Alarms, humiliations, Putin’s frailty, and guns

22 April 2023

At 3pm tomorrow, our mobile phones will beep an emergency warning at us for 10 seconds.  This is just to test a system that would warn us if there’s a danger to life, health or property in our area.  Like if Russia’s about to nuke us.  Last time there was a threat of this, somebody decided we only had four minutes left to live so we should always keep some chocolate handy.

I used to know someone who’d been in the army and seen an atom bomb explode on the Bikini atoll.  He said the best place to be if one was dropped would be directly underneath it so you would be instantly vapourised.

One problem with tomorrow’s alert is that, if you’re a victim of abuse and have a ‘secret’ phone hidden somewhere for use in emergency, the beeps might alert your abuser to its existence (and location) so TURN IT OFF tomorrow afternoon.  And, if you know someone who might be in this situation, tell them.

Somebody who’d missed the point said it was taking Britain “back to the nanny state” (e.g. NHS).  This was of course Jacob Rees-Mogg, the only MP who, as far as I know, still has a nanny.

The former Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab (whose middle name was taken from a box of indigestion pills) has gone in a fit of pique revealed in his resignation letter.  Wouldn’t it have been great to be a fly on the wall to hear:

Rishi Sunak:  About this report …

Dominic Raab:  Now listen you nasty little Wykehamist, I’m not entirely stupid …

RS (sotto voce):  Not entirely …

DR:  … Even though I’m only a state school boy, I know my history and Wykeham was a fortification by the river Win and the suburb on the hill was called High Wykeham and the famous cake burner Saint Englebert the Unready is supposed to buried near the cathedral.  And that’s what …

RS (louder):  Er.  About this report …

DR:  Fuck the report!  It’s all a plot by those leftie antisemitic snowflake civil service wokerati to discredit the only person …

(and so on, and on.)

Raab is reported to be “furious” at the report, thereby unwittingly increasing the credibility of the accusations made against him.  Silly man, he should have thought that one through.

Also humiliated this week was Vladimir Putin, when a Russian fighter plane dropped a Russian bomb on a Russian town.

Even Rupert Murdoch got in on the act by agreeing to pay $787.5m (£633m) to settle Dominion’s claim for defamation by his Fox News channel.  Anything rather than admit publicly he knew the network had wilfully broadcast lies that Dominion was involved in a plot to overturn the 2020 election results that ousted Donald Trump.

Which naturally reminds me that Putin recently visited the occupied Kherson region where his body language betrayed that he isn’t as fit as he used to be.  Leaving the helicopter, Putin descended five steps clutching both handrails tightly.

A friend recently reported that a post on Telegram* claimed the Russian government is now trying to hand out callup papers to men in the right age range when they visit all sorts of local government offices, not just the enrolment office.  They’re also issuing ‘electronic’ call ups to people’s phones.  The channel warns men to ignore the emails, they have no legal force, and not under any circumstances to go to the enrolment offices if summoned.  The worst that can happen to you for failing to appear is a fine.  “Don’t under any circumstances let yourself be signed up as a volunteer or a Kontraktnik.  This illegal war is a crime and you will be a criminal if you take part.”

Alexey Savichev, a convicted murderer, was pardoned by Putin last September and released from a prison in Voronezh in south-west Russia so he could join the Wagner group.  He has since confessed to killing civilians, including children, saying “We were told not to take any prisoners and just shoot them on the spot.”  He also said that, with other Wagner fighters, he had killed “several dozen” injured Ukrainian PoWs by “tossing grenades” into the ditch where they were held.  “It’s war” he said “and I don’t regret a single thing I did there.”  That’s the spirit – praise the Lord and pass the ammo.

In America, you don’t even have to join up to shoot people.  In Kansas City, a 16-year old rang the wrong doorbell so the homeowner shot and seriously wounded him.  In Hebron in upstate New York, a 20-year old woman drove into the wrong drive so the homeowner shot and killed her.  In Elgin, near Austin in Texas, a cheerleader opened the door of the wrong car in a car park;  realising it wasn’t hers, she went back to join her two teammates so the man who’d been sitting in the other car walked over to their car, drew a gun and shot at them, injuring two of the women.

It’s about time Joe Biden actually did something about gun control.  Surely this is above politics and both houses should be given free votes?  Or could an Executive Order increase controls without causing a second revolution?

In Philadelphia, thieves stole about 2 million dimes (10c coins worth $200,000) from a lorry parked overnight in the car park of a shopping mall.  It’s thought one of the thieves might have been the person who asked a BMW showroom if they took cash.

Over here, you can get banged up for stopping traffic and two ‘Stop Oil’ protestors have been sent to prison, one for three years and one for two years and seven months, after they’d forced the police to close the QEII bridge at Dartford.  Judge Collery KC said he’d penalised then because “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.” 

In other words, the judge decided to spend an estimated £500,000 of our money imprisoning two people who believe the future of the planet is in danger and were trying to warn others.  Is he allowed to impose longer sentences just to frighten other people?  Perhaps he should just have locked them in a room with Raab for an hour or two.

*          Telegram is a messaging app widely used in Russia for advice and warnings from Putin’s critics despite their being visible to the Kremlin – see https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/ from Wired**

**        Wired is a magazine that reports on how the world is influenced by online technology and other things.

RTFI, trees, guns v TikTok, happiness and other stuff

1 April 2023

Cryptic crossword puzzle fans may get an extra something from these mutterings if they can decipher a simple type of code that sounds like an angry parasite. 

After 50-something years, our vintage battery charger for the car finally gave up the ghost this week so I bought a new one that calls itself a ‘battery charger and maintainer’.   In the instructions, it said “Always check the maintainer has switched from CHARGE to FULL before leaving unattended and connected for long periods.  If the charger has not switched from CHARGE to FULL within 4 days this could indicate a more serious problem.”  It only took about 48 hours to charge the thing up fully but by gosh I was stiff even after 2 days standing in the garage waiting for the lights to change.

Now for something important:  in Plymouth, the chair of the city council (who’d never heard of Sheffield) has had to resign after authorising the felling of 110 mature trees so the city centre can be redeveloped and beautified by the planting of 150 new saplings which are very much easier for vandals to destroy.  Where do councils find these people?

You might remember hearing that, earlier this week, an explosion destroyed a chocolate factory in Pennsylvania.  If not, the bad news was that seven people were actually killed (morte di cioccolato?) but the good news was that many of those who survived discovered the joys of licking close friends.

Our kind-natured Conservative MPs Johnny Cash and Freddy Kruger are trying to tighten the bill going through parliament that would block judges from stopping deportations by trying to extend the bill to allow all non-Teutonic Brits to be expelled from the country, or confined to work camps (Arbeit macht frei after all). 

Unbelievably, our government is apparently still insisting that no civilians were killed while it bombed Islamic State militants in Iraq.  And that nobody actually died of Covid (except an old friend of mine), it’s just a wicked plot by woke lefties.

Some of this week’s excitement arose when Kwasi Kwarteng and Matt Hancock both claimed they were worth £10,000 a day after falling for a ‘Led by Donkeys’ wind-up.  They later admitted that they’d quoted such stupid day rates because they knew that, after people had seen them in action, nobody would ever invite them back so they needed to charge enough to buy a fortnight’s shopping at Harrods.

Perhaps there’s some small hope In Ukraine, where Russian soldiers are complaining that they are being prevented by their own side from retreating from the front line which they’ve discovered is a very dangerous place to be after 34 of their unit were injured and 22 killed, including their commander.  Morale is being maintained by the regular issue of 55% rum;  the Russian soldiers still get killed but they don’t care as much.  Well, it worked for the Royal Navy during the war.

Over in Norway, a Norwegian arms manufacturer has been forced to cut back on its production by the TikTok data centre next door that is monopolising local power supplies.  They have complained that they can’t make things that kill people while next door is using all the power to store cat videos. 

The courts here are considering allegations made by several celebrities that Associated Newspapers hacked their phones.  The editor the Daily Mail at the time was Paul Dacre who is being recommended for a peerage (for the second time) in Boris Johnson’s resignation list (aka The End of the Peer Show, first on the right just past the gents). 

The celebrities following the proceedings include ExPat Harry who chose to go in through the front door when, one report said, he could have “snuck” in the back door.  The word ‘snuck’ nearly fruck me out.

How much of the debate over statues erected to people who were made rich by the slave trade is fair?  My problem is that lots us have so many ancestors who were alive back then it’s almost certain that at least one of them was involved in the slave trade, so we’re all culpable. 

Ever ethical, the Guardian newspaper announced this week that a 2-year study has shown that, for all its liberal origins and traditions, some of its founders benefitted from the slave trade.  It has issued a formal apology for its part in these crimes against humanity and its owners, the Scott Trust, have announced a “decade-long programme of restorative justice”. 

And Rupert Murdoch will be announcing a similar scheme when his latest honeymoon is over.

Perhaps, one day, man could live on the moon:  analysis of tiny frozen marbles found on the moon’s surface has shown they are proposed as potential sources of water, and therefore hydrogen and oxygen.  An Open University professor has hailed (geddit?) this as “one of the most exciting discoveries we’ve made”, forcing sticky toffee pudding into second place.

Radiation is a form of energy and other scientists are experimenting to see how the immense energy inside massive black holes could be harnessed and used to power the 1642 train from Marylebone to Loughborough.

In the southern reaches of the south Pacific is the loneliest point on earth, named Point Nemo by a Jules Verne fan with a classical bent.  It is 1,670 miles from the nearest land.  Almost always, the nearest people are those cooped up in the International Space Station when it passes overhead.

Living animals normally have to be killed before carnivores can eat them but more scientists are now experimenting with the production of meat grown from cells that doesn’t involve any animals being killed.  Having analysed the DNA of dead mammoths, they have ‘grown’ meat that actually tastes of mammoth (they say, but one wonders how they know), and they’re now negotiating with Macdonalds and KFC over the rights to sell MamBurgers. 

For the sixth year running, Finland has been confirmed as the happiest country in the world, possibly because they all have very low expectations of life.  Well, they are the only country in the world to have a word for getting drunk, alone, in your underwear (päntsdrunk, or kalsarikännit).

One of the first publishers recently to change an author’s words was Roald Dahl’s but Agatha Christie is now having her books edited for insensitive content.   I’m looking forward to hearing that M Poirot’s name is being changed to M Chèvrefeuille to avoid offending readers with a sensitive nose.

Once upon a time, Euclid posited that, if a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the straight lines, if produced indefinitely, will meet on that side on which the angles are less than the two right angles.  Can anybody else understand all the individual words without having the foggiest idea what the whole thing means?

Lily Savage, aka Paul O’Grady, died suddenly but peacefully this week.  I’ve watched bits of his programmes over the years and he came over as a thoroughly decent and kind person, even though he was an animal freak.  In 2021, he was asked whether he would rather have more sex, money or fame and he replied “I’m not bothered about sex, money or fame, I just want a mongoose.”

M&S blow it, greedflation, and the shame of being British

4 March 2023

NEVER buy a present from Marks & Spencer for a friend.

I had a present at Christmas, bought at M&S, which looked good but was the wrong size so I drove 12 miles to the nearest store to exchange it, explaining it was a present.  “Can’t do it because the barcode’s missing and I don’t know how much it was” said a particularly grumpy sales assistant.  I explained the barcode had probably been removed because it showed the price and offered to get an identical pair off the rack so they could read the barcode.  “Can’t do it – NEXT!” was their friendly ‘customer services’ response as they looked at the person behind me in the queue.

I emailed ‘customer services’ and the answer was that the stores can’t change things without barcodes and I’d have to buy a new one the right size and return the old ones for a refund.

So I bought a new one and returned the original (still in its pristine packing) to the store where I thought it had probably been bought, explaining the situation and, guess what, they posted it back again (!!) with a standard form of words that I précised as “Bugger off”.

I then wrote to Stuart Machin, their chief executive, explaining the problem again and got a letter from one of his people that I précised as “Bugger off, not even the CEO can override the system”.  So I now have to write back and say I didn’t think the CEO needed to override the system but I’d assumed he had the power to authorise an ex gratia refund and/or compensation when his people had been rude and stupid and wasted my time.

If that doesn’t work, it’s the small claims court.  If some of us don’t stand up for our rights, big companies just get away with it.  All this for a [expletive deleted] pack of socks.

(Check their reputation on Trustpilot – I was shocked to see that 66% of 4,800 customers only gave them 1 star and another 9% only gave them two stars.)

Sadly, we all know what motivates chief executives.  The latest affront is BP’s CEO who could get a special bonus of up to £11.4m on top of the measly £1.4m salary and 2022 annual bonus he gets.  One leading shareholder has said the payment would be “a blatant grab”.  The only sliver of good news is the nominative determinism involved:  his name is Bernard Looney.

Which reminds me, I recently heard of a carpenter called Richard Wood and a local doctor called Katharine Gurney.  How glad I am that my family name isn’t something like Greedybastard or Draincleaner.

“Blatant grab” is a phrase that could also describe what the European Central Bank fears is happening – the unions are calling it “greedflation” (what a lovely word) – as companies that are keeping wage levels in the sub-basement increase prices by more than their costs increase so they can hide an increase in the profit margin.

As the minutes of the ECB’s February meeting are reported to have said: “Profit growth remained very strong, which suggested that the pass-through of higher costs to higher selling prices remained robust” and they will therefore be monitoring “profits and mark-up” as well as wages.  Let me know if you’d like that translated into plain English.

But some big businesses are motivated by power.  Take Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire which influences millions of people all over the world.  His News of the World hacked phones and some of his Fox News presenters repeatedly lied about the 2020 election having been stolen from Donald Trump.  Murdoch himself has admitted in his submission to the $1.6bn Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News that he knew Fox News was spreading lies and allowed them to continue.  By sheer coincidence, this wasn’t reported in the Times, which he also owns.

The only body that can control this sort of thing is the government and we all know where they’re at.  ‘That Woman’ started it all when she started to sell the family silver because she was too stupid to realise that, when you’ve sold it all, you have to eat with your fingers, if you can still afford food.

The most heinous example was her 1980 Housing Act that allowed local authorities to sell council properties to their occupants so we now have a desperate shortage of state-owned properties, huge waiting lists and property developers straining at the leash to build overpriced and overcrowded estates in the green belt.  Meanwhile, council houses that were bought by their tenants are now contributing to the shortage of cheap accommodation as today’s owners let them out at inflated rents.  This week brought news that Foxtons, the estate agents, are advertising an ex-council flat in Pimlico for £3,900 a month, or £47,000 a year. How many of our incomes are more than £47,000, even before tax?

This short-termism is of course another argument for proportional representation which would give much greater continuity in policies compared with our current electoral system in which policies are based on what’s most likely to get a government re-elected at the next election and policies get shorter-sighted as an election approaches.

Earlier this week, I was talking to a medic who was injecting botox into the back of my neck and she said that the government’s closure of cottage hospitals and rehab unit beds made her “really angry”.  More family silver into the capitalists’ smelters.  You’ll just have to guess if I agreed with her.

A retired supreme court judge, Jonathan Sumption, once defended his “puny £1.6 million a year” by referring to the much larger amounts paid to comparable individuals in business, sports and entertainment – and this was way back in 2001.  Anyway, he has commented on last week’s decision about Shamima Begum’s British citizenship.  He agreed that, because the law requires the home secretary’s approval to deprive someone of their citizenship, the commission couldn’t override this, but nor was it able to consider what he describes as “the real scandal” of Begum’s exclusion.

Sumption points out that a person cannot be deprived of “British citizenship if it would render them stateless” and reminds us that, although she was 19 when this was done, her theoretical ability to claim citizenship of Bangladesh (because her parents were born there) was provisional and lapsed when she was 21.  She never even visited Bangladesh which has now disowned her anyway, so she is now 23 and “As a result of the home secretary’s decision, she is stuck in a camp in Syria, with no citizenship anywhere and no prospect of one.”

He adds “Children who make a terrible mistake are surely redeemable. But statelessness is for ever.”

I feel shamed by what I’m supposed to consider ‘my’ country. Why can’t another home secretary return her passport?  What sort of country has Britain become?  I’d be perfectly happy to let her stay in our spare room.

I didn’t know that some farms and warehouses use remotely-controlled vehicles but there’s apparently thought of delivering rental cars to their destinations on public roads by remote control.  The Law Commission of England and Wales foresees “difficulties in enforcement” which could ban remote driving in the UK from overseas “until appropriate international agreements are in place”.  I foresee difficulties, whatever appropriate agreements are in place, caused by the time lag in getting a signal from the car to the driver plus the driver’s response time plus the time taken to get the signal back to the car. 

You see the delay when UK-based TV interviewers are talking to reporters in remote countries and the delay can be up about 5 seconds.  (Have you noticed the producers tend to switch the picture from the studio to the OB unit about half way through the gap to distract viewers from the delay?) 

I reckon this means that two cars heading towards each other, each travelling at 60 mph, will get nearly 300 yards (270 metres) closer, still at a combined speed of 120 mph, in the 5 seconds before the remote-controlled car starts braking, and if there’s a bend or a dip in the road, the cars could be less than 300 yards apart before they can even see each other.  Ho hum.