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?

Spring, immolation for profit, government fears and some sad news

18 March 2023

Spring is here and all over the country people are shovelling snow aside and trying to find a rhyme for daffodils (the nearest Wordsworth got was “vales and hills” which doesn’t quite cut the mustard).

My favourite (Brooklyn-accented) verse about spring has been attributed to Ogden Nash but appears in different forms all over the place, though they all tend to share the first line.

“Spring has sprung, de grass is riz, I wonder where de boidies is;  de little boids is on de wing, but dat’s absoid, from what I hoid, de little wings is on de boid!”

Out here in the country we have springtime snowdrops and crocus and primroses and celandine and, as we discovered a few days ago, fibre optic ‘cables’ that zip a telephone call to the telegraph pole outside before sending it the last few feet underground through some antediluvian wires which so distort the signal with crickles and crackles that the end result is incomprehensible.

My theory is that, when it’s rained a lot (which it has), water gets into the junction boxes and signals arc over to the wrong bit of the wire but it’s taken us four attempts to get our supplier to admit there is a fault.  Perhaps it wouldn’t have arced if they’d fitted postdiluvian wiring …  Anyway, they’re sending somebody on Monday to check the inside socket then shin up the telegraph pole and fiddle with things.  (They’ve had to do it twice before so we know what to expect.)

What puzzles me is why it doesn’t seem to affect the broadband signal, but maybe that’s because we’re used to having the signal fail, leaving us to reset the connection or reboot the whole system.  Clever people have smartphones but if you want to use any sort of mobile phone hereabouts, you have to go outside and stand in the road.

At least we don’t have a ghost, although I must admit to suspecting the previous occupier who died here enjoyed apples because, for the first month or two, there’d be a loud smell of stewed apples at bedtime;  but there is a house in Baird, Texas that’s being marketed as an “established and running haunted house”.

The previous owners ‘furnished’ it with coffin-shaped doors and all sorts of stuff that normally disappears shortly after Halloween.  In New York, Noo Joisey, Massachusetts, and Minnesota (but not Texas), sellers are required to disclose if a house is haunted and the decisions in a 1991 New York case (Stambovsky v. Ackley for people who think I make these things up) said “as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

Perhaps this confusion of law and the imagination explains how emotionally unstable judges like Brett Kavanaugh get appointed to the Supreme Court.

In the UK, some people seem to think it’s OK to sacrifice a few people’s lives in the pursuit of profit, provided it’s not too many.  Michael Gove has (5 years too late but better late than never) introduced a safety scheme requiring housebuilders to replace flammable materials found in mid-rise developments in England and 39 housebuilders have signed up to this.  However, 11 hadn’t by Monday’s deadline, including Rydon Homes, which is related to Rydon Maintenance which led the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower before the fire, which has so far declined to sign up to it saying it only “develops an average of 16 family homes per year” so it qualifies as “a small housebuilder”.  Or, in English, they only worry about safety if they put larger numbers of people at risk. To his credit, Gove has said “Those companies [who haven’t signed up to it] will be out of the housebuilding business in England entirely, unless and until they change their course” and has extended the deadline to allow them to reconsider.

Suella Braverman popped over to Rwanda, with which her predecessor last year signed an agreement to accept 200 unwanted UK immigrants.  In order to show her trip was reported accurately and without bias, she excluded reporters from the BBC and the Daily Mirror, the Guardian, the Independent and the i newspapers and took the Daily Mail, GB News and the Daily Telegraph.  That should do the trick.

As mentioned in these mutterings on 3 April last year, P&O suddenly sacked some 800 UK staff without notice and replaced them with cheap foreign labour not subject to the UK minimum wage.  Amazingly, the UK CEO Peter Hebblethwaite wasn’t fired even after saying “I know what the law is.  I broke it on purpose.  And I would do it again.”

At the time, Boris Johnson, last year’s first prime minister, said “We will take [P&O] to court, we will defend the rights of British workers … P&O plainly aren’t going to get away with it.”  Followed by, on the following Wednesday, the then transport secretary Grant Shapps’ admission that “The government are not in a position to take court action.” 

However, a nine-point plan that includes a seafarers’ wages bill is currently going through parliament and a government spokesperson said they had “reacted swiftly and decisively against P&O Ferries”, thereby giving a whole new meaning to “swiftly”.  Still one year is better than five I suppose.

P&O Ferries claimed at the time it was losing £100m a year. Last week, its Dubai-based owner, DP World, announced record profits of $1.8bn.

More sadly, the former actor Sam Neill has stage 3 blood cancer with no idea how long he’s got left so he’s written a book, ‘Did I Ever Tell You This’.  Rather than surrender to the cancer, he’s revelling in the “strong sense of being this little speck in the universe, of so little significance … but a unique speck”. He dismisses belief in an afterlife as ridiculous and talks about the notion of consciousness (“If it’s an illusion, I’m fine with that”), and the alluring idea of “dissolving and dispersing into the cosmos” saying “I don’t mind that idea at all.”

There’s something to think about if you ever worry about dying.

Even more sadly, Jacqueline Gold, who founded the sex shop ‘Ann Summers’ has died of cancer at the age of 62.  Her obituary mentioned that, with 100 shops over the country, she had made the Rampant Rabbit vibrator into a household name.  Not in this household but if any reader who knows what it is, please don’t bother to let me know – some things should be shared only with your closest friend(s).

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.

XHRH, XPM?, the next Grenfell Tower, Philip Green, Wendell Berry and warm cats

16 January 2022

Another HRH demoted.  The family seems to be shedding them faster than they can breed them.

My wife said a couple of days ago she’s almost beginning to feel sorry for XHRH Andrew, which just goes to show she’s a much kinder person than I am;  except that, when pushed, she admitted it’s the Queen she really feels sorry for. 

I too feel sorry for the Queen but I think Andrew is suffering from self-inflicted wounds and I’m less sympathetic.

Andrew is now in a no-win situation:  if he settles out of court, everybody will think he’s a liar and didn’t want his dirty linen washed in public;  if he refuses to take part in the trial, he’ll be found guilty automatically and everybody will think he’s a liar;  if he’s sticks to his claim that he has “no recollection” of meeting Virginia Roberts / Giuffre (I wonder if she’s related to Jimmy?) but the court finds him guilty, the verdict will mean everybody will think he’s a liar.

I wonder what would have happened if, guilty or not, he’d fessed up in the first place and claimed he hadn’t known his friends Epstein and Maxwell were sex traffickers and that he believed his relationship with Virginia had been consensual.  He used to be known as ‘Randy Andy’ so this would have been believable and, by pleading guilty to the main charge, he’d just have to write a cheque and there’d have been a lot fewer prurient 72-point headlines.

It’s a bit like Boris Johnson really, whose lies are catching up with him and, poetically, it’s not the 38 U-turns he made in his first 2 years as prime minister, it’s Partygate that seems to be his nemesis.  The headlines in Wednesday morning’s papers (in alphabetical order) said it all:

Daily Express – Winning war on Covid, fixed Brexit … don’t blow it now PM!

Daily Mail – Is the party over for PM?

Daily Record – I watched my brother die on Facetime but PM had a party

FT – Johnson faces ‘potentially terminal’ showdown over Downing Street parties

Guardian – Angry Tory MPs urge Johnson to come clean over party

i – PM’s future in jeopardy as Tories rage at lockdown drinks party

Metro – Partygate backlash:  Contempt for the victims

Mirror – The party’s over, Boris

Sun – It’s my party and I’ll lie low

Telegraph – Johnson losing Tory support

Times – Say sorry or doom us all, ministers tell Johnson.

The following day, at Prime Minister’s Questions, Johnson did apologise and said there were things he could have done differently but unfortunately he read his apology from a carefully prepared script which diffused any attempt at sincerity.  He repeated the half-hearted apology several times in the face of questions about whether he would resign, saying we should wait for the result of Sue Gray’s inquiry (Sue Gray has already hung a couple of ministers’ heads in her vegetable patch to frighten away the birds but his time it’s more difficult because she’s investigating her boss and there’s an increasing belief that the police should take over).

Johnson normally reacts with aggression and anger when challenged but his body language on Wednesday, hunched forward and looking down, showed a defeated man.  I’m now waiting for my wife to say she’s starting to feel sorry for him.

Several more parties in number 10 (it’s a huge building) have now crept out of the woodwork, one a staff leaving party on the evening before Prince Philip’s funeral, and Johnson has been forced to apologise to the Queen for this.  All her previous prime ministers had, regardless of their politics, been united by one rule:  never embarrass the Queen.

But this is Boris Johnson, who is thought to have had to apologise to her once already for illegally proroguing parliament in 2019.  He has now allegedly made a suitably crawling apology about the Covid parties but, by the evening, he was reported to have reverted to his default setting:  sorry ma’am; there, dunnit, phew, what’s for supper Carrie?

A few years ago, when the Conservatives were about to elect their latest leader, I asked a Conservative friend (no, not that one, another one), which candidate they would support.  They didn’t seem enthusiastic about any of them but said they’d probably vote for Boris because he stood the best chance of holding the party together.  Hmmm.

I wonder how long it’ll be before we can refer – sadly or gladly – to “the disgraced former prime minister Boris Johnson”?

But who next?  The Conservatives have been very bad at choosing leaders over the last 30 years and there’s a chance that, in a few years, they won’t have an MP left who isn’t a failed party leader.

Nor are the LibDems much better and, while the Labour party has had fewer leaders, their quality has varied.  I secretly have a soft spot for Angela Rayner, not because of her politics but because her real life has given her a strength, confidence and intelligence which she demonstrates when she deputises for Kier Starmer and eats Boris alive, possibly because he’s generally not good at losing to women and specifically remembers the days when women were supposed to be supine and grateful.

Michael Gove, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities has said £4bn of our money will be spent on replacing combustible cladding so the occupiers don’t have to pay for the work.  Being someone whose political ambition seems to exceed his intelligence, he omitted to mention other fire safety problems such as inadequate fire breaks, sprinkler systems and wooden balconies.  He added that, if developers and builders (and manufacturers?) don’t cough up voluntarily, the government could force them to.  If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.

Meanwhile, down in Docklands, property developers Ballymore are awaiting approval to build a 51-storey, 170 metres tall tower block with 400 flats, 655 bedrooms and one staircase.  UK building regulations say this OK if residents are told to stay in their homes if there’s a fire, which is of course why so many people died in Grenfell Tower.  The international building code, accepted by many countries and US states, requires buildings over 128 metres to have at least two staircases but the UK code doesn’t so local planners have approved it.

Confident that residents will stay at home while the building burns and won’t rush down the stairs and delay members of the fire brigade rushing upstairs with buckets, Ballymore didn’t include a second escape route because they can’t sell staircases and their profit would have been reduced.

“Let the bodies pile high” (Boris Johnson).  “How many deaths will it take till he knows / that too many people have died?” (Bob Dylan). 

While I’m worrying about the dangers of greed, I’m impressed that many retailers, including Kingfisher and all the major supermarkets, did return almost £2bn to the government for business rates and furlough subsidies they realised they didn’t need.  However, Homebase, Kingfisher’s main competitor, has decided to keep all the support it’s been given by the government and Philip Green’s family will probably receive another £2.5m on top of the £50m they got from Topshop, and a £1.2bn dividend from Arcadia in 2005 before they let it go bust in 2020 with a £500m shortfall in funding for the staff pension fund.  They subsequently agreed with the pensions regulator to pay £210m into the pension fund.  Big deal for the staff whose pension funds had been decimated.

Arcadia’s profile on LinkedIn still says “Life here is vibrant, challenging and fast-moving. Our people are what sets us apart.”  Well, Philip Green has quite conclusively proved this is bollocks.

Shouldn’t there be a law that restricts companies’ dividends and executive remuneration to fixed minimum levels while their pension schemes are under-funded?  With continuing restrictions until the pensions fund is 100% funded?  And companies should never be allowed to reduce payments into the fund even if it is over-funded?

Payments to selfish and greedy business CEOs have come up here before so it’s interesting to contrast them with the payments to charity CEOs of charities in 2020.  The top 100 charities, whose combined income exceeded £17bn, paid their CEOs a median* salary of £170,000.

As the American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, philosopher and farmer Wendell Berry once said “To make a living is not to make a killing, it’s to have enough.”

Here’s some cheerier news.  Elon Musk’s satellite internet company, Starlink, aims to offer internet connections worldwide through its network of satellites.  In colder areas, the rooftop receiver dishes produce a little heat so snow doesn’t lie on them and interfere with the signal.  One owner’s signal is however being slowed by five cats, all of whom have a perfectly good home to go to, snuggled up together in the nice, warm dish on a snow-covered roof at -25^oC.  A note below the picture explains that they do come in at night (when it gets really cold.)

*          The median of a bunch of numbers is the one that falls in the middle so half of those in the sample were higher than this and half were lower.

Covid testing, signing ‘HELP’, climate change, government sleaze, a bunch of good news and autocorrect

14 November 2021

It’s amazing where these mutterings seem to reach!  Having written a fairy story about Grenfell Tower last Sunday, the Housing Secretary (Michael Gove!) announced on Monday that he planned to “pause” government plans to recover cladding restoration work from leaseholders.  Giving evidence to a Commons committee, he said “I’m unhappy with the principle of leaseholders having to pay at all”.

A friend also pointed out that I’d omitted from the list of the culpable the building regulations people who approved the dangerous cladding.

On Tuesday, I had to go to London (for the first time in almost 2 years) for a medical appointment.  Despite being double-vaccinated and boosted, I decided to travel first class and keep my mask on for the whole journey.  Despite a lot of signs saying that masks should be worn and people without them might not be allowed to travel, about 60% of passengers weren’t wearing masks and even more weren’t in the crowded streets.  There’s nowt so queer as folk.

I’m now testing myself for Covid for another 10 days or so, not because I’m worried about getting Covid but because I’m a carer and can’t risk being incapacitated.

(Did you see that Jeff Hoverson, the Republican state representative for North Dakota, organised a rally to oppose vaccinations, and then couldn’t attend it because he’d got Covid-19?)

This is the first time I’ve self-tested so I read the instructions, something my wife claims I never do, and was taken by the bit that says “Open your mouth wide and rub the fabric tip of the swab over both tonsils … (use a torch or mirror to help you do this) …” 

“Or?”  Did they mean “and”?  Why don’t people get proof-readers to check what they’ve writted?

Much more usefully, I discovered there’s a discreet and unobtrusive “Help me” signal you can give if you’re in trouble, whether it’s abuse or harassment or anything, which will alert people who see it to call for help.  It can, for example, be discreetlyused during a video call or conference, or through the window of a house or a car.

What you do to show you need help is:

1 Hold your hand up with palm facing the other person

2 Tuck your thumb into the palm

3 Fold your fingers down over the thumb, rather like a peace sign.

Everybody should know this so they can use it if they feel threatened, and they can act if they see someone else using it.  What you should do if you see the sign obviously depends on the circumstances but ringing 999 is generally a good way to start.

It saved a woman in a car in America when somebody saw her sign and called 911; the driver is now in custody.  Tell all your friends if they don’t already know.

This week’s news has mainly been about the Cop26 conference on climate change.  Some sort of agreement was reached although China didn’t send anyone and India said it couldn’t reach the target in time.  These two countries together contribute 60% of the electricity generated by coal worldwide, and America produces another 11% (the EU produces 5%). 

But we all make their controls more difficult:   just think how much of the stuff we buy is made in China or India.  Should we boycott them and refuse to buy their goods?  What would this do to their economies?

Boris Johnson was stupid enough to fly 400 miles to the conference in a private jet.  In fact, of course, he had to do this because he absolutely had to get back to London for a booze-up with some old mates, but the outrage was so great that, second time, he went by train.

Other headlines exposed even more sleaze in the Tory party and Johnson was forced to reverse his plans to take over control of the independent cross-party group overseeing the maintenance of parliamentary standards. 

Even the Tory-faithful papers were outraged by his original proposal.  The Daily Mail’s leader said “So now we know the lengths to which a venal political class will go to protect its own” and the Times’ leader said “It would be good for parliamentary democracy if this time [the prime minister] were made to pay a price.”

Then we learnt that Sir Geoffrey Cox, MP for Torridge and West Devon and the former Attorney General, has been given nearly £6m for moonlighting (I refuse to say ‘earned’ – nobody can ‘earn’ that much), which included spending time in the British Virgin Islands where he’s been defending their prime minister and other government figures during an enquiry into claims of misgovernance and abuse of office.  Poetic eh?

(Remember that this is the man who included a 49p bottle of milk and £2 of tea bags in his expense claims in 2015.)

Meanwhile, Richard Ratcliffe’s hunger strike has gained a lot of publicity for his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment in Iran for the last 5½ years, reputedly as a result of a comment by the then Foreign Secretary, one Boris Johnson, who had failed to read his briefing papers or just forgotten that she was actually on holiday visiting her family. 

Her confinement is, of course, linked with the £400m that the UK has owed Iran since 1979.  The good news is that the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, was officially authorised (when he was still a back-bencher) to write to Richard Ratcliffe to confirm the UK acknowledged that the debt had to be paid.  However, it still hasn’t been paid and Ministers and officials refuse to say why.

Then the Queen sprained her back and couldn’t attend the Remembrance Day commemorations in Whitehall this morning.  (One wonders how a queen can sprain her back.  Picking up corgi poo from the royal carpets?  Or sneezing perhaps?)

But there is more good news:

• Boeing has admitted responsibility for the crash of its 737 Max model in Ethiopia in 2019 after an investigation found faults in the sensors and that the new flight control software had not been explained to pilots;
• America has set a precedent with new defence for first degree murder:  the Pentagon has said that the US drone attack in August that killed 10 Afghan civilians was “an honest mistake” and no laws had been broken;  killers can now say “it was a genuine mistake, I meant to kill someone else”;
• Julia ‘Hurricane’ Hawkins has set a new record at the Louisiana Senior Games by sprinting 100 yards in 1:02:95 minutes, the fastest time for women aged over 105; 
• music can calm dogs frightened by fireworks and a study by the Scottish SPCA and the University of Glasgow found reggae and soft rock worked best; 
• the world’s youngest winner of the Nobel peace prize, Malala Yousafzai, who survived being shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for blogging for the BBC about increasing Taliban activities in Pakistan, married her partner, Asser Malik, on Tuesday in a small ceremony in Birmingham – long life and happiness to them both.

And a final tip:  it helps if you imagine autocorrect as a tiny little elf in your phone who’s trying very hard to be helpful but is in fact quite drunk.

More genocide, UK (Han)cock-ups, more Brexit problems, Joni Mitchell, jerry-building and the freedom to protest

27 June 2021

I wrote last week about Canada’s treatment of Indigenous Canadians so it seems fair to remember that, south of the border, things were just as bad.  America passed the Civilisation Fund Act in 1819 to pay missionaries to help the federal government “civilize” Indigenous American children by replacing their traditional customs with Christian practices, forcing them to convert to Christianity and give up their own languages.

Some 40 years later, this led to the creation of state-funded schools, often run by nuns, and, in the following 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children in the US were removed from their families and sent to these schools to learn “the habits and arts of civilization”.

In March 2019, Mary Annette Pember, whose mother had been sent to one of these schools, wrote about what little her mother had told her and her attempts to discover how true it was.  Her mother had said the principal was Mother Superior Sister Catherine of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration was known as “the evil nun” for her cruelty to the children in her care:  beatings, shaming and starvation.  She told Pember “One year during the Christmas season, Sister was marching down the cellar steps to check if we stole any food, she fell on the bottom step—crash! She hit her head bad! Not long after, she died.”

“What a silent cheer us kids made!” she continued. “Maybe it was terrible, but it was the best Christmas present we ever got!”

Pember had always wondered how much of this was true, looked through old records and finally found a letter from the Sister Secretary to the Right Reverend Monsignor William Ketcham, the director of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions saying “By the time these lines reach you, our dear Mother Superior Sister Catherine will, no doubt, have been called to her eternal reward. On December 19, she fell off the second last step leading down to the kitchen entry.”

America hasn’t offered any significant apology for the treatment of these children although Barack Obama did sign the Native American Apology Resolution on December 19, 2009, apologizing for past “ill-conceived policies toward the Native peoples of this land” but it’s had no real impact on federal policy on Native Americans.

Pember headed her article “Death by Civilisation”.

On top of the impact of the Covid pandemic, Britain is currently suffering, if not death, then certainly a severe illness caused by Brexit with all sorts of small stupidities being added to the bigger ones of what we already wot.  The latest are that pigeon fanciers will no longer be able to release their birds in France to see which one gets back to Bridlington first and, despite saying earlier this year that they wouldn’t, EE will be reintroducing those extortionate ‘roaming charges’ for many UK customers using their phones in Europe.

Even the Brexit minister Lord (David) Frost has admitted that Leavers didn’t anticipate how Brexit would sour our relations with the EU and he believes Leavers are quite surprised that the UK’s duplicitous negotiations and agreements weren’t welcomed by the EU.  Frost also hinted that he thought Britain had “underestimated what sort of impact” the protocol would have on the movement of goods. 

Within the English government, the most curious things about the CCTV pictures of Matt Hancock having a serious grope with one of his staff is that he didn’t know there was a CCTV camera in his office.  Apparently it wouldn’t be difficult to identify the person who sold the pictures to the Sun but the government won’t be launching an enquiry to identify them because they would then be fired, claim they were a whistle-blower and take the government to an employment tribunal which would be, um, interesting for Hancock.

Boris Johnson accepted Hancock’s apology for breaching the Covid distancing rules and ignored the affair, probably because, as a recidivist himself, he considers it normal behaviour and, anyway, he didn’t want to lose the person he was going to blame when all the government’s (Han)cock-ups become public, but Hancock and his (obviously willing) gropee have both now resigned so Johnson will need to find a new scapegoat.

Interestingly, I heard the Minister for COVID Vaccine Deployment, Nadhim Zahawi, talking on Wednesday and was unsettled to hear him talking exactly like Johnson, the same pauses in the wrong places, the curious rise and fall in pitch and even the same vocabulary (though his voice was quite different).  Very unnerving.

Part of the UK’s and Russia’s defence strategies have always involved routine forays close to what the other considers its territory in order to see how the other side responds.  The interesting thing about this week’s naval venture near the disputed territory of Crimea was that, instead of the more usual “They shot at us” / “Oh no we didn’t”, the exchange was “We shot at them” / “Oh no they didn’t”.  There’s a plot for a pantomime in there somewhere.

This month marks the 50^th anniversary of the release of the Canadian singer Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, ‘Blue’, widely regarded as her best album.  Fans have claimed that she’s as good a lyricist as Bob Dylan and is musically his superior. 

There’s no doubt about her musical superiority and some of her lyrics do conjure up images and feelings that stay in the mind but, for me, there’s no doubt about Dylan’s lyrical superiority.   However, consider these lovely lines from ‘A Case of You’:

 “Just before our love got lost you said / “I am as constant as a northern star” / and I said “Constant in the darkness, where’s that at? / If you want me I’ll be in the bar.”

Back in 1968, a gas explosion tore out some load-bearing walls and, as a result of poor design and construction, one entire corner of a two-month old 22-storey tower block in East London, called Ronan Point, collapsed like a pack of cards. 

By 1974, new building regulations had been introduced and Grenfell Tower was built in West London;  in 2017, it was refurbished and fitted with cladding panels that had been known to be inflammable since 2005.  A few months later, the entire building was gutted by fire.

Last week, three years after an inspection had identified “major structural damage” at a 12-storey condominium in Miami, including a failing concrete slab on the floor with the pool and “abundant cracking and crumbling” in an underground garage, a wing of the block containing almost half the apartments collapsed.

Now the UK has cut foreign aid, wants to sell Channel 4 and spend £200m on a new national yacht while the pandemic rages through third world countries and more people are being made homeless and desperate in the UK.

And HS2 want an extra £75m from the government to compensate them for “violent and disruptive” protests along the route and claim they are “very exercised” about this.  By the most amazing coincidence, this claim is being made as the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts bill is tiptoeing its way through parliament and could become law later this year. As a serial demonstrator (from Aldermaston marches to peaceful sit-downs in Trafalgar Square to the huge protest against the Iraq war), I find this very frightening.  The law aims to criminalise protests that are “noisy enough to have a relevant impact” that might cause “serious unease, alarm or distress” to other people.  This would give the police power to make arrests on their personal and subjective view of somebody’s distress as individual freedoms are further eroded.  Memo to self:  remember not to call the fuzz ‘the fuzz’.

People with deliquescent brains, Boris’s fall guy, Middle East, living in Gaza, US death penalty

30 May 2021

I’m rarely shocked or disgusted but this week’s news brought tears to my eyes.

Sasha Johnson, who is an Oxford graduate with two children, helped to found the ‘Taking the Initiative’ party last year and is a prominent BLM activist. Last Sunday, she was shot in the head at a party and medics are now fighting to save her life. 

What I found so upsetting about her shooting was that, on Sunday, Sky News Australia published a 39-second video report on their YouTube channel which attracted some 9,000 comments, more than 7,000 of which were violent and racist and celebrated her injury.  One typical comment read “Damn, every once in a while I read something that makes me want to celebrate.  Hope she enjoys being a vegetable.”

Sky News and YouTube were alerted to the comments on Monday.  Sky admitted posting the video on YouTube but said they weren’t responsible for comments posted by others and complainers should talk to Google (which owns YouTube).  YouTube said ‘uploaders’, in this case Sky News, were able to delete or disable comments, but hadn’t. 

Australia’s former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has said “… the subscribers’ comments beneath [the report] illustrate how Sky News’ most popular videos are cultivating this far-right echo-chamber”.  He also said “When viewers of Australian news content are jubilant at the news of a young woman being shot in the head, something is seriously wrong.”

Who are these 7,000 people?  Obviously their brains are deliquescent but what makes them like that?  Anybody else bet that the majority were single white males worried about the size of their willies?

On this website, I’m given the choice of whether to accept comments on my mutterings and, last week, somebody disagreed with my comment on 16 May about Donald Trump’s blackmailability.  I accepted the comment and added a brief reply, which the person who made the comment ‘liked’, and both of these are now on the website.

We’re now waiting to see if the full release from Covid-19 restrictions is still sensible.  Boris Johnson will no doubt be happy to change his plan to remove all restrictions on 21 June because it wouldn’t be his fault but that of the ‘Indian’ variant, conveniently forgetting that he had dithered yet again over stopping flights from India until after 20,000 people had rushed the variant back to the UK to beat the border closure that was inevitable.

More government triumphs were revealed this week by former spad Dominic Cummings who said Johnson is unfit for office and his health secretary Matt Hancock is a liar – all this from a man whose own credibility is dubious, though that doesn’t stop him being right.  Hancock has of course been on the front bench during the reigns of David Cameron, Theresa May and Johnson through either a quite astounding combination of experience and skill or by a rather frightening combination of unconstrained ambition and political deviousness.

According to yesterday’s Daily Mirror, Hancock said “The number of people being vaccinated in Bolton right now is phenomenal, tens of thousands every single day.”  A Bolton doctor said about 2,000-3,000 people were actually being vaccinated each day.  You pays your money and you takes your choice, and what’s a decimal point between friends anyway?

Cynics believe that Johnson hasn’t fired Hancock because when he finally allows an inquiry into his handling of the pandemic and the shit hits the fan, he’ll have a fall guy.

Some of his gang are also trying to destroy the BBC, a vital source of uncensored information for people in oppressive regimes all over the world, because one dodgy interviewer manipulated a woman who was clearly damaged and suffering mental health problems into giving an interview more than 25 years ago.  She had obviously prepared for the interview, knew exactly what she was going to say and was later reported as being happy with how it went, but that doesn’t justify broadcasting it – somebody somewhere should have protected her and her family.

Another triumph was the renationalisation (sorry, “simplification”) of the railway system which is estimated to save £1.5bn p.a. most of which will now be spent on the railways instead of going to company directors and shareholders. 

I’ve always been convinced that, if you need to cut costs, this is much easier to do in ‘profitable’ areas because everybody leaves them alone and concentrate on skinning the loss-makers, but this government has a curious sense of priorities.  For example, it’s just overspent a budget of £280,000 to renovate five ‘grace and favour’ flats for senior Commons staff by 150%, Johnson is planning to spend £200m on a new national flagship (i.e.  probably more like £500m in practice) and another £100bn is being flushed away by HS2.  Meanwhile, hundreds of people remain at risk in tower blocks covered with cladding that was known to be a fire risk even before the developers specified it, the manufacturers supplied it and the builders fitted it.

People sometimes say things like “it takes a disaster to get any changes made”;  if only it were that easy.

After what seemed a good start, Joe Biden also seems to have made a major misjudgement and ensured that America can’t take part in any future Israel / Palestine peace talks by supporting Israel in the recent fighting, saying it has a right to defend itself, and aggravating the damage done when his predecessor moved the US embassy to Jerusalem.  (Biden hasn’t done too well on Alaskan gas and oil drilling permits either.)

Perhaps he’s forgotten that Israel invaded and is occupying Palestinian land in the Gaza strip, which it has isolated from the rest of the world, and the West Bank, and is now claiming “they started it” while their prime minister is facing criminal charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust and is under increasing pressure from opposition parties.  The Yiddish word chutzpah seems particularly apposite.

We have some good friends who have friends in Gaza and told us that, before destroying individually-targetted buildings, the Israelis give notice of the attack.  An anonymous telephone call gives people perhaps a couple of minutes to evacuate a house or a couple of hours to evacuate an office block.  When a general attack is actually taking place, some families gather all their members together into one room so that, if their building is hit, they’ll all die together – imagine 13 people huddled together in one room, scared even to go to the loo in case a rocket hits while they’re separated from the rest of the family.

On 2 May, I mentioned that Arizona has been secretly stocking up on drugs used in executions and it was reported this week its gas chamber has been “refurbished”.  Arizona suspended executions in 2014 after it had botched the killing on Joseph Rudolph Wood, 55, who took two hours to die, gasping and gulping as the prison executioners kept pumping the ‘lethal’ cocktail of drugs into him until he’d been given 15 times the amount required by the state’s execution protocol.  Executioners must be very warped people.

Also in America, only 6 Republican senators showed they’re not scared of Trump by voting for a bi-partisan 9/11-style investigation into the coordinated attack on the Capitol on 6 January, which means it won’t happen.  The other 44 are chicken or just stupid and have forgotten they’re paid to do what’s best for their country, not to encourage people to vote for them again.

But perhaps I’m just old-fashioned in thinking that integrity is important and money isn’t.

Message for Chuck Schumer, PM’s good week, punting, NZ, Vlad the Poisoner, flammable cladding, smart technology and smuggling cactus

7 February 2021

An open message to Chuck Schumer:

“Please remind Senators when you open the trial of your last president that, while they were elected for their party membership, this is not an election and they must now put their politics aside and think for themselves as intelligent individuals, looking only at the facts and the evidence before them.”

Boris Johnson actually had a good week, claiming personal credit for having been at least partly educated in a country whose scientists found the first effective Covid-19 vaccine, and for leading a genuinely impressive roll-out of the new inoculations.  By the end of last week, more than 8.5 million people had already been vaccinated and it seems possible that one of his promises, to vaccinate 14 million people by 15 February, might be kept.  If it is, then shall flags be hung and songs be sung and church bells rung to mark the first time Johnson’s ever kept a promise.

However, he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place:  scientists (and a Conservative former health secretary) want the lockdown kept in place for as long as it takes to know we’re all safe while businesses – many of whom are Tory donors – want everything opened up again as soon as possible.

Scientists have also said opening schools in England too soon would be “a recipe for disaster” while so many new cases are still being reported each day while Johnson has just said he reckons 8 March is “the prudent date to set”.  18 Tory MPs want them opened on 22 February…

How can Johnson possibly say 8 March is “prudent” until he knows if the number of cases will have decreased enough by then to avoid a fourth spike or surge?  (I reckon the only difference between a spike and a surge is the scale of the axes on graphs of the figures.) 

Some of the more unexpected casualties of the lockdowns are guide dogs.  Their normal lives are full of concentrated brain work, guiding their visually-impaired owners round obstacles, judging whether they can safely walk under scaffolding 6’ above their heads (how do they do that?), stopping them at kerbs, judging traffic, etc.  During lockdown, they’re getting bored and there are fears that they’ll need retraining before they can work again.

But perhaps it’s like riding a bicycle or punting:  however long it is since you last did it, it comes back when you’re on the bike / punt.  Mind you, I’ve never seen a dog punting.  (There are only two things you need to learn about punting:  don’t lower the pole down, drop it and let it run through your hand and, if it gets stuck in mud and won’t come free with a jerk, let go of it and stay on the punt – the alternative is damp.)

I can’t let this week go by without a nod at Captain / Hon Colonel Sir Tom Moore who died this week of Covid-19.  When he was 99 and had been told to exercise after a hip operation, he thought he could combine this with raising some money for the NHS so he decided to walk 100 laps of his garden before his 100^th birthday, hoping to raise £1,000.  The rest is history:  the story went viral, he raised almost £39 million, was knighted and had a number one hit song with Michael Ball.  Yet another example that ‘ordinary’ people can do extraordinary things.

At the other end of the scale are people like Vlad the Poisoner who failed to kill Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, by putting novichok in his underpants.   Navalny recovered abroad but returned to Russia knowing he was like to be arrested, and so he was, for violating parole from a sentence he was given in 2014 for embezzlement, a case he claims was politically motivated after he’d accused Putin and his mates of stealing billions from the state.  Navalny has been sentenced to two years and eight months in a prison colony, another court case is pending and his supporters are demonstrating in the streets.

Anybody making book on how long Vladimir Putin will now go before killing somebody else?

As far as I know, nobody nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize but Jared Kushner (son of He Whose Name Shall No Longer Be Spoken) and his deputy, Avi Berkowitz, have been nominated for one by the lawyer who acted for the defence in last year’s impeachment trial.  The Hong Kong pro-democracy movement has also been nominated by nine lawyers from both parties.

I’ve recently come across a fascinating project called Operation X, run by Dyami Millarson, who aims to learn endangered European languages before they die out.  At the moment, he’s concentrating on the 14 living Frisian tongues …

Jacinda Ardern has been criticised for not doing enough to remove the systemic disadvantages faced by the Māori peoples and racist bias in environment, housing and child poverty.  However, she has appointed Māori Nanaia Mahuta as New Zealand’s foreign minister, the first woman to sit in the country’s parliament wearing a moko kauae, an ancient Māori tattoo form, and there are hopes that things may be starting to change for the better.

Parliament last week voted on a Labour motion to speed up the removal of flammable cladding from buildings that are still at risk from a Grenfell-type massacre and to set up an independent taskforce to get the dangerous cladding removed.  Some Conservatives supported it but most followed instructions to abstain so it was passed by 263 votes to zero.  Because it’s a recommendation and not a requirement at the moment, why did so many on the Government benches abstain?  Don’t they care about the lives still at risk?  Or are they worried about upsetting the money-grubbing developers who fitted them?

Dolly Parton was twice offered the presidential medal of freedom, the highest US civilian honour, by the last president but turned it down both times, first because her husband was ill and second because of coronavirus travel restrictions.  Last November, Barack Obama was asked why he’d honoured musicians like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor and Stevie Wonder but not Parton.

Obama looked surprised and said “That’s a mistake … that was a screw-up … I think I assumed that she’d already got one … she deserves one.”  He also promised to call Joe Biden and it seems he did because Biden’s now offered her one though she says she’s not sure if she’ll accept it in case it appears political.

Being paranoid about ‘smart’ technology, I was rather upset to get a text message from the garage in Manchester we’d bought a newer car from this time last year saying “Your car … has alerted us that it may require maintenance.  Please call us on …” 

What’s it doing?  It’s switched off and sitting in the garage.  Has it told Google what music I’ve been listening to, or the police that I tend to keep to speed limits?  Is it about to turn the television on to the Gay Rabbit channel?  (What is the Gay Rabbit channel anyway?  We’ve skimmed past it on the list but never bothered to find out what programmes it shows.)

A woman was caught by a detector dog at Auckland airport trying to smuggle almost 1,000 cacti and succulent plants into New Zealand in stockings stuck to her body.  This brought to mind some words from a Loudon Wainwright III song which I’ve only adapted slightly:

Smuggling in cactus is easy

Stuffed in your tights – it’s a breeze

Just walk as if you’re bow-legged

Don’t laugh, don’t fart and don’t sneeze.

Unanswered questions, Trump’s Twitter password, US election, none so blind …

25 October 2020

In 2017, the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people.  In July 2019, the then housing minister James Brokenshire (another great example of nominative determinism) said he expected “remediation” of other buildings with dangerous cladding would be completed by the building owners by June 2020.  Last week, 249 buildings still needed to be made safe even though the government has allocated £600m for the removal of Grenfell-type panels and a further £1bn for first safety problems discovered since the Grenfell disaster in other high-rise blocks.  Brokenshire made it clear that the government believed the building owners were responsible so why are they giving our money to compensate property developers who selected unsafe designs, installed cheap but dangerous materials and trousered huge profits? 

The wonderful Marcus Rashford was despairing on Wednesday after the government refused to extend free school meals over the holidays.  Thousands of paediatricians and other doctors have added to the pressure to reinstate them and a petition has so far gathered 700,000 signatures.  All over the country, local councils, small and large companies and individual donors and volunteers are working together in an attempt to fill the gap and it’s now possible Labour may force another vote. Can Boris Johnson even spell ‘hunger’?

On Thursday, Rishi Sunak discovered lots more billions he could give away but rather than give it to the NHS as infections and deaths continue to race upwards, he gave it to businesses affected by the rapidly increasing lockdowns.  Did he think of excluding large companies whose owners can inject more cash themselves if they haven’t kept enough reserves?

Johnson accused Sadiq Khan of bankrupting London’s transport system.  TfL’s audited accounts show that, since Khan took over from Johnson in 2016, its deficit has reduced by 71% and its cash reserves increased by 16%.  Can’t Johnson count? 

Welsh politicians want more information about the potential environmental impact of the Hinkley Point construction contractors dumping tens of thousands of tonnes of soil in the sea near Cardiff.  Why don’t they dump it in Swansea Bay to become foundations for Swansea’s climate-friendly tidal lagoon proposal can be reconsidered?

We already knew that Donald Trump paid no personal income tax in America in 10 of the 15 years before he became president but the New York Times has discovered he has a previously undeclared bank account in China where he paid almost $200,000 in taxes in 2013-2015.  The Trump Organisation claimed that the account was opened “to pay the local taxes” and that “No deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialised … since 2015, the office has remained inactive”.  So he secretly hides lots of money in China just to pay taxes for – er – hiding money there?

In 2016, a Dutch researcher has guessed Trump’s Twitter account password – “yourefired” – and they’ve just done it again – “maga2020” – so there’s still no obvious sign of intelligent life in Trump.

On the other hand, Exeter Chiefs, who were playing in the second tier of English rugby only ten years ago, beat Wasps 19-13 to add the Premiership Crown to their European one.  

As the UK creeps uncertainly past the lockdown shadows of Scotland and Wales, the second surge is “very serious” in Germany, “out of control” in Spain, and Belgium’s deputy prime minister is in intensive care;  and, as American public health experts warned that the US is on the verge of a whole new surge in infections and death, Trump reassured everyone in the last presidential debate that “It will go away” and “We’re rounding the corner”.

About 220m people are eligible to vote in the presidential election and more than 50m have already done so and, despite polls favouring the Democrats, everybody’s still nervous about the outcome.  Remember that in 2016 Hillary Clinton got 3m more votes than Trump but the historically outdated system of electoral college voting put the loony into the White House. 

For example, California’s population is greater than the population of the 22 smallest states combined (nearly half the total number of states) but California only has 55 electoral college votes while the smallest 22 states have 96 votes.

This may be why 110,000 Californians have bought a gun since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, 47,000 of them buying their first ever gun, claiming they fear civil unrest.

Strangely enough, the most powerful argument to vote Democrat came from Trump himself when he said he could leave the country if he loses.

One of the New Yorker magazine’s legal staff writers, Jeffrey Toobin, has been suspended for apparently masturbating during a Zoom work call.  We’ve all been bored during work meetings but is this the ‘new normal’?

This could be described as prestidigitation, which literally means ‘fast fingerwork’ and is known over the pond as American Express.  It’s how stage magicians do their tricks, by making you take your eye off the ball (ahem).

How the magicians do this and how our brains are misled are still not properly understood.  We know that we can see everything from in front of us to about 90^o on each side but what we tend to forget is that we actually don’t see everything.  We normally shut out a lot of irrelevant stuff and concentrate on what’s important – a car unexpectedly coming out of side turning, the hole we’re digging for a new garden plant or the screen in front of me that shows I’ve just mistyped a word.

(For an executive summary of the next bit, skip down 4 paragraphs.)

Neuroscientists now think vision takes a complex route through the brain through areas that not only amplify the bits we’re concentrating on but filter out irrelevancies.

In 1984, Francis Crick – yes, the DNA guy – proposed that the thalamus (a very ancient part of the brain that receives sensory stimuli) acts as a filter and the cortex (the more recently developed wiggly bits on the outside responsible for more complex activity) boosts selected inputs to help us focus on features of interest.

More recently, a team of neuroscientists at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered that signals go via the front of the cortex to a much more ancient structure called the basal ganglia (found in the very primitive brains of the earliest vertebrates like lampreys and Donald Trump), then to something called the thalamic reticular nucleus (next to the thalamus) and thence to the thalamus itself, before finally going back up to higher cortical regions which make decisions about what to do.

(Executive summary:  everything our eyes see goes through various filters and amplifiers in the brain so we can concentrate on what’s important and make decisions about what to do / think.)

The obvious weakness is that we sometimes discard stuff that is actually important, or even just interesting, particularly if a stage magician misdirects our attention.  For example, many of us will have tested our awareness of what’s happening around us by trying to count the number of times the players in white shirts pass the ball in an old video clip but this one was new to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bnnmWYI0lM

Give it a go and see how you do.  (I got 2 out of 3.)

And finally – and readers who find bad language offensive should read no further – I’ve only just come across a short Twitter exchange back in June 2016 that made me laugh, between two of my favourite Guardian writers / journalists, one week after the EU referendum:

LucyMangan – This whole fucking shitshow is almost worth it to have MarinaHyde [writing] every day

MarinaHyde – thank you so much! Too kind xxxx

LucyMangan – GET BACK TO WORK