Passing Observations 115

This is a long standing series of small items which have caught my eye or mind and which seem relevant, startling, amusing or all three. Occasionally, items which appear here may return as a longer piece. Mostly they will not.

1. I regard ‘Best buy’ guides (so popular with magazines and organisations such as ‘Which?’) as a waste of time and money because I find that the recommended ‘best buy’ is never available. In addition, I believe it is no longer possible to trust brand names because many well respected brand names have been bought by unscrupulous companies which stick brand names on a dozen different versions of the same, crappy product. So buying anything these days (particularly electrical items) means taking ‘pot luck’.
2. Global warming should be renamed global whining.
3. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls.’ Thomas Paine
4. Fiction has planning, pattern, logic, unity of style and a beginning and an end. Real life has only disorder, chaos and bizarre, unplanned diversions.
5. Three things I have learned this week: Gravity gets stronger as you get older. The floor gets further away. And I now get out of breath going downstairs.
6. In the UK, the average chief executive pay ratio to the average employee is now 63:1. Last year the ratio was 34:1. Company bosses are getting greedier and greedier. And most of their companies are making lower profits.
7. Deutsche Bank was fined $7 billion for mis-selling mortgage securities. It has also been fined for money laundering, for the Libor interest rate scam and for violating US economic sanctions. And it has admitted hiring private detectives to spy on its critics. Lovely people, eh?
8. This month’s letter from the BBC’s licensing thugs says: ‘We’re giving you 10 days to get correctly licensed’. If that isn’t an unwarranted threatening letter I don’t know what is. Why are these people allowed to get away with this sort of behaviour on behalf of the BBC?
9. Queen Elizabeth has given knighthoods to Tony Blair and Klaus Schwab. It now seems clear that a knighthood is a social criticism. Moreover, Blair is now a member of the Order of the Garter – allegedly Britain’s most prestigious royal order of chivalry. I wonder if you have to be a war criminal to be a member of that one or if it’s optional?
10. Compassion is not innate it is learned. And since children are no longer taught to be compassionate they are not compassionate.
11. Television, advertisements and editorials encourage the young to despise the elderly.
12. I saw someone on the internet pontificating about the existence of ‘jerms’. I don’t think you should express an opinion on something you can’t spell.
13. The number of GPs in the UK has fallen by 8% since 2009. I blame the General Medical Council’s utterly absurd revalidation programme for this.
14. My ‘First Wooden Brain Award for Exaggeration and Scaremongering’ goes to ‘New Yorker’ magazine for describing the rebranded flu as a ‘plague’. Covid was degraded to ‘flu’ risk in March 2020 and the damned covid flu killed no more people than most annual flu bugs.
15. In the first four years of World War II (1940 to 1944) British war casualties (including POWs and missing) totalled 387,996. In the same period the number killed and injured in traffic accidents was 588,742.
16. Travel is now completely unbearable and I cannot imagine why there is anyone left who is prepared to go abroad. But it has not happened suddenly. Antoinette and I used to travel to Paris regularly. Twenty years ago we went once a fortnight. Door to door (including a long car journey) the journey took about five hours. Then the car journey alone took five hours and each trip took eight or nine hours. And we travelled once a month. To begin with the formalities at Waterloo, Ashford, Ebbsfleet and then St Pancras were fairly rudimentary. But the delays grew and the customs staff grew more intrusive and more aggressive. We then travelled once every two months. And then the journey became unbearable. And we sold our apartment and stopped travelling. By then even buying the tickets we needed had become a tiresome game that took half a day or more. It’s now clear that the conspirators were making the journey more unpleasant on purpose. The delays on the road, the rules at the customs posts, the deterioration in the service – they were all part of the plan to stop people travelling.
17. Our car is more efficient at around 70 mph. If we are forced to travel slower than that then we use up more fuel. If I’m caught for speeding I’ll say I was trying to do my bit to help cut down air pollution and use of fossil fuel.
18. The UK’s largest chain of GPs (with almost 600,000 patients) is apparently now replacing doctors with less qualified staff who see patients without being supervised by a doctor. It saves money.
19. Our silver birch trees have been losing their leaves since the middle of June. Autumn is coming early this year. I blame the chemtrails and the conspirators messing around with the weather. The sky above us is never free of chemtrails. What the hell are they spraying?
20. The evidence proving that electric cars are BAD for the environment is now incontrovertible – so owners of electric cars clearly hate the environment. I loathe electric cars (they are silent killers) and the people who drive them (who are virtue signalling numpties).