State benefits here, AI and swearing there, stupidity everywhere

1 November 2025

Without doubt, the most shocking of recent excitements is a new insight I gained into the Britain’s state benefits system.  A neuro-divergent friend, a single-parent with two small children, struggles to survive on Universal Credit and Child Benefit.  The older child was recently diagnosed as needing a SEND plan and the school counsellor said they should apply for Disability Living Allowance.

When the DWP heard about this application they immediately cancelled the next Universal Credit payment because they hadn’t been told about a change in circumstances.  People claim benefits because they can’t live without them so letting a Jobsworth remove a benefit because of a technical breach of their bureaucracy leaving the claimant Sweet Fair Angela to pay their rent and heating bills and buy food for the next month seems … petty (the kindest word I can think of)

What can anyone say about a bunch of civil servants (paid by you and me) who enforce such an ineffably stupid and cruel response? 

I wonder how ‘changes in circumstances’ are defined?  For example, should a parent report that a child will no longer drink Ribena but will now drink Dr Pepper?  If this should be reported, we can all overwhelm the bastards with trivialities.

Perhaps I’ll google it and see how changes in circumstances are defined.

I read recently that Google’s AI programming has some sort of swearing restrictions and will anticipate questions rather than offer the results of a wider search.  If you ask “What is AI?”, you’ll get an AI-generated selection of links;  if you ask “What the fuck is AI?”, you get a quite different selection.  (Of course I tried it.)

Apparently, you can also circumvent those irritating chatbots by repeating “I want to talk to a human”, or say something is an emergency, but I haven’t yet tried this.

In other news, Plaid Cymru won an election for a traditionally Labour seat in Wales;  Labour and Conservatives were humiliated and Reform was disappointed.

Further east, Andrew Windsor, the piss-artist formerly known as Prince, was stripped of all his titles  while others just worried about digital ID cards.  Why do people get so exercised about having them?  We already have photo ID driving licences and passports, I have an iris scan on a computer somewhere in America, my mother’s ‘maiden name’ was shown in ‘Who’s Who’ until I deleted it some 20 years ago, and Sainsburys know where I live.

I also wonder how many people give honest answers to ‘security questions’ about things like my favourite football team and the name of my first pet (both ‘hydrangea’ if you’re interested).

However, with the incomparable brilliance of governments generally, it seems a trial run will introduce a smartphone-based veteran card available to 1.8 million people.  “Veteran”?  Does that mean those of us who are a generation behind technology, haven’t even got smartphones and are more likely to be suffering from dementia?  I have already had to accost passing strangers at 11 pm on dark nights to offer to repay them in cash if they’ll use their smartphone to pay for my parking because the car park company’s payment machine doesn’t accept cash or cards or jokes from Christmas crackers.

More worrying still are the results by research by Cardiff University into how viewers’ preferred news media influence their beliefs about what is happening in the world.  For example, they discovered that 84% of GB News viewers believed net migration into the UK is still increasing, compared with 71% of ITV viewers, 62 % of BBC viewers and 51% of Channel 4 viewers.  It’s interesting that, in all these cases, more than half these viewers still believe net migration has increased although, in fact, while net migration did rise between 2020 and 2023, it has since been falling.  But who lets facts stand in the way of a good story?

Incidentally, can anyone think of any other political party leader apart from Nigel Farage who is allowed to front their own series on a television news channel?  I’ve tried watching some of his (and other) GB News shows but my hearing no longer lets me separate individual voices when two people are shouting over each other and I get more pleasure from reading a good book anyway.

In the Middle East, the word ‘ceasefire’ is gaining a new meaning.  Because Hamas hadn’t returned the remains of all their hostages and an Israeli soldier was killed in a skirmish between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants, Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a raid on Gaza that killed at least 104 people, 35 of them children, and wounded many more.  The situation was further complicated by Hamas’s return of the remains of a hostage who Israeli forces had claimed to have recovered two years ago. 

And there was I thinking “ceasefire” meant that firing would cease.

More evidence of stupidity came from the covid inquiry when Boris Johnson denied claims that his government had failed to prepare for school closures, saying he thought it would be “amazing” if the Department for Education hadn’t done this.  Chuck Brodsky once sang about George W Bush: “Orders come down right from the top / to punish the guy who pushes the mop”.

So here’s another example of stupidity at the bottom of the food chain in our nearest town: last week, a woman pushing a buggy, was being followed by a somewhat older child who, unbeknownst to her, dropped a sweet wrapper.  Suddenly, a “Littering Enforcement Officer” loomed out of the shadows and fined the mother £120, payable NOW or they’d call the police.  These people have the power to fine people from £75 to £150, so what costs £75 if a sweet wrapper costs £120 – an unexpected sneeze?  

Thus did the Jobsworth make a parent responsible for a crime they didn’t even know had been committed.  Surely this will allow:  “Good evening, sir, I’m a police officer.  You may have thought your 9-year-old was in their bedroom but they’ve just been caught setting fire to the Council offices so you’re under arrest for arson.”

Idiots, hypocrites, protests and British politicians

11 October 2025

Enough stuff has been happening recently to inspire me to hoick out another sheet of vellum, extract a quill from the bum of a passing goose, and scratch away at some more mutterings.

In the first year of his second presidency, Trump’s own online and onstage performances have become so deranged that Madeleine Dean, a Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania, told the Republican house speaker Mike Johnson “The president is unhinged. He is unwell.”  

Johnson’s response was “Well a lot of folks on your side are too”.  Or, in English, “So the person with his finger on the button has dementia?  A lot of powerless people on your side also have dementia” (or, in everyday language, “My dog can fart louder than your dog.”)

The other thing that spurred me to action was the murder of Charlie Kirk on 10 September. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who hadn’t heard of him until he was shot but he seems to have been one of the spittle-spouting bigots from the less-humane end of America’s Republican party.

Reactions across the political spectrum were predictable:  right-wingers were incensed that people on the left would do this;  left-wingers were appalled that the killer claimed to be on their side. 

Whether or not I believe Kirk should be canonised is unimportant (although ‘Saint Charlie’ does have a certain ring to it …)  What is important is that I believe nobody has any right to kill anybody else because they don’t share the same political or religious beliefs (or for any other reason).

Then, in Manchester, a British terrorist attacked a synagogue, killing and wounding several people before he was himself shot dead by the police.

This produced an immediate response from one of the world’s biggest hypocrites, Benjamin Netanyahu, who said “Israel grieves with the Jewish community in the UK after the barbaric terror attack in Manchester.”  Followed by which he ordered more barbaric terror attacks on the remaining Palestinians he hasn’t already murdered.  By the end of July, he’d succeeded in killing 18,457 children according to an official list of named victims accepted as accurate by the international community, the UN and Israel’s military (but not Israeli politicians!)

A 27^th ceasefire* and exchange of hostages has since been agreed but we’ll see how long that lasts.  Two hours after the new ceasefire came into effect, Israeli tanks opened fire on Palestinians but their troops subsequently withdrew to new, agreed positions.

Last weekend saw a demonstration in London organised by Defend Our Juries to protest against the banning of Palestine Action, a UK network set up in 2020, “committed to ending global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime”.  The ban adds it to a list of more than 80 groups of international political movements with armed wings, like Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as armed groups like ISIS/ISIL, al-Qaeda and Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan.

Some of Palestine Action’s members are certainly guilty of causing criminal damage but it doesn’t have an armed wing and this protest was about the banning of a UK group whose members are opposed to the government’s continuing support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.  One demonstrator was cautioned and nearly arrested by the police for holding up a sign.  As they were about to carry him off, he suggested they read what his sign said:  “I oppose genocide – I support plasticine action”, in big, bold capitals.

The police laughed and left him.

The organisers were hoping to beat the arrest record set by a peaceful CND demonstration in 1961 but, with my help, they didn’t quite make it (I was there in 1961, I was arrested and fined £1, which seemed a fair price for a night’s accommodation, a good breakfast in Balham nick and luxury coach transport to Marylebone Court, followed by which I went back to school for the afternoon).

The demonstration was held on the same day as the Peckham Conker Championships in south London.  Isn’t it nice to have a choice of events to attend.

There’s a great shortlist for Idiot of the Month with Trump telling other countries what to do, Robert Jenrick complaining that Birmingham isn’t the sort of place he’d want to live in because he was there for 40 minutes and didn’t see a white face, goody bags at the Conservative Party Conference containing some chocolate with Kemi Badenoch’s signature printed on the wrapper under the words “When Labour negotiates, Britian loses”.

As fascinating as ever is the continuing fragmentation of the British political system.  For as long as I can remember, the government of Great Britain has been controlled or overseen by Conservatives on the right and Labour on the left, with a few Liberals and others somewhere in the middle. 

Now both the Conservative and Labour parties appear to be floundering in the wake of their unimpressive leaders while Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is attracting so many people disenchanted by the other parties that there’s a very real risk he could be Britain’s next prime minister.  Farage thinks teachers would immediately go on strike if he were elected because he’s accused them of “poisoning our kids” by telling them that black children are victims and white children oppressors – now there’s an unbrilliant reason to vote for him.

But he’s still the best at public speaking if you don’t listen too closely to what he’s saying but his only loyalty is to himself and he only became an MP for the first time last year (his 27^th attempt* for 27 different parties*).

By the way, this blog’s by-line is “a thing of shreds and patches”.  One reader who is clearly much more learned than I am has pointed out my quotation from The Mikado was actually adapted by Sir William Schwenck Gilbert from Shakespeare:  Hamlet describes his murderous and usurping uncle as ‘a king of shreds and patches’. 

*          I exaggerate …

Trump’s and Netanyahu’s rockers, racism, and a joke

30 August 2025

As another August fades into history, the world is still divided between people who think Donald Trump is off his rocker and those who never thought he was on it in the first place.

Trump’s recent achievements include announcing that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, could end the war with Russia “almost immediately” if he wanted to.  Of course he could:  all he has to do is agree with everything Vladimir Putin wants and the war will end as Russia secures its new borders and disenfranchises all Ukrainians.

At Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska, he was obviously confident when he welcomed Putin at the airport.  After the meeting, it was all too obvious that Trump hadn’t got his own way and his vanity had been punctured:  he sat slumped in his chair while Putin sat upright and inscrutable.

He also proved that surrounding oneself with unqualified sycophants is never the best idea when it was widely reported that one of his team had left confidential documents describing his brief for the meeting in a public area of an Alaskan hotel.

Billy Long, a loyal Trump supporting Republican congressman and previously an auctioneer, was appointed head of the Internal Revenue Service in June and has just been booted out.  His appointment at the time had raised eyebrows because Long’s previous experience of tax were limited to the promotion of a fraud-riddled tax credit scheme.  The next head of the IRS will be Trump’s 7^th appointment so far this year.

His stunning lack of self-knowledge (and ‘political’ nous) was revealed when the Norwegian media Dagens Næringsliv reported that he had cold-called the Norwegian finance minister Jens Stoltenberg to ask for a Nobel Peace Prize.

When one remembers that Henry Kissinger was awarded a peace price in 1973, this perhaps isn’t so unlikely after all.  Kissinger was awarded the prize together with his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho but Tho had the decency to reject it and was reported by the New York Times as saying “peace has not yet really been established in South”.

A ceasefire had been agreed in October 1972 but Kissinger then ordered a bombing raid on Hanoi in December and two members of the Nobel Committee resigned in protest at the award while a New York Times op-ed suggested it should be called the ‘Nobel War Prize’.

North and South Vietnam remained at war until North Vietnam took Saigon in April 1975 and united the country.

Nothing much has changed in the Middle East except that Benjamin Netanyahu (another rocker-free ‘leader’) has decided the best way to improve Israel’s image internationally is to target and murder the journalists reporting on what they do, even if they’re inside a hospital.  They’ve even added a subtlety of their own by killing a bunch of journalists and then hitting exactly the same target again 15 minutes after the first attack so the aid workers and surviving journalists who had arrived to help the wounded are also killed.

Despite tens of thousands of people, Jews and Arabs, joining demonstrations across the country calling on Netanyahu to cancel plans to attack Gaza City, Israel’s military is accelerating its preparations for the assault.

Critics, including relatives of hostages still in Gaza, say he is prolonging the war to extend his personal political career and further delay the courts hearing the criminal charges brought against him.

Even Trump said “I’m not happy about it”.

Numbers from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate that, by May this year, almost 9,000 fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were dead or “probably dead”.  However, Israel believed they had already killed some 53,000 Palestinians, thereby admitting that almost five out of six people they’d killed were civilians.

Earlier in August, the Israel Defense Force had even “claimed responsibility” for the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and admitted having targeted him.

(Have you noticed that bombers and other terrorists are always reported as “claiming responsibility” for such atrocities.  I once suggested to Jon Snow, then a Channel 4 News presenter, that they should say that bombers had “accepted the blame” for atrocities but he was surprisingly defensive and said that a lot of editorial thought had been given to the words used.)

All that Britain can offer is Nigel Farage who has taken advantage of other politicians taking holidays to produce headline-grabbing soundbites – lots of emotional fluff not too hampered by detail or facts.  (One journalist, possibly not a fan, pointed out that Farage grabbed headlines during the summer recess because he took his own holidays while parliament was sitting.)

His “Operation Restoring Justice” (no, me neither) proposes the deportation of “absolutely anyone” arriving in a small boat and the removal of the UK’s commitments to human rights.  He said he would leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act, disapply the 1951 refugee convention and the UN convention against torture as well as the Council of Europe’s anti-trafficking convention.  (His party has already promised to do away with all those rubbish policies on equality and diversity.)

The whole thing is so ludicrous I wonder if Farage would claim he’s just patriotic but I wonder when patriotism merges with racism and ill-considered beliefs in ‘racial purity’ (c.f. Hitler’s Germanic “Master Race”, which was to be achieved by murdering Jews, Russians, Roma, disabled people, and anybody who wasn’t tall and blonde – and that was just the women because Hitler himself was short and dark).

It reminds me of whoever it was who claimed they could prove that everybody was still anti-semitic.

 “Nonsense” said a friend, “I’m not anti-anybody.”

“Well, just think:  Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews.”

“That was 90 years ago.”

“But, in Germany today, there are still Nazi groups whose aim is to kill another 6 million Jews and 47 postmen.”

“47 postmen???”

“You see, not even you care about the Jews.”

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.

Jewish compassion, banks, eco-systems and privatisation

31 May 2025

The tragedies in Gaza have moved Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, a leading authority on Judaism who feels the people of Israel are “like an extended family”, to write an impassioned article about Gaza.  Their people, he says are “caught between the contemptuous nihilism of Hamas and Israel’s attacks” and that Israel’s blockade, threatening many thousands of people with starvation, “runs counter to Judaism’s values of justice and compassion. It contradicts what we have painfully learned from our long history as victims of persecution, pogroms and mass murder:  that, despite the hatred to which we have been and often still are subject … we must endeavour not to treat innocent others as we have been treated.”

Shalom Aleichem, Rabbi Wittenberg.

Which? magazine has recently drawn attention to the closure of two thirds of the country’s bank branches since 2015.  The banks claim that they’re no longer needed as more people rely on online and mobile banking but the Financial Conduct Authority found that three million people in the UK continue to rely on money.  As a result of these closures, if I want to pay cash into my account, I have to drive 10 miles to the nearest branch, pay for parking, and then walk to the nearest branch to do this.  How do people with disabilities cope?

Another banking wheeze that seems to have been given little publicity is that the security given by ‘chip and PIN’ cards has largely disappeared.  Beg, borrow or steal somebody else’s card and you can spend up to £100 just by swiping the card without needing a PIN, and you can continue to do this in different places until either the card’s credit limit is reached or the owner realises it’s missing and cancels it. 

Other triumphs of the banking sector include Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, the disgraced former boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland who was forced to surrender half his pension payments and had his knighthood stripped from him after he’d run up record-breaking losses and allegedly shredded a whole heap of incriminating paperwork.  The ‘wealth manager’ Quilter estimates that Goodwin’s now having to scrape by on an annual pension of just £598,000, poor old sod, how he suffers for his sins.

In March 2023, while he was trying to convince people that, this time, he’d make a good president, Donald Trump said of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that “There’s a very easy negotiation to take place. But I don’t want to tell you what it is because then I can’t use that negotiation.”  In May that year, he added that he’d stop the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” if he was elected.

Well, he was elected and more than four months after he took over, Trump still has to prove this while Vladimir Putin is trying to establish what he calls “a buffer zone” by invading Ukraine’s north-east Sumy border region.  If Putin wants a buffer zone, why doesn’t he create it in his own country?

Meanwhile, the Financial Times writer Robert Armstrong has created an acronym to describe Trump’s policies – TACO, from ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’.  Particularly apposite when you look at his repeated U-turns on import tariffs.  I wonder if his brain’s big enough to grasp the information he’s been given about the climate crisis rather than encouraging companies to “drill, baby, drill” and actually accelerate the collapse? 

One of its symptoms is the increase in the number of endangered species, even those we’ve taken for granted all our lives.  We haven’t seen swifts, swallows or martins here for many years although a few swallows have nested a couple of miles away in the town by the river;  however we do have greenfinches, which are supposed to be getting rarer, but nobody’s told ours who are aggressive little buggers and control other species’ access to the birdfeeder.

Now the Labour government has withdrawn a provision in the planning bill to require housebuilders to fit at least one hollow ‘swift brick’, which provides nesting space for swifts, house martins and other birds to help boost their declining numbers.  Well, it would have cost housebuilders about £35 per house and we couldn’t expect them to pay that, could we?

Other companies just poison wildlife (and humans) by pouring untreated sewage into our waterways but at least Thames Water, the UK’s largest water company, has been fined £123m by Ofwat with a condition that it’s to be paid by the company and its investors, not by customers.  This total includes an £18.2m fine for continuing to pay dividends even though they’d failed to meet the required minimum financial and environmental standards.

Thames Water’s response was, naturally, to plead to be let off the fine because the management that had run the company to the brink of bankruptcy and renationalisation where it is now poised thought it would make it harder for the company to find a buyer.  Did the directors admit their guilt, return the money paid to them and resign en masse?  Is the Pope a Muslim?

Scotland is currently debating a bill that would criminalise environmental offences classed as “ecocide” and allow company directors who caused severe or reckless danger to be imprisoned.

In New York, there was an explosion on board a barge carrying raw sewage to the works where it is treated.  One worker died and one was injured and the clean-up afterwards can only be imagined.  It calls to mind a popular saying involving fans …

Better news comes with the White House’s official confirmation that Elon Musk will be leaving Donald Trump’s ‘cabinet’ and the Department of Government Efficiency.

If we had a DOGE over here, so many services have now been privatised and made their buyers’ fortunes while they bankrupted their companies that there’d be nobody left to run them if they were renationalised.  Ideologically justifiable, privatisation has (broad generalisation coming up) proved unworkable in practice.  Remember even Maggie Thatcher thought privatising the railways was a step too far.

It may never happen / It already did

1 March 2025

On being challenged this week over having previously called Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator”, Donald Trump said “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that.”  Then, yesterday, the self-acclaimed dealmaker failed to bully Zelenskyy into signing a deal in an unedifying performance that left me greatly relieved and (still) rooting for Ukraine; which just goes to prove either that one swallow doth not a summer make or that a successful comedian makes a better president than a failed nepo baby.

In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified a psychological condition that leads some people to overestimate their abilities.  Now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it isn’t related to intelligence but it deals with somebody’s ability to judge their competence in a particular area.  People of low ability in a particular field tend to think they’re more skilled than they actually are, which leads to overconfidence and consequential errors of judgement in the field. 

On Wednesday, Volker Türk, the UN head of human rights presented a report on the human rights situation in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem saying “Nothing justifies the appalling manner in which Israel has conducted its military operations in Gaza, which consistently breached international law” and that “Hamas has indiscriminately fired projectiles into Israeli territory – amounting to war crimes.”  So they’re both horrid, which is no surprise but little consolation to the many innocents on both sides who have lost families, friends and homes.

Medics and general healthcare workers are protected under International Law but hundreds of them who were working in Gaza have been captured by Israel.  Some have now been released under the ceasefire agreement but at least 160 are still being held prisoner and some of Gaza’s most senior doctors who were released have said they were tortured, beaten and humiliated in Israeli prisons.  In exchange, Hamas is returning hostages it took during its surprise attack on Israel that started this latest episode of the war between them;  some of them are even still alive.

Further south, with a touch of west, it’s estimated that, so far this year, about 7,000 people have been killed in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including hundreds of women who were raped and burnt, when M23, a Rwandan rebel group, freed male prisoners from the Congolese city of Goma.  Despite the decades-old conflict, Rwanda continues to deny any official links with M23 or any interest in land to the south of Goma in the DRC which (quite coincidentally) has rich mineral deposits.

This is, of course, the same Rwanda that the last government believed would be a good place to send migrants who had risked their lives crossing the Channel to reach safety in the UK.  In 2022, a UK court accepted comments from a Foreign Office adviser who had said “Political opposition is not tolerated [in Rwanda] and arbitrary detention, torture and even killings are accepted methods of enforcing control.” 

When asked about this, Priti Patel who was Home Secretary at the time, replied “You are referring to comments made from officials in a different government department but of course it is the Home Office who has led the economic development migration partnership which is our resettlement partnership to Rwanda.  Rwanda is a safe country and all our work with the government of Rwanda shows that.”

Patel resigned later that year.

According to a recent report from MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, HS2 is “a casebook example of how not to run a major project” and it is “unacceptable that, over a decade into the programme, we still do not know what it will cost, what the final scope will be, when it will finally be completed or what benefits it will deliver”.  Did it really take a bunch of MPs to discover this?

This week, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association reported that, in January, sales of new Tesla cars in Europe were 45% lower than the same month last year, dropping from 18,161 last year to 9,945 this year.

Tesla is now keen to discover why this happened.  It’s known that, after the initial excitement, Teslas earned a poor reputation for reliability and many more manufacturers have introduced electric models to compete with them but analysts are now trying to discover whether Elon Musk’s lurch to the political right might be putting people off buying his cars. 

They also need to remember that the early adopters have already bought the things and many of us who like the principle of electric vehicles are waiting for more advanced technology that won’t leave piles of dead batteries full of toxic waste in ten years’ time.  Some of us also suffer range anxiety if we have family and friends at the other end of the country. 

Every time I file my own electricity meter readings, I’m treated to a piece of fascinating but trivial information by QI Elves and yesterday it was “The Sun rotates around its axis every 26 days but, because it’s made of gas, different bits rotate at different speeds.”  This worried me.  If different bits rotate at different speeds, which bit do you choose to measure the speed of its rotation?

While talking about the sky, I assume you were all stargazing yesterday evening when seven planets lined up in a ‘planetary parade’ (which means they appear in a straight line when we look at them from here), a rare sort of super-syzygy that won’t happen again till 2040.

Some worrying news this week came from Luton where a 19-year-old has admitted murdering his mother and two younger siblings and other offences including the possession of a kitchen knife in a public place.  Since this last one is obviously a criminal offence, I’m now feeling very nervous about popping into Lakeland to replace an old kitchen knife.

But, distracted by something else, I did find one interesting piece of information this week:  Kristian Matsson, a Swedish singer-songwriter who performs under the stage name ‘The Tallest Man on Earth’, measures 1.7m (5’7”) from end to end.