Skip to content

Oh, Jesus

President Donald Trump says he wants to negotiate an agreement with Ukraine in which Kyiv guarantees supplies of rare earth metals, key elements used in electronics, in exchange for aid. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had floated such an idea last October as part of his “victory plan” for ending the war with Russia. “We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earths,” Trump said on Monday. “We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things.” Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House, said Ukraine was willing, adding that he wants “equalisation” from Ukraine for Washington’s “close to $300bn” in support.

Ukraine doesn’t have any rare earths. Not in any realistic sense, not in any mining sense they don’t.

Sigh.

Every few minutes, eh?

Tourists and locals have been forced to flee the Greek holiday island of Santorini after it was hit by “intense” tremors for a fourth day in a row.

Quakes, some with a magnitude of over four, shook the popular destination’s narrow streets and white-washed villas every few minutes on Monday as people were told to avoid crammed indoor spaces.

Yes, that’s the volcano having a burp or two at the least.

The next stage is a stink of sulphur, then if something like a large pimple starts growing feets per hour it’s time to run.

The area outside Naples – Pozzuoli, Arco Felice – where we used to live got near all the way, sans only the pimple and the boom.

Not wholly surprising

Some women become jealous of their pretty daughters, Dame Joanna Lumley has said.

The actress and campaigner, 78, said parental envy was one reason her character belittled her daughter in Amandaland, the new BBC sitcom about parenting.

Dame Joanna told Radio Times: “Felicity’s just kind of a bitch, really. Quite a lot of women who were once pretty, when they’ve got a very pretty daughter, are jealous.”

Tho’ there is a bit of surprise at it being stated so openly….

Fun number

As it prepares 140 apartments for new occupants this year, the city is targeting middle-class couples, said Nicola Simion, a Venice official. “We are aiming for recent graduates and could offer a 100 square metre flat for €580 a month near St Mark’s Square,” he said.

The subsidised council flats in the middle of Venice are 33% larger than the average British newbuild.

Cretins

Cap on-the-day British intercity rail fares, campaigners urge
Campaign for Better Transport says ‘fair fares’ are needed as system penalises people who cannot book ahead

What the British railways need is, as Bloke who used to be Bloke on the M4 repeatedly says, more airline style pricing and load management, not less.

Well, they’re right here, no, they are

US President Donald Trump has asserted South Africa is “confiscating” land and “treating certain classes of people very badly” as he announced he was cutting off all future funding to the country pending an investigation.

The land issue in South Africa has long been divisive, with efforts to redress the inequality of white-rule drawing criticism from conservatives including Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who was born in South Africa and is a powerful Trump adviser.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last month signed a bill that stipulates the government may, in certain circumstances, offer “nil compensation” for property it decides to expropriate in the public interest.

“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.

“I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!” Trump wrote.

In response to his comments, South Africa said its expropriation act was not exceptional.

Commies and idiots often do steal land.

Doesn’t mean it’s a good idea but it’s not exceptional, they’re right.

Nesrine’s a conservative now

The dust briefly settled, only for it to be kicked up once again. Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders – causing chaos on everything from foreign aid to world trade – is rapidly rocking and reshaping domestic and foreign policy. And the temptation is, yet again, to think of Donald Trump as an exogenous shock to US democracy. But look closer, and you will see not a rogue president taking a hammer to a hitherto stable political order, but a history of the erosion of norms that paved the way for him.

Political norms are the scaffolding of democracy, enforced not by the law, but by a sort of social consensus. They are not codified, strict mechanisms for regulating political facts – such as the separation of powers – but the agreement that such things should be respected and observed.

Obviously, only a conservative about those things that the progressives have managed to make seem normal but a conservative all the same. Fun, eh?

Oh, well done, well done

Canada has begun stripping US alcohol from its shelves in retaliation against Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

Retail outlets under the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), Canada’s largest province, will take US products off its shelves from Tuesday as the fight-back against the president’s 25pc levy begins.

The LCBO, which sells almost $1 billion ($688 million) worth of American wine, beer, spirits and seltzers annually, will also remove US products from its catalogue, according to Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario.

Presumably the state run, state owned (OK, Province for pendants) has already paid for this booze. Or at least contracted to pay for it. So the taxpayers of Ontario now have to cover the costs of this political gesture.

Well done there, well done there.

BTW, anyone got a phone number? There might be a stock of booze going cheap, so I hear……

This is the problem with a national wealth fund

The country’s wealth fund is being depleted, with the liquid portion of assets now down to just $38bn (£30bn), from roughly $100bn at the start of 2022.

Almost three years into his war in Ukraine, the Russian president is increasingly concerned about the state of the economy.

If there’s a big pot of money lying around some politician will only find a way to go and spend it.

Bacon, that’s the cure

Goats have previously escaped from Mr Armiger’s farm, according to Mr Smerdon, but the first pigs did not get loose until August, when five had to be rescued after straying on to the main road in the village.

Only in the past two weeks have they started digging up lawns, but villager Colin Williams, whose garden has been targeted four times, said they had already caused more than £1,000 of damage.

Mr Williams, who set up a CCTV system to record the pigs’ visits, said: “We came here to live in this lovely village but now the first thing you see when you cross the railway is mullered grass.

“Our garden is no longer a garden. It now looks like the Battle of the Somme.”

The worst offender, he said, was a large mottled pig that had visited his garden several times.

“We just want this to stop”, he said.

Pigs, like other animals, do learn. Also, like other animals, they only pass on their learnings thourgh direct demonstration. They have no libraries of past findings that new generations can catch up upon.

So, round up those who know how to escpae, know the way to the garden in question, and turn them into bacon. That’s the cure. Obviously.

Could be, possibly…..

She added: “Mumsnet users tell us that they feel in many cases difficulties in seeking diagnoses and treatment are driven by misogyny, with women’s pain seen as less serious or valid than that of men, and women’s health concerns [are] dismissed, belittled or ignored.

That the NHS does not provide timely treatment is not news. That the wimmins’ care is worse than the chaps, well.

The attention paid to breast cancer over the decades, as compared to that given to prostate, might not quite bear that out really.

Oh, delightful

Or, you know, not perhaps, and yet. A big Only Fans star, making a fortune (a McClaren when only 21 is a fortune). And:

He’s had guys who message him through OnlyFans every day for over two years, guys who tell him they’ve just put their kids to bed, that their wives are in the other room. Sometimes he feels bad for them; knows they’re probably lonely and sad. But that’s the game, right?
CJ gets it, because he does the same thing—the vast majority of his own social interaction is mediated through the internet too. He’s only had one serious girlfriend, and that was long distance. He told me he’s not good at talking to strangers face-to-face. He’s not used to doing it that way. Instead, CJ subscribes to other OnlyFans creators, and sometimes messages with them, even though he knows he’s probably not messaging the actual person.
“I know in the back of my head that I’m talking to some middle-aged man” at a subcontracted agency, CJ told me. But he’s okay with buying into the fantasy. Yes, when he messages these people it’s more for companionship than sex—but in that way, CJ told me, “it’s still porn.”

50’s pulp short story. Bloke has a job running a “girlfriend experience” or summat. Guys come in, take a pill, interact with a computing/robotic thing, think they’ve been to see their girlfriend. Can’t recall why it’s set up that way. Population worries? Dunno.

So, he knows it’s all a scam because he runs the place. But he’s diffierent of course. His girlfriend is real. In another city, obviously. So, he goes over to see her, gets to where she works, thinks, well, why not take one of the pills…..

Aha, aha, aha.

Jesu Christe on a friggin’ pogo stick:

Contrary to the assumptions of the neoliberal economists who, no doubt, promoted these tariffs,

Tariffs are neoliberal now, are they?

Dear God the man’s a loon.

Sir Pterry wrote non-fiction. You understand that, yes?

As I sometimes do, just dipped into a Pratchett last night. I know the plots well enough, it’s just a joy to see how he incorporates some of the jokes again. One of which is how the Post Office has stopped putting mongeese (mongooses?) into the post boxes. They now agree that that was a bit of an overreaction. But they were put there for good reason, to eat the toads which they’d introduced to them, the toads to eat the snails which were eating the glue from the cabbage flavoured stamps. Along those lines at least.

Rod Liddle today:

Residents in Storrington, West Sussex, are displeased that the Royal Mail has ripped out a 100-year-old postbox, leaving them without one. According to the Royal Mail, the problem was that the box was infested with “wildlife”. What fearsome creatures could it be? Tigers? Rats? No, it’s snails that Postman Pat and his friends are worried about.

Apparently these pulmonate gastropods enjoy feasting on the gum used to seal envelopes and so the postbox has to go. If I were a cynic I might venture that Royal Mail operatives had, in the small hours, been shoving snails into the pillar box to ensure they could close it down.

Non-fiction I tell ‘ee.

Er, fuckwittery, surely?

Border Force officers are to gain powers to stop suspected child sex offenders at airports and search their phones and laptops, as part of new “world-leading” laws to stamp out online child abuse.

Officers will be able to compel travellers to unlock their devices to be scanned on the spot for abuse images, if they have “reasonable grounds” to suspect them. Offenders face up to five years in jail if illegal content is found.

The law is one of four to be announced on Sunday by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to fight a tenfold increase in illegal online child sex images, amid a surge in AI-generated content.

Which ferret chewing on whose synapses led to a concentration upon airports? Anmd answer came there none. But this?

Anyone caught with the AI tools designed to generate highly realistic illegal child sex images will face up to five years in prison. Offenders convicted for possessing “paedophile manuals” which teach people how to use AI to create sexual abuse imagery will be jailed for up to three years.

The AI tools will be just like any other AI tools. So, umm, that’s a pretty wide ranging offence being created there. Similarly, a manual that used the word “ferrets” instead of “children” would perform the same education.

This is either simple idiocy or the creation of one of those ghastly offences that we don’t, in fact, want government to have the power over.

My expectation is that within a decade AI – of a certain level – will just be a chip on a motherboard. A chip that’s on every motherboard because why not? A law like this would mean that anyone walking through an airport with a laptop has such AI generating capability – 5 years!

A useful little note

Mr Trump also declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to back the tariffs, which allows sweeping powers to address crises.

If the ability to declare emergency powers exists in an emergency then, somewhere down the line, a poluitician will declare an emergency in order to be able to use the emergency powers.

Britain’s emergency act allows government to take anything – any property at all – off anyone whenever. For, say, “climate emergency” reasons. Which is comforting, no?

Anyone can get elected – as long as they’re a member of The Party of course

Anyone can become an MP. No training is required, and then they set the rules for everyone else. That’s absurd. All prospective parliamentarians and councillors should have to take an exam to prove their competence.

Sigh.

Most of them have no idea about economics at all, even though the biggest political concern of most people in the UK is about economics. They don’t even know what money is, where it comes from, how the government creates it, how it expends it, and why tax exists to help control the economy as a whole and not to fund government spending.

When it comes to interest rates, which are one of the big concerns of most households in the country, they know they’ve abandoned responsibility for this to the Bank of England and therefore don’t worry themselves about what it is they should know.

And, as for inflation, most of them are deeply ignorant as to its causes and why it invariably passes if, as was the case in the recent bout of inflation, it was created by a source outside the UK.

These people are then deeply unable to appraise the problems that this country faces because they have no training in them.

Of course it’ll be Spud writing the exam. Which is the problem with any scheme like this. Those who define the knowledge necessary then take control of the political system.

It’s also remarkably historically ignorant. We’ve been though this before. John Wilkes. The only qualification for the Commons is that enough voters say you get to go there. That’s it, there is no more. You can be a convict locked in a jail cell and still get elected. As has, in fact, happened.

Because it’s democracy, see?

Just a thought. You know, a little one?

Britain’s Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant risks being delayed yet again because of a row about fish, the project’s owner has said.

EDF Energy said it was struggling to agree protection measures for fish in the River Severn over fears thousands of them will be killed in its water cooling intakes. This has “the potential to delay the operation of the power station”, it said.

OK, say this happens.

Now, people are allowed to fish in the Severn. Including for salmon.

So, why not put a fishing net over the intakes. Co9llect those fish that do get caught. Then reduce the fishing quotas on the rest of the Severn by the amount caught in those nets?