Deal or no deal?

When you begin telling fibs, you have to remember which ones you told.  According to The Guardian, President Trump seems to be floundering:

Cohen pleaded guilty to making false statements to Congress about a deal he pursued on Trump’s behalf to build a Trump tower in Moscow.

Court documents revealed Cohen was in contact with top Kremlin officials about the prospective tower; that Trump was closer to the negotiations than previously acknowledged; and that the deal was alive as late as June 2016 – six months longer than Cohen told Congress.

The court filing appeared to expose multiple and repeated public lies by Trump about his links to Russia. “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away,” Trump said at a press conference during the presidential transition. “I have no deals … because I think that would be a conflict.”

Confronted with the contradiction outside the presidential helicopter on Thursday morning, a visibly agitated Trump said “this deal was a very public deal – everybody knows about this deal”, then denied there was ever a deal, then said if there had been a deal it would have been no problem.

“This was a deal that didn’t happen,” Trump said. “That was no deal. If you look – this was an option. To my way of thinking, it was an option that we decided not to do.”

Exactly.

   

Beyond the call of duty

It must be 1 April?  The Guardian reports:

A team of doctors who swallowed Lego and timed how long it took to pass through their bowels say the results of their research should reassure concerned parents.

In a paper published in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, six researchers from Australia and the UK swallowed the head of a Lego figure – roughly 10mm by 10mm – in the “noble tradition of self-experimentation”.

Toy parts are the second most common foreign object that children swallow, and frequently cause anxiety among parents, but usually pass in a matter of days without pain or ill-effect.

...

They developed their own metrics: the Stool Hardness and Transit (Shat) score and the Found and Retrieved Time (Fart) score.

The Fart score – how many days it took the Lego to pass through the bowels – was between 1.1 days and three days, with an average of 1.7 days.

Using the Shat score, the researchers also found the consistency of their stools did not change. They compared Shat and Fart scores to see if looser stools caused quicker retrieval but found no correlation.

Sounds like a load of crap ...

 

Reductio ad absurdum

The Times has a means of cutting short the Great 5-day Debate:

There are essentially three points that all MPs now make: a) this isn’t great but it’s as good as we’re going to get; b) this is dreadful and we should leave right now on Canada +++ terms; and c) this is terrible and we should have a second referendum.

They could just rise, say “argument B, Mr Speaker” and Mrs May can reply “I refer you to the answer I gave earlier”. It would save an awful lot of time.

   

It is of little consolation

Brexit realities revealed by The Independent:

Your fellow citizens are deluded racists who read the Sun and the Mail, fetishise two World Wars (and one World Cup) – get used to it

Brexit might be “the moment” when you simply have to come to terms that the folk you share this sceptred isle with aren’t as clever/open-minded/tolerant/humane/woke/whatever as you are.  But you’re lumbered with them. Even the shift in opinion since 2016 hasn’t been that dramatic, and, while Remain would probably win now, and a Final Say is the right thing to do, a solid quarter to a third of your fellow citizens just want out of the EU whatever the cost, and would probably personally volunteer to bomb Germany. Worth acknowledging if nothing else.

   

Compare and contrast

From The Guardian:

Here:

Denise Coates, the multibillionaire founder and boss of the gambling firm Bet365, paid herself £265m last year in a record-breaking pay deal for the chief executive of a British company.

...

Her pay is more than 9,500 times the average UK salary, 1,700 times that collected by the prime minister and more than double that paid to the entire Stoke City football team, which Bet365 owns and which was relegated from the Premier League last season. Coates’s pay is also 27 times that earned by Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, the world’s most valuable company.

And here:

The quadrupling of child problem gamblers to more than 50,000 in two years has been branded a “generational scandal”.

A Gambling Commission audit due for release on Wednesday reveals that the number of problem gamblers aged 11 to 16 rose to 55,000 over two years. It also found that 70,000 youngsters were at risk and that 450,000 children bet regularly, the equivalent of one in seven children aged 11 to 16.

The audit, reported in the Daily Mail, said the youngsters were staking an average of £16 a week on fruit machines, bingo, betting shops and online games, which are all illegal for under-18s.

 
   

Quote of the day

From The Guardian (here):

... the ERG has seemingly managed the impossible. In less than a week, they have made Theresa May appear vaguely plausible while relegating themselves to an embarrassing, long-past-its-best, music hall act. With Rees-Mogg as Archie Rice. In a straight fight between the ERG and Dad’s Army, Captain Mainwaring would come out on top every time. Tuesday’s event had all the feel of the final hurrah before the knacker’s yard.

Behind the stage was a placard with the words “Global Britain”. Global Britain turned out to be seven old, white men waiting for the golf club bar to open. Only the presence of Rees-Mogg brought the average age below 65 and he was feeling every one of his 49 years. Even he never thought he’d sink this low. Whatever would Nanny think?

   

Somewhat premature?

Now who is over-egging the pudding?  The Times reports:

European citizens will no longer be able to “jump the queue” for jobs in Britain, Theresa May will pledge today as she attempts to shore up political support for her troubled Brexit blueprint.

...

She will hint that the deal being negotiated in Brussels for the future relationship will allow the UK for the first time to create a level playing field, as EU citizens compete with other countries for the right to work in Britain.

“The difference will be this: once we have left the EU, we will be fully in control of who comes here,” she will say. “It will no longer be the case that EU nationals, regardless of the skills or experience they have to offer, can jump the queue ahead of engineers from Sydney or software developers from Delhi.

As I understand it, the position on immigration will not change until the transition period has ended, which may not take place until 2023.  And, even then, it will depend upon the deal to be negotiated on the future trading relationship.

Furthermore, is it really the case at present that EU nationals regardless of skills and experience "can jump the queue" ahead of Australian engineers or Indian software developers?  And, if it were the case, perhaps the Home Office (recent proprietor - Theresa May) and its obsession with cutting immigration may bear some of the responsibility?

   

The last straw?

Disaster looms.  The Independent reports:

The iconic chocolate nougat Mars bar could face extinction in the UK should the country leave the UK without a Brexit deal, secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs Michael Gove has been warned.

Last year, it was revealed that all confectionery imports in the UK, including Mars bars, would drastically increase in price as a consequence of a hard Brexit.

However, the situation could be even more dire than previously thought, with representatives from the food industry telling Mr Gove that a no-deal Brexit may result in the country running out of Mars bars in a matter of weeks.

The country will never forgive that Rees-Mogg fellow.

 

Picture of the day

From New European:

Quote of the day

From Theresa May:

“When you strip away the detail, the choice before us is clear, this deal … Or leave with no deal, or no Brexit at all.”

I'll vote for no Brexit at all, thank you.

 

Quote of the day

Matthew Parris in The Times (here):

Listen to Mrs May’s proposed deal as it unfolds. Listen to the caveats and exclusions and tortuously worded ambiguities. Listen (as Democratic Unionists now can when they read yesterday’s leak to The Times) to the strangled verbal formulations. And keep repeating this single question: “How is this better than just being in the EU on the terms negotiated by Margaret Thatcher and John Major?”

Answer comes there none, nor ever will, because there is no answer and the prime minister knows it. She accepted the instruction to get the best deal available. But it isn’t any good.

Can we call the whole thing off?

   

The wagging finger

 

Deja vu again

The Independent records:

Theresa May has denied she is preparing to hold another general election, stating that another vote would “not be in the national interest”.

Aye, that's what she said the last time, up to the point when she decided that it was in the national interest.

 

The do-little budget

No change in

• income tax rates
• corporation tax
• inheritance tax
• capital gains tax
• dividend allowance
• ISAs

   

Quote of the day

Will Hutton in The Observer on Sir (for the moment) Philip Green (here):

Green was a foul-mouthed, amoral deal-maker with an ego the size of a house who could only float to the top in the crazed world of credit-driven, property-bubble Thatcherite and Blairite capitalism, aided and abetted by an unsavoury cast list of loan sharks, fraudsters, indulgent bankers and fawning journalists, notably the former Sunday Times business editor Jeff Randall to whom he regularly fed gossip in return for admiring write-ups.

He had a talent for cutting costs, but his greater talent was creating the reputational halo that allowed him to get finance to acquire the next business and then using every available loophole to direct as much money as possible to himself – from the £1.2bn tax-free dividend to his wife in Monaco in 2005 to the attempt to avoid his responsibility for the BHS pension fund after he had knowingly sold it to a bankrupt. Under intense public pressure last year he finally inserted £363m into the fund.

   

Music of the week

1.  The Story of Bohemian Rhapsody

2.  How The Beatles rocked the Kremlin

3.  Sergeant Pepper's Musical Revolution

Enjoy!

 

Why not just hit it with a hammer?

When my desktop computer starts acting up, my less than fail-safe solution is to turn it off and start again.  It seems that NASA takes the same approach to the Hubble telescope.  The Guardian reports:

The Hubble space telescope is close to resuming full operations after Nasa “jiggled it around”.

The telescope was sidelined earlier this month after a gyroscope failed, leaving it unable to point in the right direction during observations....Nasa has said Hubble is expected to return to normal science operations soon after it performed a “running restart” of the gyroscope on 16 October, which turned the device off for a second. The intention was to clear any faults that may have occurred during a restart on 6 October.

The wonders of modern technology.

   

 

The law is an ass, but ...

So Lord Hain has taken it upon himself to name the individual businessman at the centre of the Me-Too allegations.  He did so by using parliamentary privilege to overcome the application of a legal injunction forbidding the media to reveal the businessman's identity.

We may consider the businessman's behaviour deplorable (and I do).  We may think that the decision of the courts was legally and morally questionable (and I do).

But this is the legal system we have.  Like any legal system, from time to time it may throw up 'wrong' decisions.  But is it right that any maverick parliamentarian may choose to subvert that system, just because he happens to be in the House of Lords or Commons?

 

Ridiculous

According to the BBC:

President Donald Trump has called on people to be more civil in politics, after a series of suspected explosives were sent to high-profile US figures.

...

Speaking at a Wednesday night rally in Wisconsin, the president vowed to catch the perpetrator and called on the media to "stop endless hostility"."Those engaged in political arena must stop treating political opponents as being morally defective," he said.

Some might think that President Trump has done more than most to coarsen the political discourse of our times ...

Some rustic charm ...