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The Tom Sawyer Principle (Politics)
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Mick Harper
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Secret Barrister: diversity of bar at risk as court closures force junior lawyers to quit

This screaming headline in the Guardian says it all. The closures have serious implications for offenders, especially those on remand; it has serious implications for the administration of justice; it even has serious implications for the overall government budget deficit. And, yes, it might mean the odd female or minority male barrister joining the rest of their peers looking for a job.
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Mick Harper
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One admittedly minor advantage of having a restrictive immigration policy is illustrated by Japan. Yakuza organised crime is declining because the hoodlums are getting too old to do the grunt work, and young Japanese regard being a Yakuza as uncool. In normal countries, eg America, when the Italians grow old disgracefully, they are replaced by Russians, or whoever the latest immigrant wave is. Thank goodness we don't have much organised crime in this country. Somalis! What a botch they would make of it.
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Mick Harper
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The sight of people queuing for hours for a Covid test in Bolton while a new testing centre stands empty a mile away is reminiscent of Russians queuing for bread because it was so cheap, thanks to government subsidies, that other Russians a mile away were buying bread to feed to their pig (they couldn't have pigs, that was capitalism).

Britain, like the Soviet Union, is 'world class' when it comes to 'moon shots' i.e. producing one thing in a national emergency, but is incapable of actually benefiting the citizenry. At the government level. The British, like the Russians, are superlatively capable of organising themselves when left to their own devices.

It didn't use to be like that. In the old days the British government was very socialistic and quite used to supplying all kinds of integrated services, but since privatisation the government consists entirely of people sitting in offices making decisions. After that it's somebody else's problem. There is only one solution: privatise the government.
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Grant



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I’m not sure we are any good at the big projects either. My suspicion is that the Nightingale hospitals which were built in five days - or whatever it was - were shut down because Matt realised they wouldn’t work. It’ll all come out in the enquiry. And it’s now even admitted that they still haven’t hit the 100,000 tests a day target after six months.
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Mick Harper
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Oh lawdy, it's official

Channel 4 News: Why didn't you seek asylum in Spain -- that's a safe country?
Asylum seeker: We had a deal with a smuggler to take us to Britain but he referred us to another smuggler. We ended up with four different smugglers. We were surprised that they ended up giving us tickets to Spain.

Human rights lawyer: M'lud, my clients cannot be returned to Spain, the first country of entry, as per the regulations. The people smugglers were clearly in breach of contract. It is they who should be punished not my clients.
Justice Cocklecarrot: Are the people smugglers in court?
Human rights lawyer: ...er ... no, m'lud.
Justice Cocklecarrot: Indefinite leave to remain until they are. Next!

PS According to Channel 4 News, the previous batch of asylum seekers, that Pritti Patel had managed to bundle onto a plane for Spain (obeying the UN Convention on Asylum, remember) promptly made their way back from Madrid to Calais in order to start the cycle over again. "People smugglers have promised us a dinghy and tickets for Mr Justice Cocklecarrot's court," they told Channel 4 News.
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Boreades


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Grant wrote:
I’m not sure we are any good at the big projects either. My suspicion is that the Nightingale hospitals which were built in five days - or whatever it was - were shut down because Matt realised they wouldn’t work. It’ll all come out in the enquiry. And it’s now even admitted that they still haven’t hit the 100,000 tests a day target after six months.


Funnily enough, I have friends and neighbours that were either
(a) in the military logistics and engineering units that drove the trucks, converted the warehouses and assembled all the stuff. They did it commendably well, in very fast time (stand easy chaps, you'll be mentioned in dispatches).
or
(b) worked for commercial medical and IT firms that supplied huge container loads of equipment in record time, all installed and fully tested in very fast time (bonuses and trebles all round chaps).

Since then what's happened? Nothing, nada, zero, zilch. The Nightingale Hospitals I know of are empty, gathering dust. The equipment is unused, and isn't needed anywhere else.

But, but !!! ... weren't they built desperately quickly because we were promised that there would be apocalyptic zombie rabid hordes of near-death Covid-19 mobs screaming at the doors of the overloaded existing hospitals?

They were, but the existing hospitals are like ghost towns.

While we were all being encouraged to go outside and bang saucepans at 20:00 hours to "protect the NHS", the NHS had already protected itself by ejecting the most at-risk and vunerable elderly patients out of Secondary Care into unprepared and unprotected Nursing Homes.

And then, to add injury to insult, in many areas Primary Care GP doctors were banned from visiting the Nursing Homes. The families and relatives of these people were banned as well. So many people were left in wretched isolation, and could not get medical treatment for their existing medical conditions. Which is already part of a "second wave" of excess deaths. caused because of and by the lockdown.

But lockdown has been an incredible success (as a Psy Ops training exercise).
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Mick Harper
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What does one call a pan-national iatrogenic disease?
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Boreades wrote:
The Nightingale Hospitals I know of are empty, gathering dust....But, but !!! ... weren't they built desperately quickly because we were promised that there would be apocalyptic zombie rabid hordes of near-death Covid-19 mobs screaming at the doors of the overloaded existing hospitals?They were, but the existing hospitals are like ghost towns.


The predicted outcomes of this "novel virus," for which there remains no evidence I can find, continue to fail to materialize. Yet none will abandon the hypothesis.
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Mick Harper
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Ishmael, just because you are barking up the right tree does not mean you aren't barking. There is plenty of evidence (presumably in petrie dishes or down microscopes) that COVID-19 is a novel virus. The question is whether it is a significant novel virus.

I concede that this might actually not be so, in the sense we haven't identified it before or some such, but unless you tell us why you believe it isn't on any ground other than "I'm Ishmael, and I'm saying it" we will have to assume you are just being Ishmael.
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Mick Harper
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When plastic waste first became a problem we were assured that the solution lay in a) new biodegradable plastics and b) recycling. The villains of the piece were landfills. It turns out that a) they must on no account be biodegradable because in practice that means they end up as tiny shards and eventually enter the bottom of the foodchain in the oceans, wreak absolute havoc and cannot be got rid of by any conceivable technology now or in the future.

Recycling turned out to be a major mistake as well. The rate has remained at ten per cent for fifty years because while industrial plastics can be industrially recycled for other industrial uses, consumer plastics simply cannot be. Of course any piece of plastic can theoretically be recycled but the cost of doing so in any meaningful way would result in the container costing more than the contents. There are just too many consumers wanting too many things from their plastics.

After fifty years of searching for technical fixes (which are often forthcoming, but meanwhile the market has marched on and is over the next hill) it can be declared insoluble. 'Recycling' has turned out to mean bundling it up, putting it into containers and shipping it out to whichever country will put up with having stupendous heaps of plastic lying around the place (currently Indonesia). Most of this too ends up in the sea but there it is at least only unsightly rather than bio-terminal (except for some large animals).

Speaking of large animals, the real cost of the recycling policy has been because it led human beings to think they were 'doing their bit' by separating stuff. If they really want to help the planet they could start by shooting themselves.

It turns out that the solution was, after all, landfill. If substantial, but reasonable, sums are spent on sorting and compacting, and as long as everything is guaranteed non-biodegradable, then they can be stored quite safely for several thousand years in holes in the ground which will affect 000.1% of any country's landscape. (My decimals but I am easy with going up several orders of magnitude.)

Plastics by the way are great and groovy in themselves and are an excellent way of utilising our fossil carbon reserves now that they are being phased out for energy, cars etc.
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Mick Harper
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Our next duty is to consider what long-term benefits will come out of the Covid episode. The sight of an entire generation of university students milling about, i.e. not milling about, discovering that a) what they came for is not much to write home about and b) what they were sent there for is available at home at the touch of a computer screen, should mean the insane (inter)national policy of getting as large a proportion of the cohort into lifetime debt in exchange for knowing which intellectual knife-and-fork to use, will slightly slow down.

It's not nothing, folks!
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Mick Harper
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Speaking of landfill, I just got two large cardboard boxes containing Nescafe Dulce Gusto coffee pods (delivered free, because I recommend them on a well-known forum). The first, larger one, contained all my favourites. But fatally, I had ordered 25 rather than 24 boxes so the odd one (a six inch cube of 16 Mexico Chiappas Organic, intensity 7 capsules, in case you're interested) required its own still very substantial cardboard box all to itself. Though it wasn't lonely because it was accompanied by substantial amounts of 'filler'.

It's not the landfills I care about, fuck the landfills, it's me having to spend all week tripping over boxes before finally getting round to spending all day ripping everything up into dustbin sack morsels. Or recycling, as I call it.
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Mick Harper
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Most people like to make their jobs easier rather than more difficult but the police and the army are notable exceptions. I have already detailed how British soldiers turned Northern Irish Catholics from relieved allies to mortal enemies, thereby condemning themselves to twenty years of universally hated garrison duty, just because they couldn't stop themselves behaving abominably just carrying out routine stops and searches. And this with their fellow-citizens.

A similar tragedy is playing out in Northern Mozambique where Al-Shabab are conducting a minor, if unpleasant, campaign of destabilisation. So the Mozambique government drafts in police from elsewhere to deal with the situation. The police, not being able to find the quite small numbers of Al-Shabab, spend their time beating up the locals instead. Why? As usual with policemen and soldiers, because they can. Not surprisingly Al-Shabab are really starting to motor.

And, unlike American and British police currently, not only fellow-citizens but the same colour too!
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Mick Harper wrote:
Our next duty is to consider what long-term benefits will come out of the Covid episode. The sight of an entire generation of university students milling about, i.e. not milling about, discovering that a) what they came for is not much to write home about and b) what they were sent there for is available at home at the touch of a computer screen, should mean the insane (inter)national policy of getting as large a proportion of the cohort into lifetime debt in exchange for knowing which intellectual knife-and-fork to use, will slightly slow down.

It's not nothing, folks!


You appear not to have noticed that fleecing wealthy foreign students is keeping the hospitality, high street, and housing sector afloat in the cities as well as the universities. We just need you to keep quiet, and embrace black and trans studies to keep the wonga rolling in. Maybe we could pay you to keep it zipped.
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Mick Harper
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You are quite correct, Wiley, I had not noticed this for some reason.
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