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.”

Mismanagement worldwide, Israeli BS and other biosolids

12 July 2025

Only 20 years too late, last week saw the publication of Sir Wyn Williams’ inquiry into the attempts of the Post Office and Fujitsu to blame their own Horizon computer system’s faults on the people running their post offices for them.  It took Williams 225 days of hearings and evidence from 298 witnesses to discover that about 1,000 people were wrongly convicted, their lives destroyed.  Some of them were sent to prison, at least 13 of them of them committed suicide or self-harmed, and all of their families suffered alongside them – an estimated 10,000 people were affected by the corporate denials.

What makes it all that much worse is that both the Post Office and Fujitsu were aware of the problems with the Horizon system.  One postmistress made 256 calls to the helpdesk about Horizon problems but still ended up in prison, and many others had asked for help when the system produced inaccurate figures.

The report described the scandal as “profoundly disturbing” and said that those who had been unjustly accused were victims of “wholly unacceptable behaviour perpetrated by a number of individuals employed by and/or associated with the Post Office and Fujitsu”.  It has also opened the door to include families in the wider net of those eligible for compensation.

So far, not one of the managers of the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable but the next stage of Williams’ inquiry will look at the question of blame, and a police investigation is in progress.  Perhaps they’ll remember corporate manslaughter was made a specific criminal offence in 2007.

The government is taking another step in the right direction with its proposals to ban the use of non-disclosure agreements when somebody has taken advantage of their seniority to grope, hassle, patronise or otherwise discriminate against another person (usually junior to them).  Until now, if the employer felt a complaint is justified, they could give the person some money in exchange for their promise never to tell anyone else about the abuse, thereby supporting the abuser and risking a repeat performance;  it’s hoped the new proposals will delete this restriction from previous NDAs.

It would be nice to see the government also taking action to stop other abuses of ‘the system’ by organisations like Nationwide Building Society and Thames Water.  Nationwide, a mutual society owned by its member, has refused to allow us to decide if its chief executive, Debbie Crosbie, is ‘worth’ a 43% pay increase to £7m.  It’s argued that, since it took over Virgin Money, it should compare its executives’ pay with the big banks but it hasn’t said why it’s happy to live with pay controls that are less restrictive than banks.  Is Crosbie suddenly ‘worth’ 43% more?  Didn’t it even occur to anyone making the comparison that bankers are overpaid?

Thames Water is equally profligate but with government money.  Having been given an emergency loan to keep the company alive, they gave almost £2.5m of it to just 21 managers and plan to give them the same again in December, as well as a further £10.8m next year.  The chair, Sir Adrian Montague, claimed that creditors had “insisted” on these payments but it was then discovered he’d lied about this and the Guardian has seen and quoted from the minutes of a Thames board meeting defining payments as “retention payments” so as to avoid the legal ban on performance-related bonuses.

This, remember, is the company that is on the verge of bankruptcy and pleading to be let off paying huge fines for mismanagement.

In America, Amazon, the well-known tax dodger, is asking employees to come to work voluntarily (i.e. unpaid, but no pressure …) to help out with ‘Prime Day’.  Will anybody give me odds that managers and board members will be sacrificing several days pay to show solidarity with the people that do the work?

America’s chief executive consistently shows similar signs of incompetence, swaying like a pansy vin a hurricane.  His havering over tariffs has left most of the world in financial limbo, wondering what they’ll be.  The latest is his imposition of a 35% tariff on imports from Canada.

Luckily, or possibly not, the UK has already agreed a deal with Donald Trump that increases the costs of stuff we sell to America by 10%.  UK exporters are not lining the streets and cheering.

Trump still has to announce what tariffs he’s going to impose on imports from the EU but, if they’re more than 10%, Brexiteers can point out that we might have had to wait 9 years, but we’re now doing not as badly as the EU.  Errr ummm.  “Not as badly as …” is something to be proud of?

Trump and his former BFF Elon Musk have fallen out and Musk is now forming his own political party to oppose the Republicans, something that worries Tesla investors who wiped another 10% off the shares on hearing the news.  It’s rumoured that the Democrats are delighted about a new party that will split the Republican vote. 

Israel takes a slightly different approach to their repeated attacks on civilians and aid workers.  Medical officials, humanitarian workers and doctors in Gaza say they’re struggling to cope with thousands of people injured and 800 killed by the continuing Israeli attacks on Palestinians seeking aid.  Israel military has repeated it does not target civilians, takes all feasible precautions to avoid harm to non-combatants and abides by international law.

The UK has gone beyond bullshit and has been spreading human waste on farmlands, calling it “biosolids”.  It’s actually the sludge which is left in the bottom of the tank when the sewage has been treated, well, sort of treated.  They leave the smell unchanged and it still contains flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, microplastics, heavy metals and toxic waste as well as ‘forever chemicals’ which briefly enrich the soil before seeping down into aquifers and running off into stream and rivers.

Down here, the sludge is put in huge tanks that are towed along local roads by tractors that are so large the drivers don’t need any special training because they know they’ll crush anything they hit. 

An accident would be interesting, if fragrant. 

Car colours, NHS, government funding, UK stocks

5 July 2025

We know cars come in different colours and shades which you can choose if you buy new (those of us who buy secondhand take what we can get) and manufacturers make so many of each colour according to the demand for them.  Or do they produce more of one colour in order to create a ‘fashion’ for it?

Henry Ford memorably said of his original Model T, ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black’ (because black was the cheapest paint and changing colour would need the production line to be shut down).  Towards the end of its 19-year life, after 15 million had been sold, Ford did introduce some additional colours and it was replaced by the Model A in 1927 and this did come in a variety of colours.

Over the years, there have been periods when most cars were a similar colour, which changed every few years when manufacturers realised people who cared about this sort of thing would realise that driving a particular-coloured car dated them.  For several years now, most cars have been painted in dark colours that blend nicely into the shadowed background of country lanes.

However, in the last year or so, there seems to be a trend towards cars painted yellow, or a rather horrid bile yellow-green colour, probably not called ‘vile vomit’ by the marketing people.  More visible in shadowy lanes of course …  Come to think of it, I’m not sure what colour our car is and can’t be bothered to go and look, but we’ve only had it for just over 6 years.  It’s either black or dark grey.

Misogynist petrolheads like to joke that women choose a car by its colour, apparently not realising that women tend to have a much finer sensitivity to shades of colour than men:  men worry less about where the colour falls on the pantone spectrum than about how many carburettors a car has and how many seconds it takes to get from 0 to 62 mph, not that any of them ever actually do this.

A dental technician was recently trying to choose the colour of a crown to match my neighbouring teeth and asked me which I thought was closest.  I told her I’d leave it to her because women are better at matching colours than men;  “That’s what Mark [the dentist] says” she replied.

Dental treatment used to be covered by the NHS on the weird assumption that the health of teeth is an integral part of our overall health but this was changed years ago by someone who had never had an infected abscess on the root of a tooth.  Whatever next?  They’ll probably be refusing to let the NHS treat the ravages of ageing next.  After all, they stopped providing glasses on the NHS under Mrs Voldemort and it can only be a matter of time before they catch up with hearing aids so we’ll end up with an ageing population of toothless old people who are purblind and deaf who will need to claim state benefits to survive.  Go figure. 

The next logical step will be to replace the Assisted Dying Bill now going through parliament with a Compulsory Dying Bill.

The government seems to be aiming in this direction but there have been a lot of very encouraging objections from Keir Starmer’s own MPs to his welfare bill and he had to water down to get it through.  Following this, the Chancellor said she probably couldn’t avoid raising taxes in the next budget.

Perhaps this will encourage the government to rethink the approach to funding services.  Traditionally, cutting costs has been seen as better than increasing income.  Except in business.  Try telling big business they can’t put their prices up but have to cut their costs.  Since we don’t do much manufacturing any more, a large proportion of company costs is people so they either have to get them to work harder for less money or cut back on what they do.

If the government – any government – started with a blank sheet of paper they might even realise they’re not charging enough for the services they provide so, once they’ve cut costs to the bone, they need to increase prices.  Fine so far, except that they have a monopoly and must therefore accept they have a responsibility to support the less fortunate by increasing prices to the more fortunate, a curious inversion of ‘market forces’.

One of the problems all governments seem to have is that they’re subject to self-centred decisions made by people with money.  We saw a classic example last week when ‘markets’ were worried about the hole in the country’s finances and Chancellor’s future and sold UK government bonds left, right and centre after Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, raising the yield to nearly 4.7%.  But they then took their Valium and bought the things back again on Thursday morning, leaving gilts yielding closer to 4.5%.

(As I’m sure you all know, UK government bonds – aka ‘gilts’ – are stocks sold by the government to raise money to waste on nuclear weapons, or whatever.  They offer a fixed rate of interest on what you give them and the government will give you back whatever you paid the government for them when they ‘mature’ on a given date. 

(So far, so good, if you hold them until the repayment date, but you can sell them before they mature and the price you get for them will depend on what current interest rates are, not what you paid for them, so you may get more or less than they cost you.  Thus, if a stock is issued at, say, 4%, and comparable interest rates rise above this, you’ll get less than you paid for them because the buyer will want more than 4% interest.  So, if interest rates go up, gilt prices will fall, while gilt prices will go up if comparable interest rates fall below 4%.)

As Buffy Sainte-Marie said in her song ‘The Priests of the Golden Bull’, “Money junkies all over the world / trample us on their way to the bank”,

Anomalies, Labour policy, tax, smoking and birds

28 June 2025

Another of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starships has exploded on the ground while its engines were being tested.  SpaceX said the rocket “experienced a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase”.  How long before we hear traffic news warning us that traffic is being delayed by a major anomaly on the motorway?

In a recent article, the New Statesman’s editor searched for a definitive answer to questions about Keir Starmer’s ideals and finally came up with “human dignity”.  For those of us who hoped that a new Labour government would usher in a brave new world after the 14 years of depredations inflicted on us by the Conservatives, this seems a bit feeble.  And sad because Starmer seems, at heart, to be a decent man.

However, he does have the strangest ideas, last week’s being the brainwave that he could remove what dignity remains for some of the poorest in society by tightening the eligibility criteria for some benefits.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity (and therefore not allowed to lobby or take a political view), has estimated that some households would be up to £12,000 a year worse off.

Luckily, a lot of his own MPs are not supporting him and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has said his proposals would “destroy the financial safety net” for millions of people.  Starmer has now watered down his proposals in the hope they’ll be passed next week but whatever gave him the idea this was a good idea in the first place while he’s spending more on nuclear weapons that are, at best, irrelevant?  Perhaps he thinks the poor should be responsible for paying for the things while the rest of us who pay income tax don’t have to contribute.

The new nuclear weapons are to be manufactured and tested at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. We’re assured that the testing will involve only tiny amounts of material, perhaps a few millimetres in size, and will be triggered in a vacuum by a set of 12 lasers which will simulate the effects of a nuclear explosion.

A scientist involved in the project has said the energy involved is “no greater than boiling a teaspoon of water” and there was “no danger of blowing up Reading”.  Why does my skin crawl when I hear this sort of stupid ‘joke’?

To maximise the chances of a nuclear ‘anomaly’, the nuclear warheads will then be manufactured at a nearby site before being taken on a lorry to Coulport in Scotland, fitted into missiles and loaded onto submarines at the Faslane naval base.  No risks there then.

Way back, I went to Aldermaston twice to take part in the annual CND marches to Trafalgar Square.  Tens of thousands of us walked behind a banner, slept in vast marquees and on hard school floors.  I still have a photograph I took of a sign inside the fence round the nuclear site saying “The taking of photographs is punishable by death” (or words to that effect).

Fat lot of good we all did.

At about the same sort of time, the top rate of income tax on ‘earned’ income was 83%, with an extra 15% taken from investment income.  (Remember the Beatles’ song ‘Taxman’:  “it’s one for you 19 for me, ‘cos I’m the taxman”?)  There were no millionaires rioting in the streets and the (Conservative) government wasn’t overturned by the rich;  I actually knew somebody back then who paid the top rates and said they got a lot of income from their business so it was fair to pay a lot of tax on it.  When did people start equating their bank balance with their personal worth?  (I know who I blame …)

Elsewhere in government, the Home Office is now refusing asylum to Ukrainians who have left their homes to find safety in Britain on the grounds it’s safe for them to go back to Ukraine.  With unbated breath, I await the Home Office’s decision to refuse asylum to Gazan refugees on the grounds it’s safe for them to go home.  It almost makes Priti Patel’s attempts to deport refugees to war-torn Rwanda look slightly less stupid – can somebody remind me what that stupid cock-up cost us?

Despite the obscenely rich forever giving hollow promises to leave the UK if they have to pay another penny in tax, another charity, the Equality Trust, has pointed out there are now 165 billionaires in the UK and that ‘private’ wealth has grown eight times faster than the wealth of governments in the last 25 years. 

The journal Heart has summarised and published the results of an analysis of the medical records of some 200 million people and have reported that the regular use of cannabis increases the risk of acute coronary syndrome by 29% and of stroke by 20% as well as doubling the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (CVD).  I haven’t been able to find comparable research into increases in the incidence of CVD in tobacco smokers but one American study showed they were three times more likely to die of CVD.  It would be interesting to relate these results to the relative numbers of cannabis and tobacco smokers but I would guess that tobacco smokers cost the NHS considerably more than cannabis smokers.

I’ve mentioned before the government’s failure to insist that swift bricks are installed in all new houses.  The need for them was highlighted (I always wonder if that should be ‘highlit’) by a recent survey that showed a decline in their numbers of two thirds between 1995 and 2022.  When did you last see a large flight / bunch / herd of swifts screaming around in the sky above you?  Even if they’re not occupied by swifts, other birds are happy to use them, including house martins, tits, nuthatches, house sparrows and starlings.

But there is good news:  locally ‘extinct’ birds can be reintroduced.  The bittern hadn’t been breeding in the UK since the 1870s after its natural wetlands had been drained for farming but, with habitat restoration, some 280 bitterns were spotted last year.

Book thefts, tax dodgers, assisted dying, odd churches, and unknown visitors

22 June 2025

I’ve been muttering away every week for about 10 years now (although they weren’t published here until mid-2018) and I’ve sent a weekly email about it to the local volunteers of the charity for which I started it. 

I will no longer be warning this hard core of readers that another bunch of my hang-ups has been published but I guess they can bookmark the site, or ‘like’ it, or Google ‘Lesser Mutterings’, or do whatever clever people do if they want to keep up with something.

This also removes my (self-imposed) weekly deadline so I can mutter when the mood takes me or when I need to vent my anger at some of life’s stupidities about things like [fill in your own words here].

So here’s a bunch of fascinating but useless information.

For example, did you know the Bible is the one book most frequently stolen from bookshops (presumably the thieves are people who haven’t read it) and one bookseller in Austin, Texas, has said “The average King James Bible with a zipper is about 35 bucks.”  I’ve got several translations of the Bible, including the King James version, and none of them has a zip.  Perhaps I should go with the flow and steal one with a zip.

Our own HMRC spends a fortune trying to catch thieves.  In 2016, they devoted the time of 2,700 staff to investigating possible tax losses but their priorities are worrying:  five times as many people were investigating benefit fraud, which cost them an estimated £1.3bn a year, as those checking tax evasion schemes which cost an estimated £35bn each year.  Tax avoidance is, of course, OK while evasion is basically fiddling the system so as to pay less tax (I over-simplify slightly …)

(Don’t you love the “estimated” losses?  It’s like saying there are 2,500 undiscovered murders in Britain every year.)

Take Amazon, for example, who seem to have structured their UK business so that, in the last reported year, it only paid £932m (including business rates, corporation tax and national insurance contributions) on UK income of £27bn.  However, we must remember that poor old Amazon has to shunt a proportion of its taxable income over to what it describes as its “loss-making” subsidiary in Luxembourg so not much profit is left in the UK for HMRC to tax.

Curiously enough, our friendly neighbour vet retired a few years ago and sold the two privately-owned practices to a subsidiary of a company also registered in Luxembourg.  This company owns almost 3,000 veterinary practices in the UK and has increased its prices by 80% in three years, including changing the crematorium to one which costs three times as much as the old one.  They refuse to answer simple questions such as whether the new crematorium is part of the same group, or even why their vets don’t know that dying dogs tend to void their bladders.  (Freedom of Information Act?  Not here, mate.)

The Assisted Dying bill has now been passed by the House of Commons and goes to the House of Lords so we humans will soon, subject to some very important controls, be granted the same powers as pet-owners to choose a comfortable death rather than suffer months of slow and painful decline.

We’ve also seen Louise Casey’s report into the influence of ethnicity in gangs of adults who groomed children for sexual exploitation.  Her conclusion was, much to the delight of racist bigots, that a disproportionate number of Asian men were among suspects in the North Midlands even though she made it clear that, at a national level, the data is incomplete and inconsistent so it’s not possible to extrapolate her findings to say that the same is true of all grooming gangs in Britain.

It seems possible that an organisation dedicated to the persecution of Asian men could be registered as a church in America where the IRS only looks at the paperwork, not at the organisation’s aims, so some people have taken the mickey by registering daft churches.  For example, you can become an ordained minister of the Church of the Latter-Day Dude online, for free.  Its beliefs are sort of based on Taoism and entirely unconnected with the film The Big Lebowski but take much the same approach to life as the Dude;  for more details, have a look at https://dudeism.com/whatisdudeism/ . 

One of my readers recently introduced me to the political campaigning group Led by Donkeys which was formed in 2018 as an anti-Brexit movement but has since broadened its base and contrasts what politicians (of all stripes) said in the past and the exact opposite they said more recently.

You know we all find our urine smells after we’ve been eating asparagus?  Well, not all of us do.  About 6 in every 100 people can’t smell the sulphur-containing compounds in the thiol family (which are also found in skunk spray), despite most human noses being able to detect the stuff in concentrations as low as a few molecules per billion.  Even curiouser, it’s thought that about 40% of these lucky people don’t produce thiols at all.  As usual (hem hem), I’m in the majority and am always amazed by how fast my body converts the asparagus I’ve just eaten into these thiols and then releases them with other liquid waste.  (There, isn’t that phrased with a delicacy for which I’m not renowned.)

And here’s a helpful hint if you’re alone in the house and nervous:  keep something impressive by your front door, like electric hedge-clippers or a hand-saw or, even better, a chainsaw.  Then, if somebody you don’t know rings on the bell, pick it up before opening the door and let them see you holding it.  But remember, if you have a chain on the door, stand to one side of the door when opening it because a good kick will tear out the screws holding most chains and, if you’re behind the door, it’ll hit you in the face.

On that cheerful note …

Good news about bookie lookalikes, U-turns, intelligent millionaires and climate action

12 April 2025

Lots of cheering news this week, including that wonderful picture of Donald Trump holding up his tariff board and looking exactly like a bookie on the hill at Epsom on Derby Day.

Amy Coney Barrett, a Republican member of the American Supreme Court has, for the second time in recent months, voted against her Republican colleagues in a ruling against Trump to put justice before politics.  Who’d have guessed she still had the integrity to do that.

Trump did a Liz Truss by imposing a 10% levy on imports from Ukraine and the UK, and 20% on imports from the EU (and 0% on imports from Russia), financial markets worldwide crashed and he was forced into a humiliating U-turn, which just goes to show that if you say “Boo!” to a bully, they’ll chicken out.

Jaguar Land Rover had immediately suspended all further exports of their cars to America, thereby boosting the owners of ones already over there by increasing their second-hand values.

Trump’s tariffs also provided a wonderful excuse for our Labour government to rethink its economic policy and Keir Starmer has said “old assumptions should be discarded” so they can forget their crazy undertaking not to raise taxes.

All over America, there were demonstrations against Trump’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda” with an estimated 500,000 people taking to the streets in Washington, Florida and about 1,000 other places, including state capitals.

There have even been rumours that Elon Musk will be leaving the Department of Government Efficiency, possibly because people have sussed that he thinks cutting expenditure must automatically improve efficiency.

Both Trump and Musk were started in business with inherited capital but, while Musk has increased his with some successful businesses, Trump has lost a large amount of his inheritance with his unbelievable incompetence in running businesses – remember his casinos were bankrupted, beating the odds that were stacked in his favour by the rules of the games.

Another millionaire who inherited wealth is Abigail Disney, one of my heroes, who has acknowledged she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”  She has for many years been giving large sums of money away and a member of The Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation dedicated to changing the system so that its members and others with even more money pay more tax.

Last year, she wrote that “Extreme wealth concentration in the hands of a few oligarchs is a threat to democracy the world over.”  She accepts that instituting a global minimum tax on the very rich will be complex, but not impossible, and she pointed out that, four years ago, 136 OECD countries “joined an accord to enact a 15% global minimum tax on multinational corporations”.  She added that “If we can institute a tax floor for the world’s largest corporations, there is no reason we can’t do the same for the world’s wealthiest individuals”, pointing out that a 2023 survey found that even millionaires in G20 countries support the idea.

More good news over here is that the planning application for a deep coalmine in Whitehaven, Cumbria has been withdrawn after the High Court ruled that the permission granted by Michael Gove when he was in charge was unlawful.  This follows another, earlier decision by the Supreme Court that quashed planning permission for an oil well at Horse Hill in Surrey on the grounds that the impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be included when the climate impact of a proposal must be included.

The Labour government is also proposing to extend restrictions on the burning of peatland which has led to the degradation of 80% of them in England.  They are comparatively uncommon but, when they’re allowed to remain undisturbed, they store huge amounts of carbon – an estimated 3.2 billion tonnes in the UK alone.  The Conservative government started with a small step in the right direction by limiting the burning to areas of ‘deep peat’ (over 40cm deep) in Sites of Special Scientific Interest in conservation areas and some even smaller sites.

Labour’s plans include reducing the definition of deep peat from 40cm to 30cm and would do away with the limitation to conservation areas, increasing protected areas by two thirds to a total of 368,000 hectares, but this still leaves almost half the total area unprotected. 

Needless to say, organisations like the Countryside Alliance are up in arms.  They don’t care about the wildlife, such as adders, toads, and ground-nesting birds, that are killed when land is burnt but they’re horrified that this will restrict the land where otherwise relatively normal people pay a lot of money for the sheer delight of blowing the heads off the grouse that live there bringing up their families.

I have no real problem with somebody shooting something to take home to eat (actually, of course, picking up and eating roadkill avoids the slaughter and is much cheaper, but remember fresh blood is good, maggots aren’t) but shooters don’t even get to keep the birds they killed without paying for them;  and what worries me more is the thought that some people actually get pleasure from killing, and are willing to pay to be allowed to do it.

Still on the subject of corpses, I’m always fascinated by the facial reconstructions of Neanderthals and other people who have been for tens of thousands of years just from a skull that’s been dug up by an archaeologist.  I know pictures are sometimes drawn using similar techniques in attempts to picture the faces of bodies that haven’t yet been identified but I wonder whether any research has been done reconstructing the faces from the skulls of people who’ve died more recently, and of whom there are photographs, to see how accurate they are? 

They’re welcome to use my skull for a test when I’ve finished with it because I find it hard to imagine how they could guess where my wrinkles are from the underlying bone so it would be an interesting test of their system.

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.

Typos, Wills, climate change, wild animals, housing and Janet Airlines

15 March 2025

Over the years, I’ve collected cuttings and notes of things that have interested or amused me.  Most of them get copied into my commonplace book but some really need to be kept in their original form so you can see the context.  For example, while I was weeding files, I came across a whole-page advertisement in the Guardian of 22 February2022 which was headed in large capitals across the top of the page “The Majority of the UK Adult Population dosen’t have a Will” (page 31 if anybody thinks I make these things up).  OK, we all make mistakes but the ad was for ‘The Society of Will Writers’ who would have supplied the artwork for the advertisement ready to be slotted into the paper so you can’t even blame the Guardian’s reputation for typos.

Would you use them if you want a Will wirtten by them?

Have you actually got a Will?  If you haven’t, check the hoops your survivors will have go through to free up your assets – house, bank accounts, cat etc – if you’re leaving more than a small amount;  and check who’ll get what’s left after the government’s taxed it and legal fees have been paid.

(And make sure your survivors know where it is!)

It’s depressing to discover how many family feuds arise from disputes over somebody’s Will … 

Here endeth the first lesson.

Another page I’ve treasured from much further back appeared in the Personal columns of Nine to Five, a magazine that was handed out free in London.  On 24 January 1983 (which shows just how far back my fascination with trivia goes), amongst the entries that said “Oxford graduate 49, seeks …” and “Two nice young ladies wish to meet …”, was the following:   “English male aged 36 single and lonely seeks female for friendship and marriage any nationality, interests walking in the countryside, landscape photography and spanking.”

This inevitably brings to mind an animal, once more living wild in the UK, which uses its tail to slap water to warn of danger.  “[Their heads have] various retractable walls that let water in or keep it out. They can close valves in their nostrils and ears and [have] a special membrane over their eyes; their epiglottis … is inside their nose instead of their throat; they use their tongue to shield their throats from water; and their lips to shield their mouths – their lips can close behind their front teeth.

“Their back feet are webbed like a duck’s; on land, their front feet act like hands, digging, grasping and carrying things from the riverbed to the surface – rocks, for example, tucked under their chins and cradled by their arms. When they swim, they do so while holding their front paws to their chests …”  Of course you recognise a beaver from this description.

I tend to be optimistic but all the news, at home and abroad, is increasingly making me wonder how justified this is.  Worldwide, sea levels have risen by 20cm due to climate change, and the increase is not about to stop.

At a local level, we all know the Houses of Parliament are in an increasingly dangerous state of decay due to damp, rats that eat the insulation of electrical wiring, dodgy plumbing and jerry-builders, not helped by the shaking caused by the bomb that exploded in its underground car park and killed Airey Neave.  If you’ve ever been in the dingy rooms and corridors in the bowels of Westminster, you’ll know why tourists aren’t allowed there. 

For years now, there’s been talk of relocating parliament, possibly for as long as a decade, while the building’s being repaired but perhaps someone will realise that, as water levels rise and flooding becomes more common, the whole thing will flood and ultimately disappear underwater, perhaps within this century.  So why not design and build an entirely new government building on higher ground, relocate everything and open the old building to scuba divers?

If this were located more centrally in the UK, perhaps somewhere near Birmingham, which already has good road and rail links and a reasonable airport, it would have the incidental advantage of allowing HS2 to be scrapped because who’d then want to go to London?

Some London Boroughs have at last realised the short-sightedness of Maggie Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ scheme and have already spent £140m buying more than 850 properties since 2017 in towns and cities across England to be used to house homeless people and families.  How sad that so many of the pre-Thatcherism council houses were sold off and are no longer available for people in need.

Now one final curiosity: Janet Airlines.  Next time you’re at Harry Reid Intl airport, Las Vegas, take a look around the airfield and you’re likely to see some white-painted Boeing 737s with a red strip running along the side but no logos or even the name of their operator painted on them.  They’re part of a classified fleet of aircraft used by the United States Department of the Air Force to shuttle people daily from a private terminal building to or from various government sites over the country.

It’s not clear how many places they serve but it is known that they go to the Nevada Test and Training Range, including the Tonopah Test Range, which is, according to Wikipedia, “a secret highly classified military testing facility where the U.S. Air Force has historically stored and developed secret weapons”.  Some people also believe Janet Airlines flies to the famous ‘Area 51’.

Since we can all track every aircraft that’s in the air at any time (if that’s what turns us on), real enthusiasts track these flights only to find some of them suddenly disappear from their screens because they’ve turned off their transponders.  This is possibly because they’re flying to classified military sites where new weapons and planes are designed and tested but I find myself asking why they don’t just build accommodation for workers at these sites rather than fly them there and back every day.

Perhaps there really is something spooky in the greenhouse (John Martyn fans might even think it’s the gardener).

J F Kennedy 61 years on

23 November 2024
Sixty-one years ago yesterday, American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot.
It was a truly shocking event and, as younger people remember where they were when they heard Lady Di had died, older people remember where they were when they heard he had been shot.
He was the youngest American president ever to be elected, and the youngest ever to die in office. He was also the first Roman Catholic president and was part of what Americans don’t call an ‘upper class’ family. He was good-looking and he was married to Jacqueline Bouvier, also good-looking, from another ‘upper class’ family.
Even today, his name is still remembered (who can name the three presidents who followed him? Or his three predecessors?) and his undoubted charisma has led to an image that has persisted into this century.
After rupturing a disc in his spine playing football at Harvard, Kennedy concentrated on politics and international affairs but his entire life was plagued by health problems and he was frequently in pain. He was awarded a purple heart when a Japanese destroyer sank his PT boat and he led the survivors of his crew to swim some three miles to the nearest land, helping another crewmate who’d been badly burnt.
While he was convalescing from another back operation in 1955, he wrote Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history, and he subsequently became active in politics.
In the 1960 election, he narrowly beat Richard Nixon and gave birth to a whole new era in American politics, most of it progressive. Although he had authorised the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in an attempt to oust Fidel Castro, he then called Russia’s bluff in 1962 over their missile bases in Cuba, leading the world to the brink of World War III, which frightened the hell out of people everywhere; but he won and Khrushchev backed down.
Kennedy then argued that the confrontation showed how important it was to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and this finally led to the 1963 test ban treaty.
He formed the Peace Corps of volunteers who worked all over the world on projects in education, farming, health care, and construction and he was active on equal rights and proposed new civil rights legislation in the belief that all Americans, regardless of their skin colour, have the same rights to a good and happy life in America. He also introduced the Equal Pay Act in 1963 so women were entitled to the same pay rates as men and he was an advocate of income tax cuts but his premature death meant this legislation wasn’t enacted during his lifetime.
Then, on 22 November 1963, he and Jackie were being driven slowly through Dallas, waving at the cheering crowds, when a bullet hit him in the back of his neck and exited through his throat. As he fell sideways, another bullet removed a piece of his skull. His head landed on Jackie’s lap and she cradled him as the motorcade raced to the hospital.
She later refused to change and, still wearing the pink dress covered in his blood, later stood beside Lyndon B Johnson as he was sworn in, saying she wanted people to see what they had done.
Because the person believed to have shot him was himself shot two days later, there was nothing to stop conspiracy theories springing up, including one theory that there was a second shooter on ‘the grassy knoll’ in front of the car and another that the person believed to have shot him had been trained and/or set up by communists, or some conspiracy or secret organisation.
Coincidentally, his murder was filmed by a supporter, Abraham Zapruder, and frame 313 of his film shows Kennedy’s head jerking backwards as the first shot hits him. The conspiracy theorists believe this shows the first shot came from in front and knocked his head backwards; others believe that the head automatically jerks backwards if one is hit hard in the back of the neck.
The 888-page report of the Warren Commission concluded that no evidence had been found that the killings were part of any conspiracy. This naturally fuelled rumours that there had been a conspiracy that had been covered-up.
After his death, it became public knowledge that he’d been a philanderer and had several affairs including, most notably, with Marilyn Monroe, and there were rumours of the Kennedy family’s links with organised crime.
These appear to have arisen because JFK’s younger sister Pat had, in 1954, married Peter Lawford, one of the infamous ‘rat pack’ of entertainers and, through them, JFK had met and become friends with Frank Sinatra (who first introduced him to Monroe). However, JFK’s brother Robert had written in his 1960 book The Enemy Within that organised crime was the greatest danger facing his country and he began a public and sustained attack on gangs when he was appointed JFK’s Attorney General.
Sinatra fell out with JFK after the latter was advised that maintaining close links with Sinatra, who was believed to have links with the mafia, might damage his reputation, and Lawford himself was subsequently excluded from rat-pack activities.
Thus was the saintlike president de-canonised and made human but it’s worth reminding ourselves that he was the right person at the right time and, peccadilloes aside, he led America through some huge societal changes and his legend lives on.
In many respects, he was a ground-breaker and it would be interesting to know what he would have thought of present-day America with another bout of Trump, this time with Elon Musk, only a couple of months away.
Nancy Friedman, a “Customer service consultant” (by gosh some UK companies could do with one of those), wrote just after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, about a kakistocracy, which she described as “government by the shitty”. ‘Kaka’ is of course a word commonly used by children in many countries as a not-very-rude way of referring to ‘poo’ though the word ‘kakistocracy’ itself goes back to at least 1644.
It’s roughly the opposite of ‘aristocracy’, based on the Greek ‘aristos‘ meaning ‘best’, which has come to mean government by people who, in the absence of any supporting evidence, consider themselves to be the best.

SUVs, two idiots and UK prisons

19 October 2024

A quick update on last week’s piece on assisted dying:  on Wednesday, Kim Leadbetter’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill had its First Reading in the House of Commons and there will be a vote after the Second Reading on 29 November.  Since this a Friday, many MPs will often be working in their constituencies so please encourage your MP to attend and vote.

On a visit I once made to Belfast at the height of the troubles, an election was approaching and one of our hosts told us, deadpan, that the slogan there was “Vote early, and vote often”.

A new danger is appearing in the wide-open racetracks of Chelsea and Notting Hill:  an American pick-up truck / SUV with the modestly self-effacing name of ‘Ram’.  It’s slightly larger than Nazi Germany’s Panzer I tanks and almost as heavy.  The European Transport Safety Council has said “This type of vehicle is excessively heavy, tall and powerful, making it lethal in collisions with normal-sized vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists … Europe should ban the Ram”.

If pedestrians are hit by normal cars with sloping bonnets and sides, the car tends to strike them at leg level and deflect them to one side.  SUVs generally have higher bonnets so it’s harder for them to see children in front of them and, if they hit somebody, smaller people will be hit in the head while taller ones will be hit in the trunk that contains all the vital organs.  Their square fronts also make it more likely that the pedestrian will be thrown forward and run over.

In Belgium, a recent study by the Vias institute, formerly the Belgian Road Safety Institute, studied the dangers of these vehicles and concluded that pedestrians are 90% more likely to suffer serious injury and almost 200% more likely to be killed if they’re hit by one of these things.

Simple physics helps explain an added risk.  Einstein’s famous formula E=mc² proves that the force of the impact is equal to the weight of the vehicle multiplied by the square of its speed, which means that heavier vehicles like SUVs (and lorries) will cause more severe injuries and greater speed will disproportionately make them even worse.

It’s thought that SUV buyers, who are the target market for Rams, are predominantly male and there is a popular rumour that they are over-compensating for personal inadequacies. Why don’t they just save money by having penis-enlargement therapy and give the savings to charity?

Other idiots include the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who has posted a comment on X/Twitter saying “Yes they can control the weather.  It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”  I have a feeling this translates as “Hurricanes like Helene and Milton wouldn’t have happened under a Republican president and Joe Biden targeted them at Florida because that’s where Donald Trump plays golf.”

Another bozo was the MSP chucked out of the Scottish National Party in August.  The Glasgow Shettleston MSP, John Mason, had said “If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed 10 times as many.”  Come on John, they’re doing their best.

In the Netherlands, the prison population is 40% lower than it was 20 years ago, down from 51,000 to 30,000.  The UK prison population is at a record high of almost 98,000, an increase of 50% from 65,000 in the same 20 years so the UK now has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in Western Europe.  Our prisons are dangerously overcrowded with corresponding increases in violence and drug abuse, and each prisoner costs us an average of £47,000 p.a. – that’s a total of £4.6bn.

If we set aside violent crimes (and I’m happy to include gaslighting as a violent crime because of the destructive effect it has on its victims), does any first-time offender going to benefit from being locked up with a bunch of experienced prisoners who can teach them all sorts of new tricks and approaches to crime?  I’ve muttered before about my belief that all ‘white-collar’ criminals’ assets should be confiscated by the state in exchange for the rights to live on state benefits.

Perhaps, as happens in the Netherlands, ‘new’ offenders should be made to do community service and, if thought necessary, made to pay compensation or fined and/or given a suspended sentence which is only enforced if they re-offend.  Dutch research shows this leads to lower rates of re-offending and it would certainly save the UK by a billion or two.

It’s a pity that governments prefer spouting tough-sounding slogans to actually doing something about the problems.  Stuff like “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.  Well, that worked a treat, didn’t it?  Sounded impressive, achieved nothing except increased overcrowding in prisons.

Let’s see if the forthcoming budget is better thought-out.  Recent research by the IPPR thinktank has discovered that a bunch of millionaires believe capital gains tax should be increased and the entrepreneurs have said was not a major influence on investment decisions.  The report also recommends a return to the system introduced by the Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson in 1988 which charged capital gains tax at the top rate paid in income tax by investors. Sounds fair.

In “The Other Place”, the Earl of Devon* is reported to be objecting to a proposal to remove all hereditary peers from the House of Lords.  As someone rather neatly put it in a recent letter to the Guardian, would you want root canal work done by somebody whose great great grandfather had been a dentist?

And a final piece of news that surprised me when I heard it:  the diameter of the Moon is less than the width of Australia.  I suppose that means that, if it crashed into Australia, the antipodean island would be left with a coastal strip in the east and another in the west, some 3,000 miles apart, and it would lead to the extinctions of humankind and any dinosaurs still undiscovered in the impenetrable forests of Hampstead Heath.

*   Come on, fess up – who knew Devon had an Earl?