintendent of Cambridgeshire constabulary) condemned the police action and said “there is evidence to suggest the potential for the arrests to amount to an ‘unlawful interference’ with the individuals’ freedom of expression under article 10 [of the European convention on human rights]”.

The government already seems to be joining international shifts towards fascism by increasing the power of the police to ‘Stop and Search’ people.  I was SASsed once coming off the top of an escalator at Kings Cross Station when a uniformed police officer asked if I had a moment to spare.  I said yes, as long as I could get a train which was leaving in eight minutes, so he asked me a few questions, looked inside my briefcase, got me to sign a form and let me go.  I was convinced he just wanted a middle-aged white person to help balance his statistics and, had my skin been less pasty, my treatment might have been rather different (“Up against the wall, kid, spread your legs, no I’m not pleased to see you, this is a Taser”).

Luckily the UK still has a way to go to catch up with post-Trump America where going to school or a club is getting to be as dangerous as raising a finger at a highway patrol.  The Los Angeles police killed more than twice as many civilians in 2021 as they did in 2020 and, all over the country, there are mass shootings almost daily by people who believe the second Amendment empowers them to do this.

Scientists believe that growing hemp could be even more effective than trees in absorbing and locking up CO₂, not least because it grows much faster than trees.  Its fibres can be used in the production of a range of materials from textiles and medicines to concrete and building insulation.  BMW is even using it to replace some plastics in their car parts.  The other good (I suppose) news is that modern varieties of hemp don’t contain enough of the relevant chemicals to be of any use as narcotics.

More good news came from oop north this week when Rochdale Housing Association, the landlord of the child who died from respiratory problems caused by the mould in his flat, admitted the incorrect “assumptions” they made about his family’s lifestyle were “wrong”.  They don’t seem to have commented on why they thought they had the right to make any assumptions about their tenants’ lifestyles rather than improving the ventilation and keeping their properties in good condition for everybody.  We can now just hope we see the landlord charged with corporate manslaughter.

As in quite a few other areas, Scotland’s legal powers to control rogue landlords and protect tenants is way ahead of England’s while, as I mentioned last month, the Welsh government now allows councils to penalise second-home owners by increasing their council tax by up to 300%.  Gwynedd council is planning to impose a 150% premium next year to help the number of homeless people which had increased by nearly 50% over the last two years while almost 10% of properties were second-homes and unoccupied for most of the year.

Might we also hope for justice for Shamima Begum?  Born a British citizen and raised and educated in east London, she and two friends left England to join the Islamic State when she was 15 (old and mature enough, according to the Home Office, to make such decisions, but not old and mature enough to vote).  There she was further radicalised, desensitised to extreme violence, married and subsequently gave birth to three children, all of whom died. 

She finally broke away and was found in a Syrian refugee camp.  The Home Secretary at the time, Sajid Javid, then revoked her British citizenship.

Now 23, Begum is challenging his decision at the special immigration appeals tribunal.  Her lawyers are arguing that, although she is also a citizen of Bangladesh because her parents were born there, she would face the death penalty if she was sent there so she is effectively stateless because Javid didn’t properly consider the consequences of his decision.

I’d be more than happy if she moved into the house next door (which is actually on the market at the moment).

Last week, I referred to the Conservatives as “traditionally bastions of honour and integrity”, only for this to be proven over-optimistic, this time by the Tory peer Michelle Mone who, unlike football sponsors in Qatar, expects a return when she does favours for friends. 

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the government created a “VIP lane” so companies with political connections could be prioritised when they awarded government contracts;  Mone recommended PPE Medpro which was subsequently given £200m of government contracts (don’t ask whether the stuff the provided was any good) but she failed to declare this in the House of Lords register of financial interests.  She has defended her silence on the grounds that “she did not benefit financially and was not connected to PPE Medpro in any capacity” but leaked HSBC documents show that, five months after her recommendation, her husband received at least £65m from PPE MedPro …

By the way, lexophiles have less than a week now to vote for the OED’s word of the year – go to https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2022/