Thought Police, President Doolally and au revoir

9 August 2025

The news from Britain last week was pretty feeble compared with what’s going on elsewhere in the world but I was pleased to see that the investment manager Neil Woodford has finally been brought to book and been fined £5.89m by the Financial Conduct Authority who have also banned him from holding senior manager roles and managing funds for retail investors.  The FCA has also fined his company, Woodford Investment Management £40m.

Woodford used to have a very close relationship with the investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown who used to plug his funds to their customers so it’s comforting to hear that thousands of the people who invested through Hargreaves Lansdown are now suing them.

I muttered about him several years ago when it became clear that his star had fallen, primarily because he made some stupid and irresponsible decisions.  I was also disappointed that, when Woodford resigned in October 2019 and subsequently closed his company, Hargreaves Lansdown responded with a deathly hush and didn’t comment on their own failures of due diligence.

However, the FCA rulings are provisional and Woodford’s company has appealed the judgement to the upper tribunal.  And why not, what have they got to lose?  (Apart from £40m.)

In the streets, police are bracing themselves for racists planning protests against asylum seekers and anti-racism activists planning counter-protests but what’s more worrying is the approach that the police are taking.  For example, Norfolk police will have the power to remove from the area anyone committing antisocial behaviour (sounds fair) or who might commit antisocial behaviour (whaaat?).

Who could they tell what I might be thinking if I were going to be there?  “What are you thinking, sir?” / “Wondering what’s for supper, officer.” / “Oh no you’re not, you’re thinking about committing anti-social behaviour. Gitart of here.” / “But …” / “Right, you’re under arrest for refusing to obey a lawful order.”

Other people protesting against the ban on Palestine Action, including 300 left-leaning Jewish figures such as the film director Mike Leigh and the author Michael Rosen, have written to the prime minister saying that the ban is “illegitimate and unethical”. 

The ban was introduced after protestors inflicted an estimated £7m of damage to RAF jets at Brize Norton.  Of course, the people who damaged the planes should be charged but a blanket ban implies that an organisation is responsible for the actions of its members.  Imagine the precedent this sets.  Suppose a male MP harassed or groped a woman?  I know it’s unlikely that any MP would ever dream of doing such a thing but, if they did, their entire party could be banned.

According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, it’s all part of a plot led by Defend Our Juries to overwhelm the police and court system.  Their response said “It’s great the Telegraph is helping us to spread the word but there are serious inaccuracies in their story.”

With Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest dreams about his plans for Gaza City, the pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea” can now be used as a pro-Zionist chant.

Still, compared to the ravings of America’s head honcho, we’re not doing too badly.  Somebody has clearly told Donald Trump about the ancient Greek habit of shooting the messenger who brought bad news because he fired Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of The Bureau of Labor Statistics, after jobs numbers for July were weaker than expected. 

But Trump’s golf game gets better and a video clip that went viral shows one of his minders dropping a golf ball in a good place – see https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1949496947808637164

There’s no attempt to conceal the action and Trump then played the ball so it’s obviously common knowledge that he cheats – the minder didn’t even bother to drop the ball down his trouser leg to make it less blatant.

What frightens me most is that Trump holds what is arguably the most powerful position in the world and, wherever he goes, is accompanied by the little red button that could destroy the world.  I know that it isn’t actually as simple as that but I just hope there are plenty of checks and balances between the president and the missile launchers.

His behaviour has become increasingly erratic and John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June that Trump exhibits “the classic signs of dementia”.  He said “If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.”

Last weekend, at a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, he suddenly stopped talking about immigration and said “The other thing I say to Europe: ​we’ve – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States​. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery.”  Followed by him rambling on for 2-minutes about wind turbines.

This seems a good time to be taking a break from the news. 

I’ve been doing these mutterings every week for ten years, though only the last seven have been posted on WordPress.  My first muttering here was published on 19 August 2018 and talked about my mother’s suicide and the need for assisted dying to be legalised.

Over the years, I’ve returned to this from time to time, as I have to my other hang-ups about such things as the distribution of wealth, and I’ve gathered and retailed bits of useless knowledge.  I haven’t yet written about many of these;  I still have them on file – things like whether canine brainwaves synchronise with those of the humans when they interact – but it’s time I slowed down a bit and stopped hammering stuff out every weekend.

So thank you for reading, and for your ‘likes’ and comments.  Keep an eye open (bookmark this site, or subscribe to it if it doesn’t cost anything) and I’ll be back, but not quite as frequently.

Motion and change, Israeli pogrom and private sewers

6 April 2024

We know that everything is in motion, from sub-atomic particles, to the corpuscles churning through our veins, to the fragmentation of Gondwanaland to the moon revolving round the earth which is revolving around the sun to the expansion of spacetime itself.  We also know that if nothing moved, everything would stop and become no more than a snapshot on the wall of the gods’ dining room on the second floor of the ninth dimension.

We also know that motion changes things, and that change involves motion.  Everything moves all the time, some things faster than others, but everything is in motion.

Just imagine time stops.  No ticking clock, no beating of the heart.  Everything is frozen because things can’t move without taking time to do it.  Or imagine, things stop moving.  How do you know if you haven’t got time to measure that time has passed but nothing’s moved.

All this means is that time and space (i.e. just stuff, from ants’ breakfasts to dark energy) are inseparable and that’s where we live, in spacetime which is constantly changing, so there’s no point trying to resist change.  Or to welcome it come to that;  we just have to accept that things are changing all the time.                                                        

Luckily, our awareness of these changes is limited to those that affect the way we live and those we are hear about here and now.  Of course the past influences us now but, if we did something yesterday that we now regret, we can’t go back and change it.  If it affected someone else, we can apologise and try to put it right but, if we can’t, we shouldn’t worry about it.  People who feel regret or sadness for something that happened are living in the past, which can’t changed.

The flipside is that if we worry about what might happen tomorrow or the next day, we’re living in the future, and all we can do is take precautions today to protect us when tomorrow comes:  save money now for a pension and, if you haven’t got enough money to do this, stop worrying about it;  worry won’t give you a pension fund but it will make you feel bad.

In practice, we need to make some preparations for the morrow, but we can only make them now.  If I haven’t got a clean pair of pants for tomorrow, I’ll do a wash today and make sure they’re dry before I need them;  there’s nowt worse than soggy pants, and I speak as someone who waited till the transfer bus came into sight before I left the sea in Corfu, pulled my jeans over a wet bathing costume, added a T-shirt, picked up my case and boarded the bus.

Six hours later, we were all still sitting sealed in a plane at Corfu airport as it got hotter and hotter while the crew tried to start the engine.  They finally gave up, bussed us to a local hotel and checked us in for the night.  In the room I stripped off my (by then) damp jeans and hung them over a chair on the balcony, then put my wet swimming costume in a plastic bag.  There are some joys in life that we don’t recognise until we experience them.

There seem to have been too many changes in the world recently and the only one that even veers in the right direction is the internal combustion of the Tory party.  Incidentally, of which man was it recently written by one of his own people saying “His madness has been described as “delusional” and “terrifying”, adding “This man is putting us all at risk:  Our future, our children’s future, the strategic alliance that is the keystone of [our country’s] national security.”  Others, also of his own people, have said he’s “off the rails” and an existential danger to [his country].  He must be gone from our lives”?

• Boris Johnson
• Donald Trump
• Benjamin Netanyahu
• Vladimir Putin

The correct answer is Netanyahu but it could be any of them and that’s what frightens me. 

His recent murders included precision attacks on an aid convoy run by World Central Kitchen that killed seven people in three trucks that weren’t travelling in convoy but had up to a mile between them, taking supplies to people who are being exterminated by Israel.  You’d think that, knowing what had happened to Jews in the Second World War, some of the Jewish leaders of Israel would see the similarities with what their state is now doing to Gazans.

Even Joe Biden, hitherto having failed to condemn Israel, seems to have come off the fence and more than 600 UK lawyers, including three former supreme court justices, have warned the government that it’s breaking international law by continuing to send arms to Israel.  A friend has said “Aha, but we import more arms from Israel than we export to them.”  I have no idea if this is true but, if it is, why don’t we increase our imports of weapons from them to reduce the stocks they’re using to kill charity volunteers and starving Gazans who Israel has forced out of their homes into concentration refugee camps?

Back at the ranch, all we can offer is the chance to share what used to be the clear waters of rivers, lakes and beaches with piles of shit, shredded lavatory paper and used condoms.  The water companies that were privatised (surely one of the stupidest decisions a UK government every made) (well, along with the railways) knew they were taking on crumbling Victorian sewerage infrastructure but, rather than plan for its replacement, chose to give a lot of its income to its management and shareholders instead.

Britain’s biggest water company, Thames Water, now seems to be on the point of being renationalised and South West Water blames its problems on having more coastline than any other British water company.  Really?  And this wasn’t known when it was privatised?  You’ll probably find Slartibartfast’s signature in one of Cornwall’s smaller coves.