Month: Jan 2021
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Dropped Boule
For those who are writing off the current EU vaccines debacle as a one-off, think again. What happened with the short-lived invocation of Article 16 was simply a more blunderingly spectacular demonstration of the bullying, self-serving, tosh that spawned a solid, broad generation of Brexiters out of 2016’s floating-voter middle ground. Five years on, and…
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Jab Well Done
Interesting that when the UK approved the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, EU honchos scoffed that the approval process had been rushed. Well, they’re not scoffing now, are they? In fact, as of this morning (28 January 2021), they had still not formally approved it. On the commercial front, the UK signed its contract three months before the…
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Inevitabubble
Queues, higher costs, dissatisfied populations, and aggravation. Looks like post-transition Brexit has followed its inexorable path to misery. Or has it? The specific logic arguably suggests otherwise. Millions of EU citizens losing their rights in the UK was not a certainty of Brexit. Additional customs checks at the border with Continental Europe were not set…
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Chapter and Verse
In the hours following the US Inauguration pomp and ceremony, CNN triumphally announced that Amanda Gorman had ‘… reminded America of what poetry can do’. Well, indirectly at least. Absolutely nothing. We had just watched the world’s most powerful nation saved from the brink of implosion, and once again, aspirations masquerading as values had heralded…
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Not the Point
I have long been aggravated by comma abuse in writing, and that goes for both the scattergunners and the stinges. However, rules are not straightforward, and when you have a flow between linguistic registers sometimes within the same piece, commas are infinitely tricky and controversial. Even that last sentence was, for several reasons. That one,…
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Sky’s the Limit
While COVID might be debilitating ever-increasing numbers of the population, Sky is following up with its own assault on the nation’s mental health, not to mention insulting its intelligence. The TV/Broadband company is now spitting out renewal letters with a twist. Headed, ‘We’re now giving you another 12 months of savings’, it all seems a…
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Squirm Ban Führer
Another day, another assault on the freedom of speech by right-on, winkle-dicked, Big Tech bottom-feeders. This time, social media Sturmbannführers at You Tube have driven a metaphorical Panzer through the frontier of my channel and spiked one of my cringeworthy promotional videos. Last month, I received a missive from Team YT to inform me that…
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Trouble in Sight
It looks like they are all going after Trump now, albeit four years too late. He urged his supporters to march on the Capitol and to cheer some senators, ‘and others not so much’. He droned that they ‘would never take back the country with weakness’. Now, I am no expert in the technicalities of…
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Capitol Punishment
The most staggering take-out from the Capitol ruckus was not the sight of a few hundred rank, one-toothed, tits-out hillbillies in full-MAGA descending on the seat of the legislative body. Nossir, it was that it took a jaunty rumble from the sweaty masses and a few waywardly lobbed bricks to prompt any serious notion of…
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Extra Dish-Up
Julian Assange has (sort of) won the latest stage in his battle for absolute freedom, but for the whole Wiki-litany of leaks, this is only the end of the beginning. I never really did get the whole argument that Julian’s sojourn in the Ecuadorian embassy had amounted to ‘arbitrary detention’. After all, he had voluntarily…
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