World War III and Civil War II, social ‘norms’ and fruit drinks

14 June 2025

Labour’s spending review last week allocated more money to housing, nuclear power, carbon capture, new rail links and defence.  Defence?  For heavens’ sakes, what can we offer on the world stage by allying with or against the big world powers of America, China, India, Russia, and even the EU?  The days of empire are gone.  We’re not even part of the EU now.  Britain is just a small island that, apart from renting property to USAF bases, is militarily irrelevant even when compared with states in the Middle East and North Korea.

Surely the money could be better spent?

Almost certainly, but not on corporate failures like Thames Water, whose horrific incompetence continues to make headlines.  Its potential buyers are now asking to be let off its £123m fine for environmental and other criminal breaches of its licences and permits, including intentionally diverting millions of pounds it was granted for environmental clean-ups into bonuses and dividends.

KKR, an American private equity firm, has already pulled out of the auction, worried about its politicisation and its inadequate assets and only a bunch of bondholders who lent the company some £13bn remain.  If their bid isn’t accepted, it’s probable that Thames Water will return to public ownership but a recent report has suggested this could be done without spending a penny; and people spending pennies is one of their problems (younger readers may need to ask what ‘spending a penny’ means because it now seems to cost anything between four and ten shillings).

A recent report by Common Wealth, a not-for-profit group formed in 2019 to “reimagine” the relationships between ownership and society at large, has disputed the cost £99bn reported as the total cost of renationalising of all English water companies, pointing out that this figure was produced by a thinktank funded by water companies.  Common Wealth has suggested that the government could use a process called ‘special administration’ to return Thames Water to permanent public ownership and that when its debts and past dividends paid to shareholders are set against its supposed regulatory capital value, the cost would be much less, possibly even close to zero.

Israel has recently admitted to a novel approach to war:  arm enemy criminals.  Israel Defence Fund officials have confirmed they have been supporting a Palestinian gang, led by Yasser abu Shabab, known locally for his involvement in criminal activity, in an attempt to undermine Hamas after 50 members of this gang have been killed in recent months. 

Then, to distract attention from its culpability in Gaza, Israel attacked targets in Iran to stop them making nuclear weapons.  Does Benjamin Natanyahu really believe it’s better to get your defence in before an attack?  Iran has now promised the attack that would ‘justify’ its response.  They’re like squabbling children, except they’re potentially squabbling over the world’s future instead of which is the best YouTube clip of people falling over.

Except squabbling children don’t risk starting World War III, even if it appears Netanyahu would accept this if it would keep him out of prison for longer.

There’s more confusion in Germany where Joachim Streit, a German MEP, is campaigning to get the EU to admit Canada as a member.  I wonder how he fared in “Geografie” at school.

In America, Donald Trump’s trying to start Civil War II by calling in 700 marines and 4,000 members of the national guard to control protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detentions taking place in Los Angeles.  The ICE raids targeted immigrant workers in the city but the California governor, Gavin Newsom, and other civic leaders called the mobilisation of troops “authoritarian” and “a brazen abuse of power”, that has “inflamed a combustible situation”.

By Monday, even more residents were taking part in protests and sympathetic protestors were starting their own demonstrations in places like New York, Austin, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco.

In Los Angeles, national guard troops and marines are reported to have told their families and friends they were not comfortable about being used as pawns in politically-motivated domestic operations, while Trump is trying to convince people it’s all a foreign conspiracy.

What makes it all the more poignant is that the actual insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol have been pardoned and released from earned prison while those protesting peacefully in the streets against ICE raids face the US marines.

Even a Republican senator, Rand Paul has described Trump as “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag” while another dedicated Trump supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has admitted she didn’t actually read Trump’s tax and spending bill before voting for it and that, if she had, she’d have voted against it.

Public records show that, during hubby’s first 100 days in office, Melania, Mrs Trump, spent just 14 days in the White House, which might appear to a cynic to imply a marriage not entirely based on mutual infatuation.

Jonathan Haidt has written a book, The Anxious Generation, which proposes four “norms”:  no smartphones before the age of 14; no social media until 16; phone-free schools; and far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. 

I’d add “no more crisps and pop” to the list (and would limit sugar because I’ve seen too many sugar rushes in children).  My own experience last week came when shopping and I bought a Robinsons orange and mango drink as part of a ‘meal deal’ (“no added sugar, real fruit in every drop”). 

Puzzled by its bitter taste I took a magnifying glass to the list of contents, printed in a white 4-point typeface reversed out of an orange background, a combination not recommended by the Royal National Institute of Blind People.  There was, predictably, more water than anything else, followed by fruit juice from concentrates (apple 16%, orange 1% and mango 1%), citric acid, acidity regulator, antioxidant, carrot and apple concentrate, orange and other natural flavourings, stabiliser, sweeteners, and natural colour (carotenes).  That’s the last time I buy an apple and carrot drink described as an orange and mango drink.  Back to Adam’s Ale next time.

Good news about bookie lookalikes, U-turns, intelligent millionaires and climate action

12 April 2025

Lots of cheering news this week, including that wonderful picture of Donald Trump holding up his tariff board and looking exactly like a bookie on the hill at Epsom on Derby Day.

Amy Coney Barrett, a Republican member of the American Supreme Court has, for the second time in recent months, voted against her Republican colleagues in a ruling against Trump to put justice before politics.  Who’d have guessed she still had the integrity to do that.

Trump did a Liz Truss by imposing a 10% levy on imports from Ukraine and the UK, and 20% on imports from the EU (and 0% on imports from Russia), financial markets worldwide crashed and he was forced into a humiliating U-turn, which just goes to show that if you say “Boo!” to a bully, they’ll chicken out.

Jaguar Land Rover had immediately suspended all further exports of their cars to America, thereby boosting the owners of ones already over there by increasing their second-hand values.

Trump’s tariffs also provided a wonderful excuse for our Labour government to rethink its economic policy and Keir Starmer has said “old assumptions should be discarded” so they can forget their crazy undertaking not to raise taxes.

All over America, there were demonstrations against Trump’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda” with an estimated 500,000 people taking to the streets in Washington, Florida and about 1,000 other places, including state capitals.

There have even been rumours that Elon Musk will be leaving the Department of Government Efficiency, possibly because people have sussed that he thinks cutting expenditure must automatically improve efficiency.

Both Trump and Musk were started in business with inherited capital but, while Musk has increased his with some successful businesses, Trump has lost a large amount of his inheritance with his unbelievable incompetence in running businesses – remember his casinos were bankrupted, beating the odds that were stacked in his favour by the rules of the games.

Another millionaire who inherited wealth is Abigail Disney, one of my heroes, who has acknowledged she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”  She has for many years been giving large sums of money away and a member of The Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation dedicated to changing the system so that its members and others with even more money pay more tax.

Last year, she wrote that “Extreme wealth concentration in the hands of a few oligarchs is a threat to democracy the world over.”  She accepts that instituting a global minimum tax on the very rich will be complex, but not impossible, and she pointed out that, four years ago, 136 OECD countries “joined an accord to enact a 15% global minimum tax on multinational corporations”.  She added that “If we can institute a tax floor for the world’s largest corporations, there is no reason we can’t do the same for the world’s wealthiest individuals”, pointing out that a 2023 survey found that even millionaires in G20 countries support the idea.

More good news over here is that the planning application for a deep coalmine in Whitehaven, Cumbria has been withdrawn after the High Court ruled that the permission granted by Michael Gove when he was in charge was unlawful.  This follows another, earlier decision by the Supreme Court that quashed planning permission for an oil well at Horse Hill in Surrey on the grounds that the impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be included when the climate impact of a proposal must be included.

The Labour government is also proposing to extend restrictions on the burning of peatland which has led to the degradation of 80% of them in England.  They are comparatively uncommon but, when they’re allowed to remain undisturbed, they store huge amounts of carbon – an estimated 3.2 billion tonnes in the UK alone.  The Conservative government started with a small step in the right direction by limiting the burning to areas of ‘deep peat’ (over 40cm deep) in Sites of Special Scientific Interest in conservation areas and some even smaller sites.

Labour’s plans include reducing the definition of deep peat from 40cm to 30cm and would do away with the limitation to conservation areas, increasing protected areas by two thirds to a total of 368,000 hectares, but this still leaves almost half the total area unprotected. 

Needless to say, organisations like the Countryside Alliance are up in arms.  They don’t care about the wildlife, such as adders, toads, and ground-nesting birds, that are killed when land is burnt but they’re horrified that this will restrict the land where otherwise relatively normal people pay a lot of money for the sheer delight of blowing the heads off the grouse that live there bringing up their families.

I have no real problem with somebody shooting something to take home to eat (actually, of course, picking up and eating roadkill avoids the slaughter and is much cheaper, but remember fresh blood is good, maggots aren’t) but shooters don’t even get to keep the birds they killed without paying for them;  and what worries me more is the thought that some people actually get pleasure from killing, and are willing to pay to be allowed to do it.

Still on the subject of corpses, I’m always fascinated by the facial reconstructions of Neanderthals and other people who have been for tens of thousands of years just from a skull that’s been dug up by an archaeologist.  I know pictures are sometimes drawn using similar techniques in attempts to picture the faces of bodies that haven’t yet been identified but I wonder whether any research has been done reconstructing the faces from the skulls of people who’ve died more recently, and of whom there are photographs, to see how accurate they are? 

They’re welcome to use my skull for a test when I’ve finished with it because I find it hard to imagine how they could guess where my wrinkles are from the underlying bone so it would be an interesting test of their system.

The Peter Principle writ large, and rocket science

21 October 2023

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

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

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

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

He also seems to have swallowed the false syllogism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some useless information*

2 September 2023

A study of 2,350 children (published in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research) found that 34% of children became good readers with ‘normal’ schooling but twice as many (70%) became good readers after being exposed to 30 minutes a week of subtitled broadcasting (Hindi film songs in this experiment).

Warning:  if you tend to squeamishness, skip this paragraph and the next one.  An Australian woman was admitted to hospital in January 2021 after suffering three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhoea, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats.  By 2022, her symptoms had worsened and included forgetfulness and depression and an MRI scan of her head showed abnormalities that a neurosurgeon thought required surgery.  She was admitted to Canberra hospital and they cut a hole in her skull and poked around, only to find a live roundworm wriggling around in her brain tissue.

Being surgeons rather than parasitologists, they consulted an expert who identified it as Ophidascaris robertsi,a roundworm usually found in pythons, who said this was the first time one had been found in a human.

Incidentally, patients whose operations are carried out by a woman are less likely to suffer from post-operative complications.  Doctors in Canada and Sweden reviewed more than 1m patient records from two separate medical registers and discovered that, 90 days after the operation, 12.5% of female surgeons’ patients suffered “adverse post-operative events” while 13.9% (10% more) patients whose operation had been carried out by a male surgeon had problems.  After a year, the men’s patients were 25% more likely to have suffered than women’s.  (I don’t know if they analysed the results by the patients’ gender.)

France is to ban girls in state schools from wearing abayas, the style of long, flowing dresses worn by some Muslim women, because they aren’t in keeping with the French principle of secularism (laïcité).  When I heard this, I wondered if they also refuse to allow orthodox Jewish pupils from wearing a yarmulke on the grounds that “When you walk into a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the pupils’ religion just by looking at them.” Sounds like dangerous territory to me.

To many people’s disappointment, the two biggest British political parties seem to be drawing closer together.  We’re used to the right wanting to keep workers’ wages low so capitalists can get richer, while the left wants to pay workers more and take money from the rich.   However, this over-simplified differentiation goes to the wall as general elections approach and politicians will say whatever they think is most likely to get them elected.

Many people were therefore disappointed last week when Rachel Reeves, the Labour shadow chancellor, ruled out a wealth tax if Labour is elected at next year’s election.  We now await the Conservative party’s promise to tax the rich and increase state benefits.

One of the greater hazards of modern life is dust (small d, nothing to do with Philip Pullman).  Dust is basically just small bits of stuff that floats around in the air and settles on any flattish surface, especially (I’m told) on the top of books, and the piano, where it remains until somebody decides to spread it around with a duster.  This allows it to float free until it settles back on the tops of books and the piano, or in people’s lungs where it can aggravate conditions like asthma and other chronic lung diseases.

Dust may be particles of loose skin, or dried earth, or molecules that have wafted off something we can identify, making us think food smells particularly good, or not breathing in the bathroom.  (Does anybody else think that hot brake pads on braking trains smell a bit like chrysanthemums?)

In cars and lorries and trains, it’s more of a problem.  Some of us remember when petrol contained lead and added a certain je ne sais quoi to roadside blackberries but that was banned and we all know of the dangers of the particulates emitted by diesel engines. 

So we’re now being encouraged to switch to electric cars which reduce exhaust emissions although but tend to produce more road dust.  They do reduce brake dust by an estimated 75% but they create more tyre dust and road wear and raise more of the dust already on the road because they are generally heavier than cars with internal combustion engines;  and road dust is a major source of the ubiquitous microplastics that are found everywhere, even in the benthic zones of the Marianas Trench.

And what will happen to the batteries when they wear out.  Are we just hoping that we’ll be able to extract the small quantities of precious metals and recycle all the plastics and other chemicals? 

While I’m muttering about pollution, weren’t we all surprised when Michael Gove pandered to impoverished property developers by removing the rules that stop them building on certain hitherto protected land such as green belt, flood plains, AONBs and other areas of environmental value; and relaxing the rules limiting chemical and farm pollution of waterways. (“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”)

America’s heatwave has been causing unprecedented problems in Arizona with doctors having to treat severe contact burns suffered when people have fallen in the street.  The trouble is not just that concrete, paving slabs and rock are at the ambient temperature, which has been around 45^oC, but asphalt is hotter still so road surfaces can reach 80^oC.  Frying eggs on it is not recommended unless you like them garnished with dust.

A couple of days ago, one of those irritating little pop-ups at the bottom of my screen said “Amazing discovery on moon’s surface”. Aha, I thought, that sounds interesting, I’ll look at that when I’ve finished what I’m doing but, when I tried to get back to it, it had gone.  One of my readers will be convinced I was hallucinating and invented it but it did start the old imagination ticking over.  What could it have been?  A half-full packet of Woodbines cigarettes, Rosebud, Hitler’s moustache or even, wait for it, dust?

*          Supposed to fire your imagination (if you’re a Rolling Stones fan)