‘A house divided’ – never a good thing. Bye, bye the united United States? If you value your unity, get rid of the orange cretin, a fraud, a fantasist, fat and old

Recently I’ve been wanting to write again about one Donald J Trump, but each time I held back, for one simple reason: there’s nothing much new to say.

From where I sit in the far south-west of England, America 3,000 to 6,000 miles away, seems deeply, deeply divided into two: those who – still – think the sun shines out of Donny’s arse, and those – like me – who think he is the mother of all cretins, dumb, self-deluded and living in a fantasy world all of is own.

Thus if I were to write here to remind you that ‘water is wet’, you would be entitled to ask ‘OK, so why are you telling us?’

Those two irreconcilable halves of America might not, though, be the full story. Conventionally, it was assumed that at the presidential election last November which resulted in Donny winning the electoral college vote by 86 electoral college votes (312 to 226 for Kamala Harris) was not a simple ‘Democrats v Republicans split.

Many of those who voted for Trump are thought to have been independents, registered or othwerice, who de facto voted against the Democrats. Many are thought to have been Republicans who wanted a conservative president and although they had no time for Trump himself, held their noses and ticked his box as he was the only GOP candidate on offer.

This is all speculation, of course, and as a rule I don’t have a great deal of respect of speculation and regard it is imply ‘guessing’ with with a posher accent and and a spurious air of authority.

What we can say, however that a result Donny, never one to tell the truth, even on a good day, likes to spin into ‘a landslide’ was nothing of the kind. He won the popular vote by a very anaemic 1.5% – that is 2,284967 votes of a total 152,320,193 cast –, not ‘a landslide’ in anyone’s book, I suggest.

And if you, dear reader, are into ‘speculating’, you might care to ‘speculate’ how many of the 77,302,580 who voted for Donny were ‘MAGA’ supporters. Not as many as Donny might have persuaded himself, and nine months in with prices and inflation creeping up I suspect there might now be fewer prepared to accept Donny’s spiel.

But even that is more in the line of ‘water is wet’: it is simply retreading old ground and, frankly, why?

What is worth writing about, though, is how Donny’s second term in the White House is developing in the United States, and it is far from encouraging: the problems are no longer economic, although they are not also becoming more severe, but political.

. . .

As we live day-to-day, week-to-week, we have a rather skewed concept of ‘what is going on’. Developments ‘in contemporary history’ – which is admittedly is a ham-fisted phrase but I can think of no alternative at the moment, let alone a better one – do not seem to happen very quickly.

It might sound daft to say so, but for a week to pass we must live through seven days and for month to pass we cannot rush through the weeks – it will always be four weeks. So looking around, when we can’t spot much activity we assume ‘everything is in hand’. Of course it might not be – it is just taking longer to work its way out.

I enjoy reading history and at present I’m reading about the English civil wars (there were actually two, a long one, then a short one), and when we read history, we do gain a sense of ‘development’ and that ‘development’ does not happen in one weekend.

A good example would be ‘the outbreak of the First World War’ (then called The Great War as at the time no one was planning a ‘Second World War’).

The Dick and Dora version known to most would have ‘war starting’ on June 28, 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist.

In fact, the war had been several years, arguably at least 36, in the making from 1888 when Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm was crowned after the death of his older brother Friederich III and immediately found himself at odds with Otto von Bismarck.

Neither Bismarck nor Wilhelm were ‘nice’ people, but Bismarck was considerably brighter than the Kaiser and certainly more strategic (and, like Trump, thought himself to be rather a smart cookie although he was anything but).

After several bad disagreements in council with Wilhelm, who arguably childishly wanted his own was – after he ‘he was the emperor – Bismarck gave in and resigned, and Germany was in the hands of something of an idiot, much as America is now.

In Wilhelm’s fumbling hands, the elements that led to war in August 1914 one by one fell into place. Like Trump, Wilhelm had an inferiority complex which manifested itself, as in Trump, in brooking no opposition of any kind and demanding total loyalty. There was thus no one to give Wilhelm good advice when it might be needed, just as is the case with Trump (and like Donny, Wilhelm also became a figure of fun in private).

I’m quite prepared to accept that Scott Bessent and one or two others in Donny’s cabinet who have financial and economic experience are fully aware of the stupidity of Donny’s economic policies but, for whatever reason – status, perhaps – prefer to keep schtumm.

The point is that WWI like all other wars did not suddenly ‘break out’, and bearing that in mind, we might care to look at several unusual developments in America since Donny took office which could indicate how the growing disaster that seems due will evolve.

. . .

One not so obvious starting point what I suggest might be an uncomortable period in both American and global history might be a decision by the supreme court of the United States (SCOTUS) on July 1, 2024, which was by any measure extraordinary. Until then, a US president could not be sued in a civil court for any acts he (or she, but ‘a she’ is still to come) had undertaken in the course of his (or her) presidential duties. The new ruling was that the same applied to any criminal acts a president might similar commit.

I am not a lawyer and will not claim that my thinking is always straight or the best. But SCOTUS’s ruling strikes me as dangerous. But the impossibly vague nature of what a president might claim was a ‘presidential act’ promises huge confusion.

SCOTUS’s handling of the issue came after Donny summoned his followers to meet outside Congress on January 6, 2024, to protest.

Although he never openly said so – he has the kind of peasant cunning one finds in many backstreet thugs which combined with an essential stupidity makes them very dangerous and was wise enough to be clear – he claimed he had lost the election the previous November because of fraud and the result should not be certified.

His mob eventually and literally invaded Congress, and he was subsequently indicted for insurrection. But eventually SCOTUS, which had a Republican majority, let Donny off the hook. To quote from the preface to SCOTUS’s ruling:

A federal grand jury indicted former President Donald J. Trump on four counts for conduct that occurred during his Presidency following the November 2020 election. The indictment alleged that after losing that election, Trump conspired to overturn it by spreading knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the collecting, counting, and certifying of the election results. Trump moved to dismiss the indictment based on Presidential immunity, arguing that a President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities, and that the indictment’s allegations fell within the core of his official duties. The District Court denied Trump’s motion to dismiss, holding that former Presidents do not possess federal criminal immunity for any acts. The D. C. Circuit affirmed. Both the District Court and the D. C. Circuit declined to decide whether the indicted conduct involved official acts.

After hearing oral arguments from both sides, it made its ruling on presidential immunity.

Quite how ridiculous that ruling is – and were there any doubt about my opinion of Donny, that last sentence should lay to rest any doubts – might be gauged from the following: in response to a hypothetical question from

one of the justices, John Sauer, Trump’s attorney argued that if it were deemed to be a ‘presidential act’ within his duties, a president who a political opponent murdered would be immune from prosecution.

That pretty much sums up the dangerous state America now finds itself in but that was over a year ago – there have been other more sinister developments. What is remarkable is that this bizarre ruling form SCOTUS seemed almost to pass with comment in a nation that had hitherto prized itself and posed as the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy.

I shall leave to one side Donny’s ridiculous programme of ‘reciprocal tariffs’ he unveiled on April 3 in the White House Rose Garden (now apparently a parking lot. Oh well, this is Donald Trump after all).

Donny’s quite blatant authoritarian tendencies became very clear when sent out his ICE goons to round-up ‘illegal migrants’, all based on a ridiculous claim that ‘the country was being invaded’. ICE made one terrible mistake and detained and deported to El Salvador, but Donny then doubled down and tied himself in knots rather than give way.

There are further details, at each point underlining how stupid Donny’s administration is, but I shan’t go into them here except to add that a charge of ‘contempt of court’ is just one of the complications Donny’s gang of morons have landed themselves with.

It gets worse: claiming another ‘national emergencies’ because allegedly crime it out of control, Donny had state national guards sent on to the streets which looked very much like the military taking over policing duties, certainly forbidden under the constitution.

The suspicion is that Donny wants to set precedents. And notably he only claimed ‘crime was out of control’ in blue states, although the stats show that crime is a bigger problem in red states. But Donny is not one to allow details to deter him – and, anyway, the whole point of the exercise was to have a semi-plausible excuse for sending in the national guard: the stats are irrelevant.

Most recently there was one of the oddest developments: Donny had Pete Hegseth, the former Secretary of Defense, now Secretary of War, summon all American senior officers from around the world for a meeting in Virginia. They were not told why or what the purpose of the meeting was.

Two suggested explanations, both fundamentally nuts but sadly not at all implausible, are that Donny wanted to ’test loyalty’ of the armed forces leaders who were expressly told that it they did not agree with the policies and policy objectives of the Trump administration, they must resign.

This, of course, put them in a terrible situation: if on principle they did resign, they are out of the game and would have not clout at all. If they do not resign, they might well feel themselves obliged to undertake actions with which they do not agree.

Furthermore, this whole business is horribly reminiscent of Hitler’s antics when he manoeuvred himself into controlling the German army as well as setting up a kind of alternative army in the SS.

. . .

Despite all the bullshit coming out of the administration, America is not thriving economically and it is very, very likely that the Republicans will be wiped out of the House of Representative and lose senators in the mid-term elections. And Donny knows this.

So there are quite serious suggestions that he will somehow ensure there are no mid-terms, perhaps by claiming there is a national emergency and declaring martial law.

Does that sound mad? Of course it does, it sounds absolutely fucking bonkers! But equally as bonkers would have been to predict that Donny would resist the peaceful transfer of power in January 2024 and do his best to stope the election being certified. But that is exaclty what he did.

Most distressing of all is the apparent supine attitude of the opposition Democrats who apart from notable exception seem to be doing nothing.

The real danger is – and this is where many will decide I have lost the plot – another American civil war. Did he really suggest that? Yes, he fucking did.

Unlike in Europe, America is awash with guns and there are some very odd attitudes to gun deaths: this is what St Charlie Kirk, MAGA’s very own Horst Wessel told a Turning Point rally in 2023

The 21 victims murdered at the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022, whose deaths, however, were ‘worth it’ according to Charlies Kirk, MAGA’s very own Horst Wessel. Ironically, though Yanks rarely do irony unless they are Jewish and have a sense of humour, Kirk was also a gun death victim. I wonder whether his wife and the mother of his two children agree that his death was ‘worth it’? Doubt it

It just takes hotheads on both side for the whole thing to get way out of control. ‘Getting out of control’ is how most wars start (except Vlad Putin’s ‘limited military action’ – that was planned, though it was planned to be done and dusted in a matter of weeks. Now more than three years on and almost a million dead . . .)

With luck, America will get through this. But will it get that luck?

The final irony is that none of this should come as the surprise it seems to be to many folk. Trump has always been very clear that he does not believe in democracy, wants to rule like a king, doesn’t give a shit about anyone except himself and loves no one but himself.

He is also a sandwich short of a picnic, but that is just the icing on his cake.

 

Are Apple now really just a gang of hypocritical, greedy wankers without a new idea in their bones or is that just malicious hearsay? You decide. Me, I decided long ago – read on

Here’s a notable development – remember ‘Apple, Think Different’? Apple at the forefront of innovation, in the avant garde of a brave new world, Apple [add your own hyperbole]? Well, Apple is failing, slowly but surely.

It is not that since the death of Jobs and the departure of Jonathan Ive Apple have lost something essential that made Apple Apple. It’s also that with the rise to leadership of one Tim Cook - whose Apple background was not in any way technical but always commercial - making money seems to be the raison d’etre of Apple.

Bugger Apple’s previous reputation for making imaginative products with user-friendly software, now it has become recycling old ideas, the challenge always to be how to disguise the fact that recycling is going on.

But let me be fair: I don’t have an Apple computer but apparently its M Series of chips are a winner. That, though, is the sum of the winning. Apple glasses are not being bought simply because they are a gimmick.

The iPhone is simply recycled year in, year out with small cosmetic changes to give the impression of being a ‘new model’. The same is true of its Mac OS and IoS operating systems: changes are minimal and, frankly, pointless.

Two days ago I upgraded from IoS v18.6 to v26 on my iPad. I immediately noticed a difference in that it began to lag. My iPad is only four years old so not ‘old’ or ‘obsolete’, but it is now lagging. This morning I tried to downgrade to the previous IoS, v186, but as it is no longer ‘signed’, that is impossible.

So I am no stuck with an iPad which is no longer as much use to me as it was. Somewhat miffed, I went to the Apple Community forum and - headlinong my contribution clearly as ‘Not a question but a complaint’ asked why we could not longer downgrade and what the reasoning was.

In my post I went on to criticise Apple in similar terms as I have above. Several hours later I was informed my post had been deleted. Apple might argue that its community forum is not the place for such criticism, but I would suggest the opposite is true. I immediately posted again twice in response, but each post was gain deleted, notably within minutes.

Here is the text of my original comment

Here is my second comment, this time being pretty straight about what spineless wankers Apple are, though, er, not expressing myself in such plain English

OK, I’m not kidding myself on that this signifies the slow collapse of the Western World. But anyone here who can still remember the Apple glory days – how using an Apple compared to a Windows machine was straightforward and how the slogan ‘It’s an Apple’ did somehow convey quality and reliability.

Looking back, I don’t at all mind conceding that we were all a little naive and overexcited by the ‘possibilities’ of the – then new – technical age. And that naivety – I bought my second computer in 1999, sadly only an Apple clone because I couldn’t afford the real thing (I had very briefly owned a desktop which was still running DOS but it was stolen within weeks when my house in Groton Road, Earlsfield, was burgled over Christmas.)

This was in the days when the internet masqueraded as ‘the information superhighway’ and that astonishing institution was about to usher in a new age of democracy when totalitarianism had no hiding place.

The giveaway was Apple’s little puppy rushing around wagging its tail and Windows had – wait for it! – a fucking talking paper clip which passed on wise advice and warned you if you were using non-PC language. And Lord weren’t we all charmed and excited!

Me, working in newspaper production as a sub-editor – I had given up on reporting after six years as my heart wasn’t in it but more on that another time if the demand is there – was excited by ‘desktop publishing’ with Quark Xpress.

That software was then the only game in town and took users to the cleaners when I first started using it (in a newspaper office, so I wasn’t paying for it) 35 years ago, those shysters took everyone to the cleaners and charged about £800 for it! By my reckoning that would now, in 2025, be about £1,560. But newspapers – at least those that didn’t operate a mainframe had no choice.

Now, ‘the net’ is useful, certainly – I do all my shopping and banking online – but it has also thrown up any amount of nastiness, not least access to child porn for those who want it.

In brief, we have come a long, long way since Apple and Google – fucking ‘Don’t be evil’ for fuck’s sake! – posed as the future in which we were all going to be better people.

OK, I’ve come off-topic now, but it is sobering to find that Apple is now aping one Donal Taco Trump in denying the reality of anything or everything that puts it in a bad light.

So, all together now

In which, inadvertently, I create my very own mob

Many years ago, I organised a disruptive political protest and learned something about an odd aspect of human behaviour. Perhaps I should tread carefully and write that I learned something about an aspect of human behaviour in the ‘civilised’ West and in Western cultures (there are several, though all are related and they are distinguished by ‘local’ cultural variations).

On the face of it I was the most unlikely bod to engage ‘politically’, or better, to seem to engage politically. And I must confess that my motive was ‘fun’ and my tongue was firmly in my cheek.

It was in about 1969 or 1970, and I was about 20 or 21 and knew little about politics and understood less and was even less interested. As a Roman Catholic-born – cradle-Catholic – product of the English public school system – ‘public’ as in ‘private’ in that wacky way we Brits like to confuse the world – I was expected to, or better it was assumed I would, cleave to soft-centred small C conservatism.

I didn’t, however (and as I’ve ‘grown up’ and seen a little more of the world, I find, despite what is expected of ageing gents, to be drifting to the left, though to social democracy not to all out communist fascism).

For some reason, as the child of a German mother and British father who attended German schools for four of his formative years and was in many ways more German than British, I didn’t feel particularly British when we returned to live in Britain from West Berlin in July 1963 and the whole ‘public schoolboy’ schtick just didn’t catch with me.

For three of the previous four years I had attended Das Canisius Kolleg, a Jesuit college in Berlin-Tiergarten (just over a mile through the park to the Brandenburger Tor) whose ethos was one of positivity and ‘doing your best’.

Then in September of 1963, I began life as a boarder at the Roman Catholic Oratory School in Woodcote, Oxfordshire, where it seemed to me the ethos – that is the true ethos of the boys who made up the school rather than the ‘official’ ethos the school might have thought it was inculcating – was almost nihilistic.

I must stress, though, my line about ‘it seemed to me’, as now, in later life, I am far more aware how perception is far more potent than what what might, ludicrously, be called ‘the reality’. I am not denying ‘reality’, as such I am suggesting that there is no one ‘reality’ but pretty much as many ‘realities’ as there are men, women and children on this world.

So to speak of ‘reality’ is in one sense a little pointless.

I had been looking forward to ‘going to boarding school’ because after spending my boyhood reading Billy Bunter (below) books, I anticipated it to be an enjoyable romp of jolly japes, but it was anything but. Of my year’s intake 

49 boys, 47 had attended a ‘prep school’ for at least four or five years and, to be blunt, they had already developed the shell which protects our inner selves from the world. I had not and I was miserable and homesick for what seemed like and extraordinarily long first term of fifteen weeks.

I now know that many boys and girls, men and women have a sense of alienation in one way or another. Perhaps, depending upon the situation and circumstances, such alienation is quite common.

But for me it was partly ‘not feeling English or British’ and not relating to a great deal of what the others seemed – that word again – to have in common. I hadn’t had The Wind In The Willows read to me, I had never played ‘pooh sticks’. Much, perhaps all, of my childhood had been German what with even before moving to Berlin my mother read stories to me in German.

So although when I arrived at Dundee University at the beginning of October 1968, with an impeccable ‘boarding school’ accent and no doubt many ‘public school’ behavioural tics, I did not quite fit the bill, especially in the political role into which folk were ready to give me.

. . .

Until just a year earlier, Dundee University had existed as Queen’s College, St Andrews, but then gained its independent status as part of the then Labour government’s determined expansion of university education.

This expansion meant – in fact, to achieve this was its prime reason – that the intake of colleges and universities was from a far broader social spectrum, notably of young men and women who not ten to fifteen years earlier might never have considered attending university.

Anno domini 2025, modern Britain, rather smugly, likes to see itself – perception and ‘reality’ again, you’ll notice – as classless; but as far as I am concerned, the only difference is that more than 60 years ago ‘class’ distinctions were simply more obvious (and let’s face it snobbery will never go out of fashion).

Pertinently, the 1960s – the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and always remember that these silly, though catchy, descriptions are all invented by national newspaper sub-editors (US copy editors) – became an apparent sea-change in social attitudes, though it didn’t really take off until the Labour Party under Harold Wilson won the 1964 general election.

In fact, there had previously been several such broad, though slow, changes from the mid-1950s on. I suggest they occurred as boys and girls – though it was still very much a male-dominated society – born just before World War II came into their own, found their voice and made themselves heard.

In other words, it was the same old story of a new generation demanding that the previous generation made way!

‘Deference’ went out of the window, it was the heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it was reported that ‘the working class has found a voice’ and novels, plays and films became ‘gritty’ observations of ‘how the other half lived’. That, not uncommon phrase then used, is very, very telling.

One such change was that the new young generation – who I suspect were not quite doing any more shagging then in earlier years but were certainly talking more about – also found their voice, especially those on the left.

This was 1968, the age of ‘student politics’, though if any of that gang had more than a fleeting knowledge of history, they would have known that ‘student politics’ were as old as the hills, as old as greed, altruism, incest and gullibility.

Britain’s young might, with Labour in charge, believe it had it’s ‘left-wing’ government, decried by those on the right as ‘socialists’ (which description was enough to frighten the horses in many a shire parlour), but it was not very left-wing at all and certainly not at all left-wing enough for many of the protesting firebrands.

It wasn’t that many of Labours MPs were more than nominally middle-class, many were not actually socialist but social-democrats who broadly aimed to achieve the same improvements for those at the bottom of the pile. They certainly did not sign up for the hard ideology of ‘all means of production must be nationalised and in the hands of the working man’.

That phrase gives me occasion to trot out an old joke of mine when politicians pledge to take care of the ‘hard-working’ man: ‘So what about the rest of us?

This, then politically naive, young man was well aware of the iniquity of America’s Vietnam war but couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about.

Then there were the protests about the apartheid regime in South Africa and how that nation’s, then all white, cricket team should not be allowed to come take part in a Test series in Britain. The various protests even involved

 

The Oval cricket pitch in Kennington, South London, was surrounded by barbed wire in March 1970 to try to protect it from anti-apartheid protesters intent in disrupting the South African tour by digging up the pitch

digging up a cricket pitch and grounds being defended by strands of barbed wire. But, I wondered, why couldn’t they just sit down and sort it all out. Surely to goodness, was it really that hard?

. . .

The ‘protest’ I organised was against Tony Benn, then still Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who at the time was Labour’s – if my googling is correct – minister for technology, but despite his slow drift leftwards from a ‘soft-left’ stance, he was something of a hate figure for the hard left.

For the non-lefty young he was also disliked because previously as Labour’s ‘postmaster general’ he had begun the government process of outlawing the ‘pirate radio stations’ swimming in the English channel, though by the time

the relevant bill outlawing the stations became law, he had just been promoted to technology minister.

In my book Tony Benn (right) is something of a good egg. He was born and brought up in a ‘progressive’ household (in brackets because I don’t much like the word, but I use it because most will know what I mean).

Both his grandfather and his father were Liberal MPs, but his father crossed the floor and joined the Labour government of Ramsay McDonald in 1928 (when Tony Benn was just three).

When Tony Benn was seventeen, his father was created Viscount Stansgate and when he died in 1960, Tony inherited the title, although he had previously several times, unsuccessfully, tried to renounce his succession and as a peer could not longer sit in the Commons

Finally, in 1963 because it, too, had useful MPs who were due to inherit titles and would thus have to leave the Commons, the Conservative government passed an act allowing peers to renounce their titles. Benn did so and won a seat in a by-election the same year and remained a sitting MP for the next 38 years.

Benn’s drift to the left and to becoming something of a saint of the left began after Labour lost power to Margaret Thatcher in 1979, although he claimed it had started more than a decade earlier when he was in Wilson’s 1960s governments, partly with his impatience by how the civil service was frustrating many attempts at reform.

When I organised my ‘protest’, Benn was still regarded as just another Labour minister, and few if any thought of him as the figure of the left he would become.

. . .

My ‘protest’ began in the students’ union coffee bar on the morning when Benn was duet to give a speech in the, then still new, lecture hall of Dundee’s social science building. And I have no idea why I thought of ‘organising’.

But for some reason I suggested to those I was sitting with that we should go to the meeting and disrupt it. It was certainly not a political gesture on my part.

As I say, Benn was not a figure of the left and on the face of it, this seemed to many a good idea, so a gaggle of us, I should think about six or eight of us, possibly more, took ourselves off to the social science lecture hall and sat up far at the back.

We began, again I should imagine at my instigation, to chant ‘give peace a chance’ and bang our fists in the desks in front of us. And that, dear friends, is all I remember of the ‘protest’ itself.

Whether Benn was forced to abandon his speech, whether we finally gave up and departed and left him to it I have no idea and no recollections at all. As I say as far as I was concerned it was simply a hoot and while it went on it was certainly good-natured.

When we left, we retired to the coffee bar and sat down, talk began of staging another protest, although there was no obvious reason to do so or cause to protest. And it was then I noticed something odd and, for me, quite disturbing.

The small, good-natured group who had returned to the coffee bar had been joined by several others who had somehow heard all about it and before my eyes in a matter of minutes that small good-natured group was evolving into a small mob. It was uncanny and I was not imagining it.

As we can walk into a room and sense joy or sorrow or whatever is the mood of the room. Well, the mood of the group I as sitting with definitely changed and not for the better: it turned dark and nasty.

It was no longer a case of ‘what fun can we have doing something similar’ but more, far more, what ‘damage’ can we do now? And there was a very definite desire to cause ‘damage’ of some kind.

I had inadvertently and innocently created a mindless mob. Or better, the mob had created itself, drawing on the darker elements which, to a small or greater extent, are a part of our psyche.

It was at that point I wanted nothing more to do with whatever they were hoping to do and I never heard reports later that they had done anything. But I could not deny that I had witnessed something which I did not like at all but for which is was, though indirectly, responsible.

I am not suggesting that I don’t, in one way or another, also have a darker side and I could give several examples – but shan’t – of my behaviour of which I am not proud and would condemn. But there and then in the coffee bar, I wanted nothing to do with the small mob I had created.

It did, though, give me an insight as to how, on both the left and right violence can become almost natural, evolve from nowhere and almost seem legitimate. Very odd.

How Donny's 'big, beautiful bill' could help finance his very own 'secret police'. Paranoia? Let's hope so, but perhaps Ernst Röhm and his SA pals might have been a little more paranoid when they took off for a relaxing mid-summer weekend break in Bavaria 91 years ago . . .

Here’s a scenario which might well be filed under ‘conspiracy theory’ by all sane and decent people, and probably should be, but is actually more than a little plausible given what has occurred since January 20 this year (2025).

Donny’s bill going through the US Congress at present, and as I write it has not yet passed, but with come amendments I’m sure will, includes giving ICE another $45 billion to expand its operations and hire another 10,000 agents by 2029.

So that got me thinking . . .

ICE already has many agents who go around in masks and never identify themselves. By the beginning of November 2026 - over the next 17 months - their number will be swelled significantly and their activities widened.

The simple ICE protocol is to grab folk from the street – and they are legally allowed to do exactly that with no immediate explanation if they claim the people they are grabbing are ‘suspected illegal aliens’. There is no fuss, no bother and no comeback, except for the poor saps thus grabbed.

There are already many documented cases where ICE agents have grabbed someone who was not an ‘illegal alien’ and who they subsequently released. Others, though, were initially flown out of the country and there was no recourse to the courts as should be the case: they were out of the country in just a few short hours with very few questions asked (‘You look suspiciously dusky, pal, so come with us!’)

The ICE agents were and are legally covered at all times: they simply have to swear, on oath if need be, that at the time they grabbed someone, they sincerely believed the men, women and children they were arresting and

 detaining were ‘illegal aliens’. That’s it, and pretty much a carte blanche to do what the hell they like.

Those who do not believe ICE and think that claim is just a convenient fig-leaf – there is no way on God’s earth that they can prove that ‘I sincerely believed the dude as an illegal alien and I was simply doing my duty’ is a lot of hooey. They are stymied.

Store that particular dilemma in the file which also contains many, many instances in which a witness up before a Congressional committee has pleaded ‘sorry, I do not recall saying that’. Go on, legal superman, prove said witness is lying and that they do recall it. Go on, score a first. Then be off and drown your defeat and sorrows with a stiff drink.

That all brings me to this: we might like to consider a possible tactic by Donny on November 3, 2026, as voters gather to elect a new representative, a new senator or a new state governor, one in which ICE agents attend a polling stations and ‘arrest’ those they ‘suspect’ of being illegal aliens. And best do it while they are waiting to vote.

This might well take place mainly in purple states and red states where the GOP believes it is in danger to losing to Democratic candidates, on the assumption that all those lining up to vote who look vaguely ‘foreign’ and are thus legally ‘detainable’ in some way are likely to vote Democrat.

All the ICE agents need to do is simple: prevent them from voting by detaining them until voting has closed, then release them with a ‘sorry, but we had good grounds to believe . . .’

If ICE agents are subsequently taken to task about their actions – though that is not very likely it has to be said – they can fall back on their useful standby that ‘I was acting in good faith and simply doing my job because I sincerely did believe I was detaining someone I suspected of being an illegal alien’ with the subtext ‘so fuck off you libtard’.

This line can be passed up the chain of command: ‘All we did was to instruct our agents to attend gatherings where we suspect illegal aliens might congregate. That was their sworn duty and that is all they did.’

Game, set, match and any number of potential Democratic supporters are prevented from voting.

Donny, of course, has the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Card if – again it is possibly not very likely but . . . – the flak reaches the Oval Office: why, hasn’t SCOTUS ruled that a president cannot be accountable for any criminal acts he might have committed while acting as president? It certainly has, and that is luck Donny’s arse well and truly covered.

. . .

I am as a rule not interested in conspiracy theories and in the eternal debate of ‘Conspiracy or Cock-up’, I am a ‘Cock-up’ champion at every turn. But we should remind ourselves that what hitherto in recent history has been regarded as impossible has shown itself as often nothing of the kind.

Had anyone before January 6, 2021, suggested that an incumbent US president would resort to organising what to all intents and purposes was an insurrection when he summoned thousands of MAGA wackos to DC to prevent certification of the presidential election vote, he might well have been carted off by the men in white coats.

Had anyone suggested that an incumbent president agreed to take part in a suggested conspiracy to rig the presidential election in a US state, he, too, would have been locked up for her or his safety.

Whether or not you accept that Donny tried to rig the election in Georgia, remind yourself that three of his former attorneys – Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis – pleaded guilty to being a part of that conspiracy, so one did exist.

There is also overwhelming proof that Donny himself agreed to be a part of the conspiracy, although admittedly none could legally be produced in court, because Donny’s – successful – tactic was to delay as long as possible his own appearance in court in Georgia.

Oh, and consider this: if anyone suggested that a German vice-chancellor would organise the mass murder of 85 of his own supporters, they would be dismissed as being away with the fairies.

Those dismissing might, however, care to consult accounts of what happened at Bad Wiessee in Bavaria, Germany, between June 30 and. July 2, 1934, just over 91 years ago. Oh, and apart from those 85 who were murdered in the course of three days, another 700 odd Nazis and other politicians – including many on the right – were ‘liquidated’ in the subsequent weeks.

As one ostensible reason for eliminating the leadership of the SA (Sturmabteilung), led by Hitler’s former best buddy Ernst Röhm, an out-and-proud gay man (below with Hitler), was the ‘moral turpitude’ of

rampant homosexuality in the SA, any closeted MAGA men and women reading this might care take more care than they usually do.

You can be certain Donny knows all about it as he claims to have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, although as the man is a lazy cunt who doesn’t much like reading, he probably listened to the audiobook or had Karoline Leavitt rustle up a four-minute powerpoint presentation.

All that is an extended way of saying ‘never say never’. The US is living in unprecedented times and no one can take anything for granted. For example, economic indications are that little by little the US economy is going tits up.

I really don’t think it occurred to Donny that the tariffs he imposed on imports would be paid for by American businesses big and small and that these were almost certain to pass on the extra costs to their customers.

Finally, as we are here dealing with conspiracy theories, let me mention one which is also plausible and which has been mentioned by more than one respectable economists who, one might assume, wants nothing to do with wacky conspiracy theories and who one might care to take a little more seriously than all the Q-Anon nutters with their pizza parlour paedophiles.

The claim is that Donny is not averse to crashing the US economy because he believes it would bring down the dollar and makes American goods cheaper abroad – and the US would then sell more – and also make imported goods more expensive so America would start buying fewer imported goods and start buying more domestic products.

On the face of it, that makes sense – except that, as was pointed out in Congress by representative Madeleine Dean when she was questioning secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick on June 5, 2025: why, she asked quite

reasonably, has Donny slapped a tariff on imporing bananas when American doesn’t grow bananas and imports them for that reason?
Lutnick (right), ever the sycophant, gave no answer and simply waffled about this and that.

Given that Donny gives every impression of having limited and short-term peasant cunning than involve himself in anything that might make more intellectual sense, suspecting him of ‘hoping to make the dollar cheaper by crashing the economy’ is not necessarily unlikely.

And I’ll repeat that not a few respected economists, men and women decidedly brighter than the lad from the Jamaica Estates, Queens, have suggested that might well be Donny’s intention.

There is an even more unlikely, though not at all implausible, corollary: that Donny intends to bring civil disobedience to America amid the growing economic upheaval and can use it as a justification for marshalling the national guard in various states to ‘preserve order’.

But, you might be asking, isn’t ordering in the national guard the prerogative of the state governor? Well, yes it is, and Donny knows that is the law. But he drove a coach and four through the law when he ordered the national guard into Los Angeles a few weeks ago and did so without consulting California’s governor Gavin Newsom.

In the event, there was a lot of liberal huffing and puffing and outrage and more huffing and puffing and no-holds-barred condemnation of Donny’s blatant act to undermine the constitution and then even more huffing and puffing and outrage, before the ‘news cycle’ moved on and sexier fresher outrage by Donny could be reported by the media.

But Donny got away with it.

Yes, there was court action and even for legal huffing and puffing, and Newsom is now suing Fox News for defamation for repeating Donny’s claim that he had telephoned Newsom to ask for his consent because the only call he had from Donny was three days before the national guard was (were? subs please check) and, anyway, there was no mention of the national guard at all, but . . .

. . . Donny got a way with it. I’ll repeat: Donny got a way with it.

. . .

Yer actual dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist might then argue that sending in the national guard on that occasion was a dry run for what Donny hopes will be the real thing. And if – if – a ‘real thing’ occurs and civil  

disobedience does break in many states, patsy GOP governors will mobilise the national guard on Donny’s behalf and in blue states Donny might simply do what he did in Los Angeles a few weeks ago.

He will also be able to call upon his growing army of ICE agents, described by one commentator in all seriousness as ‘Trump’s secret police’ and who will be ready to do whatever dirty work is required of them.

Donny is adept at simply making up stuff, for example claiming against all possible evidence that his actions on deporting as many folk as he feels like deporting is legal under the ‘Alien Enemies Act’. That act is actually 227 years old and was passed while America was at war with the British. Ah, but Donny insists, America is again ‘at war’ because has been ‘invaded’ by Central and South Americans.

Complete bollocks and total shite? Yes, of course it is, but the US in 2025 is in such an odd pickle that no one, but no one knows how to deal with Donny’s lunacies. The opposition are almost like rabbits frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car that is about to run them over. In the meantime, Donny carries on rampaging like a manic toddler.

If any of this comes about, it will not be until autumn (‘fall’) by which time most economists think store prices in the US will have risen sharply, many farmers bereft of their labour force of mainly illegals will be going out of business, unemployment will be rising and folk might well be in the mood to make their feelings felt.

But will those feelings be opposed to Donny, or will many again be convinced it is all the result of ‘deep state’ machinations as ‘stealing the election in 2020’ was also engineered by the ‘deep state’?

I have been mixing with several of MAGA drones on Truthsocial who all argue that the ‘the election was stolen’ and that anyway democracy is not necessarily what it is cracked up to be. None is the brightest by any means and several make it very plain that they rather like possessing weapons of all kinds.

Unfortunately, irrationality is certainly not reserved for the right and there is any number of ‘anti-GOPs’ who might be up for a fight and who are equally enthralled by possessing and using lethal weaponry.

Pie-in-the-sky? Almost certainly, but it does sound horribly plausible.

Is Donny insane? I very much doubt it. Was Hitler insane, was Stalin insane, were or are Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, the Iranian supreme leaders, Viktor Orban, Mussolini, Franco, Lukashenko insane? I very much doubt it.

What might be Donny’s objectives? That’s hard to say, but easy to guess: it has been long accepted that he is terminally narcissistic, has no conscience or scruples and demonstrates many sociopathic symptoms, has the attention span of a bored gnat, has to be the centre of attention and has a certain peasant cunning but is really not very bright.

My personal addition to that list of characteristics is that he suffers from a huge inferiority complex and that would explain a lot: the lying about his ‘achievements’, the apparent conviction that he is an expert in a great many areas and the vindictiveness to which he resorts when he feels he has been slighted.

One final point: what I have here outline is fantastical: America eventually engaging in another civil war? Is this ’ere himself sane?

Well, I like to think I am and as evidence I shall again concede that all suggested above is fantastical.

Another, for me, encouraging point is that when fantastical, unprecedented, impossible situations are predicted and subsequently come true, the predictor – here that would be me – is hailed as a true visionary, someone with an uncanny foresight etc.

When none of it comes true, the prediction is very much forgotten. Let’s hope we can all forget all that I have outlined above.

Happy birthday, Donny!

 

A little more inconsequential bollocks and a one-off in as far as it is semi-personal, about writing and disguising art (and I trust that won’t put you off)

A while ago, I started a second blog so that I could keep it private and where I could post stuff I would not want to make public, such as my wife’s - - - - - - - when she - - - - - during the - - - -, and my brother’s - - - - - - - -, my sister’s - - - - - -, that kind of thing.

It was to be ‘my space’ for letting my hair down – the quote marks indicate that ‘my space’ is a ‘new’ expression for us over 70 in that it evolved and became current in the past twenty years rather than last week, and that I’m not overly fond of it as in I’m not accustomed to it.

It wasn’t to be: somehow it was also listed on ‘my other blogs’ with this one, so it was not at all private. Worse the ‘stats’ indicated that he had been read several times.

Well, I couldn’t have that, could I! How would I be able to call my best friend a - - - - - who doesn’t - - - - - - - - - - - - on a good day when he’s sober in a month of Sundays knowing that he might well, solely by chance, come across my second blog and realise that I am not the nice, affable guy he first met in - - - - when we were both working on the - - - - - - but essentially just another two-faced - - - -?

You see my dilemma, but then in a way it got worse: I realised it was my fault that the third ‘private’ blog had been listed and thus accessible to all and not in the lightest bit ‘private’.

So I de-listed it, but, in a sense, that created another problem: as an ‘aspiring writer’ – yes, even at 75 – 76 on November 21 next, sadly – and like all other ‘aspiring writers’ I am more or less convinced that Fate will be kind and that my genius will, it time, be acknowledged and that legions or PhD students and ambitious academics and – well, why not! – biographers will be trawling for details of my life, my work and my thoughts. And where else to trawl, now that writing long letters is a thing of the past, than in a blog.

Yet by keeping my thoughts and all the other crap that sustains biographies private in their own separate blog would – will not only would their job be far harder, but I will be running the risk that would-be biographers finding the tasks of digging out ‘telling details’ so tiresome that they might conclude ‘what the fuck, think I’ll biographise someone else’.

To cut to the chase: I’ve decided to get a little cute and post the occasional ‘private’ blog here in public and in full view of the word, which, of course, will not make it in the slightest ‘private’.

NB I’ve long known that I sharpen my ideas best in conversation and by getting them down in words. Mere ‘thinking’ doesn’t cut it for me. Of those two, in conversation is best as whoever you are talking with will, as an outsider, spot flaws in your thinking which were not apparent to your.

As for writing down my thoughts, I worked as a newspaper sub for 37 years and I’m accustomed to re-writing in order to clarify what I’m writing. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is perfect, but in the reading and rephrasing I, myself, do get more clarity.

It is always quite surprising how badly phrased a passage might be when you read it the first time around. I don’t know where I first came across this observation, but it is most certainly true: ‘Confused writing betrays confused thought’. Remember that the next time you read something and ask yourself ‘what the fuck is he / she / it on about!’ It might not be your fault.

Sorting through my ideas, in this case by writing this blog entry it the purpose of this and previous and subsequent posts on my private blog. I hope all that isn’t too longwinded and that your are still with me.

. . .

Those who have dipped into this blog before might know that I am shameless enough to plug what I have previously written. Those books – a novel, five volumes of short stories, three volumes of verse and a non-fiction opus looking at why Ernest Hemingway, in my opinion really not a great writer at all got to be so bloody famous. But rather than clog up this bit of the post, I have listed them and links on Amazon at the end.

I conceived of what I am obliged to call ‘my second novel’ quite a few years ago and have been thinking about it ever since, but that thinking was not ‘what the story would be’. Ironically although there is ‘a story’ of sorts – and I have now written just under 45,000 words – telling that story is not at all the purpose of this new work.

As far as I can see ‘telling a story’ as in ‘things happening’ is useful in as far as it might serve to hold the reader’s interest while you – that is I in this case – gets on with attempting something else.

I shan’t say what the ‘something else’ I have in mind and will eventually be – or better am – attempting is because if I don’t pull it off, I shall look a little silly, not to say a tad big-headed. But it does relate to the notion, which I find attractive of ‘art that conceals art’. To sound a little more impressive, not to say pretentious, here is the original Latin – ars est celare artem.

I’ve been beavering away at it for a few months now and although progress has been slow in as far as I, like all other would-be writers, will pretty much do anything rather than sit down and fucking writer, though not that I find writing difficulty.

Frankly, I now regard what I am doing as a learning process and I am learning a little more about writing as I go along. And talking of ‘writing’, as far as I can see there are as many different kinds of ‘writing’ as there are writers. Then there’s the fact that different writers will be trying to do different things.

At its most basic some might be hoping to write romance, other murder mystery, others still might be hoping to ‘save the planet’ by pointing out the dangers of ‘global warming’. Some might hope for money and fame, some might purport not to give a fig about money and fame, some might be persuading themselves that they want ‘to create literature’ and so on and on an on (and I have read some real guff from supposedly ‘serious writers’ but no names, no pack drill.

Me, I’m doing it for only two reasons: that I enjoy it and because ever since I was sixteen I’ve persuaded myself that I was ‘a writer’. I shan’t tell the story here as to why I came to believe that, but I shall confess that I more or less did fuck all writing until I sat down and wrote what became Love: A fiction. Essentially, I want to prove to myself that I am not just another of life’s bullshitters, though now it does go just a little deeper than that.

One thing I keep in mind is that nothing, but nothing is perfect from the off and ‘my plan’ is to get it all down, then ‘shape’. The trouble is every time I sit down to write – and see above about procrastination – I am for ever doing a little re-writing when strictly I should not bother with that until the first draft is finished.

NB (the second so far) The other day I looked up the history of pens, mainly those used in the 16th, 17th, 18th and early 19th century.

For much of that time writers of every kind were using quill pens, dipping them in ink. ‘Re-writing’, composing drafts was all done by hand and it must have been a bloody pain like no other.

For example, Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, is estimated to be about 1,105,000 words long. And I am certain that Gibbon made many changes to what he was writing as he went along.

Apart from juvenilia, Jane Austen wrote six novels before she died at the age of 42 in 1817 and all were written with a quill pen.

Later came the metal nib pen but writing was still only done by hand, and although typewriters became common in the last decades of the 19th century, I have no idea how many writers used them in preference to writing by hand. Finally, word processing software such as Microsoft Word (and Bean which I use on my Macs) took over from typewriters.

To get to the point, because of all the re-writing I do, I would find it a real pain to write on a typewriter. Yes, it’s possible, what with crossings out and such, and I did write stories in the early 1990s on a little portable typewriter (and still have them somewhere, though I doubt any would shake much fruit from the trees).

Originally a word processor was a kind of digital typewriter and in 1993 I bought one made by Panasonic, a WL50 or a WL55 according to the picture of one I have just found in the net. This was a halfway house

and certainly not as good as a laptop as it had a limited memory and once you got to a certain point, you had to save what you have written to a floppy disk (look them up, kids) which as a pain. But I am now vastly off track by writing all the semi-irrelevant bullshit.

In fact, I’m going to end this post here. Sorry. I’m sure you are all panting for more, but . . . (I’m tired, so nothing more today, not even another NB).

. . .

Here is the work I have so far had printed – I put it that way because although, strictly, they have been published, it was me who published them, and claiming ‘they are published’ might be a tad misleading. In fairness to myself, I haven’t even tried to interest a publisher (and getting one interested in publishing short stories is just a little harder these days than squeezing blood from a stone.

Although all these are available to be bought, I am not interested in ‘making money’ (and would be deluded if I thought I might, frankly), but I would just like the different works to be read. I mean surely that’s at heart all that most writers want? No? OK, I did try.

Short stories:

Stories – Volume one

Short stories – Volume 2,

Once upon a time: Stories – Volume 3

Arte? È solo un’abile fregatura. Sempre: Stories – Volume 4

Chess avenna’ laff: Stories – Volume 5

Verse:

Oh muse! Where the fuck are you! 

My life, the early years – Poems volume 2 

I know where you live – Poems volume 3

Novel:

Love: A fiction – A romantic mystery in five parts 

Non-fiction:

The Hemingway enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame? 

Trump and his gang of no-hopers are still cretins, but here is the first post this year that is not about the Desperate Don and his stupidity, but about short trip of Canterbury to see an old friend and two more recent friends

Canterbury, May 17-19

I have rather neglected this blog and have post only five times since the turn of the year, four times in February and just once in January. Furthermore, all four posts were about what a cretin Donald Trump is and the fifth on the related question of wondering why the far-right in Germany is making a comeback.

None of those posts will have been popular with supporters of he Desperate Don and Germany’s Afd (Alternative für Deutschland) party. Those who happen upon this ‘ere blog might also be wondering ‘can’t the old chap bang on about something else for a change?’

Well, of course, he can and so here and now I shall bang on about a tripette I’ve just made to Canterbury and from where I am returning home to North Cornwall as I sit on the 12.35pm from London Paddington to Exeter St Davids, then to driver the final 60 miles home. And if that topic, most certainly not about morons around the world, including Donald Trump and his assortment of cabinet deadbeats – Rubio, Hegseth, Bondi, Noem, Kennedy, Burgum, Duffy et al – doesn’t shake your tree, piss off and read someone else’s blog and consider yourselves banned from reading mine for a month.

The occasion of my trip was a reunion of sorts with a very good old college friend – ‘old’ as in ‘longstanding’, although neither of us will see 70 again – and two more recently acquired friends, the former drummer in the band they were both in in the 1970s and his wife.

The former drummer was born in Barnard Castle, on the County Durham / Yorkshire border, but has lived in the US for more than forty years and now has American citizenship. His wife is fully American, born in New Jersey.

We chose to meet in Canterbury because our mutual friend lives in Deal on the Kent coast and it was easy for him to drive to Canterbury for Sunday lunch at The Old Weavers in Canterbury old town, built in 1500 

although dated on its sign as 1500, much of the structure of the building is earlier with the foundation having been laid in the 12th century. The fabric of the street frontage is 15th century with 16th to 20th century alterations and additions. The external river frontage has been much altered and extended from three to five gables, disguises the original 15th century fabric. In the interior of the building much of the original Tudor structure has survived with Jacobean, Georgian and later additions.

This was our second such reunion, and although I had been in touch with the Americans over then net, only the second time I had met them face-to-face. (For those interested, they – all three – had roast lamb but I stuck to chicken Kiev as I am not much of a meat eater these days).

The Americans and I stayed Canterbury’s Cathedral Gate Hotel, sitting in Butter Market and, as the more astute reader will gather, right next to the gate leading to Canterbury Cathedral. The cathedral was literally as stone’s throw away and either backed on to our hotel or our hotel backed on to the cathedral. That’s up to you.

The hotel was as old as the cathedral itself built for monks. Quirky does not even begin to describe it, and the quirks delight most foreign visitors, especially Germans and most Americans, though, the owner assured me, it does get some guests with a vanilla outlook who far prefer very bland, very straight lines and somewhere with as little character as possible. This, I suspect, are wholesome, God-fearing folk from the American Mid-west who can’t be doing with fiddle-faddle of any kind however ‘charming’.

There are no straight lines in the Cathedral Gate Hotel, none at all. Everything is at an angle, uneven and leaning over. I assume the health and safety bods have been over it with a tooth-comb to ensure it is safe to live in, but we can only go on the promise.

Stairs are steep and narrow and uneven. Corridors lead here, there and everywhere. I had a reasonably simple trip to my room on the fourth floor overlooking the Butter Market (which I could not see, however, as the – quite modern – window ‘curtain’ refused to be raised).

My American friends, however, had a more adventurous trip to their room from the reception area. This took them down one narrow corridor, into another off to the left, then up a few stairs to a door leading on a roof. This they had to cross along a short gangway which did have a rubberised floor to avoid slipping in the rain and a guardrail on the sides, but did not have a roof to keep guests on their way to their room dry on their brief crossing from one part of the hotel to another.

Inconvenient? No, not really, just a charming quirk that amused guests (except those from Kansas, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Nebraska).

The weather forecast for Canterbury when I looked at it on Saturday morning just before leaving home promised quite warm temperatures and sun, sun, sun and the more sun for the weekend. And that’s what we got throughout Saturday. We did not on Sunday or this morning. Sunday was distinctly chilly.

Because of that forecast I decided to set off with in just a T-shirt and shirt and dispense with a jacket. Come Sunday I wish I had taken a jacked of some kind, or a hoody. Just after nine when the streets were pretty much deserted and did not fill up with tourists as they did later in the day, I went for a walk around the cathedral and got

colder and colder. Finally, my hour of sightseeing over I decided to find a local Asda or Tesco to get some kind of cheap pullover or hoody. And here in medieval Canterbury old town, of course, there was nothing of the kind.

So I went into one of the – very many – touristy shops to ask where I might find an Asda or Tesco (think Walmart or similar – I was not looking for anything fashionable just something a tad warmer than a thin cotton T-shirt and a thin cotton shirt).

There an extremely helpful shopowner told me there was a Primark in ‘the high street (and the Asda and Tesco superstores) were some distance away for a walker). He checked and told me it would be opening in and hour at 11am. Then he did something quite touching: he insisted that I borrow his jacket (something like a North Face item) while I found my way to the Primark branch. I refused. But he kept insisting until I could no longer refuse, and I then set off

As it turned out a branch of Sports Direct was already open and I bought a hoody for a very reasonably £16 (after having to ask whether they had anything cheaper than the £59.99 hoodies more prominently on display). Then it was back to the shop to return the jacket, and this led to a long conversation.

The owner, a man from Uzbekistan, was a former sociology lecturer at the University of Kent. I discovered this when I asked where he was from as his kind of generosity, though not unknown in Britain, was unusual. We then talked bout this and that for the next hour and a half.

He explained that since Brexit – remember Brexit? Funding for universities, much of it dependent on European Union money, and the number for European students had fallen alarmingly, his department staff of 60 had reduced to 13 and fearing the worst he and his wife and decided to open their shop (though why that kind of shop was not clear and nor did I think of asking).

After that lunch at The Old Weavers followed by a trip to pub showing Sky sports and see Arsenal beat Newcastle, secure its participation in next season’s Champions League.

That’s it really. A little break in routine which has been welcome.

Pip, pip.

A new American civil war? Can it happen? Will it happen? Who knows, but it ain't looking encouraging for the Yanks. Mind they were stupid enough to elect a rapist fraudulent felon who paints his face orange every morning

Just posted this on Twitter (‘X’), and it has finally sunk in that Trump (and Musk) in his extremely addled way really does want to do away with democracy in the US and become ‘a dictator’.

Unlikely? Well, as unlikely as a convicted felon, proven fraudster and ajudged rapist being elected US President.

That happened, so frankly all bets are off.

Face it, ALL of us here might be outraged and predict the worst, but in our - I’ll say it! - complacent liberal way, there’s a corner of us which keeps whispering ‘don’t fret, it won’t come to that’ and, guiltily, we take a quiet solace in that ‘well, this is America, this kind of thing doesn’t happen!’

Well, what HAS happened is that SCOTUS has declared that ‘a president is immune from criminal prosecution for any presidential acts’, and that will in time certainly open a can of worms.

What is so piss-poor about that ruling is not what is says, which is dubious enough, but far worse: how utterly vague and supremely debatable the phrase ‘presidential acts’ is! It can mean anything depending upon who is being asked. And, of course, it bloody will!

So while we outraged angel-souled liberals get our lawyers to complain to the federal courts that this and that can certainly NOT be construed as a ‘presidential act’, La Trumpa and his organ grinders (of whom I suspect there are several and La Trumpa is to dumb to realise he is fundamentally a patsy) are already having the lawyers argue the toss in court in the standard delaying tactic will also committing more ‘presidential acts’.

Result: total bloody legal logjam and it will be one which really will divide the nation. It’s the old and very useful political tactic to neutralise opposition: ‘send it to committee’.

It’s even worse than that, however. What if, say, one of La Trumpa’s ‘presidential acts’ is not necessarily to murder opponents - though we are now assured ‘he could in the course of doing his duty’– but far simpler: to detain under house arrest as many Democrat lawmakers as he need as well as potential Republican ‘trouble-makers’.

More democratic outrage and thundering editorials in the Washington Post, New York Times and even the Wall Stree Journal ‘that this is wholly unacceptable!

Then, after a federal judge has put a temporary stay on the relevant presidential order and ruled that the deatainees must be released - sparking more confusion about ‘judges overreaching their authority’ – what then? Simple, La Trumpa and his mobster, simply ignore the judicial rulings.

There, in a nutshell, is the simple liberal democratic dilemma: WE ‘play by the rules’ and are stymied when other simply don’t do so.

And the first such two-fingers (US middle finger) to the judiciary makes subsequent two-fingered salutes ever easier and they come thick and fast.

You Yanks have guns and aren’t afraid to use them (and we Brits are perpetually baffled by the bullshit about ‘it’s every Americans right to bear arms’ – yes, in the frontier days 240 years ago, but in 2025 when it is now something of a weekend sport to take out as many elementary school kids and students as you can before lunch.

So how soon might it be that someone takes up arms to make a ‘democratic’ point about La Trumpa and MAGA pissing all over American democracy, then getting an armed response.

Lord, what a fucking bloody mess you guys have allowed to evolve. Seems you took your eye off the ball.

East and West and never the twain shall meet – the Romans cottoned on fast, so what’s the future for a country so divided and with a rising far-right party scoring well in a federal election?

There’s a very good overview of the 2,000 years of the part of central Europe which we now know as German and Austria called The Shortest History Of Germany (by a James Hawes). I stress that it is an overview and is not a detailed, academic history. But, like me. you might initially want and overview and later go on little by little to refine what you have learnt little by little and fill in the cracks.

One of Hawes’ central contentions is that since the Roman occupation of part of Germany, the part of the world has been quite radically divided into two quite distinct spheres, along a line which runs more or less as the same course of the river Elbe.

Hawes contends that when the Roman empire came to expand into that part of the continent, they had so much trouble first conquering the tribes east of the Rhine, then holding on to the territory they had conquered, that they eventually decided that trying to do so really wasn’t worth the hassle.

The worst encounter with those tribes was in the first decade AD when an estimated 20/25,000 Roman soldiers of three of its best legions were wiped out in the Teutoburg Forest by a Teuton tribe under the leadership of Armin / Herman.

So, Rome decided, that’s it – let those savages stew in their own juice.

OK, the Elbe is further east than the Rhine, but the course of the Elbe was a very good line to draw. The divide was not hard and fast. The Romans did allow trading to carry on across the Rhine into the area west of the Elbe, but they never bothered with the territory to the east of the Elbe.

Hawes fleshes out his notion by contending that from the Middle Ages and until unification ‘West Germany’ – and I mean the term in a geographical sense, not a national or political sense – looked west for its alliances, cultural links

 

and trade, and regarded itself as ‘belonging’ to western Europe.

Conversely, ‘East Germany’ and its people felt far greater kinship with the Slavic peoples to their east, and made their alliances and cultural and trading with them. And frankly both sides of Germany had rather less to do with each other than we might think.

Hawes also contends – and research, archives and documentation of different kinds could well bear this out – that there was also a notable religious and political divide between ‘West’ and ‘East’ Germany.

The west was, largely, Roman Catholic and the East was largely Lutheran. And the values of both the parts of Germany reflected the values we (perhaps generalising a little) associate with Catholics and Prots.

That is a plausible notion and if nothing else might explain some things. But as far as the map here is concerned, Hawes writes that support for the National Socialists was rather lukewarm west of the Elbe but enthusiastic to the east.

Again this suggestion might well be tested by looking up voting patterns etc (although not by me). As a ‘half-German’, I do get a little pissed of by ‘traditional’ lazy Brit stereotyping of the Nazi era that ‘the Germans were all Nazis’ – bollocks!

There most certainly was resistance to the Nazis from the start, but as you could end up dying and eventually dead in a concentration camp for opposing the thugs in charge, it is not surprising that many kept their heads down and opted for a quiet life. And Brits better not try to persuade themselves that the vast majority would not have done the same.

And that brings me to the map here: except for a part of East Berlin and a tiny part of ‘East’ Germany, ALL of ‘East’ Germany Germany voted solidly AfD. On the other hand in ‘West’ Germany the Afd only scored in a small part of the Rhineland Palatine and apart from isolated and small areas which went the social-democrats, the CDU/CSU held sway.

And that fits in rather neatly with Hawes’ contentions.

Q: What is the difference between a clueless, cack-handed twat and Donald Trump? A: There isn't one

Proving again that he has van Gogh’s ear for music, Donald Trump has once more shot himself in the foot: piss of the Democrats if you like, Donny - but DON’T piss off your own side! But you are!

American conservatives don’t like Russia and Putin IS Russia. And they want nothing at all to do with that ‘Evil Empire’ (© Ronnie Reagan) and are pissed off with Donny is crawling up Putin’s bum.

 
The Murdoch-owned Post has the fourth largest circulation in the US and has been staunchly conservative since it was founded 224 years ago. Very conservative as are its readers!

With his usual cack-handed skill Donny has - all on his own - landed himself in a terrible fix: carry on sucking up to Putin and lose the support of your own. About-turn and take against Putin, and you will

1) look very, VERY weak and silly, and,

2) Putin will take against you with a vengeance.

Listen up MAGA and other conservatives: this is the cretin you have put back in the White House. End the Ukraine war ‘in a day’? Yeah, right! Bring down inflation? It’s going up! Bring down prices? Er, they are still going up.

But what Donny IS good up is screwing up - he did it in the 1990s but was rescued by NBC, he did it between 2020 and 2024 and was on his way to jail, but was rescued by the voters electing him again. Now, though, he is doing his best to make sure they will withdraw their support. 

Nice going, Donny!