Some interesting friend requests on Facebook recently. However, if you claim to be studying at Cambridge University and your mobile phone has a Nigerian dialing code that seems unlikely. It seems particularly incongruous too when your profile pictures (which are all else that remains of your profile) depict you as both a young black man and a young white man. That said it is quite an achievement for a young 20 year old of any ethnicity to be driving a sports car and working as a manager at a top UK share trading company since 1980 when he would have been minus 20.
I would remind you all that if you want to be my Facebook friend you are up against some pretty stiff competition including senior programming managers at Facebook who never talk about code and young ladies who cordially invite me to visit third party websites to show me photographs of themselves.
These "stunning houses" omaze are trying to raffle always seems to contain a lot of glass. Can't fool me. I know the difference between a mansion & a greenhouse.
All this slashing pictures and toppling statues stuff is entirely down to one thing. The decline of Guy Fawkes Night. In the past all of these activities could have been simply avoided by burning someone in effigy.
Meanwhile over the pond...
Attendees at a Kansas Republican Party event on Friday paid to punched and kicked an effigy of President Biden on Friday.
Top tip: New comics. During the 1950s many famous comedians learnt their trade by appearing between the striptease acts at the Windmill Theatre. Having to stand out from soft pornography really sharpened their comedy. Today you can recreate this learning experience much more quickly and easily by simply posting a joke on twitter and hoping somebody spots it between the AI porn bots.
…it was possible to believe that Donald Trump might eventually come to trial in one of his 4 criminal cases soon… but the wheels of justice would seem to still be turning at a glacial pace …
At the moment there are 4 potential criminal trials….
They are:
DC Trump Case: United States v. Donald J. Trump – This is the Federal level case about election interference brought by special Counsel Jack Smith
Georgia : The State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump, et al. – This is the one about the telephone call to the Georgia official asking him to find votes and the hounding of election officials in Georgia
Mar-a-Lago : United States v. Donald J. Trump, et al. – This is the one about the Top Secret documents that Donald stored in his bog to read on the toilet.
New York 2016 Election Interference Case : The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump – This is the one about Donald paying off Stormy Daniels for shagging him before the 2016 election.
An authoritative timeline of all the trials of Donald Trump is available on the Just Security website
Of these the nearest one to reaching an actual trial is the New York 2016 Election Interference Case.
The DC Trump Case has been stalled because Trump argues that he has “absolute” Presidential Immunity and has taken his claim all the way up to the Supreme Court who will not be sitting again on it until April 22nd.
Whether a Trial can be stayed by the Supreme Court investigating the liability of the President to prosecution is a matter that under the constitution varies from state to state. This is the reason that the DC case is stayed and the New York case is still on. Also, the New York case is about actions that Donald Trump took before he became President and therefore it is much harder for him to claim Presidential immunity with regard to them as he was just an ordinary citizen at the time…
Donald Trump’s many legal nonsenses seem to be partially indulged by some people within the judicial system who are painfully aware that imprisoning the potential Presidential nominee could effectively create a constitutional crisis. This may be why the Supreme Court is entertaining Trump’s claim of some form of Presidential immunity. It may be they claim he has partial immunity for some actions that he or others perceive as “official acts”…
There have also been various attempts to get Trump removed from the ballot under the 14th Amendment for Inciting Insurrection. However, the Supreme Court has just ruled that this clause can only be implemented by Congress. Any other ruling would have caused a Constitutional Crisis of the Judiciary vs Voters. However, the can has in some sense just been kicked down the road – there could still be a challenge between the election and the inauguration… Interestingly this also throws open the question that if it’s up to Congress to enforce the exclusions does this mean that the exclusion of non-US-born citizens is also effectively overturned and now just for Congress to police if they’re in the mood…?
Could the Simpsons vision actually happen? Of course, the election isn’t ALL about Trump …there are many issues and well as Bill Clinton would have said “the economy, stupid”. America’s recently had a tough time… and if you’re a Republican Trump is THE candidate… the other nominees with the exception of Chris Christie being, as Mrs Slocombe would have said, as weak as water. I don’t want to be ageist but my parents are 84 and spend a lot of time in the evening and afternoon sleeping. The idea Biden is fully awake … then again Biden has staff….
Another bizarre facet of the process is that Donald Trump seems to be allowed by the GOP to avoid ever publicly debating with his party opponents meaning few of his arguments/statements are being scrutinized. It's hard to imagine such a thing happening in the UK where every party elects it's candidates using local hustings... But then under our Parliamentary constitution even the PM has to face a weekly grilling by MPs. All the Trump has to endure is some "Town Halls" and hand picked sycophantic journalists. The penny seems to have finally dropped for Ms Hayley that if she's going to even dent his following she has to risk attacking his base ... There's a psychological and practical reason parties don't want to defrenstrate their leaders. Since the Conservatives dumped Boris Johnson in response to his Partygate criminal fines they've suffered catastrophic polling results...
Such is an existential crisis. Dumping your leader for criminal behaviour can have devastating consequences... Even when it's just for sharing a birthday cake during lockdown... Some of this can be explained by the economy... But what is a personality cult if you lose the personality? Trump seems to tap into some level of nostalgia and seems now to be able to sell his former presidency as a golden age when people were better off...
The gloves come off between the Judiciary and the former POTUS when Jury selection starts on March the 25th. That trial will last a couple of months. The SCOTUS should hear aural argument on former Presidential Immunity on April 22nd and then…? There is also the question of cash… Trump owes $450,000,000 from his Civil Fraud Trial and is running out of time to find money for a Bond. He also owes $83,000,000 in punative libel damages; he also recently lost a libel action in the UK High Court. A GoFundMe was launched but is only raising enough money to cover the daily interest… His legal representatives consequently seem to go even more downmarket and eccentric…
Even if he is clearly guilty will he actually be convicted or will the jury return a perverse verdict knowing the constitutional consequences of a guilty verdict?
Angela has red hair and works for a party whose logo is Red so I call this bird the Red Queen cus she is like wot the Queen would be (the dead one not Charlie's bit of fluff) if she had been a commy like. She lived in a council property (like the Queen did except Angela only had one) but she is one of them wot bought it cheap off Thatcher but wants us all to believe she ain't a Tory but she sure acts like one!
Being a posh bully I went down the Council offices and poured over the Public Version of the Electoral Register to try and find some evidence to show that she had abused the right to buy scheme. There weren't none so I went down Somerset House and found the birth certificates of her sprogs. What I found was astonishing.
Despite being supposedly married this bird don't live with her husband but he has his own home 352 yards away and they wonder why they split up?!
Clearly she moved in with him and left her Council House empty while not registering that she had moved which is FRAUD! despite there being no financial gain except continuing to pay council tax on two properties. Did she claim the single person discount? I don't know but I'm going to imply she did while her brother was living there looking after her premature babies! If that's true, who knows what you can believe with this bird? She should have paid Capital Gains tax when she sold it if she wasn't there absolutely every minute of every day as since she bought it off the Council it went up in price £48,000. 10 per cent of that is £4,800. Thieving cow! See I knows everybody's income and wot everybody earns and I carefully compare it with the income tax returns...
We spoke to a neighbour whose sprogs had broken one of her windows with a football and he says she like sat outside their house in her Audi demanding several tonnes to fix it when it was only double glazing and should only cost a pony when she lives supposedly next door and could have shouted over the garden fence like what people does in Belize.
Do you want this bird as your Deputy Prime Minister?
607 people are murdered in the UK every year. If the UK Police took the IDF's approach to solving these murders there'd be 14,000 collateral deaths a year caused by ongoing murder investigations. All human life is of equal value. At least that's what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says ...
One day when I was child my mum was driving us out of a Reigate car park when a small man in large Rolls Royce made way for us… it was Melvyn Hays who at the time was at the height of his It Aint Half Hot Mum fame. It was the first time I had ever seen in real life however fleetingly someone who actually worked in entertainment. And not just worked in it but had the trappings of success to go with it. I say it was a Rolls Royce… it may have just been a big car but it was a Rolls in my imagination.
Thanks to the wonder of some DVDs that Ava Alexis bought me for Christmas I have now re-watched the entirety of “It Aint Half Hot Mum” which has never been repeated by the BBC because it includes Windsor Davies liberally calling all the members of the concert party “poofs” and Michael Bates who grew up in India playing an obsequious Indian bearer called Ranji Ram in what some people have since described as “blackface” but Jimmy Perry described more diplomatically as a “light tan”. Having watched all the episodes sequentially I have to say the lightness of the tan depends very much on who was make up artist from week to week… the sweat patches on everyone’s uniforms seem to become less or more pronounced as the weeks go on too almost finally disappearing by the end...
Honestly, I didn’t really remember Bates’s character from original broadcast probably because he died after series 5 and I think I must have only started watching from series 6 when they have moved from India to Burma. It follows then that if the BBC’s rational for not repeating it ever is Bates performance that only actually puts the first 44 episodes as verboten for terrestrial broadcast… there are still a further 20 without Michael Bates that could be theoretically repeated? Perhaps there are other taboos surrounding British Empire adventures in India that make the BBC queasy… Along the way there are passing references to many fragments of now forgotten bits of Empire/Indian history …such as the Thug Cults, the Black Hole of Calcutta, Clive, the Indian Rope Trick … that probably are best forgotten and yet were once probably common knowledge to a certain generation but are now seldom mentioned except in Indiana Jones films. One has to wonder how contemporary audiences viewed them … but let’s not wander down that road today… I’ll leave that to "La-De-Dah" Gunner "Paderewski" Jonathan Graham with his degree from Oxford or Cambridge depending on which one the writers’ thought was funnier week by week…
Rangi’s sudden disappearance at the end of series 5 (Bates died) is never explained. Instead, Chai Wallah Muhammad (Dino Shafeek) who sells tea to the troops gets a bigger part – see there were some Indian actors after all. I remember being particularly moved as a child by the scene at the end of the penultimate episode where Muhammad waves goodbye to the concert party as the boat back to England takes them back home.
Barbar Bhatti the punkah wallah who pulls a string all day to keep the officers cool also mysteriously disappears for the last couple of series. I expect he got fed up with being kicked… Mainly he speaks complicated passages of Urdu which lapse into English in the last few words which constitute the punchline – a device since substantially employed by the Fast Show Channel 9 sketches and also to some extent by Rowley Birkin QC except that Bar is speaking real Urdu … perhaps now the technology is available they could provide subtitles…? His replacement is the Chinese Chef played by Andy Ho who in a reverse of this joke doesn’t actually speak any Chinese … of course one could criticise the characters as racial stereotypes but then all the characters a pretty much 2D stereotypes...
Possibly the most three dimensional is Windsor Davies as Battery Sergeant Major Tudor Bryn "Shut Up" Williams a man who is simultaneously at the pinnacle of his career and at the same time looking redundancy and obsolescence in the face for when the war ends so almost inevitably will his job… something that does eventually happen. His superiors – the pompous Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Arthur Digby St John Reynolds and the ineffectual Captain Jonathan Tarquin "Tippy" Ashwood are, like the concert party, also not professional soldiers but conscripts and also secretly harbour the desire for the avoidance of actual violence and danger. Indeed, it is the very real threat of death around the corner that pushes this sitcom into sometimes quite powerful emotional territory. When characters get a chance to leave the concert party for a better position there is always the moral dilemma that this would effectively mean the party being disbanded and their comrades being put in the path of mortal danger …although Bombardier Beaumont seems far more concerned by the “horrible creepy crawly things” that inhabit the jungle than the Japenese.
Having said all the above …to be fair to Jimmy Perry …perhaps there can’t have been that many Asian/Indian/Burmese actors in the UK as many Indian actors appear over and over again in the series in different small parts. Then again Croft used many of the same actors over and over again in his work and we also see a pre-Hi-de-Hi Jeffrey Holland (twice) and a pre-Allo Allo Gordon Kaye. Anyway, that’s the elephant in the room dealt with if you don’t count the memorable episode with the circus elephant which now wouldn’t be allowed. This got me wondering elephant intelligence …no one’s quite sure of their IQ but it seems they can recognise themselves in a mirror which makes them quite bright… or so it seems...
Particularly moving is the final episode where they all become civilians again. As they pass through the processing centre one of the characters complains to the man in the clothing store room issuing their demob suits that they’re not being treated like heroes to which the man (Bill Pertwee I think) memorably replies that there’s “no shortage of heroes round here”. For such is total war. WWI and WWII affected entire generations changing society on every level… and leaving many, many people with deep psychological scars. When I was a child such people were very much in evidence. Today, not so much. Perhaps that’s why war’s back in fashion…
"Even in a parallel universe, where 15 is the age of criminal responsibility... " - Zoe Williams in the Guardian
The age of criminal responsibility is 10.
I'm not a fan of making people stateless but the fate of Ms Begum is not keeping me awake at night
Her larger point is that the decision itself makes people with one or more non-UK parents able to have their citizenship stripped whilst us indigenous people have more rights. Perhaps... but when you've been living for years in Syria fighting for an Islamic State... I believe the court said one of the reasons Begum was not given prior warning was to stop her returning as it is very hard to make people who live in the UK stateless...
175 people have been deprived of British Citizenship on National Security grounds since 2006 see here
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Normally I solve this problem with ultrasound, flashing strobes or other methods but this year I was unable to get the squirrel 🐿️ out the loft without getting the man with the Kania trap in. He has eaten his last Snickers and I feel guilty for having killed him but you can't legally release them once captured as they're classified by the government as "vermin"... I looked on YouTube about how the kill bar dispatches them and apparently there are a lot of survivalists who not only kill but cook and eat them. I mentioned this to the pest control man who said in the countryside they have more meat on them but London squirrels are a bit skinny. Later I wondered if he'd had it for dinner...
It's not like it's hard to get a photo with the Pope. He has free photo ops / audiences every week. I went in St Peter's once , the doors shut, loads of security appeared and the next thing I knew I was shaking hands with John Paul II.
I hadn't even gone there to meet him...
With thanks to...
So Calvin Clown, the creepy crowdfunded cosplay clerical conman is now swanning around in Rome dressed like Indiana Jones. Wonder if his gullible flock of fleeced fools are regretting ponying up over £33,300 to keep his gravy train ‘crusade’ on the tracks? Cheers, suckers! 🥂 pic.twitter.com/laS6c5GC9S
Today I have been mostly being blocked on twitter by right wing freeze peacher turned GB News gobshite Josh Howie for daring to point out that this must win an award for one the most spiteful mean spirited articles ever. See here
Gary Linekar : I took it down because people were reading into it that it was my opinion. They thought that it was my view. I retweeted a news story. I think it was a news story. I took it down because people were you know, they seemed unhappy. It was nothing to do with the BBC. They didn’t contact me. I hadn’t breached the guidelines.
Miserable cow: Even though this man is talking to us trying to understand our POV I'm literally shaking with anger
Josh : She put him in his place
No, Josh, she didn't...
Anyway I just thought I'd mention it here so I can be blocked again on every other platform by a man whose single debating skill seems to be calling other people blind and stupid...
I mean, Mr L goes to the effort of speaking to the Jewish Chronicle to try and understand their concerns and all their reporter can do is seeth anger....
Anyway, I think that's why he blocked me. Could have been pointing out that Palestine existed before 1948 as it was a League of Nations mandate. My grandfather was there for a while. He drove all over Europe, Africa and the Middle East during WWII delivering supplies. See Royal Artillery War Memorial in Hyde Park...
This was erected after WWI... But apparently people actually believe the PLO was started by Stalin these days...
Along with nonsense like that the Arabs there were all nomadic people... If so it was very careless of them to leave a mosque there in 700AD and then wander off for 1200 years... During which time it hasn't fallen into disrepair...
In 1850, according to the Ottoman census provincial yearbook, Palestine had 63,659 recorded households. Roughly 85% were Muslim, 11% were Christian and 4% Jewish. The fact lots of people both Arabs & Jews have moved there since doesn't mean there was no indigenous culture. But the first casualty of war is truth. Actually it's youth but let's not get pedantic. When they drone on with their long historical diatribes these people also forget that since 1919 we've been supposed to be using National Self Determination to resolve these issues. It's living people that matter...
In other news I hear Labour has suspended a candidate for saying that Israel knew about 7 October in advance. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's what IDF soldiers told the BBC (SEE HERE). Now that doesn't mean Israel "let it happen" but they did have intelligence. They just didn't use it intelligently.
Still, the world keeps turning. I clicked on the BBC News Website the other day and there was a special tab for the Israel-Gaza War and another for the Ukraine-Russia war. WWIII is on the way. Apparently Ukraine is running out of people (see here) to call up now and radio stations are being taken off the air because they keep tipping the public off where the draft men are... Putin meanwhile has almost limitless cannon fodder to throw into graves meaning Ukraine has "shifted to a policy of exhausting it's enemy". That may take some time but sadly many in America don't get that paying others to die for you is a bargain.
When quisling rapist fraudster gangster and insurrectionist Donald Trump was first elected he stood on the platform of America First ... Which was of course the name of Charles Lindbergh's pro Appeasement WWII lobby group.... It's little surprise then that today he's besties with Vladimir...
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