America’s legal system, an example of Americans’ humanity and Liz Hurley

9 November 2024
How can so many Americans be so stupid?

Abraham Lincoln famously said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” What last week proved is that, in practice, you only need to fool enough of the people once every four years so let’s hope that those who weren’t fooled will be able to salvage what’s left of America’s dignity.
Before the final result was known, Wednesday’s Daily Mail headline read “Tinderbox America on knife edge”, but only because they couldn’t find a third metaphor to mix in.
Perhaps we wrong Donald Trump. Perhaps he won’t be as bad a president as he was last time and will have learnt from his mistakes. Perhaps those of us who don’t actually know the man and have to rely on what the media tell us, everyone from GBNews to the Morning Star, should just stop worrying.
What we mustn’t forget is that America’s ultimate arbiter of the law is a group of politicians called the Supreme Court whose decisions are based on the policies of their party leader rather than the law.
We know, for example, that Trump has been convicted by a civil court for what I hope we Brits would call Grievous Bodily Harm rather than “sexual assault” (remember that some men still think rape is a sexual crime rather than the vicious and violent bodily assault it really is).
He has also been barred from doing business in New York after being convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He actively encouraged the invasion of the Capitol Building by a bunch of right-wing thugs on 6 January 2021 (result: 5 dead, including a police officer), and he is still facing other felony charges.
There is a widespread belief that, once he takes office, he will pardon himself of everything he’s ever done wrong (thereby implicitly admitting his guilt) and instruct his Attorney General to drop all outstanding charges against him, knowing that the Supreme Court, with its Republican majority, will support him.
However, it is still unclear whether presidents can pardon themselves. The Constitution itself doesn’t forbid it, possibly because, in those pre-Trumpian days, it was unthinkable that a president would ever do anything that they would need to be pardoned for. While the Constitution was being drafted, somebody suggested that presidents should be specifically prohibited from pardoning themselves for treasonable activity but it was agreed that a president committing treason could be impeached, removed from office and prosecuted, so the question wouldn’t arise.
The Constitution’s power of pardon is basically limited to federal crimes and a president can’t pardon offences against state laws so Trump couldn’t pardon himself for the 34 counts on which he was found guilty in New York.
Perhaps Trump will make a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to change this …
It could be argued that presidents should be allowed to pardon themselves for actions taken in good faith in their capacity as president even if the actions were subsequently found to be illegal but there can be no possible justification for pardons for actions carried out in a president’s personal capacity (and ‘good faith’ is not a phrase that fits comfortably into the same sentence as ‘Donald Trump’).
For example, if a president committed rape, this was carried out by the person, not by the president who swore an oath to uphold the law when they were inaugurated.
The Supreme Court (6 Republicans and 3 Democrats) moved closer to the former limitation this summer when they issued a majority ruling (6 for, 3 against, surprise surprise) that former presidents are immune from prosecution for official actions, although they fudged the issue by extending the immunity to the “outer perimeter” of his office.
If personal crimes were included, Trump could commit murder on 19 January 2025 and pardon himself after being inaugurated on the following day.
However, Trump said in September in an NBC ‘Meet the Press’ interview with Kristen Walker that it is “very unlikely” he would pardon himself because he has done nothing wrong. He also said in 2021 “The last thing I’d ever do is give myself a pardon.”
So that’s OK then. Secure in the knowledge that a proven liar has said he would never pardon himself, we can look forward to other things, like a federal law banning abortions in all states, even if the foetus is dead, or after rape, or for children under the age of legal consent; a mandatory death sentence for capital crimes; jailing political opponents and deporting foreign migrants (goodbye Melania); disenfranchising women; outlawing LGBTI+ people; exercising dictatorial powers; trashing the myth of climate change; and making the beauticians who wax his combover and dye his face orange ex officio senators.
But what are real Americans like? One of those thingies that go viral on the internet is a recording made by a doorbell camera in Detroit. It shows a woman asking her Muslim neighbour how she should wear a headscarf correctly at a funeral to be held in a mosque.
The neighbour, Rahab Almohammed, demonstrated the process step by step with her own headscarf and then gave the woman the scarf, saying “You can keep that because I’ve got a million at home.” The mutual respect shown in the video is heart-warming and I would like to think that most real Americans are like that.
More good news appeared in an interview with Liz Hurley who was asked what laws or changes she would make if she were in charge. She replied “I’d ban prison sentences for white-collar criminals and make them give back to the community instead – imagine if Lester Piggott had had to spend years teaching inner-city kids to ride horses. And I’d lock up violent criminals for longer.”
Perhaps she’s been reading Lesser Mutterings?

Apology, Sidmouth, voting, royal money, Labour and Tory saboteurs, cromulence and a cobra

8 April 2023

A friend who isn’t a crossword fan failed to spot the significance of the date on last week’s mutterings and didn’t realise that they weren’t all entirely accurate.  My apologies to all those who didn’t get the clue in the first paragraph that was supposed to lead to ‘a cross tick’ (“an angry parasite”, geddit?), or ‘acrostic’, thereby inviting people to read the first letter of every paragraph in order.  It wasn’t meant to make people feel stupid, it was just intended as a bit of fun, so this week’s is deadly serious. 

Sidmouth is a pretty town with crumbling cliffs on the coast of East Devon which has hosted an annual folk festival for longer than some of us care to remember and is a good resting place on the South West coastal path, attracting thousands of visitors every year so the town’s last bank, Lloyds, will be closing in September (HSBC and Coop have already closed their branches).  Do you think their call centres have a recording saying “Thank you for holding.  Your call is important to us.  But not so important that we’re going to hire extra staff to reduce your waiting time.”?

Everybody wanting to vote in person next month must now have photo ID even though there were no prosecutions for voter impersonation last year.  According to the Electoral Commission, there were just seven allegations of ‘personation’ at local and mayoral elections and the six by-elections throughout the UK in 2022 and no police action was taken in any of these cases either because there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing, or none at all.

Downing Street’s defence of this utterly pointless exercise said it was “to guard against the potential for wrongdoing”.  If you listen carefully, you can hear Rome burning.

The Guardian has disappointed me this week with what appears to be a republican campaign, estimating how much the royal family gets and what it owns.  They have to estimate the numbers because, even though we pay them, the family refuses to disclose their income and assets (“it’s private” they say). 

As far as we know, they’re not even the richest family in the UK and we give money to all the others as well for the stuff they sell us (like pageantry and vacuum cleaners), or they stole it from us in the past.  Since it now seems polite to apologise for our great⁶ grandparents’ part in the horrors of slavery, doesn’t it sound reasonable that we should ask various dukes and other nobles who inherited stuff to give back the land that was stolen from people like us by their great¹² grandparents?

However, the Windsors do have one big advantage in that they are exempt from tax, even though some of them voluntarily pay what they think they should.  Wouldn’t it be better if they were subject to all the same laws and taxes as the rest of us, including capital gains and inheritance taxes?  They could always give Cornwall to the National Trust if they haven’t enough spare cash to pay what should have been paid on the Queen’s estate.

I’m not anti-monarchy but I do worry that the Guardian’s coverage looks more like a republican campaign than a simple desire to expose the inequities of rich people.

And now the government is giving £8m to allow every public authority a free portrait of King Charles.  You can tell the ministers who decided this by their brown noses.

Luckily for them, Labour has attempted political suicide by using ‘knocking copy’ which accuses the Tories in general and Rishi Sunak in particular of not imprisoning paedophiles.  This has been welcomed by the Tories and condemned by clear-thinking lefties. 

But the Conservatives have their own saboteur in the form of Suella Braverman.  She claimed “almost all” members of grooming gangs were British Pakistani men even though a 2020 Home Office report concluded that most child sexual abuse gangs comprise white men aged under 30 and there wasn’t enough evidence to suggest members of grooming gangs were disproportionately more likely to be Asian or black.

When challenged over the 18-hour delays at Dover, she also denied it was anything to do with Brexit even though Doug Bannister, the port’s chief executive, admitted a year ago that Brexit was causing longer processing times at the border.

This week has also seen reports of falling house prices.  Why do people worry about this?  If the values of houses go down across the board and we decide to move, we’d get less when selling and pay less for our new house.  People with second homes and Buy To Let landlords would lose out but who cares about them?

Suppose all property prices reduced by 90% and became worth only 10% of what they were last week.  It wouldn’t make any difference to those of us who already own our houses and would make it much easier for first-time buyers.  My first house cost about 2½ times my salary;  the same house would now cost about 25 times what I would now get doing the same job I did back then.

Mortgages could then also be reduced by 90% so it stopped people with mortgages going into negative equity.  The cost to lenders would be funded by cancelling management bonuses and taxing the Windsors …

I had a slight attack of schadenfreude when Donald Trump announced that he was going to be “indicated” [sic] and he duly was, looking rather grumpier than usual. 

Sounds cromulent to me (a new word created for The Simpsons in 1996 meaning legitimate or acceptable, which I heard for the first time this week).

And, in South Africa, a private plane flying four passengers at 11,000’ made an emergency landing at the nearest airport after a 5-foot cobra slid past the pilot’s thigh and curled up under his seat.  Everybody left the plane safely, the snake slept on, and the pilot was rewarded with a handful of Valium tablets. 

The Spare, the right wing, climate, brainwashing children

14 January 2023

Harry and Meghan have had a lot of media attention following the publication of his book this week, media attention being one of Harry’s major complaints of course.

I watched the first section of his interview but decided at the commercial break I had more interesting things to do so I gave up.  My immediate reactions were that he is sincere about what he has said, and is still very angry at the tabloid media who he blames for his mother’s death.  There was a telling and obviously spontaneous eye-flick at the camera (the only time he looked at the camera in that first section) when he had talked about the paparazzi throwing themselves onto the bonnet of his car and said “we don’t want something like [Diana’s death] happening again”.

He was also genuinely taken aback when the interviewer said he appeared very scathing about Queen Consort Camilla;  he denied it even though it seemed a perfectly fair question to me on the basis of an extract we’d just heard read.  However, from earlier ‘teasers’ for the book, we know a lot of closet doors have been opened, many of which would have been better left shut.

He came over as somebody who’s been very damaged by a dysfunctional family who live an unreal world and, having seen ‘real life’ in the army, he feels unfairly maligned and he wants everybody to know this.  From the huge number of books sold so far and the viewing figures for his various interviews, he seems to have been pretty successful in this.

There are now three main camps:  those who think the monarchy is good and Harry has put it at risk, those who feel sorry for Harry and Meghan and perhaps a president would be better, and those who don’t really care one way or the other.  However, the absence of any comment or reaction from Buckingham palace (“never complain, never explain”) is very powerful and may leave Harry out on a limb.

My Conservative friend reckons the monarchy brings a lot of money into the country and he has no time for either Harry or Meghan.  He is also an unwavering critic of the left-biased BBC and believes union leaders shouldn’t still be paid while their members are on strike.  He thinks Russia is (or calls itself) a Communist country, thereby proving the basic principles of communism are wrong.  He’s anti-PC and anti-woke, and doesn’t accept that the whole concept of ‘woke’ was invented not by ‘wokeists’ (?) but by the far right so they could then use ‘anti-woke’ as an insult. 

He’s an unrepentant Brexiteer and still thinks that the UK is better off away from the bureaucrats in Brussels, and that the new tariff walls and UK/EU border paperwork, delays and controls are caused by remainers*, who won’t accept Brexit is a done deal.  He doesn’t see a problem with having a land border with the EU in Ireland.  He dislikes Joe Biden, France (especially Macron), all recent Labour prime ministers and party leaders, HS2, demonstrators and strikers, civil servants and Working From Home – he recently told me that he’d discovered 99% of civil servants in Wales are doing just that.

He disbelieves polls and research that produce results he doesn’t agree with and dismissed a recent report from The King’s Fund (a highly-respected medical foundation which is forbidden by law from taking political decisions because it’s a charity) on the grounds that all charities are full of lefties and therefore biased.  He doesn’t even like Martin Lewis and his ‘Money Saving Expert’ website because he’s made himself very rich and now appears everywhere (when I pointed out Lewis is an admirable, textbook capitalist who’s made a lot of money by supplying a service that people find useful, answer came there none).

This week’s blinder was a vituperative tirade about the BBC producing a lengthy series on Shamima Begum.  He couldn’t bring himself to say her name but suggested the young lady (though this wasn’t exactly what he called her) should stay where she is or go to Bangladesh and should never be considered for return to the UK.  He says the very idea tempts him to stop paying his TV licence fee.

In fact the only people I can remember his having praised are Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is his local MP (although, to his credit, he wasn’t a fan of Priti Patel). 

While I’m frequently surprised by some of the more extreme things he says, I have to admit I do find it fascinating to be kept in touch with what those on the political right are thinking (he describes himself as “centre right”).  For example, bosses can be trusted (except trade union bosses) and workers can’t, so bosses can do their work on golf courses or over a meal, but workers can’t work at home.  So widespread is this belief that software monitoring employees’ use of their computers has recently been used in Canada to fire a member of staff and recover payments made to them when their spyware had “identified irregularities between [their] timesheets and the software usage logs”.

Before you ask the obvious question, we’ve known each other since we were 16 and I only became interested in politics when Brexit loomed over the horizon.  We swap jokes and comments about Wordle in regular emails and we now also diss each other’s views on politics and society.  

Despite all this, he’s actually a good and kind man who does a lot of voluntary work helping people in his local community and he keeps fit by playing ping pong and smoking;  and we still enjoy each other’s company when we meet.

He will no doubt approve if the anti-strike bill becomes law and bosses are allowed to veto changes in working conditions, limit everybody’s pay (except their own) and generally treat staff as consumables / disposables.

The dangers of unfettered capitalism became clear last week when a study of some old Exxon papers revealed that Big Oil had known of the risk of global heating since the 1950s and, in the 1970s, Exxon scientists had projected an increase in global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions, predicting an increase in temperatures of about 0.2^oC a decade (which has proved remarkably accurate).  So, as good capitalists do, they hid the results and publicly derided similar forecasts to protect their profits.

Now, as they had foreseen, the weather has changed and we’re on the brink of climate disaster. 

Last May, Rhianan Rudd, committed suicide in a Nottinghamshire children’s home even though charges of terror offences when she was 15 had been dropped.  The decision not to continue with her prosecution was based on evidence that she’d been a victim of online grooming. 

Let’s hope that the government will now accept that Shamima Begum was similarly brainwashed and was also the victim of a trafficking gang.  (The charity Exit Hate says that they’ve found children as young as 9 being radicalised via social media.)  Begum therefore can’t be held responsible for her departure or subsequent actions so they should return her passport and let her come back home. 

Much to the delight of drug barons, smugglers, county line gangs, and your friendly neighbourhood dealer, some idiot has also suggested banning the sale of cigarettes.  Let’s hope the government also responds appropriately to this.

*          Regular polls by the National Centre for Social Research (WhatUKThinks.org) show that, when ‘Don’t Knows’ are excluded, 57% of voters would now vote against Brexit if another referendum were held, leaving only 43% to vote in favour, up from 52% / 48% at the end of 2021.

Funeral feathers, medals, nuclear war, UK money, Trump admits theft

25 September 2022

The Queen’s funeral on Monday was attended by some 500 heads of state – foreign presidents, kings, queens and prime ministers – whose security was provided by 10,000 police who, as a mark of respect, stopped catching criminals for the day.

I didn’t watch it but my wife did so I saw odd bits as I passed and was riveted by one soldier’s problem with a swan feather dangling from his hat and tickling his face.  Knowing he couldn’t move, he twitched his head very slightly in an attempt to shift it but finally gave up and blew so some feathers wafted gently up into the air before settling down again.

Just as normal people don’t, I found myself thinking that if Putin exploded a nuclear device on the funeral, he’d also destroy the Palace of Westminster, New Scotland Yard and much of Whitehall.  He’d then be able to invade the UK in a rubber dinghy but he’d have to remember to get a London Bridge train because Victoria station would probably have been damaged by the blast.

At the time, I was puzzled to see the youngest royal grandchild, who is 14, wearing two medals.  How can a 14-year old have done anything that earns a medal?  My wife suggested he might have been in the Scouts and got one for rubbing two sticks together;  I thought he might have got the other for swimming a complete length of the school pool. 

After imagining Putin nuking London, I tried to think what it must be like to be a civilian in, say, eastern Ukraine, when it’s suddenly taken over by a foreign power.  One such was a teacher who was told to teach Moscow’s censored curriculum and had to choose whether to go along with it or to leave, abandoning her pupils’ futures to the mercy of the Russian occupiers.  She chose to leave and left carrying a pot plant and a bag of poems after 25 years’ service. 

I wonder what I’d have done.  My life isn’t terribly important to me (though I’d like to do a lot of sorting before I die) but I like to think I’d stick to my principles and explain both sides of the question to the children, even if I then got ‘disappeared’. 

Meanwhile, our new prime minister’s attempting to change everything, only some of which needs changing, but Liz Truss is sticking with her belief in the ‘trickle-down’ theory regardless.

This theory was postulated in the 1980s by one of Ronald Reagan’s advisers, Arthur Laffer, and suggests that reducing taxes on corporations and people who are already rich will encourage more investment and everyone will benefit as the economy grows.  So rich Brits trousering £1m a year will now be an estimated £55,000 a year* better off and will immediately reinvest this in their businesses to create more jobs for poorer people and the economy as a whole will grow and we’ll all benefit and we’ll have fairies at the bottom of our garden.

The theory has since been comprehensively rubbished by various experts, including the International Monetary Fund in a 2015 assessment which concluded that increasing the income of the top 20% results in lower growth and “when the richer get richer, benefits do not trickle down” so countries’ policies “should focus on raising the income of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class”.

Laffer himself has since accepted that it only works when tax rates are high, which he described as over 50%, and that lowering tax rates when they’re already below 50% actually increases budget deficits. 

Even Joe Biden has said he’s “sick and tired” of people who believe that ‘trickle-down’ economics works, which doesn’t bode well for a UK free trade agreement with America (even Liz Truss herself has already admitted this’ll take years to agree). 

What happened to “levelling up” anyway?  It’s obviously oxymoronic and means “evening-out”, which is the only way to balance the distribution of wealth, but this doesn’t have the same vote-catching ring to it.  Besides, it would definitely upset those getting paid most who, quite coincidentally, tend to be those who vote for and give lots of money to the Conservative party because they believe in making the rich richer and only tossing pennies at the poor.  Er …

There’s something unusual about the way Truss moves (and speaks).  A photograph of her shaking hands with Emmanuel Macron caught my eye because she was turned about 45^o away from him.  Normal people face each other when shaking hands. 

But hey, let’s give them a chance:  Truss used to be an accountant and, in the first leadership ballot, 264 of 314 of her own MPs didn’t want her as prime minister.  Her business and energy secretary doesn’t understand geology and her chancellor hasn’t heard of the Micawber Principle.  In her campaign, she promised that fracking would only happen with local approval but it now seems that local decisions will be over-ruled by governmental diktat.  She also promised more financial help for adult social care (we’re waiting with unbated breath). 

Friday saw a not-budget (experts only check the numbers in real budgets) in which Kwasi Kwarteng supported the wealthy by cutting taxes and removing the cap on bankers’ bonuses, and borrowing an extra £400bn at ever-increasing interest rates to fund this rather than imposing a windfall tax on windfall profits.  Even the staunchest Conservatives described it as a high-risk budget and markets reacted by marking sterling down to its lowest level against the US dollar in 37 years so a pound now only costs just over a dollar.  This makes sterling very cheap for money launderers who will rush to secure London’s reputation as the premier European centre for money laundering.

Our wildlife and countryside have also been threatened with new, feebler planning rules and, if there was any mention of more money for education and the NHS, I missed it.

While we’re running out of money, Vladimir Putin is running out of soldiers and thousands of Russians are fleeing the country before their call-up papers arrive.  He’s also threatened a nuclear attack but Truss has already said she’d be prepared to respond in kind so that’s alright.

Donald Trump has tested a new defence against some of the accusations making it increasingly likely he won’t be able to stand for president in 2024.  In an interview with Fox News, he defended the recovery of classified papers from his Florida home by saying “as I understand it, if you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it.”  Explains a lot about him and, in passing, admits he stole classified papers.

The other loonies on the right, the Proud Boys, now have a 23-page manifesto with a section telling people how to carry out violent attacks and then cover their tracks.  I still think their name makes them sound like a fun LGBT+ group, but perhaps that’s their intention (aw, look at the great butch sweeties).

Not to be outdone, the loonies on the left had a hit this week when they claimed that some of the classified papers Trump stole from the White House were buried with his ex-wife on his New Jersey golf course.

Is the world getting weirder or is it just my imagination?

*          The UK’s median income from full-time work is £26,000 pa, less than half the extra people already being given £1,000,000 pa will get.

New president in waiting, Ukraine advances and Ig Nobel prizes

18 September 2022

We have a new prime minister who’s found herself leading a government neck deep in the muddy, with problems stretching from the cost of living crisis, energy costs, inflation, a looming recession, The Northern Ireland Brexit problem, strikes and the imminent collapse of the NHS to the climate crisis.

Sadly, she’s stuffed her new cabinet with her mates rather than the best people and is cancelling everything she can find, but at least Priti Patel’s gone before she can do any more damage to the UK’s reputation.

And she’s dumped Dominic Raab’s plans to restrict our human rights with a Bill that would have given the British government power to ignore rulings from the European Court of Human Rights.  (Raab had also been asked to include the right to abortion in the Bill but he said this was already “settled in UK law”, which isn’t actually true, but he’s gone as well.)

Other stuff she’s overturned so far is the ban on fracking until research into its vulnerability to earthquakes has been concluded – another 2019 manifesto pledge broken – and the cap on bankers’ bonuses.  She’s also promised an energy price freeze and cuts to tax and national insurance and refused to impose a windfall tax on energy companies. 

The Resolution Foundation estimate these “colossal” cuts will cost about £120bn but Liz Truss (aka The Faerie Feller) is planning a mini-budget this week which will explain where the money’s coming from. 

Her Master-Stroke was, on her first day in office, to alienate the entire civil service by firing Sir Tom Scholar, the highly experienced permanent secretary to the Treasury who, according to an inside source, was “viewed as one his generation’s outstanding civil servants [who] would loyally serve any new administration”.

Truss said the Treasury required “new leadership” to go with the new premiership and wanted to show how tough she is.  This will also encourage the waverers who were uncertain about her political history and thought she’s still a LibDem at heart but stood a better chance of becoming powerful as a Tory.  Her repeated U-turns also show her willingness to be competitive and beat Johnson’s record.

Some doubters believe that civil servants simply implement governmental decisions without any political fear or favour but Truss is clearly making a bold move towards politicising the civil service and pacifying the far right.  Their views were encapsulated by Lord (Robin) Butler, who served under Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.  He said “I think the politicians are beginning to forget the constitution. The civil service is Her [/His] Majesty’s civil service. A government wouldn’t come in and on the first day sack the head of Her Majesty’s defence forces.”

Truss also has the advantage of inheriting the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 which increases the powers of the police over things like peaceful demonstrations.  They’re certainly practising this in Edinburgh where a man in the crowds watching the royal procession was questioned for holding up a blank sheet of paper.  When he asked “What if I write ‘Not My King’ on it”, he was told he’d be arrested.

Great stuff PC Whoever, just what we need:  a strong police force supporting a strong civil service in thrall to a stupid strong leader.  Just a touch more gerrymandering might do the trick and we’ll have Tory governments forever.

Still, we must remember that Richard Dadd ended up in Broadmoor.

By the way, had you spotted that the same Police Act increases the maximum prison terms from 10 to 14 years for serious sexual assaults and to 10 years for assaulting a statue.  You only get four extra years inside for rape compared with throwing a tomato at a statue. 

A couple of weeks ago, Vladimir Putin reminded the world what brilliant a leader he is and said “We have not lost anything and will not lose anything”.  Followed by which Ukraine took the Russians entirely by surprise and have taken some 6,000 square kilometres of the Kharkiv region back under Ukrainian control.

Less cheering has been the discovery of graves marked just with a number outside Izium from which more than 440 bodies are being exhumed.  Close to these graves is an unmarked mass grave containing 17 Ukrainian soldiers.

In Iowa, a human trafficking victim, Pieper Lewis, killed the man who’d repeatedly raped her when she was 15 and being pimped for sex.  She pleaded guilty to manslaughter and wilful injury, each of which earned her a 10-year prison sentence.  A sympathetic district judge decided to defer the sentences on the grounds that the 834 days she had already spent in juvenile detention was enough “punishment” for a teenager and let her off with a 5-year probationary period.  

However, the judge also ordered her to pay $4,000 of state costs and the $150,000 restitution to the estate of the rapist that a state law demands of killers. 

The good news is that one of the woman’s former teachers, Leland Schipper, was so shocked she said “A child who was raped, under no circumstances, should owe the rapist’s family money” and set up a GoFundMe appeal that, as I write, has raised more than $540,000.  Schipper has said that the surplus will “remove financial barriers for Pieper in pursuing college/university or starting her own business [and] give Pieper the financial capacity to explore ways to help other young victims of sex crimes”.

Anybody else think Iowa needs to change the legislation to allow for exceptional cases?

And more good news from this year’s Ig Nobel awards, one of which was given to Prof Gen Matsuzaki who headed a Japanese team that researched the best way to turn a knob and concluded that the bigger the knob, the more fingers you need to turn it.  Other recipients studied how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions (cue old joke:  How do hedgehogs make love?  Very, very carefully.) and why success is due more to luck than to talent.  The last is blindingly obvious from a quick glance at the people who run our governments and companies but they proved it using mathematics (no, me neither).

For example, Southern Water’s Beachbuoy map showing which beaches they’ve polluted will no longer automatically include all raw sewage releases into bathing waters, thereby improving their record in one fell swoop.

And tomorrow the Queen’s funeral service will be attended by all foreign leaders who were invited and are willing to be bussed into London.  Except Joe Biden who’ll make his own arrangements thank you.  I’d love to be a fly inside the bus as foreign monarchs and presidents experience how the rest of us travel. 

Monarchies and republics

11 September 2022

The Queen died on Thursday. 

From the palace’s announcement at lunchtime that her doctors were concerned, it was obvious that her death was imminent but it was still a shock to hear the word when somebody reminded us that Prince William is now heir to the throne because his father is king.  We’ve known the queen for so long that the word ‘king’ gave me a jolt.

Charles had obviously had advance warning because he was in Scotland and able to get to Balmoral quickly so he was with her as she died which is, somehow, rather comforting.

Rumours that she only hung on for as long as she did to receive Boris Johnson’s resignation are likely to be the product of a warped mind.

She certainly hung on for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations so as not to spoil the event for everybody else, and to confirm Liz Truss as the new prime minister;  48 hours before she died, she got up and dressed and stood to welcome Truss with her usual beaming smile, despite what one doctor thought was a bruise left by a canula on the back of her hand.

The initial tributes were predictably sombre with Truss and Keir Starmer appearing to have agreed that the former would cover the boring platitudes while the latter gave a much more human and impressive eulogy.  It was then open house for other MPs to pay their own tributes.  Boris Johnson spoke very well, showing that he can actually talk without erring and umming when he’s done his homework, and Theresa May amazed everybody by making the chamber laugh with a personal anecdote of an encounter with the Queen. 

Other tributes poured in from around the world, including a touching message from Vladimir Putin in a letter whose contents were released by the Kremlin.

My mother used to say the Queen had one of those faces that made her look severe when she was actually just relaxed but she had the most wonderful smile (and laugh) and, had she not been a monarch who took her job very seriously, she’d just have been described as a nice person, which is surely the highest praise anyone can give.

A number of people writing about the Queen’s sense of fun have mentioned the American tourists taking a selfie of themselves with her protection officer, her having tea with Paddington Bear and being parachuted into the Olympic games (it was apparently her idea to greet Daniel Craig as “Mr Bond”).  My favourite story about her came from someone I knew when I worked for one of her son’s charities.  As he’d walked into the room to see the Queen, he tripped over a corgi and was mortified but the Queen said “Don’t worry, it’s his own fault for being the same colour as the carpet”.  What a graceful way of putting someone at ease.

I’ve never had any strong views about the different arguments for monarchies or republics.  I was an admirer of the Queen but the times they are a-changin’.  In the last few days, we’ve been shown ceremonies that have never been publicly seen before.  The pomp of the public parades was certainly impressive but they are for show.  Any power the monarch has is exercised behind closed doors and tends to influence the beginning or the end of parliamentary decisions, but they do have some real power.

One assumes that a British republic would impose similar limitations on the powers of the president so the basic choice could perhaps be reduced to a simple question about whether one has greater faith in nepotism or elections.

In companies, nepotism has proved almost without exception a singularly inefficient way of choosing the next boss but this may be because there is competition and you know my belief that anybody who actually wants to be in a position of power is, by definition, unfit for purpose.

Now we’ve given up regicide and importing foreigners, there’s a fixed hierarchy within the royal family which determines who’s going to be the next monarch so there’s no competition, or choice.  For example, if 58,496,132 Brits all suddenly die, I’ll be king. 

This makes the system dependant on who gets born when but they’re brought up for it from when they first grimace and cover their ears as a bunch of planes thunder overhead so they know what’s expected of them, and that stability is essential.

Presidents are elected for fixed terms more or less democratically and they are part of a political process so their actions and popularity depend on the mood of the moment which is often (always?) influenced by or linked to events outside the country concerned over which neither the presidents nor their governments have any control. 

Even presidents who elect themselves for a life-term in the job rarely die in post and there can be political – and all too often violent – disturbances when they step down or are removed.  A president should have the internal and international respect – and the humility – of somebody like Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama, but there aren’t enough of those to go round.

The advantage of British hereditary monarchs is that they are above politics and can provide an impartial sounding board for the leader of whichever party was disliked least in a general election.

The other problem with presidents is how to choose them.  We live with a broken electoral system that allows small minorities of voters to form governments and even smaller minorities to be completely unrepresented in parliament.

As I write this, I realise I’m talking myself towards being a monarchist, but only faute de mieux.  We’ve been lucky enough to have had an incomparable monarch in E2R.  Let’s hope C3R does as well.

So why don’t we make all royals subject to the same laws and taxes as the rest of us, let them stay in power and see how it goes.