Politics from the sublime to the ridiculous, and conspiracy theories

19 July 2025

Donald Trump has turned against Vladimir Putin, one of his former BFFs, and has agreed to send arms to Ukraine.  His eyes seem to have been opened by the patient efforts of other NATO leaders who have opened his eyes to Putin’s true nature.  One European diplomat admitted that, when talking to Trump, “there is a line between flattery and self-abasement, and we happily crossed it”.

In Israel, Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009, is brave enough to speak out about his country’s intentions for Gaza and its ongoing attacks there, describing them as war crimes, saying that building a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Gaza to house the surviving Palestinians would be “a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing”.  He also said “In the United States there is (sic) more and more and more expanding expressions of hatred to Israel … we call them antisemites [but] I don’t think that they are only antisemites, I think many of them are anti-Israel because of what they watch on television, what they watch on social networks.”

Xenophobia is also spreading in Britain and former Tory MP Douglas Carswell recently wrote in his regular column for the Daily Telegraph that “low-skilled, non-western immigrants” are a “burden” on the country and what is needed is “a detailed plan to take foreign nationals off the benefit system and remove them from the country”.

Other disillusioned politicians include those on the far left of the Labour party who support Jeremy Corbyn and are forming a new party for disappointed Labour voters.  Nigel Farage has done the same for disappointed Conservatives by setting up the Reform party, and many Labour voters have already moved to support the Lib Dems and the Green party.  With a head start, Farage’s gang has made surprising progress and, if Corbyn’s gang follows suit, we could have four large parties as well as various minority parties, which will make future elections in England and Wales tremendously exciting (or is that an oxymoron?)

The Scots blew their chance to join the mêlée by forming the Scottish National Party which sounds too much like a single-issue party and dissuades voters whose main interest in maintaining ready access to deep-fried Mars bars.  (I had one once and it was delicious but I couldn’t move for 48 hours and, three days, later, all my teeth fell out.)

Wouldn’t it be fun if even more groups broke away and split the vote ten ways, leaving Plaid Cymru with a majority in the House of Commons.  I realise you could claim they too look like a single-issue party but only if you speak Welsh, which 70% of the population of Wales don’t.

Following in Farage’s footsteps, another of Trump’s former BFFs, Elon Musk, is setting up the America Party to compete with the Republicans.  It hasn’t published a manifesto, nor is it clear what it will stand for although, when he announced it, Musk said “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

As well as exploding rockets, Musk made headlines when his association with Trump led to a devastating fall in the price of Tesla’s shares, which was helped by the news that the cheaper electric cars made by the Chinese company BYD (an upmarket Kia) are outselling Tesla cars in the UK.  Musk’s latest problem arose when his AI-based chatbot company Grok posted antisemitic replies and praised Hitler.  They grovelled and blamed a faulty software update but Grok still sounds unpleasantly like somebody retching.

Travis from Texas, a man described as “large” by an interviewer because they couldn’t bring themselves to write ‘obese’, used to tell another chatbot called Lily Rose about interesting things that had happened to him and, as time went by, he fell in love with ‘her’ and, with his human wife’s approval, married her in “a digital ceremony”.  And he’s not alone.  It’s probably the result of aliens subtly manipulating humans through the software we use.

While the latest news is that faults in the Air India plane’s systems had been reported shortly before the accident, there’s still plenty of scope for conspiracy theorists in the partial release of information from the black box of the flight that crashed last month killing 260 people in the plane and on the ground.  Both the switches that send fuel to the engines were turned off shortly after take-off.  One of the pilots asked why the other had turned them off and he said he hadn’t but we don’t know which pilot said what.  They managed to switch one of them back on again but it was too late and they died.

So were there any passengers on board that a terrorist group wanted to kill?  Did one of the pilots hold a grudge against the other one?  Both passed the routine pre-flight breathalyser test but did one of them have personal problems?  Was one of them sleeping with the other one’s partner?  Was there a target in the student building they hit?  Had a mechanic sabotaged the controls?  Were the gods angry? 

My brother knows someone who works in crash investigation and says the last words recorded are often “Mayday Mayday oh shit” but he was disturbed by the recordings from the fatal crash of one flight whose pilot didn’t want to stop for fuel on the way home.  The co-pilot said there wasn’t enough fuel to do it without stopping but the pilot insisted.  Some time later, the co-pilot said “I think we should put our uniform jackets on now”.  “Why?” asked the pilot and the answer was “So they can identify our bodies”.

But, to end on a cheerier note, I didn’t know much about Mae West until I saw a piece in Commonplace Fun Facts recently and it seems she was … feisty … and wore silk lingerie when she was sent to jail – see https://commonplacefacts.com/2025/07/13/mae-west-career-bio/.  For others like me, who are always finding something more fascinating than doing the washing, this site is a godsend …

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 …

Executions, assisted dying, free speech and The Quiz

7 December 2024

The early part of the week was taken up by various reactions to Joe Biden’s having given two formal pardons, the first to his son Hunter and the second to a turkey. The most shocking thing was that he didn’t pardon any prisoners on death row.

The UK finally stopped executing people in 1965 but 55 countries still have the death penalty. America is one of the supposedly civilised ‘western’ nations that still hasn’t ratified the International Bill of Human Rights requirements (introduced by the United Nations in 1948) and still executes people. In the 1960s, Tom Paxton wrote about what a child had learned in school: “We learned that murderers pay for their crimes / even if we make a mistake sometimes”.

One of the most recent cases is that of Robert Roberson who was sentenced to death after being found guilty of murdering his 2-year-old daughter Nikki in 2002. Roberson has always maintained his innocence and scientific evidence gained since his trial has led medical experts to decide that Nikki died not from abuse but from a combination of pneumonia, an accidental fall, and inappropriate medications. Despite this, no court has considered the new evidence in any detail and Roberson was due to be executed on 17 October.

With a certain lack of imagination, on 16 October, the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a subpoena for Roberson to testify on a day after he was due to be killed. The execution was halted by a district court so he could testify at the hearing but the Texas Supreme Court bitched on 15 November that the committee had exceeded its powers saying “categorically prioritizing a legislative subpoena over a scheduled execution … would become a potent legal tool that could be wielded not just to obtain necessary testimony but to forestall an execution.” So his death sentence stands and a new date will be set not less than 90 days after 17 October.

For heavens’ sakes, where do they get people who argue that “my law’s bigger than your law” when somebody’s life is at stake?

However, there is some good news: the judge who signed the death warrant that expired in October has, without giving any reason, voluntarily recused herself and has stepped aside from the case.

Better news is that the second reading of Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill was passed by 330 to 275 after a reasoned 5-hour debate and a commission on palliative care has been set up to help improve end-of-life care in England and Wales.

Some opponents fear that people may feel they should relieve the burden on their family by dying sooner, and some families might actually exert pressure on the person who is dying. Others worry about the pressure this will put on clinicians who are likely to be involved in the final decision but all these will be considered in detail and it’s to be hoped that the final result will allow an estimated 100,000 people to receive an “unprecedented transformation” of care as their death approaches.

There will naturally be costs but there will also be savings from the medical costs currently incurred by extending life against the wishes of the dying.

One of the most fascinating by-products of the debate was that, given a free vote which allows MPs to speak freely instead of parroting the policies of their party, the debate was much more constructive and less confrontational than the usual pantomime of “oh yes they did” / “oh no they didn’t”. If only more debates could be like this, individual MPs could contribute freely, there could be sensible discussions across the house and we’d end up with better-balanced laws.

In America’s even less democratic society, Elon Musk, who seems to be getting the job of running a “department of government efficiency” under Donald Trump, has made it clear that he wants to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal watchdog that helps protect consumers from predatory financial practices. What a wonderful idea; of course every millionaire and billionaire should be free to screw the poor to make themselves richer. It’s their own fault, after all: if poor people got off their fat bums and worked, they too could be millionaires.

I wonder if Musk was at all influenced by a Delaware judge ruling that the £56bn bonus awarded to him by Tesla is excessive, confirming her decision last January to revoke it on the grounds that the company’s board (which includes Musk) was too greatly influenced by Musk when it approved the original, uncapped package in 2018.

The original judgement to deny Musk £56,000,000,000 has just been upheld, despite the shareholders (12% of whom are Musk) voting to support the package in June; one braver investor did file a lawsuit, claiming the board had misled them and that the scheme was unfair, but the others chickened out.

Not one of my heroes nor, apparently, one of my keyboard’s which keeps typing ‘Mush’ instead of ‘Musk’.

As I write, we’re enjoying Storm Darragh down here – my phone beeps urgently every half hour or so with a government text telling me that we have a red weather warning and should find torches and camping gas stoves so we can still enjoy a good old English cup of tea if there’s a power cut.

We could then all try our hands the annual King William’s College quiz by candlelight. The Isle of Man college first introduced the test of general knowledge in 1905 and it’s since been described as “the world’s most challenging puzzle”, something I find hard to believe just after writing about Elon Musk’s wealth.

The advent of Google must have challenged the people who set the quiz by making so much more information easily available. For example, the first question in this year’s quiz is “In 1924, who climbed to a world record 28,126ft?” Having checked on balloons (wrong, I thought the question was more subtle), it then took me less than a minute to find the correct answer. I wonder if the other 179 questions can be answered as easily.

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.

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.

Spring, immolation for profit, government fears and some sad news

18 March 2023

Spring is here and all over the country people are shovelling snow aside and trying to find a rhyme for daffodils (the nearest Wordsworth got was “vales and hills” which doesn’t quite cut the mustard).

My favourite (Brooklyn-accented) verse about spring has been attributed to Ogden Nash but appears in different forms all over the place, though they all tend to share the first line.

“Spring has sprung, de grass is riz, I wonder where de boidies is;  de little boids is on de wing, but dat’s absoid, from what I hoid, de little wings is on de boid!”

Out here in the country we have springtime snowdrops and crocus and primroses and celandine and, as we discovered a few days ago, fibre optic ‘cables’ that zip a telephone call to the telegraph pole outside before sending it the last few feet underground through some antediluvian wires which so distort the signal with crickles and crackles that the end result is incomprehensible.

My theory is that, when it’s rained a lot (which it has), water gets into the junction boxes and signals arc over to the wrong bit of the wire but it’s taken us four attempts to get our supplier to admit there is a fault.  Perhaps it wouldn’t have arced if they’d fitted postdiluvian wiring …  Anyway, they’re sending somebody on Monday to check the inside socket then shin up the telegraph pole and fiddle with things.  (They’ve had to do it twice before so we know what to expect.)

What puzzles me is why it doesn’t seem to affect the broadband signal, but maybe that’s because we’re used to having the signal fail, leaving us to reset the connection or reboot the whole system.  Clever people have smartphones but if you want to use any sort of mobile phone hereabouts, you have to go outside and stand in the road.

At least we don’t have a ghost, although I must admit to suspecting the previous occupier who died here enjoyed apples because, for the first month or two, there’d be a loud smell of stewed apples at bedtime;  but there is a house in Baird, Texas that’s being marketed as an “established and running haunted house”.

The previous owners ‘furnished’ it with coffin-shaped doors and all sorts of stuff that normally disappears shortly after Halloween.  In New York, Noo Joisey, Massachusetts, and Minnesota (but not Texas), sellers are required to disclose if a house is haunted and the decisions in a 1991 New York case (Stambovsky v. Ackley for people who think I make these things up) said “as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

Perhaps this confusion of law and the imagination explains how emotionally unstable judges like Brett Kavanaugh get appointed to the Supreme Court.

In the UK, some people seem to think it’s OK to sacrifice a few people’s lives in the pursuit of profit, provided it’s not too many.  Michael Gove has (5 years too late but better late than never) introduced a safety scheme requiring housebuilders to replace flammable materials found in mid-rise developments in England and 39 housebuilders have signed up to this.  However, 11 hadn’t by Monday’s deadline, including Rydon Homes, which is related to Rydon Maintenance which led the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower before the fire, which has so far declined to sign up to it saying it only “develops an average of 16 family homes per year” so it qualifies as “a small housebuilder”.  Or, in English, they only worry about safety if they put larger numbers of people at risk. To his credit, Gove has said “Those companies [who haven’t signed up to it] will be out of the housebuilding business in England entirely, unless and until they change their course” and has extended the deadline to allow them to reconsider.

Suella Braverman popped over to Rwanda, with which her predecessor last year signed an agreement to accept 200 unwanted UK immigrants.  In order to show her trip was reported accurately and without bias, she excluded reporters from the BBC and the Daily Mirror, the Guardian, the Independent and the i newspapers and took the Daily Mail, GB News and the Daily Telegraph.  That should do the trick.

As mentioned in these mutterings on 3 April last year, P&O suddenly sacked some 800 UK staff without notice and replaced them with cheap foreign labour not subject to the UK minimum wage.  Amazingly, the UK CEO Peter Hebblethwaite wasn’t fired even after saying “I know what the law is.  I broke it on purpose.  And I would do it again.”

At the time, Boris Johnson, last year’s first prime minister, said “We will take [P&O] to court, we will defend the rights of British workers … P&O plainly aren’t going to get away with it.”  Followed by, on the following Wednesday, the then transport secretary Grant Shapps’ admission that “The government are not in a position to take court action.” 

However, a nine-point plan that includes a seafarers’ wages bill is currently going through parliament and a government spokesperson said they had “reacted swiftly and decisively against P&O Ferries”, thereby giving a whole new meaning to “swiftly”.  Still one year is better than five I suppose.

P&O Ferries claimed at the time it was losing £100m a year. Last week, its Dubai-based owner, DP World, announced record profits of $1.8bn.

More sadly, the former actor Sam Neill has stage 3 blood cancer with no idea how long he’s got left so he’s written a book, ‘Did I Ever Tell You This’.  Rather than surrender to the cancer, he’s revelling in the “strong sense of being this little speck in the universe, of so little significance … but a unique speck”. He dismisses belief in an afterlife as ridiculous and talks about the notion of consciousness (“If it’s an illusion, I’m fine with that”), and the alluring idea of “dissolving and dispersing into the cosmos” saying “I don’t mind that idea at all.”

There’s something to think about if you ever worry about dying.

Even more sadly, Jacqueline Gold, who founded the sex shop ‘Ann Summers’ has died of cancer at the age of 62.  Her obituary mentioned that, with 100 shops over the country, she had made the Rampant Rabbit vibrator into a household name.  Not in this household but if any reader who knows what it is, please don’t bother to let me know – some things should be shared only with your closest friend(s).

Guns, diluting standards, Elizabeth line and typos

29 May 2022

19 young children and two primary school teachers have been shot dead, and three more young children orphaned when the husband of one of the dead teachers had a heart attack two days later.

The murderer was a teenager who wasn’t old enough to buy alcohol but had legally bought and registered two automatic weapons, practised by shooting his grandmother.

This was at Uvalde’s Robb elementary school in south west Texas, 10 days after another teenager had killed 11 people at a supermarket in Buffalo NY.

The school itself is said to have established and practised safety responses – locking the door, turning the lights out, hiding under desks and everybody staying very quiet – but this wasn’t enough.

Gun violence is of course endemic in America and, while a small majority of people believe gun laws should be tightened, the National Rifle Association spent almost $5m last year trying to convince people they are already too restrictive.  It’s also, of course, complicated by the lack of any federal law which restricts everyone, so states make their own laws.

In the UK, a murderer shot a lot of children at a primary school in Dunblane in 1996.  In 1997, the successive Conservative and Labour governments under John Major and Tony Blair passed a law banning the private ownership of handguns despite active opposition from the gun lobby and many on the political right (including one Boris Johnson) who argued that owning guns wasn’t the problem, even though the one thing that all such killers have in common is they own a gun.

Since then, gun crime in Britain has fallen significantly, fatal shootings are mercifully rare and these have almost all been individually targeted rather than mass murders.

International comparisons also show that the more households that have guns, the more gun-related deaths there are, and records of shootings in America show that having a gun in the house actually makes it more likely that a member of the household will be killed by one.

The laws vary widely between different American states, from Massachusetts where gun ownership is fairly tightly controlled (by American standards) to Texas where there are few controls.   Many who support gun ownership quote the Second Amendment to the US Constitution but others argue that these people either haven’t actually read the amendment or failed to understand its purpose and that the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States would be horrified to see how their intentions are being misinterpreted.

Just as worrying is the lack of any control on the sale of ammunition.  In a recent documentary, a British journalist asked one dealer how much ammunition he could buy.  The answer was “How much money have you got?”

I wonder how many gun owners are male and how many female.  My own prejudices make me feel that you’re more likely to see a man with a big penis-substitute in a holster than a woman with a Saturday night special in her handbag, but I could be entirely wrong.

The trouble is that the problem has been linked – probably by the NRA – with politics so, broadly speaking, Democrats want more gun control while Republicans want more guns.  The gun lobby thinks the answer is more guns, and teachers should be armed so that, if a gunman (I’m sticking with the sexism) enters their classroom, the children can watch a real-life shooting match in which real people get hurt and killed.

Their argument is that guns aren’t dangerous, it’s people with guns that are dangerous but ignores the fact that the country has conspicuously failed to educate gun owners so far.

Other suggestions include

• incorporating the NRA’s safety rules in federal law
• banning automatic weapons and extended magazines
• perhaps even allowing only guns that fire just one bullet before they need to be reloaded
• limiting gun permits to hunters
• increasing the minimum age for gun ownership to 21
• more background checks, including mental health histories
• requiring a gun permit when selling ammunition and only selling cartridges for the gun in the permit
• limiting the amount of ammunition that can be sold to any one person
• requiring owners to be insured and responsible for all damage caused by a gun registered in their name
• rewriting the second amendment to make it clear that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” is the prime reason for “the right to keep and bear Arms”.

Jacinda Ardern gave Harvard’s annual commencement address this week and was given a standing ovation after describing how New Zealand had tightened gun laws after the 2019 shootings in the Christchurch mosque.

Let’s hope Americans have the courage to make changes.  

The UK can do it: Boris Johnson rewrote the rules on Friday to remove the duty of ministers to resign after breaching the code of conduct and deleted the words “honesty”, “integrity”, “transparency” and “accountability” from the foreword, thereby exempting ministers from four of the seven (Nolan) principles of public life (adopted in 1995).  All this in an attempt to save the skin of a congenital liar who probably can’t even spell integrity and who believes being open about and accountable for one’s actions are for lesser people from cheaper schools.

The good news is that, after five months of pressure from the Labour party to introduce windfall taxes on serendipitous profits, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has finally accepted they are necessary and done a U-turn, though actually he’s not imposing ‘windfall taxes’, he’s imposing a “temporary targeted energy profits levy” which is, of course, quite different.

Anything to divert attention from the details in Sue Gray’s report on ‘partygate’.

And, in another amazing coincidence, this week saw Johnson claiming credit for the opening of nearly all of the short central section of London’s Elizabeth line which was described by one commentator as being “true to the finest traditions of British infrastructure … years over deadline and billions above budget”.

I can remember Crossrail’s route being discussed in the early 1990s and, after years of negotiations, building work officially started in 2009.  While this was shortly after Johnson had been elected mayor of London, claiming credit for it seems to be rather less than truthful – good job he’s no longer required to be honest.

The only real success in the story is that some 3m tonnes of soil dug out from under London was taken to Wallasea Island on the Essex coast, creating a new wetland sanctuary for birds.

Back in the days of typesetters and hot lead, the Guardian contained so many typographical errors that Private Eye always referred to it as the Grauniad but the editors always took it in good spirit and apologised when necessary.  A columnist in yesterday’s paper repeated what she described as “the greatest correction of all time”:

“A caption in Guardian Weekend, page 102, November 13, read ‘Binch of crappy travel mags’.  That should, of course, have been ‘bunch’.  But more to the point, it should not have been there at all.  It was a dummy which we failed to replace with the real caption.  It was not meant to be a comment on perfectly good travel brochures.  Apologies.”

And the week’s other major event was Bob Dylan’s 81^st birthday.  Never let anyone tell you that excessive use of drugs will shorten your life.

Depression and illegal drugs, current research and problems with decriminalisation

28 November 2021

People with “less severe” depression should, according to new NHS guidelines, be offered a “menu of treatment options”, such as cognitive therapy, exercise, mindfulness or meditation, before they’re given high-intensity psychological intervention or stuffing them full of the usual chemicals (though that’s not quite how they put the last bit).  What is noticeably missing is any extra funding to allow this to happen and, with the NHS at breaking point even before the new omicron* mutation of Covid spreads through the UK, this looks like another of those ‘all mouth and no trousers’ claims so beloved of the government.

(One of our former prime ministers, Gordon Brown, has pointed out that this latest mutation is the price for refusing to send vaccines to the developing world.  The UK has some 100 million vaccines that will pass their sell-by date in December while South Africa has only vaccinated 27% of their people overall, with the rate in its rural areas rarely reaching two figures, and neighbouring countries have even lower rates – a classic case of ‘dog in the manger’.)

About 17% (7.3m people) of UK adults were depressed even before the Covid pandemic increased its prevalence and severe depression is, of course, life-threatening because it increases the risk of suicide.

The medications commonly used to ‘treat’ depression have changed radically over the last 60 or so years but they still affect different people in different ways and there’s no guarantee that any particular drug will cure everybody, or even affect them in the same way (talking therapies are no more consistent in their effects).

So the effects of magic mushrooms and other ‘illegal’ substances on depression and other conditions such as PTSD and addiction are now being researched.  A team at Imperial College London has found that two doses of psilocybin mushrooms are effective in treating depression and, in America, the state of Oregon has legalised psilocybin. 

(Indigenous communities around the globe have used psychedelics in spiritual ceremonies and healing for millennia.  It just takes the superstitious west time to catch up.)

There is also some evidence that ketamine, already licensed for use as an anaesthetic, can ease depression that hasn’t responded to other forms of treatment and some scientists are hoping it may offer an alternative to existing treatments for chronic suicidal tendencies.

The medical use of cannabis was legalised in the UK in 2018 after studies showed it can benefit epileptic children and two rare but severe forms of childhood epilepsy.  Multiple Sclerosis sufferers have also claimed cannabis reduces the pain.

MDMA has shown promise if it’s combined with talking therapies when treating post-traumatic stress disorder but, so far, it’s only been used in research and isn’t available more widely. 

Many research projects around the world are also looking into the benefits of other psychedelic drugs and four separate reviews of progress have been published this year reporting dozens of studies offering compelling evidence for more research into psychedelic-assisted therapies.  It appears that psilocybin is a relatively safe drug and has shown very promising results, especially with depression.

In America, Oregon was the first state to decriminalize the possession of most drugs and to create a legal system for supervised psilocybin experiences;  closer to home, Netherlands also allows these.  California, Vermont and Hawaii are actively considering new legal frameworks for psychedelics and even Texas is directing state funding to research.

Over here, Deborah Frances-White, a comedian who was only recently diagnosed with ADHD, was nervous of trying a psychedelic drug because she relies on the speed at which her brain works to provide inspiration onstage.  However, a friend who’d been into the desert and done ayahuasca told her it had healed many of her traumatised wounds without slowing her down.

So Frances-White went to Amsterdam, where supervised hallucinogenic trips are legal, and spent four hours having her mind opened.  Afterwards she said “My brain was as fast as ever, but at some kind of new and unusual peace”.

As readers with good memories will know, I took LSD once when I was in my 30s and now (some years later …) it remains one of the formative experiences of my life, having opened doors to new ways of experiencing things.  A friend who took it at the same time says she feels the same.

Why are so many people prejudiced against illegal drugs but disregard how many people are dependent on two life-threatening and highly addictive legal drugs?  (Think Nigel Farage, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other.) I do find myself wondering if it’s just because they are illegal and not for any more convincing reason.

I’m not alone in believing that all illegal drugs should be decriminalised, quality-controlled and taxed so as to put drug dealers out of business and save public money trying to catch them.

But (there has to be a ‘but’) how this should be done would need a lot of consultation and deliberation, neither of which come naturally to our present government.

In November 2016, California legalised the recreational use of marijuana but (another ’but’) allowed individual cities and counties within the state to make their own local rules and prevent its legal sale.  The inevitable result is that you still can’t buy cannabis in much of the state and experts estimate that 80-90% of the market remains underground because legal outlets pay taxes and regulatory costs so they have to maintain links with the illegal, unlicensed market to make a profit.

This leads to other problems, including black-market dealers having a financial incentive to offer menus that include more profitable hard drugs, and to cut these with other similar-looking substances to make the drug go further.  Cocaine, for example, usually comes as a white crystalline substance but can be diluted with anything from bicarbonate of soda to bleach powder and what you buy in the streets may not be pure and may be poisonous.

(It is of course rather more difficult to ‘dilute’ cannabis buds but hash comes in many different forms, all extracted from the resin of cannabis plants.)

In the meantime, let’s not make judgements about things of which we wot not.  Why don’t we start by giving users and those who treat them a voice alongside pharmaceutical experts, neurologists and other specialists when deciding whether and which particular drugs should be legalised?

Having said that, I do wonder if Boris Johnson might be improved by a dose of something that would space him out a bit, though maybe that was his problem last Monday when he gave a glitteringly asinine speech (which included a 20 second pause – a long time if you’re trying to make an impact) which signally failed to impress the Confederation of British Industry, and they’re supposed to be on his side.

(Who else thinks countries should be run by people who don’t want the job and are keen to sort things out sensibly and as quickly as possible so they can get back to their normal lives?)

*          What happened to epsilon, zeta, eta, theta etc?

Texan lunacy

5 September 2021

Sometimes I just can’t believe the viciousness and stupidity of mankind (with the emphasis on ‘man’), some of which make the Taliban look like Mother Theresa.

This week, it was the US Supreme Court’s chickening out (by 5 votes to 4) of blocking a new Texas state law that bans almost all abortions in defiance of the federal law established by Roe v Wade in 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled that the US Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s right to have an abortion.

Texas isn’t a nice state at the best of times – in June, the creeps in charge there passed a law that, from last Wednesday, allows anyone to carry a handgun without a permit or training – and they have just passed a law which does not allow state officials to interfere (so it doesn’t directly defy the Constitution) but instead offers a $10,000 reward to anybody who snitches on people who carry out abortions, or any woman who is more than 6 weeks pregnant and planning an abortion, or anybody else encouraging or supporting or helping her in any way, like telling her which way to turn at the crossroads.

The 6 weeks is apparently to be measured from their last period despite many women not even knowing they’re pregnant at six weeks, especially if their periods are irregular.  So a woman who has been made pregnant by a rapist must live with the rapist’s child growing inside her for another 7½ months.  I wonder what this will do to suicide rates amongst pregnant women in Texas.

Apart from making large numbers of Texan health workers unemployed, it is also likely to lead to new and remunerative opportunities for bounty hunters (who started seeing if they could trick clinics into breaking the new law within hours of its introduction).

In the second largest state in the ‘United’ States, the new law will most seriously affect those who can’t cross the border into a neighbouring state (from San Antonio, the nearest neighbouring state is about 400 miles away), which means that its impact will most seriously affect poorer and disadvantaged women, many of whom will be women of colour.

But what I find most horrific is that the majority of people who voted for this law were men, and men will have been between 50% and 100% responsible for the unwanted pregnancy in the first place.  Suppose a majority of women passed a law requiring rapists and other male sexual predators to have their penises surgically removed and for $10,000 rewards to be given to people reporting offenders.

What the Great Brains of Texas have failed to realise is the dangers of the precedent they have set by not being clever enough to think the implications through.

The ‘justification’ for the 6-week limit is that the heartbeat of a foetus can first detected about then, so the foetus is deemed to be ‘alive’ after that and an abortion would therefore be equivalent to murder. 

This arbitrary judgement leads to some worrying conclusions.  I’ve mentioned before the uncertainties about when somebody can be said to be dead but the Texan legislators have cut through all the scientific uncertainties to decide that having a heartbeat means you’re alive.  Which means that if somebody’s heart stops for any reason, they’re dead, there’s no point in resuscitation and you can cut bits out of them for recycling while they’re still warm. 

Even the President of America (himself a Catholic) has accused the Texan court of assaulting vital constitutional rights and ordered the federal government to ensure women in Texas still have the right to abortions.

I wonder if Mexico might be interested in taking over Texas (which would also, of course, solve the problem of Donald Trump’s ‘wall’ which is (a) incomplete and (b) collapses in strong winds and (c) can be scaled with a ladder just longer than the ‘wall’ is high)?

Making mistakes, foreign holidays, democracy doesn’t work, getting older and kindness

6 June 2021

Being clever doesn’t mean never making mistakes, it means learning from the ones you do make.

Mistakes like giving several days’ notice that flights to and from India would be stopped, which gave 20,000 panicking Brits enough time to cut short their holidays and be sealed together into a tiny space, sharing other’s air for 9 hours with incomplete tans and lungs full of Covid-19’s variant Delta, known to be more easily transmissible than earlier variants. 

The inevitable consequence was that infection rates in the UK went up and the R number exceeded 1 again, meaning that (on average) each person infected would infect more than one other, thereby increasing the total number of cases.

Normally intelligent people would have realised this response was inevitable and would have stopped flights immediately but we are talking about MPs, not all of whom even had proper jobs (which doesn’t include bankers, investment managers and estate agents) before turning to politics.

Anyway, ‘twas done, so we do the best we can and, because we’re clever, we make sure it doesn’t happen again.  Don’t we?

Well, no actually, remember these are politicians.

Clever people would have stopped all flights from Portugal overnight.  Unfortunately, the government gave everyone 6 days’ notice of the cancellation of Portugal flights so even more Brits could rush their own personal infections back into the UK.

What compounds the stupidity is that the people who were in India and Portugal knew that countries are classified red, amber or green (like the lights on Bal Ham High Street for those of us who remember Peter Sellers’ ode) and they knew these classifications change all the time but, even though they knew the risks they were taking if these countries were suddenly reclassified, they went ahead anyway.  

Do you make the 20,000 holidaymakers in India stay longer or do you increase the risks to the UK’s population of 65m?  And if it made the holidaymakers’ lives difficult, tough – taking the risk was their choice, not the government’s.

So those of us who weren’t as stupid now risk the government’s having to delay lifting all Covid restrictions on 21 June.

Having been as critical last week of Joe Biden’s attitude to licences for gas and oil drilling in an Alaskan nature reserve, I must add this week’s welcome update:  he’s now revoked the licences that his predecessor had granted.

However, democracy seems to be becoming increasingly fragile in the post-Trump world with Texas putting forward a bill that would seriously limit the right to vote by proposing a ban on 24-hour and drive-through voting and restricting rights to postal voting, disadvantaging mainly poorer people, especially those of colour.  The bill only failed because Democrats left the House just before the midnight deadline, leaving the House non-quorate.  Vice-President Kamala Harris has now been given responsibility for getting voting reform bills through congress.

But many of the GOP are still prejudiced.  Michael McCaul, a senior US House Republican from Texas, told CNN “In my state you actually do believe that there was tremendous [voter] fraud.”; and, in Wisconsin, the influential speaker of the state house of representatives has hired a bunch of people, at least one of whom has a record of supporting GOP claims regardless, to investigate claims of fraud in the state.

In fact, the entire state of Texas has only one voter fraud case in progress out of 17m registered voters after the 2020 election and, in Wisconsin, state officials found only 27 cases of potential fraud out of 3.3m voters.

A recent poll by a research centre at the University of Chicago showed that, since 2016, the number of gun-owning households increased by 22% and almost 4 in every 10 households now have at least one gun, which seems to indicate that many more people are frightened of some sort of national outbreak of violence. 

There are precedents for successful gun control.  Singapore, for example, has one of the tightest gun-control laws in the world.  Mind you, unless you need it for medical purposes, you can’t even chew gum in Singapore and that would never work in America.

Mind you, democracy doesn’t work in the UK either.  Nelson Mandela once said “democracy is the imposition of the rule of the majority on the minority” but even this isn’t true in the UK where two thirds of voters didn’t vote for Maggie Thatcher, and look at the damage she wrought. 

Even in the 2020 elections when 47.6 million people were eligible to vote, the Conservatives only got 14 million votes and still ‘won’ an unassailable majority of seats in the House of Commons, leaving 33 million Brits unrepresented, either by choice (because they didn’t vote) or because they voted for another party.

In the same election, the Liberal Democrats received 11.5% of the votes which, in a fairer system, would have earned them 75 seats;  they actually won 11 seats.  

How can we get turkeys to vote for Christmas and introduce a voting system, possibly based on some form of proportional representation, which would allow voters’ political choices to be fairly represented in parliament?  Of course there would be a lot of detail to sort, like who gets to represent their party in government and how geographical responsibilities are apportioned but let’s give it a try – it can’t be worse than what we’ve had in the last 40 years (a period carefully chose to include Labour and Conservative governments).

As a nation, we scoff at politicians in other countries who’ll do anything for money but we don’t even blink when the Electoral Commission reveals that a businessman called Peter Cruddas gave the Tory party a large donation followed by Boris Johnson gave* him a peerage last December against the advice of the House of Lords.

But life isn’t fair.  In 2005, Patricia Ensworth, a social scientist, showed that people working together are much more influenced by social and cultural differences and cited an example of tensions between competing sub-contractors in a New York office.  It came to a head when a male Canadian tester swore, using personalised X-rated words, at a female Indian tester and she responded by throwing hot coffee in his face.  Guess which one was fired.

Some things have changed since then but, sadly, it’s still deemed noteworthy when a female actor stands up for her right to get older.  Kate Winslet has been widely praised for her role in Mare of Easttown, a 7-episode HBO series, but made headlines for refusing an editor’s offer to trim a “bulgy bit of belly” in one scene and for rejecting two versions of the promotional posted that she felt had been airbrushed too much saying “I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye, please put them all back”.

And one last thought:  I came across a quotation this week about what was then called ‘good’ but could now be called kindness:

“A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.”  (attributed to Jesuit Fr Strickland, 1863)

*          I know this is grammatically incorrect but I like this verb form after “followed by”.  (And no, I don’t know why except that, the first time I heard it used, its unexpectedness gave me a slight, pleasurable jolt.)