President Zelensky’s Dog and Pony Trick

 The “Daddy, I want a pony” tactic goes roughly like this:

Little girl: Daddy, I want a pony! Want pony! Want want want pony!


Dad: Uhm, no, uhm, uhm, no, how about a dog?


Little girl: No no no NO! Want pony! PONY! …Dog? Well, ok then.

At this point the dad thinks, “Phew, that was a close call!”. The little girl on the other hand thinks “Wow, that’s the easiest dog I ever got.”

Zelensky’s pony is a no fly zone and the dog is anything he can get his hands on to prolong the war in the Ukraine.

The BBC has a good article on Zelensky’s tactics.

Shame on you': How President Zelensky uses speeches to get what he needs 

The more equipment we give him the longer he will prolong the war. The less need he will feel to negotiate. The more Ukrainians will get killed.

He has become a dangerous war hawk who might embarrass Biden et al into doing something that ends in a nuclear war. 

Politicians often feel the need ‘to do something’ no matter how foolish that might be.  

Fortunately, I suspect most Americans do not even know where the Ukraine is and care more about the price of gasoline than anything happening in Europe so Biden should not be under too much pressure. 

Even so, somebody needs to tell Zelensky to shut his mouth before we all find ourselves running about screaming with our hair on fire.

My car insurance just got cheaper

I just got the renewal notice for my car insurance. It is over £50 less than last year.

Why?

The car is the same. The drivers are the same. I live in the same place. I have had the full no claims discount for years.

I wonder if it is anything to do with this -

"The biggest shake-up to the insurance industry for decades takes place on Saturday, when insurers will be banned from quoting policyholders a higher price to renew their home or motor insurance than they would offer a new customer.

After years of complaints that customers who regularly switched insurer were paying significantly lower premiums than those who renewed, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has said they must be offered the same price."

In other words the insurance companies have been overcharging loyal customers [like me] and using the money to buy new customers.

You can read the full article here  https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/dec/30/landmark-uk-insurance-shakeup-poised-to-benefit-loyal-customers

My insurers are Direct Line. 

 

How university lecturers are chosen

It often comes as a surprise to those outside academia to discover how relatively unimportant teaching ability is considered in many university recruitment decisions. In one institution in which I worked, we took the radical step – resisted by some colleagues – of introducing sample teaching sessions as part of our appointment process.

As the students were leaving, after its first try out, one had a question: “Did you say”, he asked, “this was the first time you’d done this?”

“Yep”, we said.

“So before”, he asked perplexed, “you used to appoint lecturers without checking they could lecture?”

“Yep”, we said.

The cogs turned within his head, and – as if one of life’s great mysteries had finally been solved – he exclaimed: “Ah, well that explains it.”

Philip Cowley, Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London    

This is very true. I cannot recall a single instance of an appointments panel checking if candidates could actually lecture [or considering it when promotion decisions were being made].

Only research mattered. That was not acceptable when higher education was free and students got grants. It is totally unacceptable when there are high fees and and students incur heavy debts.

There is a lot wrong with the UK's higher education sector but no sign that the government is capable of making the necessary reforms.

Amazons second hand ripoff

For the third time this year Amazon has sent me a second hand item, presumably a return from another customer,  when I actually ordered and paid for a new item.

If Amazon wants to sell its returns it has to make it clear that that is what it is offering and price them accordingly.

I think it is dishonest to charge a new item price but actually deliver a second hand item.

When I have tried to mention this in feedback Amazon emails back saying they cannot publish the post.

Fake News

Having purveyed fake news for decades the British press is getting frightfully annoyed about fake news on the internet. Nobody hates a liar more than a than a lying hypocrite.

How dare these internet scallywags lie to the public. That's the prerogative of the government and the media. How else can our rulers maintain the false consciousness that is so essential to the maintenance of a well policed state.

One of the reasons that some people voted to leave the EU was that some British newspapers had been printing lies and distortions about the EU ever since we joined. The sustained drip, drip of poison finally had its designed effect.Of course, Brexit will be  bad for most people, but some chaps expect to do very well out of it once they are free of all that annoying EU regulation.

The Economist has a nice piece from Cory Doctorow identifying the most prolific purveyors of fake news about the EU.

EU lies and the British tabloids who told them

 Private Eye has a cartoon which neatly skewers the hypocrisy of the Daily Mail [and the stupidity of its readers].

England saved from Heffalumps

Andrew Parker, Director General of MI5 [aka the Security Service] and head of Britain's secret police  warned that Britain was facing its gravest threat from fanatics and his agency had foiled six major plots to attack this country in the last year – the highest he has ever known. Mr Parker is trying to persuade Parliament to gives his organisation even more surveillance powers.

Here at MI4786 [and two thirds] we have had another successful year keeping the country free of heffalump attacks. Our department foiled 17,689 heffalump plots to launch attacks on our country. If even one of these  attacks had succeeded millions would have died.  I am confident we can continue to defeat heffalumps if our budget is doubled and we are given the power to enter any property and strip search any person we choose [and I am given a knighthood when I retire].

Mr Parker would undoubtedly claim that the fact that in Britain only one person has  been killed by a terrorist in the past ten years demonstrates that MI5 is putting its funds and sweeping powers to good use.

However, here at MI4786 [and two thirds] we have ensured that not even one person has been killed by heffalumps in the past twenty years and that demonstrates that we are even worthier of more of everything.

A Boy's Guide to Detecting Evil

Evil v Definitely Not Evil

Evil	Not Evil
Supplying arms to Ukrainian rebels	Supplying arms to Syrian rebels
Russians not giving money to US & UK politicians	Zionists giving money to US & UK politicians
Killing civilians	Killing human shields
Occupying Crimea	Occupying Iraq, Afghanistan etc.
Selling Russian oil & gas to Europe	Selling US oil & gas to Europe
Shooting down a civilian airliner [MH 17]	Shooting down a civilian airliner [Iranian Air 655]  See note 1
Facts & evidence	Unsupported accusations and ranting

 NOTES

1. In 1988 the USS Vincennes guided missile cruiser shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 civilian passengers on board, including 38 non-Iranians and 66 children. At the time of the attack the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters and IR655 was within Iranian airspace. It was also broadcasting an IFF signal indicating it was a civilian aircraft. When the Vincennes  returned to port its officers were rewarded with medals and promotions.

Eddie Mair and 'fishy' data retention

On today's edition of the BBC five o'clock news Eddie Mair gave a pathetic Liberal Democrat Home Office Minister a good kicking over the new Data Retention laws which are to be rushed through Parliament.

At one point he asked the poor sod if the public should find it fishy that all the three main political parties were supporting this nonsense.

Of course it is not fishy, Eddie.  It just means that our secret police have gathered enough blackmail information on the parties from past data retention that they can force them to do whatever they want.  An situation that was entirely foreseeable once that fool Blair was talked into forcing data retention through the EU Parliament and then through the UK Parliament.

Politicians and journalists must be truly stupid if they do not realise they are going to be the main targets of data retention. We might catch a few criminals and terrorists but political power for our UK versions of J Edgar Hoover is the main pay-off from data retention.

They are the masters now and are so confident of their powers that they don't even bother to think up plausible excuses or reasons for their actions.

As Craig Murray says in his latest post, "It is not that they expect us to believe them – they just don’t care. They have the power, and we don’t.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron to do honourable thing?

The BBC reports

"Tomorrow members of the National Union of Teachers will walk out in a long-running dispute over performance related pay, pensions and workload – forcing many schools to close.


Mr Cameron told Prime Minister’s Questions the NUT’s strike ballot had taken place in 2012 on a 27%  turn out.


"I think the time has come for looking at setting thresholds in strike ballots.

"How can it possibly be right for our children's education to be disrupted by trade unions acting in that way? It is time to legislate and it will be in the Conservative manifesto."

Dave is right,  27%  is not enough. That is why I know he is going to resign.

He became Prime Minister after the 2010 General Election in which his party got 36.1% of the vote on a turn out of 65.1%.

36.1% x 65.1% = 23.5%

I know that if Dave the Dim really believes in thresholds he will realise that he cannot be Prime Minister when only 23.5% of the electorate voted for his party.  That is well below any legitimacy threshold.

Obviously he will now do the honourable thing and resign.

Sick of it

This is the first of what may well be many posts on things that are currently annoying me.

1.  Olympics in any shape or form.

2.  Headmasters and teachers moaning about the marking of exam results.

3.  The BBC's biased reporting on Syria. When are they going to stop broadcasting rebel press releases as if they were factual reporting? When is the BBC going to mention the plight of ordinary citizens who might not appreciate Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the USA and the UK financing a war in their neighbourhoods? 

Sick of it - The Olympics ad nauseam

I soon got sick of the  excessive media coverage of the games. I was never very interested and by the end I was thoroughly sick of hearing the word Olympics.

The problem is that July/August is a low news period. Parliament is in recess, most of the more intelligent journalists are on holiday in Tuscany and the low brow sports reporters have hogged the media in the absence of anything better.

I do not care who can run the fastest or jump the farthest.  I don't want to bath in any reflected glory if my countries athletes win medals. It is nice for them if it is what they want but it has nothing to do with me. I didn't do anything; other than pay extra taxes.

As usual the dimwit journalists have missed the real story about the games.

That is that it has been an organisational triumph.  A colossal organisational task  was completed flawlessly. The facilities were completed ahead of time and under budget. The transport system coped extremely well. Nobody had anything other than praise for how the games were organised. That is the real British triumph.

I don't expect the media to ever notice but it would be nice if the politicians, particularly Cameron and Johnson, acknowledged that the real heroes of the games are the people who behind the scenes who made everything work so well.