I've now watched the whole of DS9

Well, after some time I finally got to the end of Deep Space Nine.  Unfortunately I didn't manage to do this before it all got taken off Netflix who seems to have lost the battle for old Star Trek with Amazon and the new Paramount plus or whatever it is so I had to pay to see the end of the last series.  It's taken me about four years to get through DS9 and frankly some episodes are a bit of a slog.  The ending is kind of unsatisfying as we don't quite know when (and if) Sisko is returning ... The final face off between Gul Dukat and Sisko I think noticeably owes something to "The Final Problem" of Sherlock Holmes... Apparently the original intention was to kill off Sisko but the decided that killing the first black Captain wouldn't be a good look so what we're left with us a literal cliffhanger that is never resolved.  No sign the Emissary popping back for a Picard-like cameo yet...

Among the other things I noticed were Brunt and the various Weyouns being the same actor in the same episode (but only because the credits told me so ... You really can't visually tell).  Sisko's father being Tom Robinson from To Kill A Mockingbird - nice to see him still working in his twilight years... And the station set being cleverly redressed as other space station other episodes to save money...

Most amusing is the episode "Far Beyond the Stars" which takes place largely inside Sisko's head in which we get to see all the main characters without their prosthetics and Sisko becomes the writer of DS9 writing in the 50s who can't get it published because of racial prejudice... apparently a reference to sci-fi writer Samuel R. Delany who had similar problems publishing stories with black central characters.

"In the Pale Moonlight" is possibly the standout episode of the entire run a Sisko unable to produce the evidence required to convince the Romans to join the war on the Dominion engages in a grubby False Flag operation faking the evidence instead with the help of Garak.  This results in at least one seedy murder and he gets away with it and conceals the truth from the rest of his crew but at what cost to his own soul?  Other standout episodes include "It's only a paper moon" where Nog tried to escape the PTSD he suffers after losing a leg in the war by going and living in a Hollosuite programme with holographic lounge singer Vic Vontaine who then has to start dealing with the problems of being real or nearly real like needing to sleep.  Perhaps an inspired twist is he then becomes obsessed with balancing the night club books.  When Nog objects that the financial transactions inside aren't real, Vic responds that they're "real to him" and he and Nog bond over financial planning... However, when you really think about it is course, all money isn't real.  It's value only exists in other people's minds.  More so in these days where physical cash is disappearing and all we have is numbers on computers ...

Royal Carpet Sale

Designed by L. Gruner of 12 Fitzroy Street and made at Wilton by Blackmore Brothers for Watson & Bell of Bond Street the carpet in the great drawing room of Buckingham Palace was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

However, concerns have been raised of late that it is reaching the end of its useful life.  The carpet attracts general attention from its immense size (the extreme length being 52 feet, the width 38 feet), and from the brilliant, yet not gaudy colouring however Prince William has recently raised concerns that it is no longer capacious enough to sweep all the Windsor's dirt under. 

Although Prince Albert thought it ideal for the drawing room of Windsor Castle it does not seem large enough to conceal the family's complicity in the Epstein scandal underneath anymore.  "It was great in its day but we need to modernise," said the Prince.  

The fabric is entirely worked by hand and carefully designed so that any investigation of what is below it can be properly stitched up.  It is also toed through the back, so as to secure greater durability than in any other description of carpets as well as to increase its capacity to convincingly conceal conspicuous bumps. 

The work, which required the greatest attention to the working pattern and the selection of the various shades, was executed at Wilton, by Blackmore Brothers, for Watson and Bell of Bond-street, who claim that it is excellent for hiding things underneath and that it can conceal several hundred thousand pages of incriminating documents or photos.  

However, it no longer being large enough for the great number of three million Epstein files that His Majesty now has to catalogue which were previously kept beneath it, it is currently being offered for public auction at a starting price of £12,000,000.  All proceeds to be donated to the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor home for distressed gentlewomen.
 

And thus I clothe my naked villainy

 

This is the Tomb of hunchbacked child murderer Richard III who assumed power illegally and illegitimately by bumping off his own nephews.  He was rediscovered under a car park and this elaborate bullshit tomb was immediately built for him.  Thousands turned out to the reinterment of one of the worst of our medieval monarchs like it's something to celebrate.  Honestly, I don't know why they don't erect a mausoleum to Myra Hindley and be done with it.  And people wonder how Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor got away with it for so long ... It's this kind of uncritical, servile fawning.  And thus I clothe my naked villainy with odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ; and seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

Starmer Unpopular - It's the Economy Stupid

Growth from the end of Sunak
to the start of Starmer

I've recently heard various theories for why Keir Starmer is the "worst Prime Minister in living memory".  Is it his purging of the Labour left? Is it his taxes? Is it his lack of charm?  Is it his wooden persona?  Is it facilitating genocide?  Is it categorising grannies with cardboard signs as terrorists?  I have a theory that the driving factor is actually, as Bill Clinton would say "the economy stupid".  Britain's economy is supposedly bumping along the bottom with growth at 0.1% if the Bank of England's figures are correct.  Note that GDP figures are not always correct and are often revised retrospectively as their calculation is far from simple.  If the Bank's figures are 0.2-0.5% out we could have been in recession since the Sunak government which achieved at least one quarter of negative growth (two is an official recession).  If the primary driver of how people vote is the day-to-day economy, this would explain why Starmer is even more unpopular than John Major during his double-dip recession of the 1990s.

Mr MacLeod 

So how reliable are the BofE's figures?  Well, we know for a fact their inflation figures have been rubbish of late.  Recent internal and external reviews (see here and here) have shown that the government underestimated inflation during the post pandemic/ Ukraine invasion inflation shocks.  If it's underestimating inflation, it's probably calculating growth incorrect too.  Indeed they have been... So I wouldn't be surprised if someone pops up in a few years and tells us that actually the economy has been in recession after all (see here).  There certainly seems to me to be some disconnect between the Bank of England's statistics and my lived experience... At best we seem to be experiencing what Iain Macleod would describe as Stagflation - stagnant economic growth, high inflation and increasing unemployment... So ...

Growth since the Pandemic 

We all laughed at Liz Truss but her dash for "Growth Growth Growth" through deeply misguided and appallingly executed did at least correctly identify Britain's great problem ... Stubborn stagnation.  Since Brexit the economy has been seemingly stuck in a doom loop of near zero growth.  Hence various bungled attempts to give it CPR which fail to bring the patient back to life but give them a nasty shock before they return to a coma...  It is thought that Britain's hard Brexit far from providing £350m/week for the NHS actually shaved about 2% off GDP.  That's the difference between getting by and bumping along the bottom.  Last time we were here Ted Heath's solution was the Barber boom and...

Looking back at historical GDP figures (see right) we can see that in the 1950s and 60s Britain was often making 5% growth ...by the 90s this had lowered to 3 or 4% and by the 2010s 2 or 3%.  The figures are then slightly distorted by the Pandemic when there was extreme negative growth followed by a brief boom adjustment... But since then we've been averaging (see above graph) 0 to 1%. ...often less.  This isn't all down to Brexit, there is a global trend of Western economic decline but Brexit seems to have been like tying a lead balloon to the drowning man...

The question is what drives this trend.  Well, there are various theories... One is the aging population and declining birth rate.  Whilst the official inflation figures that we now know were wrong but not by how much have not been too bad recently (if you disregard the post COVID economic shock when they went to 10%) ... The CPI index does not really reflect things like housing costs very well.  It does attempt to reflect them to some degree but it bases it's calculations on the housing costs of owner occupiers.  So if your rent has inflated ...sorry that doesn't go into the calculation...

The reason for this ostrich-like approach is that buying a house is not seen as day to day expenditure - it's a one off purchase.  This is a bit silly because the increasing amount people are saving to buy a home has a strong negative effect on economic growth.  Added to this House Price Inflation is very high meaning if it was properly integrated into CPI then we'd get a very different graph...

As we can see House Price Inflation and Private Rents are significantly higher than the headline CPU inflation rate with HPI frequently breaching the 10% barrier and Private Rents not far behind.  Before the sub-prime mortgage financial crash figures were even worse.  In the early 00s HPI frequently breached the 10% barrier.

So what?

Well, all of this has an effect on the amount of money being spent in the day-to-day economy.  That is to say that inflation depresses growth.  There are other increasing signs of poor health in the economy.  For capitalism to work there must be regulation to prevent the growth of monopolies which depression competition.  Astute social observers will have noticed an increase in the number of flamboyant billionaires about.  This is not actually a good thing for the health of the overall economy because billionaires tend to hoard wealth rather than spend it which does not create growth ...

Trump Supporters be like...

Well okay he's a gangster, convicted felon, civilly adjudicated sex offender, war criminal, openly racist, so narcissistic he slags off his predecessors on the White House Walls, bulldozes bits of the White House and renamed the Kennedy Centre after himself but...

Wicked witch of the X

In case anyone's wondering what happens if you assiduously block all the fake Elon bots and accounts on X and his real official account too the answer is ...his scary wicked witch of the west mother starts cyberstalking you instead

Anti Slavery Collective

In 2012 our co-founders HRH Princess Eugenie and Julia de Boinville travelled to Kolkata in India, where they met the late Aloka Mitra, a social activist who led programmes supporting vulnerable women and children in India for over 35 years. Aloka (who sadly passed away in 2025) founded the Women’s Interlink Foundation, which rescues survivors of modern slavery such as sex trafficking.  

The organisation gives them a home either in New York, London or on the Carribbean Island of St James and teaches them simple vocational skills to support the process of rebuilding their lives such as giving massages or going round to Jeffrey Epstine's with your mum for a free nosebag when you are 19 and your sister is 21 but not seeing any modern slavery in evidence anywhere, or simply some work experience in Pizza Express Woking.

The next five years were spent learning more about labour exploitation and modern slavery in the UK by continually helping deny that the photograph of your father next to a sex slave was just that, even though it obviously was and everyone and their dog new it, meeting with policy makers like Peter Mandelson, law enforcement agencies, academics, NGOs, social workers, and survivors who later die in mysterious circumstances to find out what support would help gaslight the public into believing that that picture ain't real. 

The Anti Slavery Collective was created in 2017 as a project to raise awareness of labour exploitation here in the UK and build more effective models of collaboration. In 2022 this small project was incorporated as a standalone charity and The Anti Slavery Collective hired our first member of staff who cost considerably less than the £12 million Eugenie's grandmother paid to Virginia to not claim she was sex trafficked for a bit.

The Anti Slavery Collective hosted our inaugural Force for Freedom gala in 2023. The generosity of so many supporters during the gala enabled the charity to refine our mission and programmes, build a new team, and scale up our operations. We are dedicated to building on this momentum, strengthening our impact, and ensuring that modern slavery remains on the agenda for change-makers around the world particularly on the Carribbean Island of St James.  Remember modern slavery is everywhere all around us and it can often be very very hard to spot if you don't know what to look for.  You're never 1.5 miles from a human trafficked sex slave, even in Windsor Castle.

So is Mandelson's appointment as Ambassador the fault of poor MI5 vetting?

So claims Sir Keir Starmer but one didn’t have to call in Mycroft Holmes to find the facts about Epstein and Mandelson even then. Back in 2023 the Financial Times reported uncovering an internal JP Morgan dossier from 2019, which found ‘Epstein appears to maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British Government’ and suggested Lord Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s house in Manhattan (the one full of pornographic art) in June 2009, whilst Epstein was in prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Still, we’ve all house-sat for sex traffickers by mistake. And the photos of Epstein and Mandelson shopping next to an enormous ugly glass vase and Mandelson attending Epstein’s birthday party in the early 00s have been doing the rounds of the tabloids and the internet for years. Still, who hasn’t been to a party on a peadophile island by mistake? That Mandelson should never have been appointed is not a three pipe problem. The question is what magical powers did the Prince of Darkness have to allow him to defy political gravity…? All the recent revelations have done is turn the already small mountain of evidence against him into a volcanic archipelago but there was undeniably a mountain already… Perhaps this why was he made Ambassador to the United States? My theory is the Cabinet would not wear the Lord as an unelected cabinet member anymore after Brown and no CLP would take him on as a candidate and no constituency would elect him again so Starmer was forced to invent some kind of job to keep McSweeney happy but Mandelson at arms length by inserting an Ocean between Peter and the PLP… and one he hoped would put enough distance between himself and the Lord of Darkness that if the skeletons fell fully out of the closet again then… There was however, a tiny flaw in the plan… since Epstein topped himself, his every email now belongs to some trust he set up and the FBI and it lays bare years of skulduggery in breathtaking detail.  Bit of lobbying here, bit of insider trading there, pumping his associates for information, supplying sex slaves to the rich and infamous.  It's wilder than a Bond novel.

As to Epstein's death that resembles a locked room mystery like something out of the Sherlock Holmes story The Speckled Band.  Was it suicide?  Epstein originally shared a cell with multiple murder and drug conspiracy suspect Nicholas Tartaglione who attacked him.  Following this he was moved to a single cell and put on suicide watch but then taken off it and moved back to a normal cell where he had another cellmate who was moved out the evening before his death.  He was not checked on every 30 minutes, cameras failed and he was discovered to have hung himself at 6:30am.  Discovered in his cell were notes investigated by 60 minutes about burnt food and "Giant Bugs crawling all over my hands". See here.  Was he drugged?  In the Adventure of the Speckled Band a snake is introduced into the seemingly impenetrable locked room via an air vent.  New York City's Chief Medical Examiner Barbara Sampson and Epstein's lawyers' pathologist Michael Baden disagreed violently about the cause of death and autopsy report.  How did a 6ft man hang himself from a top bunk?  Were his injuries consistent with hanging? The FBI interviewed dozens of FBI witnesses who were not in the room at the time of his death and 100,000 documents about what happened when no one was looking and said it was definitely suicide.  29% of the public believe them.

Why does Facebook think I want to be a screw...?

And what kind of advert is this?  Do they really think that refereeing a punch up inside a prison is something to aspire to?  Does anyone look at these dystopian images and think "Yes, that's for me.  Standing in a gloomy room with no windows trying to split up a fight.  That's what I'm looking for out of life".  These people are not like me.  I do not want any job even tangentially related to physical violence.  It sounds about as glamorous as a visit to the dentist.  But I'm sure this will appeal to their target demographic of people who fancy a bit of a barney ...which is even more scary.  I mean, all these AI algorithms that are supposed to decide what propaganda to send to what target audience... Could none of them tell that I am ... as Frankie Howerd would have said ... erm ... a coward?  When the going gets tough, I'm off ... and the "Team" can suck it up... If indeed, I'm on anyone else's team ever.  I'm sure there are a lot of brave men and women in the prison system but I'm not one of them... And I'm not becoming one of them.  I'd rather face destitution...

NADEZHDA

Amazon MGM Studios' film NADEZHDA offers unprecedented access to the 20 days leading up to the 13th Party Congress in May 1924 -- through the eyes of the General Secretary's wife herself. Step inside Nadezhda Alliluyeva's world as she orchestrates five year plans, navigates the complexities of what to wear during purges, and decides which of her rivals to exile to Siberia. With exclusive footage capturing critical meetings, private conversations about how to Trump up charges against Kamenev and Zinoviev and never-before-seen environments such as the gulags and the inside of the Lubyanka Building, NADEZHDA showcases Mrs. Stalin's assumption of one the world's most impotent roles.  Often dismissed as just a gangster's moll who doesn't ever crack a smile, dresses in militaristic clothing and looks as though she's going to top herself at any moment, "Nadezhda" shows a different side to the General Secretary's often misunderstood wife.  Candid footage shows her buying clothes, staring into space, wandering aimlessly around the interior of the Kremlin, refusing to toast the deaths of enemies of the state because her and Joe have had another argument and accepting bribes from American billionaires.  The one person who attended the London Premier said "People have said this film is boring but the great thing about watching it on the big screen is that VUE have reclining seats so if you're homeless it's a great place to have a kip during the day.  Also as Nadezhda seldom says anything in public so it's virtually a silent movie apart from my snoring".  Critics have heaped praise on the film by a lot.  The President of the United States said "Russia is a much misunderstood country but we love Russia and Russians and that guy Stalin, he rules those 287 million people with a rod of steel and they love him for it.  Particularly in Ukraine.  You've gotta respect that.  They're people I can do business with.  I've invited him to join my board of peace.  His wife is pretty fit too.  I'd grab her by her pussy any day but she doesn't let me.  Ever."

Toe curling chinny rub of the week

 

I am settling in for a showing of ‘Melania’ and the theater is PACKED!

Earlier, a bystander asked if I was heading in to see Avatar, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

“Avatar? No, son,” I curtly replied. “I don’t watch woke movies. I’m here to see the groundbreaking documentary about our incredibly talented First Lady.”

The man’s two little girls began jumping up and down, pulling on his sleeve, and begging, “Daddy, we want to see Melania!”

“But. But…” he stammered, “I thought you girls wanted to see Zootopia 2?”

“No, no, NO,” they said, now nearly shouting. “We want to see Melania!! She is the most beautiful First Lady EVER.”

Their father was scrambling, stressed out, and disoriented.

“Girls, I’m afraid you aren’t the only ones who are captivated by President Trump and his beautiful wife,” I said, kneeling to get on their level. “Virtually everyone in this theater is here for the 7:30 PM showing, and it’s been sold out for days.”

Tears began to well up in their eyes.

“But…” I said in a hushed tone, “I happen to have a few extra tickets with me, and I’d like you and your dad to have them.”

They jumped for joy and began hugging their father. He looked relieved as he wiped the sweat off his brow with a smile.

I handed him the tickets and pulled him close. “Raise these girls right,” I whispered. “Teach them to be classy conservative women of faith like Melania, don’t let them become like Meghan Markle. Capisce?”

He hugged me and thanked me profusely. “What are you going to do now?” He asked. 

“Don’t worry about me, son,” I told him, with a twinkle in my eye. “I’ve already got tickets to the next showing.”

I am settling in for a showing of ‘Melania’ and the theater is PACKED!

Earlier, a bystander asked if I was heading in to see Avatar, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

“Avatar? No, son,” I curtly replied. “I don’t watch woke movies. I’m here to see the groundbreaking documentary…

— Nick Adams (@NickAdamsinUSA) January 31, 2026

A lot of discounted American libations in the Spirits Aisle

 

Does nobody want to buy booze from a fascist dictatorship?

It's terribly nice with ICE...

Judging a book by it's cover

 

I was pootling round that cornucopia of incorrect and ill informed opinion the other day that now calls itself X when I saw someone complaining that "they had put the film poster on the cover Emily Brontë's novel.  I thought this was the poster from some 70s adaptation but actually this is from the 2026 film which isn't actually released till next month.  I think the "Now A Major Motion Picture" tagline made me think it was a 70s book.  Of course as an exercise in olympic level snobbery this tweet had collected negative feedback at such an accelerating rate that it's cowardly author had said that they had blocked replies.  "Well, I'm sure that'll stop you looking a massive snob," I said.  I then got several more replied from nincompoops trying to defend snobbery as a lifestyle choice.  Ideas travel upwards, manners downwards.  If everyone was a snob, argued one correspondent, there would be no snobs because they would somehow all cancel each other out.  A nonsense argument.  Actually, if everyone thought they were more intelligent and better than everyone else literally nothing would get done and there'd be no cooperation because society would become extremely management top heavy.  

Some tried to argue that the cover was ugly.  I don't see anything except the two central characters.  Am I missing something?  As this was a hard sell someone came up with the alternative image below and asked "What is this?"

To which the answer is...  It's the two central characters and a tree.  The tree outside the window by which Heathcliffe is found dead perhaps.  Or a tree on the moor?  It's not my choice of design but it's the kind of cover school copies of the classics used to have in the 80s.  Really, what is wrong with these people?

Perhaps the problem is that the images are too functional and don't represent the Barbers Cartlandisation that goes on in some of these people's minds.  Or that it's too romantic?  After all, Wuthering Heights I always feel was meant as a fairly dark satire on abusive relationships... It's funny that it should become some benchmark for romantic fiction.  Then again, perhaps that's why it's so successful... You can read it on multiple levels.  Whatever... The function of book covers is to entice people who haven't read a book to read them, not to reflect back the experiences and feelings of past readers...

I was particularly amused when someone suggested I stop judging people I "knew nothing about".  Where's the fun in that? Man, your snobbery oozes from your comments like sweat.

I went to the Brontë Parsonage Museum once.  It's a creepy place.  The silent reverence of the visitors as they pass old dresses and spectacles is very sad.  To be fair perhaps this is because the Brontë's lived rather short lives, all having died of common diseases well under 40 that we can now easily cure but the atmosphere was notably different to that inside your average National Trust or English Heritage property.  It was more like a mausoleum.  I mean Dylan Thomas drank himself to death but when you visit his home you don't feel people are there to mourn like it's Princess Diana's funeral.  You have to wonder what they'd make of it all if they could see it.  I think they'd be amused.

Thank you for your inattention to this matter...

If anyone's still in doubt about the ramifications of the Andy Burnham situation let me spell it out for you.   There are 400 Labour MPs and despite many of them despising Sir Keir, not one of them has the bollocks to be a stalking horse and put up a leadership challenge.  Not even the one who has just resigned... so they have to get Andy Burnham to try and stand in a safe seat so he can but no one on the NEC has the bollocks to let him.  Neither does Burnham have the bollocks to stand as an independent like Ken Livingstone.  The problems this Labour government has cannot be solved by it's own MPs and so what has been created instead is a load of bollocks whatever way you look at it.  The reality is this government is so ineffectual, it can't even do infighting properly.  It's just pitiful.  It isn't even like Andy Burnham is some charismatic hard left alternative to Keir Starmer either.  He's just another plodding career centrist after power for its own sake and ... He's almost as deep a personality vacuum as Wes Streeting and both of them are almost as empty vessels as Sir Keir.  So there you are.  Thank you for your inattention to this matter.

The most expensive squaddie in history...

Mr Starmer has responded to Mr Trump's fascist threat to annex Greenland by imposing Tarrifs on the UK that are likely to cost £15 billion to the UK economy, possibly making this one soldier the most expensive squaddie in history.  

Private Equity said today that he was proud to carry to the economic can for Britain.  

"In the past British soldiers had to go over the top, fight them on the beeches and the landing grounds and parachute behind enemy lines.  It's really progress that today we can just keep war economic and that to start one all a single soldier has to do is turn up.  It's a testament to how terrifying we, the British Army, are that just one of us can result in crippling economic sanctions on an entire nation.  You can hear the sound of Donald Trump soiling himself every time I don my Busby.  Indeed, I often don my red ceremonial uniform just to remind me how far in the red I've made Britain."

Me Starmer, the Prime Minister, meanwhile stated at a press conference today as The World Economically Held to Ransom Forum that "We shall fight them on the European Stoxx 50 index, we shall fight them on the FTSE 100 blue chip index.  We shall never surrender the French Cac 40 or the German Dax and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were economically subjugated and starving, then our British Overseas Territories beyond the seas like Bermuda, Gibraltar and the Falklands, armed and guarded by the International Monetary Fund would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the financial foreclosure of the old."