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.”

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.”

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.

Magic v science

10 May 2025

Back onto one of my continuing interests this week:  the gulf between what we can explain and ‘prove’ and what we can’t explain.  The former is based on our latest understanding of scientific laws and hypotheses, which some people think must therefore be true, the latter can’t be explained by these laws and hypotheses and is therefore trashed by people who have shut the door on the possible realities of things beyond our current understanding.

The range of the inexplicable is huge and extends from fortune-telling to telepathy to crop circles to UAPs to ghosts to the existence of an afterlife to dowsing to healing to the location of our minds to after-death experiences and ley lines, to mention a few.  People have put forward theories about how some of these things work while others just accept their personal experience of one or more of these things without worrying about why they happened.

The boundaries between the explicable and the inexplicable are defined by the extent of our current understanding of things scientific.  Without repeating my worries about black matter / energy, think about psychotherapy.

A hundred years ago, people putting forward psychological solutions to human problems thought they were pretty cool but many of their ideas have since been developed and updated.  Remember that Sigmund Freud, who is remembered primarily for his obsession with sex, was preceded by a 19th century therapist who invented a device that gave ‘hysterical’ women orgasms and discovered this tended to relax them.  This seems hard to believe at a time when a visit to Ann Summers can now achieve similar results at minimum cost.

One of Freud’s more acceptable thoughts defined the three basic contributors to human activity as the ego, the superego and the id.  If one ignores these dated and often misunderstood terms, they can be used to parallel the development of humans from birth.  For their first couple of years, babies’ own comfort is their prime motivation but this develops into an awareness of their connections to family and friends and the interdependence of the people around them.  Most children then develop further and accept their connection with society at large and become fully-functioning humans, understanding the benefits of showing kindness to strangers.

How has this affected psychotherapy?  Fashions come and go but a study some years ago showed that success rates in curing depression hardly varied between talking therapies, medication and doing nothing.

In the last 150 years, we’ve discovered more about stuff that’s billions of miles away in space than about how the insides of our head work.

Take dowsing for example.  I’ve used two Bic biro tubes and two bent bits of coat hanger to find where the main drain ran under a neighbour’s garden.  I knew roughly where it ran so I knew where to look and, when the two wires swung inwards, then back out again as I walked on, we marked the spot.  The neighbour was naturally (?) very dubious about this so he had a go, slightly further over the garden and he jumped visibly when the wires also moved in as he walked forward.  We marked that spot, laid a rake handle between the two and that was the line of the drain, running at an angle across his garden, not parallel with the back of his house.

When he built an extension onto his house, he didn’t hit the drain and the digging showed that the line of the drain we’d marked was spot-on.

Detectorists use machines sensitive to electronic echoes to locate buried Roman coins and ring pulls.  Perhaps our brains could do the same if we let them?  What we do know is that nobody can explain how dowsing works.

Or ghosts.  A relative of mine once woke in the night in an old house and saw a ghost, a young woman in a long white shift comforting a baby by walking up and down at the foot of her bed.  “Oh,” thought Auntie Gertie, “poor thing”, and went back to sleep.

I’ve never seen a ghost but I nearly saw one once and, while I find it hard to believe in wronged lovers and dead dogs roaming the earth, I’m perfectly willing to believe that something in the multiverse allows them to appear to some people.

Sadly, I’m better at receiving telepathic messages than I am at sending them, so I can’t transmit messages saying I’m going to be late but I have received what seem to be telepathic messages.  Doubters explain it as a coincidence and even believers point out it might be due to precognition, looping back from future to the exact point in spacetime I experienced it.

We hear stories of clocks stopping at a time when somebody close to them died half a world away, and stories of children talking to invisible people before they’re told that such things don’t exist.

Some places also have atmospheres.  I’ve always felt a sense of great calm in Durham Cathedral and I once found myself feeling extremely uncomfortable in a 1930s Crittall-windowed semi-detached house in Hounslow that had, as far as I know, no history of murders or persistent indigestion and whose owners were charming.  I’ve had comparable feelings of calm in some woodlands and while watching waves break over rocks in Shetland.

It’s known that biofeedback can help people to consciously change some bodily functions.  To see if this worked for me, I once strapped on a gadget that told me my pulse-rate and lay down and, by monitoring my progress, slowed my heart from its usual 65 bpm to 39 bpm.  So why shouldn’t we believe in the power of healing using ‘magic’, whether it’s reiki, reflexology, meditation or prayer?                                 

I find it much harder to believe that any or all of these things might be a subjective response to yesterday’s crab sandwich than that they’re simply due to something – sometimes called paranormal – that our present level of ‘scientific’ understanding hasn’t yet discovered or explained.

Wars, dictators, the dangers of spaceflight, pensions and assisted dying

22 March 2025

Is the news getting worse or is it just me?

For example:  we’ve learnt that a terrorist, or anybody living under the flight paths, can close London’s largest airport by burning down one electrical substation.

Israel has broken the ceasefire and started killing Gazans again followed by a court agreeing that, “due to the renewal of the war”, Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal trial for corruption, which could land him in prison, should be postponed.  I wonder if he thinks it’s better to start killing women and children again than risking going to jail.

In Ukraine, civilians are also still dying while hopes of an amicable settlement, never high, are receding.  Valdimir Putin has “demanded” that Ukraine demilitarises (Demanded?  He’s supposed to be negotiating, not bullying), while allied European leaders are deciding how best to support Ukrainian forces.

What Ukraine remembers is that, in 1994, it had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world and relinquished all nuclear warheads as part of a move towards complete nuclear disarmament.  In exchange, it received security guarantees of its safety from America, UK and Russia.

When Donald Trump was elected, he had boasted he could bring peace to Ukraine in 24 hours but, amazingly, he’s failed to do this.  (I wonder if Trump’s a Russian mole?)

Just look what Trump is doing to his own country.  The biggest single worry is his obvious commitment to destroying the rule of law.  He only appoints people to the highest court in the land if they’ve had their noses stuck up his backside so he can tell them to overrule anything he doesn’t like.  Anywhere else, he’d be a dictator and, if the country had valuable mineral resources, America would be invading it to remove him from power.

He’s even targeting law firms which have done work he doesn’t like by threatening to suspend security clearances of their attorneys and terminating contracts the firms already have.

Trouble is, his Tweedledum and Tweedledee act with Elon Musk leaves the two of them bolstering each other’s judgement, beauty and business incompetence.  Musk has ‘done a Gerald Ratner’ in sucking up to Trump, causing Tesla’s shares to fall by 50% in three months.  He’s even been reduced to pleading with his employees not to sell their shares.

(If you own a Tesla, you can apparently now get stickers saying “I bought this before Musk went into politics”.)

Tesla has been missing its sales targets, still hasn’t produced the autonomous vehicles it promised a decade ago and is now facing increasing competition:  the Chinese manufacturer BYD will soon be selling electric cars that will take only slightly more time to recharge than a ‘regular’ car takes to fill with fuel.

Still, the collapse of Tesla’s share price made a lot of money for hedge-fund managers who had been busy short-selling Tesla;  the Financial Times estimated they made $16.2bn from the collapse.

Musk has even beaten his own record with X / Twitter which one academic has described as the worst-performing business in history (outside wartime) and, earlier this month, SpaceX’s latest Starship launch ended with a loud bang a few minutes after taking off, the second consecutive launch failure this year for the attempts to send Musk to Mars.

But, to be fair, it was Musk’s SpaceX Falcon rocket that got a replacement crew up to the International Space Station to relieve the two NASA astronauts who’d popped up there for a week and got stuck on it for nine extra months after the failure of the Boeing Starliner capsule that was supposed to bring them down again.  Their landing was marked by a pod of dolphins which swam round them, possibly looking for the fish they’d been eating before the splash frightened them away.

Actually, being weightless in space for long periods isn’t good for people.  The lack of gravity causes bone density loss, muscle wastage (including the heart because it doesn’t have to work as hard to pump blood round the body), reduced blood volume and a build-up of fluids that change the shape of their eyeballs and give the symptoms of a constant cold while accumulating in the brain.  So, by the time he gets to Mars, Musk will be a snuffly 9-stone weakling.

Next week, our very own snuffly 9-stone weakling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is expected to cut benefits that primarily affect disabled people while not increasing taxes on those who actually can afford it.  I thought this was a Labour government.  Where did I get lost? 

After Labour said they wouldn’t be increasing any taxes, Kemi Badenoch, the opposition leader, accused the government of planning to introduce a stealth tax by not increasing the threshold above which tax is payable, something that her own party did for years while they were in power and digging themselves still deeper into their financial hole.  Not the sharpest pencil in the box, Badenoch, but she’s lucky that even the prime minister doesn’t seem to care very much about anything.

My Conservative friend believes that self-made business owners shouldn’t be penalised for their success (or, as we cynics call it, their luck).  For the sake of peace and quiet, let’s accept this for as long as they’re still running the business, then charge them 100% tax on everything over a certain level when they sell shares to outsiders, or die. 

I’ve just had a letter headed “About the general increases in benefits” telling me how much my pension will be from April.  Benefits?  I’ve spent a lifetime buying my pension, it’s not a “benefit”, it’s my money they’re now giving back to me.  Talk about weasel words trying to make me feel grateful for getting my own money back.

But there is a little good news:  the Royal College of General Practitioners has voted to drop its longstanding opposition to assisted dying and joins the Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal College of Anaesthetists, and the British Medical Association in taking a neutral position on the subject.

Pardons, Wills, films, children and kindness

28 December 2024

A quick update: Joe Biden obviously read my comment that he hadn’t pardoned any federal prisoners on death row because he’s just commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 of them to life imprisonment without parole. In doing so, he said “I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss … but, guided by my conscience … I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.” You see the influence I have with American presidents. (Incidentally, have you noticed people are beginning to use ‘trumpy’ as an insult?)

Thinking about death, have you written your Will? In the UK, a frightening number of people haven’t and die ‘intestate’ so, if you’re one of them and superstitious, I can reassure you it doesn’t hasten your death. I wrote my first Will when I was in my twenties and I’m still alive.

I wonder if eunuchs die intesticulate?

Of course, if you really want to piss off your family, don’t do a Will and leave them to spend your money on lawyers to fight through the Courts to get probate (permission to deal with your stuff) before telling your survivors what the law says about who gets what. Does anybody know who got Shakespeare’s best bed?

Remember to allow for contingencies: if you’re leaving everything to your partner and you’re both killed in the same accident, it’ll be assumed the older one died first so their estate will then go to their partner and then, in the absence of a Will, to the partner’s beneficiaries. So why not leave stuff to people on condition they survive you by a set period – 3 months? or until probate is granted? – and, if they don’t, it goes to your children, or your favourite charity?

And do it properly. It needn’t be difficult but it is absolutely vital to get some very precise formalities right, like getting it witnessed. Handwritten notes saying “All to Chris” don’t work unless you’re dying on a battlefield. Many solicitors now do Wills free and larger charities offer support in writing them.

This is the season of films which gives us nitpickers the chance to spot continuity and bad editing. A few years ago, we watched a recorded Christmas special edition of Sherlock. Not having seen any of the original series, we got a bit lost about characters and plot but I did enjoy the interchange between Holmes and Watson in a coach when Watson’s wearing a hat, then he isn’t, then he is again. Mind you, not everybody notices these things and I had to replay that bit to show my wife ‘The Case of the Disappearing Hat’.

There are websites devoted to such errors, including famous ones like a Fiat 500 in the distance in a Roman chariot racing scene, a Viking wearing a wristwatch in another film and contrails in the skies of Westerns. And, in the 1964 Western ‘Cheyenne Autumn’, members of the Navajo nation spoke their own language but, instead of the scripted words, said things like “this man has no penis”.

Which inevitably reminds me of the monologues Joyce Grenfell gave in the role of a primary school teacher, before she went to the big kennel in the sky. Here’s one that, as far as I know, she didn’t write about a teacher explaining metaphors.

“Metaphor, George – that’s very good! Do you know what it means? / It’s a more picturesque way of saying something. / What? / Yes, pictureskew, it’s the same word, but you pronounce it ‘picture-esk’, not ‘picture-skew’. / Well most people do. / It’s like when you’re grown-up and play a game called ‘Hide the Sausage’ but there isn’t a sausage. / Because ‘Hide the Teddy’ wouldn’t … / Teddy bears don’t smell … / You did what on it? / Yes, Amanda, it would be easier for a dog to find a sausage but we’re not talking about dogs. / Well, I wasn’t talking about dogs, I was talking about metaphor, which is a figure of speech. / No, not that sort of figure. / No, not eight either. / No, not even a million, oh gosh, look at the time, it’s nearly time for break so let’s all tidy our desks shall we, spit spot.”

As inspiration for the new year – and thank you to the friend who told me about this – let’s remember the spirit of the beautiful Kindred Spirits sculpture near Cork in Ireland that was ‘opened’ in 2017 by the artist Alex Pentek and a 20-strong delegation from the American Choctaw Nation. Planned to mark its 170th anniversary, it commemorates the 1847 gift of $170 given by the Choctaw people to Irish famine relief during the Great Hunger caused by misgovernment and the repeated failure of potato crops.

The value of the gift in today’s terms is about £5,000 and was given by people who were themselves still suffering after being ‘relocated’ 500 miles from their 11m acres in the deep south of America to Oklahoma in the 1830s by the white occupiers who wanted to grow cotton on their original homelands.

In 2020, when the Covid pandemic badly affected the Choctaw, Navajo and Hopi communities, the Irish people raised an estimated €1m to help them out, many donors each giving €170 in recognition of the original gift.

Gary Batton, the 47th Chief of the Choctaw Nation, said “Adversity often brings out the best in people. We are gratified – and perhaps not at all surprised – to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi nations. Our word for their selfless act is ‘iyyikowa’ – it means serving those in need. We have become kindred spirits with the Irish in the years since the Irish Potato Famine. We hope the Irish, Navajo and Hopi peoples develop lasting friendships, as we have. Sharing our cultures makes the world grow smaller.”

Let’s all practise ‘iyyikowa’ in the future, starting now.

Love and peace to you all in 2025.

Autocracies, microplastics and speeding tickets

14 December 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And all the while, China remains a wild card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More extremism in America, and the Buddhist alternative

16 November 2024
In the last week, we’ve seen some post mortem analyses of what the Democrats got wrong. A lot of people are (too late) trying to explain Donald Trump’s victory and anticipating what it could mean for women, migrants, political opponents, the climate, democracy, international relations, his criminal convictions and the objectivity of the American justice system. There is also real concern about how he and his dearly beloved friends, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu and Kim Jong Un, will work together to achieve world peace.
The unpredictable ego of Elon Musk, who bought himself a place in the next president’s inner circle, adds an extra dimension of uncertainty …
It feels as if there is an ever-increasing distance between the political right and left, with the centre being marginalised (lesser mortals can only dream of producing a metaphor as daft as that). It matters less whether the right and the left dislike each other because both extremes despise the centre ground and the centrists often don’t have extremist convictions about what is right and what is wrong, believing that normal people can usually find some middle ground.
There have also been unattributable reports of concerns from moderate Republicans who are just as worried as the rest of us about another 4 years of Trumpism, but their jobs are at stake so they’re rendered powerless.
Remember a red shift is what proves the light has been bent.
The same shift to political extremes is also being seen in other countries, including what were the more moderate countries in the EU, and I’ve been wondering if the problem stems from a redefinition of ‘the right’ and ‘the left’ as ‘the right’ and ‘the not right’. This view seems to be enthusiastically supported by the far right.
The trouble is that’ all over the world, the far right produces wonderful slogans that offer nothing specific (think ‘MAGA’ and ‘Stop the Boats’) but attract the support of unthinking masses who rarely read beyond the headlines. Give them labels and badges and baseball caps and they’re happy feeling part of groups that become their extended families and they all march together with banners and placards, chanting the latest slogans.
And they want to believe the slogans mean something even if, deep in the heart of the more intelligent people, there’s a suspicion that an over-defensive, shouty, criminal liar in a baseball cap – and a tie so long it inevitably invites Freudian interpretation – might not actually deliver his promises.
(I was once given a baseball cap in a goody bag but the only use I’ve ever found for it was as a sun visor but, since I already had dark glasses, I’ve never worn it. They don’t even stop bald spots developing sun cancer but I suppose they do stop dodgily coiffeured combovers blowing away in the wind and, of course, ‘merch’ is a brilliant way to make people pay you money to advertise your products for them.)
The far left’s response can be just as extreme but tends to be negative, using anti-right slogans (think ‘Stop Oil’ and ‘Britain Deserves Better’) rather than producing positive and active slogans offering a society based on peace, kindness and mutual respect.
Sadly, these wishy-washy idealists in the centre don’t have the same power to influence the gullibles as the approach taken by the American right who love rally cries like ‘Make America White Again’, ‘All men have a right to carry machine guns’, ‘Women should stay in the kitchen / bedroom’, ‘Kill the Commies’, ‘Rid America of Jews and Disabled People’, ‘Outlaw LGBT’, ‘All drugs should be illegal’, ‘Except Nicotine and Alcohol’, ‘Abortion is a Crime’, ‘Burn more Coal’, ‘Strengthen our Borders’ and so on.
This all sounds powerful and macho and positive and attracts people who want their lives to be better and think these sloganistas will improve things for them. By comparison, slogans like ‘Be Kind to Others’ just sound feeble.
Imagine if Adolf Hitler and Jesus had a debate: Hitler would be foaming at the mouth and Jesus would be offering him a hanky to wipe up the spittle.
At a more mundane but just as manipulative level, the far right first label then ridicule attitudes like ‘wokeness’; then they criticise people who are only trying to make sure that everybody has a fair chance in life.

In the end, they just come over as believing that only the strong deserve to survive and the weak and unlucky should be allowed to fall by the wayside.
Meanwhile, the far left claim to support the working classes and are determined to bridge the gulf between the Haves and the Have Nots. Momentum, for example wants to “transform the Labour Party, our communities and Britain in the interests of the many, not the few.” If we disregard their limiting their aims to the Labour Party, this is laudable but still feeble compared with the enraged rhetoric of the right: it’s easier to wind up the right by the emotive shouting and prejudice (that led to the invasion of the Capitol building) than it is by peaceful demonstrations of the quieter but just as well-intentioned left.
In America, the John Birch Society still exists and invites people to “Be part of the patriot movement to protect and restore American freedom, independence, and our God-given rights.” They are convinced there is a national conspiracy that encompasses the Biden White House, the Federal Reserve and Covid vaccines and starts with the indoctrination of children attending public (state-funded) schools. Bob Dylan wrote a song called ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ in the early 1960s but they’re still there!
In a way, the Society is the natural successor to J Edgar Hoover who was (the first) Director of the FBI from 1935-1972 whose particular form of paranoia convinced him there were reds under every bed. He was also a racist with a dubious personal life and there were persistent rumours of his own homosexuality and his predilection for cross-dressing (both of which lifestyles he publicly persecuted).
What’s wrong with the Buddhism’s “middle way” that eschews both extreme asceticism and sensual indulgence?
Peace be with you all.