Local electioneering, serial killers, Swedish TV interviews and rockets

8 June 2024

Our local MP called the other day.  No, not that one, the other one because the constituency boundaries have been changed.  I told him he’d get our vote because I wanted the other lot out and said he could put a poster up on our fence, one of the most noticeable sites in the village, and that he could put it on top of the Ukrainian flag we’ve had up there for a couple of years.

Two days later, I noticed a raggedy piece of paper, defacing the election poster, on which someone had scrawled in an obviously uneducated hand “Disgusting [party name redacted] putting a poster on top of the flag”.  It was obviously intended as the sort of reasoned debating point beloved by the [party name redacted] because they had taken the trouble to bring some Sellotape to stick their note to the flag. 

Because I feel rather sorry for people who feel the need to do things like that. I just removed the scrap of paper but I did wonder if it was the same person who stole the first two flags we’d put up there when the war started.

I’m now looking for a house with a note on their fence saying “Don’t vote for [party name redacted] because they’re disgusting”.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former director of the FBI, has just published a book called “Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers” which claims long-haul trucking is a happy hunting ground for serial killers.  In 1994, Robert Ben Rhoades was given a sentence of life-without-parole having agreed to plead guilty to two murders in exchange for the death sentence being waived and he remains in the maximum-security Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois.

While they were trying to identify Regina Walter, one of his victims, an Illinois state trooper publicised her details nationally and asked for information about Caucasian females aged 13-15 who had disappeared nine months earlier.  He got more than 900 replies.

Further investigation showed that, over at least 15 years, Rhoades had kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed as many as 50 suspected victims before being caught and jailed.  His victims were almost all sex-trafficked women who’d hitched a lift at a truck stop.  He’d then assault and kill them in another state and dump their bodies in a third state, which complicates investigations in America where each state has its own jurisdictions.

Having learnt that at least 850 murders in the last few decades have taken place along the country’s highways with more than 200 of them still unsolved, Figliuzzi argues that it’s a much wider problem than odd truckers here and there.  Twenty-five long-haul truckers are in prison for multiple murders and he claims the FBI has a list of about 450 suspects, many of whom are truckers.

 An entire mythology surrounds these drivers.  In Figliuzzi’s words, they see themselves as “Part cowboy, part fighter pilot, and part hermit, long-haul truckers” while they actually “glide along the edge of a certain seam in the fabric of our society – the seam that separates their reality from ours.”

(Think of ‘Duel’, Steven Spielberg’s first film, originally made for TV in 1971, the one that made him famous.)

The drivers spend so much time alone that a tendency to sociopathy probably helps but the big question involves chickens and eggs:  do psychopaths choose the work for the opportunities it offers or does the job itself tip borderline psychopaths over the edge?

It’s tempting to assume it couldn’t happen in the UK because settlements are so much closer together and the country is so much smaller (just remember the state of Texas, which isn’t even the largest state in the Union, is almost three times the size of the UK) but remember what the Yorkshire Ripper did for a living.

On a more wholesome note, Stina Lundberg Dabrowski is renowned and respected for her documentaries and interviews on Swedish television.  She’s produced documentaries on contentious subjects such as Cuba and Colombia, the Zapatist guerillas in Mexico and a family who are members of the Ku Klux Klan, but she’s best known for her studio interviews with an eclectic bunch of people such as King Abdullah and Queen Rania of Jordan, Yasser Arafat, Benazir Bhutto, Hillary Clinton, Leonard Cohen, the Dalai Lama, Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tom Hanks, Eddie Izzard, Madonna, Nelson Mandela, Diego Maradona, Dolly Parton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Margaret Thatcher, amongst many others.  At the end of her interviews, Dabrowski asks her guests to jump and a freeze-frame from the jump closes the programme.

Over the years, only three people are known to have refused to jump: Bhutto, Mandela and one other.  I can’t imagine why the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Bhutto didn’t, one can excuse Mandela if his knees were anything like mine are now (although the Dalai Lama jumped and he’s no spring chicken) but the third was a person renowned for a total absence of any sense of humour who was either so arrogant or so insecure they didn’t want to lose what they perceived as their dignity.  You guessed:  it was Thatcher, who claimed it was “a silly thing to ask”, and “puerile”.  Her briefing for the interview had obviously failed to warn her about the jump (and, when she refused, she’d forgotten any Latin she once knew).

At this point, for the sake of my sanity, I feel an irresistible need to change the subject so let’s congratulate China on the first soft landing of a space probe on the far side of the moon – a world first – where it’s hoped it will collect about 2kg of rock and soil samples from one of the oldest craters on the moon.  And let’s also congratulate Elon Musk who has at last managed to get one of his American rockets to reach the edge of space and return safely without exploding.

Bad interviews, murder, crooks and the climate emergency

17 February 2024

Two bad interviews this week made the news.  The first one was Rishi Sunak’s Q&A session with members of the public on GBNews.  The introduction said that neither GBNews nor the prime minister knew what questions were coming but the presenter knew who was going to ask the next question so somebody somewhere had selected the questions.

I initially thought this was a brave thing for Sunak to do until I realised that he knew his frailties and had prepared answers that basically said “I obviously can’t talk about individuals but the government has achieved …”

Unfortunately, the camerawork was so bad, especially the camera that went round the floor in circles and showed Sunak’s back while he made his opening remarks, that I got very restless and went to do something useful when he said sending people to Rwanda would be “a deterrent”.  He’s trying to force through a law that would describe Rwanda as a safe place to send refugees so how can it be “a deterrent”? 

In Moscow, Tucker Carlson, a right-wing American journalist, interviewed Vladimir Putin.  Putin said afterwards he’d been surprised by the lack of “sharp questions” and wished Carlson had been more aggressive so he could have been aggressive himself.  Eh?  Putin can be tamed by gentle questions? 

In a later interview with Russian TV presenter, Pavel Zarubin asked him who’d be better for Russia, Joe Biden or Donald Trump.  Putin replied “Biden. He is a more experienced, predictable person, a politician of the old school [but] we will work with any US president who the American people have confidence in.”

The latest murder (presumably) authorised by Putin (presumably) is that of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny who was being held under a “special regime” in a prison camp inside the Arctic circle where winter temperatures can rise as high as -30^oC. 

Navalny consistently exposed and reported on fraud and government corruption and, in 2013, won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral election which was widely believed to have been rigged.  He went on to identify and report on a huge palace built on the shores of the Black Sea for Putin and, in 2020, fell into a coma after suspected Novichok poisoning by the Russian security service.  He was surprisingly allowed to go to Germany for treatment where he unexpectedly recovered.

However, Russia underestimated his bravery and his commitment to expose the corruption there and he returned in January 2021, knowing that he would be arrested and sentenced to a term in prison that he would probably not survive.

It’s also been revealed in the 2021 leak about a secret operation in 2016 that Putin had personally decided to support Trump’s election campaign because Trump was “mentally unstable” and such a leader would destabilise American society and weaken America’s negotiating powers.

Trump’s recent claim that he’d support Russia’s invasion of NATO countries if they didn’t contribute to the defence budget makes it look as if Putin’s assessment was right.  And yet Trump still seems to have the support of a frightening number of American voters who are happy to vote for someone who has already been found guilty in civil courts and is now being tried on umpteen criminal charges.

The most recent judgment found Trump, his eldest sons, and their associates guilty in the New York Financial fraud case and ordered them to pay more than $350m as well as banning him from running any New York business for three years (Eric and Donald Jr have only been banned for two years).  This is in addition to the $83m he had to pay to the writer E Jean Carroll for defaming her.

Judge Arthur Engoron wrote that, in the fraud case, the defendants’ “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological”.  What we’re now waiting to see is whether Trump, who must now pay the $350m into the Court even if he appeals, actually has that much in liquid assets.

A study by the University of Michigan revealed this week that 15% of Americans don’t believe that the world’s climate is changing and glaciers and polar icecaps are melting.  What I find encouraging about this study is that it also implicitly says that 85% of Americans do believe the world is facing a climate emergency.

Other scientists have found that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (known to its friends as AMOC) has slowed by 15% since 1950 and is heading for a sudden shift.  The Gulf Stream, which keeps temperatures in the British Isles and western Europe temperate, is part of AMOC;  if / when the Gulf Stream fails, we will be reminded that southern England is at the same latitude as Newfoundland, where it is not unknown for the sea to freeze, Edinburgh is at the same latitude as the south of Alaska and Shetland is at the same latitude as the south of Greenland.

AMOC is a complex system of waters moving around the Atlantic ocean and carrying carbon and nutrients in the warmer surface waters northwards from the tropics.  When it gets to the Arctic Circle, it cools and sinks to the bottom of the sea and returns southwards.  However, as the world gets warmer, the Arctic ice sheets melt faster and reduce the salinity of the surrounding sea water which affects the sinking of the saltier warmer water so the whole system will just stop.

There seems little doubt amongst experts that this will happen if things don’t change although there are differences about whether this will happen in the next decade or the next century but computer modelling indicates that if it does happen, it will happen very suddenly.

The volcanic eruptions in Iceland have produced lava flows that inexorably consume roads and houses show just how puny and powerless humanity is so perhaps we should open our eyes and start taking climate change seriously.  We can’t stop tectonic plates moving but perhaps we can make small personal contributions by avoiding foods that make us fart.

Not-poverty, autism and littering

3 February 2024

Having written about poverty last week, I discovered this week that not everyone agrees with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s definition of poverty.  George Freeman, Conservative MP for Mid Norfolk since 2010, resigned last November from his post as Minister of State for Science, Research, Technology and Innovation claiming that, on his ministerial salary of about £118,000, he couldn’t afford to pay his mortgage when his payments increased from £800 to £2,000 this month. 

So he’s now a backbench MP getting only £86,584 but able to moonlight in some second jobs to top up his income to a level that will cover his modest outgoings.  I thought MPs were paid to work full-time on behalf of their constituencies and digging the country out of the hole it’s made for itself.  If you now listen very carefully, you’ll hear complete silence, which is the sound of blood not dripping from my bleeding heart.

At the other end of the scale, a Delaware judge has ruled against a $56bn pay package ‘awarded’ to Elon Musk saying it is “an unfathomable sum” and is unfair to shareholders.  She also ruled that Musk had “dominated the process that led to board approval of his compensation plan”.

Musk has, predictably, objected and said he’ll move Tesla to Texas where they don’t mind that sort of thing.  He hasn’t made any public comment about how many people will lose their jobs in Delaware or whether he’ll expect them to take a 3-hour flight each way to commute to the new site.

Equilar, an American pay research firm, has calculated that the combined pay of the 200 highest-paid executives in 2021 together were paid one sixth of what Musk is trying to grab, which puts his greed into perspective. 

Regular readers will know I have trouble with big numbers so I tried to get a sense of just how big $56bn is by imagining each dollar was equivalent to one inch (about 2.5 cm for younger readers).  I then piled 56,000,000,000 inches up on top of each other to see how high they would reach.

What I discovered was that the pile would reach the moon, and come back again to earth, and then go back to the moon, and then come back about two thirds of the way to earth.

He’s a strange man, Musk:  obviously very bright within limits, with the money to indulge even the daftest of his whims, he’s far enough along the spectrum to have no contact with reality outside these limits.  However, he does do some interesting things and his neurotechnology company Neuralink, has announced that the first human brain has been given a surgical implant of a brain-chip to help improve the neurological functions that were not working properly;   the patient is said to be recovering well.  It’s been formally approved for human use and sounds like the next generation of the Deep Brain Stimulation implants that have been around for years and ease the pain suffered by people with movement disorders like Parkinson’s Disease and Dystonia.

A cross-party group of MPs reported this week that the financial crisis facing so many local authorities could drag even more councils into bankruptcy, threatening local services, and urged the government to inject an extra £4bn into town hall budgets. 

After a decade of repeated reductions in support from central government and devolving expensive services from central to local government, some of them are now scrabbling around to find assets they can sell on the basis that tomorrow may never come and they won’t need the income these currently bring in or the expenditure they reduce.  In the meantime, of course, our council tax bills go up and up to plug gaps and central government claims it wants to reduce taxes, trying to conceal the fact that they’re already taxing us more heavily at a local level.

In Hertfordshire, Dacorum Borough Council has come up with a novel way to make a little money on the side:  they issue Fixed Penalty Notices to men urinating in rural lay-bys.  Their website proudly confirms they fined 785 people in 2023 for pee-stops, bunching these ‘offences’ along with fly-tipping and other littering.

This raises two interesting questions in my mind, the first of which is “who reports them and what evidence do they provide?”.  Do they arm people with cameras and station them in lay-bys to wait for men with full bladders?  What defence would they offer against a counter-claim of invasion of privacy?  What do these guardians of public order tell people?  (“What do you do at work, mummy?” / “I take pictures of men peeing, dear.”) 

Now deepfake pictures are becoming common, it can only be a matter of time before there’s a picture of Taylor Swift standing at the roadside practising her new-found skill of doing it standing up.  Apparently Virginia Woolf could do it so why not Taylor Swift?

The other question is how one defines ‘littering’.  Most normal people believe that the litter is visible and, in hard-surfaced alleyways and backstreets of urban areas, abandoned urine is obvious to at least two of our senses or, if you slip in it, three, but offenders used to be charged with a ‘public nuisance’ offence, not littering.

Gardeners are told that peeing onto the compost heap adds all sorts of useful nutrients to the soil and the same must be true of roadside verges.  It also leaves no trace and I challenge anybody without a dog to visit a lay-by where somebody relieved themselves an hour ago and show me where the offence took place.

Wouldn’t it raise more money if they fined people who leave their dogs’ droppings on pavements and footpaths?  Some people even bag the dog poo and then cast the bag aside or, even more weirdly, hang it from a bush – I often come home with a plastic bag containing more than our dog produced.

Anyway, normal drivers keep an empty plastic bottle in the car, and a ‘She-Wee’ if appropriate, so they don’t even have to get out.

On a somewhat related theme, a Rhode Island animal charity has promised that, for Valentine’s day, you can write the name of someone you don’t like on a paper heart and send it to them with a $5 donation and they’ll put it in a cat’s litter tray.

Sociopathy in leaders, the Peace March and Linnean classifications

11 November 2023

Why is it that the motivations of people who reach ‘the top’ are rarely obvious until it’s too late?  Looking round the world today, we can see that most so-called leaders are sociopaths, and can only guess which were born sociopathic, which learned sociopathy and which had sociopathy thrust upon them.  I wonder sometimes if their sociopathy is what makes them want to be low on the totem pole*.

One of the most recent and obvious examples is Benjamin Netanyahu who is happy to continue slaughtering civilians en masse, including children, until Hamas releases the hostages they’re holding.  He admitted earlier this week that he wants to retain “indefinite control” over the Gaza Strip followed but, two days later, he U-turned and told Fox news “We don’t seek to conquer Gaza, we don’t seek to occupy Gaza, and we don’t seek to govern Gaza.” 

Of course actions of the leaders of Hamas who ordered the 7 October attack are just as unforgiveable and their holding civilians as hostages and reportedly torturing and murdering Israeli people is condemned by all right-thinking people.  As are Israel’s claims – if they’re true – that Hamas leaders are sheltering in and under hospitals and refugee camps so it’s OK for Israel to kill hundreds of medics, patients and refugees in the hope of killing a Hamas leader.

Nor must we forget the sociopaths Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and the leaders of oppressive countries like Afghanistan and Myanmar and North Korea and rather too many in Africa.  At least in America and the UK, there are still enquiries and courts that expose the extent of the sociopathy and, in both countries, former leaders are being proved dishonest and untrustworthy.

However, in Donald Trump, America not only found the classic sociopath but elected him as president and, despite all his crimes and misdemeanours, there’s a terrifying chance they might elect him again.  We can only hope that, by election time, he’ll be in prison and bankrupt and something in the Constitution can be used to prevent a convicted criminal being president.

Our home-grown sociopaths pale into insignificance beside people like these but Boris Johnson came close – somebody who knows him well said they wouldn’t trust him to feed the cat – and Suella Braverman, our sociopathic Home Secretary, is emulating him with some the daftest comments we’ve seen for some time. 

All over the world, pro-Palestine demonstrations have taken place to plead for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza and today’s Peace March in London attracted an estimated 300,000 people (or tofu-eating, Guardian-reading, left-wing wokerati as Braverman might have said).  The organisers, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, had invited “all people of conscience to join us in peacefully marching” and confirmed they were working with the police to ensure public safety.

In an article in the Times on Wednesday, Braverman described the event as a “hate march” organised by and for “left wingers” and “pro-Palestinian mobs” and she told the police to prevent its happening.  Using suitably diplomatic language, the police reminded her of their operational independence and told her to piss off.

As I write, it appears a small counter-protest attracted a few burger-eating, Daily Mail-reading, right-wing reactionaries, more than 100 of whom were arrested for violence, but there have been no reports of any arrests on the march itself.

In defiance of the ministerial code, Braverman’s article had apparently not been cleared with Downing Street; various brown-nosed ministers have distanced themselves from her comments but Rishi ‘Never Do Today What You Can Possibly Put Off Till Tomorrow’ Sunak hasn’t yet fired her.

Not that this matters to a sociopath who wants to be prime minister next year;  or, if the Tories lose the election, leader of the opposition, and is probably one of those stupid people who believes that any publicity is good publicity (what about the Yorkshire Ripper?)

At this point, I must admit to a personal feeling of sympathy for the sociopaths who are so insecure that they need something like power or money or admirers to give them any sense of self-respect.  I also have great difficulty in believing that some people really are narcissists and wonder if they really think they’re wonderful when they’re constipated, or have diarrhoea. 

But I do find it difficult to name powerful people in recent history who didn’t tend that way and, after some thought, could only come up with Barack Obama and John Major.

I also wonder how much of the damage they’ve suffered is down to their parents.  For example, we know that Boris Johnson’s father never really achieved much (who’d even heard of him before Boris appeared on the scene?) and I suspect he’s one of those people who thinks it’s a compliment if somebody calls him ‘incorrigible’ which, while it seems to be used as a reluctant, semi-admiring description of somebody who is unable to change their ways, it actually means “incurably bad, or depraved” (OED) or “incapable of being corrected or amended” (Merriam-Webster).

Sociopathy and brown-nosing even enters the world of botany and zoology.  The naming of newly discovered plants and animals follows an internationally accepted two-word system set up by Carl Linnaeus on the 18^th century:  the first word identifies the genus, the second the species, often using the discoverer’s name or that of another well-known figure.  Some of these names are now being reviewed because their names related to people who have since been discredited, like a beetle named Anophthalmus hitleri in 1937.  Actually, since it’s brown and eyeless and looks rather like a very small turd, that one seems OK to me, as does a moth discovered in 2017 that was christened Neopalpa donaldtrumpi because it has blond head scales and small genitalia.

Then, last week, the American Ornithological Society said it was changing the names of birds named after racists, slavers and misogynists.  Perhaps Britain could follow suit and the Great Tit, currently Parus major, could become Parus Johnsoni.

*          Despite ‘a low man (sic) on the totem pole’ being used colloquially to indicate low status, the importance of people pictured on a totem pole actually increases downwards.  Well, you wouldn’t want to be the chief and have your image carved at the top where nobody could see it would you?