The great leader inspires the youth

20th Century authoritarian kitsch: Roses for Stalin, by Boris Vladimirski

21st Century authoritarian kitsch: Teach a Man to Fish, by Jon McNaughton

For a didactic, ideological painting with a clunkingly obvious propaganda message, Teach a Man to Fish sure poses a lot of questions. I'd add one more question to the list. Who's morally worse, Vladimirski or McNaughton?

You could say Vladimirski was worse, on the grounds that his painting was a fawning celebration of a mass murderer. Say what you like about Trump, but he can't come close to matching Stalin's body count, and probably never will (unless he pokes the nuclear button).

On the other hand, Vladimirski and his fellow socialist realists were churning out obsequious hack work in a society where dissent could be punished by a one-way ticket to the Gulag, or a bullet to the back of the head. McNaughton doesn't have the excuse of acting under duress when he churns out his obsequious hack work.

A simple (part of) the solution

The UK population is growing by more than 500,000 people every year but only about half the homes required are built. I believe there is one key reason behind the UK housing problem: a lack of apartment living. But it’s possible to change this. I’m originally from Greece and one thing that has struck me about the UK is that British people dream of living in houses.

As the chart below shows, just 14% of British people live in apartments. This is one of the lowest percentages in Europe. In Germany the figure is 57%, in Spain it is 66%, and the Euro area average is 48%.

At first sight, this seems like a good idea. My only quibble is with the title of the piece, "The simple solution to UK’s housing problem – apartments." Simple? Really? I very much doubt whether there's just one simple solution to such a complex problem. To be fair, the article does talk about wider issues, like the need for rent controls and stronger tenants' rights as a prerequisite for turning flats in the private rented sector into proper homes.

But building more apartments does seem like a sensible part of the solution. As the article acknowledges, a shift in mindset is needed, so that flats aren't just seen as the sort of cramped, shoddy places where you'd only live if you had no alternative, so we're talking about building properly designed quality homes. Having lived in a flat in the past, these would be my top three suggestions for turning flats from those unloved boxes from which most Brits aspire to escape, into proper homes:

• Abolish leasehold for residential properties. Even this government seems to be inching towards doing something about landowners jacking up and creaming off ground rents, but the whole leasehold system is a worse than socially useless subsidy for the rentier class, and it needs to go.
• Decent soundproofing is a necessity, not a luxury, for people living in high-density accommodation.
• Put balconies on flats (or patios, if ground floor). I'm no gardener, but one unanticipated thing I grew to love about moving from a flat to a house was the patio. Just having a little bit of outside space of your own really does a lot to make your home feel less claustrophobic. Of course, in a block of flats, this is the one area where decent soundproofing won't help if your neighbours are making an unholy din on their balconies but inconsiderate people is a whole other problem to which there's definitely no "one simple solution."

Europe to blame for Windrush scandal, claims cretin

This might sound rude, but that impeccably well-bred gentleman, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has just confirmed that it is perfectly acceptable to describe political views with which one disagrees as "cretinous." O tempora o mores!

Sarcasm aside, I don't mind people like Rees-Mogg saying stuff that's silly (or "cretinous", if you want to answer abuse with abuse). What annoys me is seeing the media treat his nonsense like holy writ ("It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of Mogg"). As somebody just said, in a slightly different context:

"This is the part of ... inequality ... that doesn't get talked about enough. One percenters ... aren't necessarily more prone to stupid ideas than the rest of us, but when they have stupid ideas, their enormous power shakes the world."

Creating a hostile environment™

Sadly, it's not only Theresa May who believes that designing unpleasant environments is a good thing...

We don't need no stinkin' (Br)exit strategy!

From last week, but still pertinent, here's Tim Harford on how a chaotic, incoherent non-strategy can be a feature, not a bug - at least for a while:

The Brexiters seemed hamstrung by the fact that they ran two mutually suspicious campaigns — Leave.EU and Vote Leave. “It wasn’t one of my adverts,” said Nigel Farage about Vote Leave’s bus, while Boris Johnson said Mr Farage’s inflammatory poster about refugees was “not my campaign” and “not my politics”. This left the Leave campaign, as Sun Tzu advised, “without ascertainable shape”, so voters picked which ever message resonated, while the Remain campaign did not know where to look. Dominic Cummings, of Vote Leave, later said a united Leave campaign would have been easily defeated.

This got me thinking about the parallels with the almost equally protean strategy that got the 2003 Iraq War on:

• Shock and awe your (domestic) enemies with an overwhelming blizzard of ambiguous bullshit* (imply that Iraq was behind 9/11, that its WMDs can be ready in 45 minutes, that we're wasting £350 million a week which could be going to the NHS)
• Include a grain of truth in the noisy matrix of nonsense (yes, Saddam was a brutal dictator, but we were specifically told this was about self-defence against an alleged imminent threat, not regime change), (yes, there were plenty of things actually wrong with European Union institutions, like the disastrous handling of the Eurozone crisis, but these had nothing to do with the claims on the Brexit bus, or the migration/border scares, the two central arguments which fuelled the Leave campaigns)
• Use fake urgency to move fast and break things ("...we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud", "UK faces millions more migrants as Turkey and its 75 MILLION people on brink of joining EU").
• Don't have an exit strategy, because that's just a hostage to fortune that your (domestic) enemies might use against you
• Mission accomplished!

We know how the 2003 decision worked out. The 2016 decision still has a way to run, but it's already brought us to the absurd paradox of being at the mercy of people who've spent decades developing their monomaniacal obsession with exiting the European Union, but never agreed a coherent exit strategy.

The poetic justice would be highly satisfying, if only the rest of us didn't have to survive "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology."

Though cowards run and traitors sneer...

... we'll keep the pink flag flying here:

Where does this vexillological curiosity come from? I didn't realise, until reading this, that some of the international volunteers fighting for the Kurdish People's Protection Units, against Daesh and everybody's favourite fascistic frenemy, Erdoğan, have started organising themselves under the banner of the International Freedom Battalion (IFB). The IFB is a loose collection of national and factional groups, some of which are called brigades, with a nod to the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War.

There is, for example, the Anglo-Irish Bob Crow Brigade and the French Henri Krasucki Brigade (also named for a promenant trade union leader).

And the pink flag? It's the flag of another IFB unit, The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA), formed in response to the persecution of LGBT people by Daesh.

What Comrade Kalashnikov would have made of his deadly brainchild adorning the flag of a group of radical gay anarchist guerrillas I don't know, although it wouldn't be the first time its image has been appropriated for a flag:

The image of AK-47 appears on the flag of Mozambique as well as coats of arms of Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso (1984-97) and East Timor. The Kalashnikov rifle is also present on the flag of Lebanese militant organization, Hezbollah. 

It's probably one of those things that reactionary numbskulls everywhere will seize upon as futher evidence of the collapse of civilization, even though the combination of same-sex action and military action has a venerable history going back at least to the Sacred Band of Thebes.

Catwoman: hostile, yet global

The "hostile environment" policy is a straightforwardly awful idea from straightforwardly awful people with straightforwardly awful consequences for the designated victims. But it also seems to form part of a wider agenda which is also awful, but not in quite such a straightforward way.

Exhibit A: 2012: Theresa "Catwoman" May "chooses her words with feline delicacy" as she tells her adoring Telegraph fanbase that "We're going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception":

Exhibit B: The sidebar of immigration stories which appears next to that same Telegraph interview. Nestling in among the stories about migrants rioting in Calais, swamping the country, stealing our jobs by working too hard, or being gypsies, there's an intriguing article headlined "New VIP visa service for wealthy foreigners", next to another pic of the kitten-heeled dominatrix:

Taken together, the two articles make very interesting reading:

...soon, she insists, [net migration] figures will fall, as restrictions on student and working visas are reflected in the statistics. “We are seeing the number of visas issued going down, but there is a lag between those and feeding through into the net migration figures...”

...Today though, her focus is on those who are in Britain illegally, and her language becomes uncharacteristically vivid. “The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration,” she declares....

...Ministers are creating a new visa system for global business leaders amid concerns that moves to tighten immigration rules are deterring “high-value” individuals from overseas.

Around 100 wealthy foreigners will initially be invited to join a new “bespoke” visa service which the Home Office said will ensure their passage through the UK border system is “swift and smooth.”

Members of the “GREAT Club” will get a personal “account manager” at the UK Visas and Immigration service to deal with their travel plans. The manager will arrange visa services “tailored to each individual’s needs at no extra cost”, the Home Office said.

Personal account managers for oligarchs, a Kafka-style bureaucratic nightmare for the "lower value individuals" from the Windrush and the EU who settled here under the mistaken impression that this was a country ruled by decency and fair play, rather than a private club where the rich and powerful get to shove everybody else aside as they push their way to the front of the queue.

If you ever wondered what sort of hybrid abomination will emerge from the apparently contradictary goals of creating a "global Britain"* which is simultaneously a "hostile environment" for those guilty of being insufficiently British, and insufficiently rich, these two articles paint a vivid picture.




*Again, sorry Northern Ireland - blame the people who came up with the phrase "global Britain." Although it looks as if you'll be getting your revenge on the "global Britain" mob, as their misty-eyed Empire 2.0 fantasies are shredded on contact with your border with the Irish Republic. It's a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology". Or, as sombody once tweeted, rather magnificently, "there are unicorns as far as the eye can see. And many of them are eating cake":

“That’s not my Brexit! Its trade is too encumbered by tariffs.” pic.twitter.com/Fc1HssMZ3X

— Mike K (@mpk) 19 April 2018

Wake me up...

... I'm having this really disturbing dream where Ukip have turned the whole UK into a creepily unfunny, racist 1970s sitcom and put Jim Davidson in charge of the Foreign Office:

UK government guide advises people being deported to Jamaica to fake Caribbean accent to avoid attention

Wait a minute ... that was no dream...

The Windrush scandal is Theresa May’s creation, borne of an innate inability to equate ‘immigrant’ with ‘person’. It’s a hefty accusation, I know, but it makes sense of almost everything she’s done since 2010. Lying about a cat; Go Home vans; subsuming Ukip; EU citizens as cards.

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) April 17, 2018

Welcome to my nightmare.

On the road to Damascus

Throwback... pic.twitter.com/4fx9jAnuKu

— Matt Turner (@MattTurner4L) April 16, 2018

And Theresa went his way, and entered into the house; and putting her hands on him said, Brother Boris, The Donald, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales...

Trending now

Well, here's a thing. I happened to be hunting the mot juste, using an online thesaurus, when I noticed which words are trending now:

"Lowlife", "kakistocracy", "slimeball", "salacious", "oligarch." There's your zeitgeist, right there.

Obscure trivia, pedantry and cake...

... are a few of my favourite things, so if course I was going to enjoy Simon Whistler's video on the history of the phrase "having your cake and eating it." My favourite piece of trivia was the fascinating detail that The Unabomber's pedantic habit of turning this phrase around so that it made more sense was one of the linguistic clues that finally revealed his true identity. If these are your sort of things too, help yourself to a slice...

We want our vote

Even without Trump's Wag the Dog moment, the BBC would probably have ignored this story, so here's a shout out to all the under-appreciated folk who turned out today to take back control of our democracy:

Thousands of activists will take to the streets on Saturday as part of a national day of action to demonstrate public support for a vote on the final Brexit deal.

Several pro-EU organisations have joined forces to mount an attack on the government’s Brexit plans with more than 350 events across the country, ahead of the launch of a £1m campaign demanding the opportunity to stay in the EU if the people want to...

...As well as flagship events in 12 cities, ranging from Weston-super-Mare to Edinburgh, there will also be thousands of supporters setting up stalls and leafleting in both Remain and Leave areas.

The European Movement stall outside Milton Keynes Central station today

No fish were harmed.

Sightless songbirds for morose, sulky boys

Here's a nasty, but curious, slice of Victoriana from Wikipedia:

In 1882 the English publisher Samuel Orchart Beeton issued a guide on the care of caged birds and included the recommendation: "To parents and guardians plagued with a morose and sulky boy, my advice is, buy him a chaffinch." Competitions were held where bets were placed on which caged chaffinch would repeat its song the greatest number of times. The birds were sometimes blinded with a hot needle in the belief that this encouraged them to sing.

Just one of a very long list of needless cruelties that people once thought were OK.

More surprisingly, this sort of thing didn't die out with the Victorians. Apparently, competitive sing-offs between caged chaffinches (called vinkenzetting, or vinkensport) is still a thing in Belgium, although at least blinding the birds was banned in the 1920s (interestingly enough, as a result of a campaign by blind World War I veterans, it says here). Even so:

Modern animal rights activists, such as those from the Flemish Bird Protection Society, accuse trainers of "brainwashing" birds into singing more than is natural or healthy by playing looped recordings of finch calls, and that caging birds in the intentionally small and dark contest boxes is cruel.  

Of course, morose and sulky boys that they are, some of the owners still find bizarre reasons to criticise the songs of the birds they've imprisoned in the dark for their own amusement:

Some vinkeniers claim that finches from the different regions of Belgium sing in different dialects; with birds from the Dutch-speaking Flanders singing "in Dutch" and those from the French-speaking Wallonia singing undesirably "in French".

Howl and Boo

Since February, we've known that the United Kingdom's government knows that any plausible version of Brexit will almost certainly make the UK poorer, not richer (tl;dr graphic version here).

On the face of it, that was a big deal and a strong argument for having another vote to check whether the people of the UK really want to be poorer. However, the Express's headline writers, having had two months to produce a watertight counter-argument, have come up with, not one, but two (count 'em!) irrefutable arguments against thinking twice about this whole thing:

"Question Time audience HOWL and BOO commentator for advocating second Brexit referendum"

To me, Howl and Boo sound great as names for a pair of children's cartoon characters, maybe not so great as conclusive arguments for leaving the largest free trade area on the planet, but what do I know?

Arron Banks, the wealthy donor partly responsible for the Brexit campaign, explained leave’s media strategy thus: “The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally."

Maybe, with Howl and Boo, we've reached the logical conclusion of Banksy's campaign to lobotomise political argument, all the better to connect with unthinking gut instinct which, as any fule kno, is all you need to make good decisions about the future of international trade, tariffs and customs unions.

But, then again, over the last couple of years, whenever I've imagined that the level of policical debate has definitely reached rock bottom, some twit has whipped out a stonking great diamond-tipped drill and bored down a bit further into the bedrock. Howl and boo too complicated for you? Coming soon to a headline near you: "Audience members GRUNT and HOWL at smelly Remoaners."

Oh well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. All together now:

"All the little pigs, they grunt and howl
The cats mee-yow
The dogs bow-wow
Everybody makes a row
Down on Jollity Farm..."

"...Everything's a perfect treat
Down on Jollity Farm..."

"Propping up extremist groups with fascist tendencies"

During testimony on Capitol Hill on 10 April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged — for the first time — that it is “entirely possible” there’s a connection between Facebook users who had their data taken by psychographics firm Cambridge Analytica and content generated by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA)...

...In March 2018, Malcolm Nance, a retired naval counterintelligence officer, author and frequent television commentator on national security issues, tells us he has long believed Cambridge Analytica provided a “data bridge” between Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks, a document dumping site founded by embattled Australian national Julian Assange that played a key role in the 2016 election cycle by leaking hacked e-mails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, starting in summer of that year.

In November 2017, Cambridge Analytica executive Alexander Nix confirmed that he had reached out to Assange to see if he would share some of the hacked emails with the company. Assange claimed he had turned the request down...

...Nance said he believes Cambridge Analytica’s story won’t end with the 2016 election, and that it was only one chapter in a long game with the end goal of crumbling Western liberal democracies from the inside out by propping up extremist groups with fascist tendencies, and turning citizens against each other.

Of course, "entirely possible" doesn't equal "confirmed" and Malcolm Nance's beliefs may be mistaken. Although these possibilities aren't just clogging up the conspiracy theory drain of the Internet, but are being given space on the respected fact-checking site Snopes, so maybe we (and hopefully any actual conspirators) should start worrying.

It certainly makes Farage's assignation with Assange for alleged "journalistic purposes" look even more intriguing. Especially since Farage still hasn't, to my knowledge, published any journalism resulting from that fascinating encounter.

Ears of corn

"We must also recognise there are real economic reasons why people have played up the issue of the Irish border and the need to have the shibboleth of the Good Friday Agreement."

Labour politician Barry Gardiner being just plain wrong about the Good Friday Agreement. A shibboleth, you'll recall, is a social marker which distinguishes members of an ingroup from members an outgroup:

...the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Judges 12

The only function of the shibboleth is to distinguish between groups. The word's intrinsic, specific meaning is unimportant ("The term originates from the Hebrew word shibbólet (שִׁבֹּלֶת‬), which literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain or, in different contexts, "stream, torrent").

The intrinsic, specific meaning of The Good Friday Agreement, in contrast, matters. The Republic of Ireland amended its constitution to remove its territorial claims to the whole island of Ireland. The United Kingdom ended direct rule in Northern Ireland. New agreements were made between Ireland and the UK and between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Watchtowers and border posts came down. People mostly stopped killing one another.

A daft quibble about cereal pronunciation it wasn't.

But Gardiner's use of the word did get me thinking about actual shibboleths. Not only was Gardiner wrong about the Good Friday Agreement itself, which was not a shibboleth, but the Good Friday Agreement precisely destroyed the power of shibboleths that had previously divided Irish people on both sides of the border:

In the BBC documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, for instance, Graham Norton describes fraught childhood visits to his grandmother’s Belfast home:

I remember once my father got lost [in the Sandy Road area] and we were walking around, and I’d be gabbling on and my father was like, “shut up! Shut up!” Because if anyone heard our voices, you know, we spoke with a southern accent, it would have been trouble.

Dialect blog.

The Good Friday Agreement was all about getting rid of barriers and shibboleths. The global Trumpists, the Brexiteers and the alt-right are all about putting up walls, taking back control of our borders, sorting folk into "them" and "us", taking something as unimportant as skin colour or birthplace and turning it into a shibboleth.

For a long time I didn't understand why these sort of people kept on using this weird stereotypical vocabulary that you never ever hear ordinary folk using in everyday life - "snowflake", "SJW", "cuck", and so on. It doesn't make sense if you assume that these individuals are using language to communicate with others outside their own group. It makes perfect sense if you assume that these words are shibboleths, being used to self-identify as part of the ingroup.

One of the zeitgeisty books of the noughties was a hatchet job on business bullshit titled Why Business People Speak Like Idiots. Clearly there's a gap it today's market for a book called Why The Alt-Right Speak Like Idiots (tl;dr answer: because shibboleths).

Chocolate teapots and other useful things

1. It was as useful as a chocolate teapot. That is to say, children loved it, and crowded around asking for another; and it might just have saved the life of someone who was starving.

2. It went down like a lead balloon. Which is to say: it was designed to go down, and did so very successfully; and unlike the other balloons it was able to go into the deep ocean and explore there, perhaps holding a fragile crew within its compass to take notes.

Unlike raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, these have never appeared on anybody's list of favourite things, at least until they were reimagined at Listing to Port. See here for another six rehabilitated things to go with your chocolate teapot and lead balloon.

The respect he deserves

Here's the United Kindom's excuse for a foreign secretary, showing how to suck up to a racist, authoritarian anti-Semitic bully:

Congratulations to Fidesz and Viktor Orban on winning the elections in Hungary. We look forward to working with our Hungarian friends to further develop our close partnership. #UKandHungary

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) 9 April 2018

And here's Jean-Claude Juncker demostrating the correct diplomatic protocol:


Well played, Jean-Claude. If you need a list of other people overdue for a bit of disrespect and a good slap, I've got a few names here. The list, of course, starts with Boris:

The foreign secretary joins Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Matteo Salvini, Beatrix von Storch, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini in sending his congratulations to Viktor Orban. https://t.co/vw0Jgxh6FQ

— Peter Foster (@pmdfoster) 9 April 2018

"There's a frood who really knows where his towel is..."

"...from."

"Frenchtex  100% Egyptian cotton loops ... Made in Colombia"

As a citizen of nowhere,* I approve this towel.





*At least until the bastards rob me and my family of our EU citizenship rights.

A spotter's guide to Caucasian wingnuts

"From pollination to the Caucasian wingnut's first released seed you could have taken 28,478,544 steps." Message set into a paving stone outside the Network Rail building, Milton Keynes.

The Caucasian wingnut (AKA the Caucasian walnut), Pterocarya fraxinifolia, is a deciduous tree, native to the Caucasus/Iran region. Apparently, it can grow up to 20m high, bears small green winged nutlets and its dark wood is often used in veneers, so it can't, unlike certain other Caucasian wingnuts I could mention, be accused of being neither use nor ornament.

Fraudian slip?

"FRAUD WARNING: Exploiting BREXIT among top ways scammers will cheat people out of money", caution the Express's headline writers.

Whether the headline is symptomatic of severe irony deficiency, or just a rare lucid insight, the fortuitous pairing of Brexit and fraud is probably not the best look for the Europhobic press to be wearing right now.*

Whatever the reason, I find myself in the rare position of endorsing an Express headline. Being gullible enough to believe the people who sold the nation Brexit probably is a fair predictor of susceptibility to scammers.



* Update - although, as our learned friend points out, mere electoral fraud wouldn't invalidate the result, at least legally speaking. But it would certainly undermine the political legitimacy of the failing Brexit project.

"Nudge, nudge, wink, wink..."

Let's run with that unstated assumption that "those ‘choice architects’ claiming that they know what is best for society and individual citizens are exempt from that theory [i.e. nudge theory]."

Nudgers are, by definition, more powerful than the people they nudge, and more powerful generally means richer. If the poor are nudged, for their own good, does that mean that everything is now OK, because their self-evidently superior betters can be trusted to act rationally and reasonably at all times? How's rule by enlightened plutocrats working out?

Then there's the outsized role that rich peoples' irrational prejudices play in the policy sphere: whether that's Wahabism and its systematic oppression of women, or American hydrocarbon barons' climate denial, Mike Pence's Dominionism, Gwyenth Paltrow's multi-million-dollar science-denial business, Putin's violent aggression against anyone who criticizes the Russian Orthodox church, or Prince Charles's absurd belief in homeopathy. When the richest of the rich can swing policy outcomes just by insisting that they're right and everyone else is wrong, evidence is unceremoniously dumped and we all have to survive the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology.

It's worse than that, actually, because when the shear occurs, the rich don't just admit they were wrong and move on. They jail people who point out their mistakes, get their paid-for lawmakers to defund research into their pet theories, and deny, deny, deny, until the seas rise and measles kill our kids.

Cory Doctorow

Either that, or they're wittering on about the urgent need to create a massive network of enormous pneumatic tubes, so people can travel in individual pods, because if you catch a bus, like normal people, you just might end up sitting next to a serial killer. Or falling for quacks who promise them eternal youth if they inject their ageing bodies with young peoples' blood.

It's almost as if unchecked inequality, which lets the irresponsible whims of the few trump the interests of the many, is more of a problem than the alleged fecklessness of the poor.

"...say no more!"

Boris and Vlad's PR agency

Is this what Mrs Mayday meant by a "red, white and blue Brexit"?

Both Sanni and Wylie have also confirmed that the harvested information has been shared with Kremlin linked entities.

These could include the Internet Research Agency troll farm in St Petersburg, accused by Robert Mueller and the US Supreme Court of manipulating the Trump vote in the US.

With a budget of approximately $1.25 million, the Internet Research Agency is mostly funded by Oligarch Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, linked to the three state run TV networks in Russia and known by the Russian media as “Putin’s Chef.”

Prighozin, who held clandestine meetings with Robert Mercer in the Virgin Islands during the Trump Presidential Campaign, also has a major interest in Wagner Group, the corporate mercenary army implicated in war crimes in Donbas, Crimea and Syria.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned, together with his daughter Yulia and a British policeman, in Salisbury this month using a deadly nerve agent developed by the Russian military.

A source close to Skripal has said he was investigating the collusion between the Internet Research Agency, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL.

Roger Cottrell.

Having already photoshopped an image of Corbyn onto a red Kremlin background and - purely fortuitously - softened the outline of his cap to make it look like a fur hat, I presume that the BBC, in the interests of balance, will now be giving Boris, the Vote Leave Commissar, a similar Russia-themed graphic makeover?

What d'you mean "Nyet"?

Hmmm ... It's almost as if the British establishment will let a chap get away with almost anything, so long as he attended Eton or Marlborough.

Ukip still alive, allegedly

As of today, Ukip's crowdfunding site is still showing only £620 raised of the £100,000 needed. But interim leader Gerrard Batten has been boasting that the Kippers have not only raised more than the £100,000 they were begging for, but that they've settled their £175,000 defamation bill by "other means."

Disappointing, if true.

Assuming it is, I wonder who's throwing money at these clowns? Presumably not the small grass roots donors the crowdfunding site was there to attract. The wonga is more likely to have come from a well-heeled source like Mayfair-based Growth Financial Services Ltd, who bunged the Kippers £154,000 in Q4 of 2017. Time, and the Electoral Commission, will tell.

If they're back, I seriously doubt that it's by popular demand.

Who nudges the nudgers?

Nobody, because they're rational and unbiased, honest:

It struck me during Chris Wylie’s commentary about the use of “behavioural science” that his language reflected the central ideas of nudge theories, he was using words like “heuristics”, “cognitive bias” and so on. He outlined the basic premise of nudge, too – the idea that humans are fundamentally ‘irrational’. (Yet curiously, those ‘choice architects’ claiming that they know what is best for society and individual citizens are exempt from that theory).

And if you believe that you're welcome to trust them.

Ukip death clock update

On March 16th, the crowdfunding site set up to raise £100,000 to "save Ukip" had raised just £610. By March 25th this had gone up to £620. Today, with UK local elections just a month away and a leadership election due before the end of May, they've raised:

Yep, it's still £620.

You might call this a crowdfunding page.

I call it the Ukip death clock.

Angry waters

Bank holiday Monday, England. Incessant rain falls from a colourless sky and anger rules the tiny greyish waves on the ornamental lake.

Everything still LÖUDER than everything else

... and they're not skimping on the stage lights, either:

April fool!




That's no rock concert ... It's a combine harvester!

Now try not to think of The Wurzels.