Category Archives: News

The Minnesota ICE update

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Regular service on this blog will resume soon–probably on Friday, although I make no promises. I’ve had a post in the queue, waiting for its moment in whatever faint sun Notes has to offer. In the meantime, after last Friday’s post about ICE activity and the Minneapolis resistance, I’ve been sent new bits of information, some from friends and some from news sources you may not have seen. I’d like to pass them on. 

You will have figured this out if you’re awake and breathing, but I’ll say it anyway: Notes isn’t a newspaper. I can’t cover the situation with the thoroughness even a half-decent journalist could manage. But I also can’t sit on my couch eating popcorn and pretending none of this is happening. I grew up in the US and spent 40 long, cold years in Minneapolis, although I live in Britain now. What’s happening there is close to my heart and given the power the US wields in the world, it matters to all of us.

The usual irrelevant photo: Yes indeed, folks, it’s the moon and two trees. They’re in Cornwall, or at least the trees are. The moon is–or was–where moons usually are. None of it has nothing to do with anything.

News from friends

A friend writes that churches, community organizations, and businesses are collecting and delivering food, diapers, detergents, and other necessities to families hiding at home. They have an army of volunteers to collect and deliver. “My two faves,” she wrote, “are my dentist and . . . a sex toy store. Doulas have offered to help with delivery and postpartum care since women are afraid to go to the hospital. A vet said he’d take care of dogs by visiting homes for free. A couple guys with trucks offered to tow abandoned cars back to their owners’ homes. I just read now that the city will tow a car abandoned because of an ICE abduction for free.  People are sitting in warm cars with clothes, food and burner phones to help people who just get thrown out into the freezing air after being detained.”

My goddaughter* writes, “Almost every place you go–shopping, churches, to work, doctor’s office, whatever–they have free whistles that are hanging by the doors for everyone to grab when you walk in because there is a good chance you’ll need one. Driving by [ICE agents] when they’re in the vehicles, they stare you down, challenging you with their eyes. People are giving out food, tear gas relief, effing GAS MASKS. I have a friend making entire kits for chemical irritant relief, free, funded via crowd sourcing. We are teaching each other new ways of protecting buildings with vulnerable people in them. At one of my jobs, I walk the perimeter hourly to scan for [ICE agents] camped out, looking for folks. We all have signs on locked doors indicating ICE is not permitted to enter.

“Yesterday they tear-gassed a PRESCHOOL looking for a 21-year-old teacher, who’s legal to be here. Neighbors surrounded the school to protect the kids, using their bodies as shields. They’re now using something called LRAD, which I’m learning causes permanent hearing damage, up to full deafness. They’re surrounding businesses they know cater to minority populations, just looking for anyone that looks like easy pickings. Bus stops and schools are DANGEROUS places to be right now. They’re targeting white people with cars full of groceries, because they assume they’re doing deliveries for scared neighbors. Those volunteers are advised to keep no records on their phones, paper only, and instructed to EAT THE PAPER if stopped to avoid giving away info on those families.

“We are all scared. But we can get through scared because we are on the right side of history. We love our neighbors here. We don’t back down. Considering they’re armed with guns and vests and aggression, and we are not, we’re doing ok. Not really, but we’re holding the line.”

 

It’s not all about ICE

A small Minneapolis charter school that’s focused on social justice was outed first by CNN, then by the New York Post, and after that by a paper further to the right than the Post, as the school Renee Good’s 6-year-old son attended. (Good was the first Minneapolis observer to be killed by ICE.) After that, the pile-on started. A Georgia congressman called for the school to be defunded. 

“This institution radicalizes students and pushes a left-wing agenda that demonizes ICE agents,” he said. “The federal government should not subsidize anti-American education.”

A TikTok video said, “So, Renee Good was trained to fight federal agents through a Minneapolis charter school?!”

It got 100,000 views.

Social media went wild. Teachers got death threats and the school shut down its web presence and switched to online classes to keep students and teachers safe.   

 

From social media and the news

St Paul’s mayor, Kaohly Her, who’s Hmong, writes that ICE is targeting the Karen community, a large ethnic group from southeast Asia.  

“They are refugees and asylum seekers on the path to earning their green cards.

“ICE is now using a deceptive new tactic to detain them. Individuals receive ‘call-in’ letters instructing them to report to the Whipple Building [a federal building and the center of ICE activities in Minneapolis], warned that failure to appear could jeopardize their legal status. But when they do exactly what they’re told, they are detained on the spot — without an interview, without a case review.

“It’s a trap that puts people who came to this country seeking safety in an impossible position. These detainment tactics are cruel, deceptive, and deeply un-American.

“I recently visited the Karen community to pray together and to make clear that they are not alone — and that I will continue to stand with them.”

An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports the people detained in the Whipple building–ICE’s all-purpose, overcrowded lockup–are being denied medical care, including diabetes and epilepsy medication, as well as products for their periods. Some report being given one sandwich a day and left to beg for water. Some are held in toilets, sometimes shackled or handcuffed, sometimes in mixed-sex groups, and packed in so tight that one person reported that they had to take turns to lie down. A woman reported that her wedding ring and some of her clothes were cut off. Citizens and legal immigrants are held separately from the undocumented, who conditions are worse.

Lawyers say it’s virtually impossible to get access to their clients.

And on Facebook, someone writes, On Facebook, someone writes, “One of the nuts things about organizing in the Twin Cities right now is that even the most long term organizers who’ve been here for decades can’t keep track of all the resistance that is going on. There are so many self-organized crews just doing work that in any conversation with someone from another neighborhood you might stumble over a whole collective of people resisting in ways you didn’t think of. There’s a crew of carpenters just going around fixing kicked-in doors. There are tow truck drivers taking cars of detained people away for free. People delivering food to families in hiding. So many local rapid response groups that the number is uncertain but somewhere between 80 and the low hundreds- especially when one considers that several immigrant communities have their own non-English rapid response networks usually uncounted in the main English-language directories. People standing watch outside daycares and schools.”

 

Two notable arrests

A legal Turkish immigrant who was his severely disabled son’s primary carer was picked up by ICE when he appeared at a regularly scheduled immigration hearing. His son’t condition deteriorated. The government refused to release him or let him communicate with his son.

When his son died, they refused to allow him to attend the funeral. He’s still in detention.

On a cheerier note, ICE picked up a Brazilian influencer who’d defended ICE, arguing that the people ICE had detained were “all crooks. The lot of them.”

 

Is it settling down?

After Alex Pretti’s killing caused an uproar, Trump made a few noises about dialing things down, but it doesn’t look like target groups (Asians; people who are brown- or black-skinned) are any safer. ICE has expanded its power to arrest people bothering to get a without warrant. As far as I can tell from the wording of the news articles I’ve seen, ICE granted that power to itself. A judge could overturn it, and may, but the order would then get bogged down in the courts until eventually Trump’s Supreme Court upheld ICE’s power to forgo warrants, and if the mood takes it, to turn spring to winter and wine to caustic soda. 

The government’s offered to scale back the Minnesota operation if the state “cooperates.”  

What does cooperate mean? With a bunch as chaotic as this, you can never be sure. I’ve seen one statement saying they want access to the prisons, presumably to deport people, but several say they want access to voter rolls, which raises the chilling (and not unlikely) prospect that they would use them to tip the November midterm elections in their favor. They’ve already asked 43 states for access and only 8 have allowed it. The ones that refused cite privacy concerns and the right of states to determine voter eligibility. The Justice Department has sued 23 for access.

 

The musicians fight back

I can offer you not one but three songs about the Minnesota resistance: Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis,” Billy Bragg’s “City of Heroes,” and the Marsh Family’s “Minnesota,” an adaptation of the 1967 “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)”; it keeps the original line about wearing flowers in your hair, which–sorry, guys–no sane Minnesotan would do in the winter and just isn’t a Minnesota kind of thing in the summer either. Never mind. The rest of it is a good fit. 

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* If you’ve been around here for long, you will have stumbled over some mention of me being a Jewish atheist. So what am I doing with a (yes, Catholic) godkid? Religiously, I admit, it’s strange. It’s also been wonderful. My partner and I became joint godmothers, and it formalized our relationship with the family and let us know we were welcome to stay involved. I’m proud to quote her here and in awe of the person she’s grown up to be.

Minnesota, Trump’s immigration raids, and resistance

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Today’s post is off topic. I’m supposed to write about Britain here. Sorry, but I’ve been watching the US, the country I grew up in and thought I knew, teeter on the edge of authoritarian* rule, so what the hell, let’s throw my self-inflicted rules out the window and talk about what’s happening in Minnesota. 

Minnesota’s in the middle of the continent and so far north that it hangs off the clothesline of Canada, gathering icicles until March. Or is that June? I’ve been gone so long that I forget. Until recently it was known primarily for being cold and bland. People talk about Minnesota Nice, which you could define as a culture of overwhelming politeness and an allergy to confrontation. I lived there for forty years, and spiky New Yorker that I am, I didn’t do well with all that  blandness and the confrontation allergy–or the cold. I wouldn’t have picked it as the most likely place to face down an occupation by heavily armed federal agents and do it with resilience, with grief, with compassion, and with flashes of humor. But it has. I’m in awe of the people I know there and of all the ones I don’t.

If you follow the news, you’ll know that some 3,000 of Trump’s federal agents were dropped into Minnesota–mostly to Minneapolis, but they’ve made forays into its sister city, St. Paul, into the suburbs, and into a few rural towns. They’re not all from ICE–Immigration and Customs Enforcement–but let’s use it as shorthand. 

Embarrassingly irrelevant photo: I did have some shots of Minneapolis in more peaceful (and warmer) times but I seem to have deleted them in an effort to free up some space on my phone. So here’s a photo or a prehistoric stone quoit in Cornwall. Anyone can spot the connection, right?

If you believe the governmental noise, they’re there to detain the most dangerous illegal immigrants, but they’ve swept up the legal as well as the undocumented. They’ve swept up people with a criminal record and people who have none, citizens and non-citizens, immigrants and the native born, always focusing on people with brown and black skin, although they’re not above snatching the occasional Asian or (irony with never die) Native American. They’ve been stopping cars and pulling (literally pulling) people out, smashing windshields while they’re at it, and bundling them into unmarked cars. They’ve been grabbing people at work, at home, in parking lots, at bus stops, on the way home from school or the supermarket, at school. They’ve been detaining children. 

I could go on but if you follow the news you know all that. I could also fill a post with the ways they’re breaking the law, violating the constitution, and ignoring court orders, but I’m working hard not to rant here, and not to tell you too much of what (I hope) you already know. 

What I want to do instead is draw on what friends have told me about living through this moment, which a lot of them are calling an occupation.

 

Kids living in the cross-hairs

A white friend has two children whose father, her ex-husband, is latino. She’s terrified for the kids, although last I heard she hadn’t started keeping them home from school. They’re native-born citizens but they look latino and ICE agents are not known for caring about niceties. So the kids carry copies of their identity documents with them and their mother drills them on what to do and  what to say if they’re stopped. She loses sleep over how to reclaim them from the system if they are taken, and whether she’ll be able to reclaim them. When their father, her ex-husband, picks them up, she asks him to keep his papers on the front seat because if he’s stopped they won’t give him time to open the glove compartment. Last time I talked with her, she was thinking it would be safer if he didn’t see the kids up for a while. He’s a naturalized citizen but that may not protect him. They could easily sweep him up and they could take the kids with him. It’s dangerous to be in the car if you’re latino. It’s dangerous to be on the street. 

Some time after the occupation started, the kids asked what they could do to look more white. 

Let that sink in. It’ll break your heart.

Their mother also loses sleep over whether she’ll have to scoop the kids up and flee. 

How likely is she to have to do that? No one knows. That’s why, at 3 a.m., people make plans, or at least understand how unprepared they are. The central issues are where they could go and how, but another one is what to do with their much-loved dog. They can’t abandon her. They might not be able to take her. 

At a time when we’re all feeling helpless, I was able to do one thing: email friends and ask if they’d be on standby to take the dog and either keep her or find her a home where she’d be loved. Without hesitation, they said yes, as I’d known they would. Everybody exchanged phone numbers. It’s one less middle-of-the-night worry for a mother stretched almost to the breaking point.

It was a small thing, but I felt like I’d done a good day’s work. 

My friend’s family is safer than many, but their story gives you a sense of what people are living with.

 

Legal observers

I used to live in South Minneapolis, close to where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by federal agents. It seems to be the epicenter of the conflict. Some people I know are acting as legal observers. These are ordinary people, giving up their time and risking detention and, it turns out, death, to protect their immigrant neighbors. What they can do is limited, but they patrol the streets armed with phones and whistles. If they see ICE stopping a car, watching a playground, cornering someone, chasing someone, beating someone, dragging someone into an unmarked car, they blow their whistles, they record what’s happening, and they use social media–encrypted neighborhood chat groups–to alert the neighbors. They record license plates. They escort kids to school and stand by to make sure they get on and off their school buses safely. It sounds like nothing, but they make what’s happening public. ICE hates them. 

And the people ICE hates aren’t just the people patrolling the streets. When whistles start to blow, neighbors come outside. They yell. They watch. They record. They blow more whistles. More heavily committed people are on neighborhood chat groups that formed in the wake of the George Floyd killing and that now carry alerts about local raids, so they hear about them that way. So when ICE stops, people gather. 

George Floyd? He was the man whose death sparked off the Black Lives Matter movement. That also happened in South Minneapolis.

Two observers have been killed and some uncounted number that we’ll just call a lot have been dragged into cars and detained, then eventually photographed, occasionally told they’ll be added to a list of domestic terrorists, and released into the cold–it’s been -20 F. for part of this time; cold enough to turn your thoughts to ice–with no coat, no phone. A person could freeze out there, but a group of volunteers, Haven Watch, has formed to meet released detainees, bring them into their cars  to warm up, and give them coats, a hot drink, and a burner phone, then find them a way home.

Ilhan Omar, one of Minnesota’s senators, sent out an email mentioning a legal immigrant–a refugee–who was “visited by ICE and swiftly taken away. Her children produced paperwork proving their mother was in the country lawfully. ICE ignored them, shackled [her],and flew her to a detention center in Texas. Days later, they released her in Texas with nothing but the shirt on her back. Family and friends had to help her get back home to Minnesota.”

And those are the lucky one–the people ICE releases. The undocumented and some random number of people who are in the country legally are moved into detention centers, where conditions are reported to be horrible and elected officials are only occasionally allowed in.

One woman who hadn’t been detained wrote that “agents showed up outside my home. They didn’t approach the house, but they parked there, watching. They’ve taken photos of me, they know my car, and they followed me to intimidate me. It worked. I ended up removing my children from our home out of fear. . . . This is the reality we’re living in. Families trying to help other families are being harassed and intimidated. Our rights are being stripped away in plain sight.”

If you’re connected to the right people, Facebook has become a useful forum for people to exchange information, personal testimony, the occasional rant, and news articles and commentary published by smaller magazines. One reporter wrote, and someone copied onto Facebook, that what he was seeing in Minneapolis looked a lot like what he saw during the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square. It was spontaneous, it came from the grassroots, and it wasn’t centrally organized. 

 

Flashes of hope

That people continue to turn out in huge numbers–one estimate is tens of thousands–is a massive sign of hope, but there are less visible ones. A friend who lives in an old people’s housing complex organized a letter writing session. She drafted sample letters to the governor, Minnesota’s senators, corporations who’ve visibly supported ICE. Chaos ensued. People couldn’t get online. People confused links and email addresses. People stopped writing to declaim, as my friend said, “About how awful this all was. I felt like a Kindergarten teacher who lost control of her class.”

Still, letters were sent. 

Elsewhere, both individuals and organizations collect and deliver food to people whose situation makes them vulnerable and who are afraid to go out. Local cafes, coffee shops, and restaurants offer free drinks and soup to frozen legal observers. You can’t understand the value of that until you’ve lived through a Minnesota winter. In Cornwall, where I live now, when people say “it’s freezing,” they mean water freezes. In Minnesota, they mean their eyelashes are frosting over, and no, I’m not exaggerating about that. If you wrap a scarf around your nose and mouth, which is tempting and I’ve done it, your lovely warm breath will first turn to frost on the scarf, pressing a layer of ice against your face, and then rise up toward your eyes. In no time at all, each time you blink you can feel your upper eyelashes grasping your lower ones and then gently letting go. They do let go–you won’t end up with your eyes frozen shut–but it’s a very strange feeling.

A yarn shop is selling a pattern for a red hat modeled on one Norwegians are said to have worn as a symbol of opposition to the Nazis. Proceeds go to immigrant aid organizations. 

I mentioned that people had brought some flashes of humor to their resistance. They’re not dressing in inflatable costumes the way people did in Portland. Different situation, different responses. But I have seen clips of two demonstrators zipping downhill on a sled decorated as a giant can of de-icer. A second group dressed as bowling pins with the heads of Trump and his cronies and waited at the base of the hill until someone rolled a giant bowling ball downhill and they obligingly fell over. A third group went down on a sled decorated as a swan. What that had to do with anything is beyond me, but it was lovely. 

I’ve leaned heavily on old friends for the information I’ve used, and we lean heavily to the left. But what’s happening is wider than my old circle of friends. A former neighbor who’s not particularly political and not of the left writes, “Words can’t describe what a sad mess it is here. Never thought I would see Minnesota like this.” 

 

Since the shootings

As I write this (a day or so in advance of posting it), a widespread and angry response to the second, meticulously documented, shooting has forced the federal rhetoric to be toned down a bit and a few layers of support have peeled away from Trump’s anti-immigrant push, but ICE is still on the streets in Minnesota. Federal prosecutors are bringing charges against people for “everything from spitting to throwing an egg or brick at federal agents. The defendants are also accused of other efforts to impede law enforcement, including blocking, striking or bumping agents’ vehicles, shoving agents and resisting arrest.” (Sorry, the article’s behind a paywall, but hey, it’s there.)

This morning, again on Facebook, a suburban organization warned of “ICE agents . . . impersonating concerned community members in an attempt to gather information about vulnerable individuals and to target the helpers too. . . . As long as ICE is in our community, we have to set aside ‘Minnesota Nice’ and be comfortable telling people we cannot share information with people we do not personally know.” Someone else posted about finding a car abandoned on his street, windows smashed, keys and identification inside, evidence of another abduction. “When I tell you it’s worse than it seems,” he wrote, “I’m not exaggerating. People are disappearing all over the place and we may never know their stories. I’ve started to lose count of how many I have personally witnessed.”

Through neighbors, the writer was at least able to notify the missing driver’s family.

The Nation magazine has nominated Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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* I used the word authoritarian. It’s a more moderate word than fascist and I’d like to sound marginally well balanced, but you could argue reasonably, I think, for either word. Whichever one we go for, it’s deeply troubling.

Playing politics with typefaces, or what font to choose as the world falls apart

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What’s the important news in our moment of multiple crises? That the US State Department ordered its diplomats to stop using the Calibri typeface, which is a sans serif font, and replace it with Times New Roman, which has serifs.

Which has whats? A serif typeface stands on flattened little feet, as if someone had come along and melted the bottom of each letter, although admittedly with some letters it’s not exactly a foot but a tail. On the other hand, a sans serif typeface doesn’t flatten out at the bottom, and unlike that doggy in the window, it has no waggily tails. It goes up and down, it goes around when necessary, and it gets off stage in as straight a line as possible. 

Did I throw too many images at you in too short a space? Don’t worry about it. It’s the least of our problems.

The blog you’re looking at uses a sans serif typeface–no feet; no tails; all business.  Or since one picture’s worth 839 words:

So that’s what we’re talking about, but still, when a rich and powerful nation orders its minions to abandon one typeface and use another, sane people everywhere rise up from their Crunchy Munchy Oatsies* and ask why the country has nothing better to do with its time.

 

The explanation . . .

. . . or as close to an explanation as I can get, given that none of this is going to make much sense.

Once upon a time, children, a man named Joe Biden was the U.S. president and the State Department began using the Calibri typeface, because Calibri is easier for people with visual disabilities to read, and if anybody cared it didn’t make the evening news. Then the country elected a new president who I won’t bother to name because it’ll only depress me, and with him came a new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who seized upon that business about disabilities and said**, “Ha! Wasteful diversity move. I’ll take care of that.” Because why should some bunch of disabled whiners get to make the rest of the world read their preferred typeface? We all have problems, right? If I’m allergic to onions, do I get to stop you from eating onions?

(The * above indicates an entirely made up breakfast cereal, and the ** an entirely made up quote, although I’m reasonably sure the words “wasteful diversity” come from an actual quote. They may or may not have been rubbing shoulders as they do here. Close enough.)

How much did the wasteful changeover to Calibri cost? If anyone’s offered a number, I haven’t found it. 

How much did it cost to roll back that wasteful changeover? The same amount it cost to introduce it, I’d guess, but never mind. Calibri is the woke typeface and therefore bad. Times New Roman is its opposite, the non-woke typeface, and therefore good. So if the woke change was wasteful, the un-woke one must, ipso facto, QED, and several other Latin-inflected inserts, be the opposite of wasteful. Who knows, it might be so opposite it positively generates income.

But it’s not all about cost and that now-forbidden phrase, diversity, equity, and inclusion: “Consistent formatting,” the State Department pontificated, “strengthens credibility and supports a unified Department identity.” 

Credible? Unified? Sweetie, you’re going to need more than a change of typeface.

A story comes to mind. It may not be relevant, but I do hope it is: many and many a year ago, someone I know worked for an organization that the State of Minnesota had just started investigating for fraud. Management was visibly coming unglued and one of the executives ended a staff meeting early so everyone could go file a mess of papers that had been left lying around. Not because she was trying to hide them–they weren’t the papers that needed hiding–but because it was one of the few things she could control at that moment.

Not that long afterward, the organization went down the tubes and the director went to jail. 

Maybe, however, if they’d changed their typeface–

The creator weighs in, and so do I

The man who created Calibri, Lucas de Groot, said it “was designed to facilitate reading on modern computer screens” and that he found the uproar over it both sad and hilarious.

I find it mostly hilarious but with overtones of infuriating. I like Times New Roman and I’m not a fan of Calibri or any other sans serif font. That makes me worry about the company I’m keeping. First chance I get, I’ll have a serious talk with myself and see if I can bring my aesthetic preferences into line with my politics. 

However, I have zero control over the typeface this blog uses, so don’t read anything into it and don’t expect it to change. It’s one of the many things in life I have no control over. I did ask Lord Chatbot the name of the typeface, though, and he told me it was Georgia, which goes to show you what Lord Chatbot knows. Georgia’s a serif face. This is definitively sans. 

I have no control over much of anything, but I can one-up a chatbot with the best of ’em.

None of this, I admit, has any connection with the alleged topic of Notes. It interested me. It’s absurd. And I’m originally from the U.S. From where I sit, that’s a good enough excuse.

Nigel Farage, the Reform Party, and a very British form of racism

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Back in 2025 (remember 2025?), the Guardian broke a story that surprised no one who pays attention to the British news: Nigel Farage–head of the right-wing populist Reform Party, face of the Brexit campaign, and beer-drinking, former commodities trading, expensive-suit-wearing man-of-the-people–was known, as a schoolboy, for racist bullying.

Such as? According to his fellow former students, he said things like “Hitler was right” and “Gas then all.” Other incidents, which don’t condense as neatly onto a list, involve him asking Black students where they were from and then “pointing away, saying: ‘That’s the way back.’ ”

It is understood by a certain category of British racist that no dark-skinned person is from Britain. If they were born abroad, that’s where they’re from, even if they came to Britain as an infant. And if they were born in Britain, it doesn’t count: they’re still from the country some ancestor was born in. 

Farage’s comments were part of a pattern he was, apparently, known for–a pattern that included leading students in racist songs.

Apparently? Well, I wasn’t there, but a number of fellow former students have told similar stories. Some who’ve gone public were on the receiving end and some were witnesses. 

This all happened in what the British call a public school, which in case you’re not British I should explain means it isn’t public, it’s private. And expensive. The kind of place every budding man-of-the-people is sent by his well-established parents-of-the-people.

Irrelevant photo: a neighbor’s camellia, blooming in December

 

Ah, but the story isn’t complete until we have a denial

I said no one who’d been paying attention was surprised, but I exaggerated: Farage’s Reform Party was surprised. It never happened, the party said. And Farage’s barrister said the same thing, although in fancier language: he never “engaged in, condoned, or led racist or antisemitic behaviour.” 

Farage was also surprised, although instead of saying it never happened he said something I’ll translate to, It didn’t happen like that so it doesn’t count. In one denial (ask Lord Google for “Farage denies racism” and you can take your pick of links), he said he “never directly racially abused anybody.” 

Directly abused them? 

Do I have to explain everything? That’s the opposite of indirectly abusing them. He described his comments as “banter in the playground” and said, “I would never, ever do it in a hurtful or insulting way.”

Would he apologize? 

“No . . . because I don’t think I did anything that directly hurt anybody.”

The people who were on the receiving end have, shall we say, different memories of it all. One said that after his “existence as a target was established” Farage–who was considerably older than him–would wait for him at the school gate  “so he could repeat the vulgarity.”

Another talks about Farage’s comments as “racial intimidation,” and a third–a witness–described one of his targets as being “tormented.”

As denials will, Farage’s have succeeded in keeping the story alive and bringing more former students out of the woodwork to say, Yes, I remember that happening.

Meanwhile, when a BBC interviewer pushed Farage to answer some awkward questions, Farage accused it of hypocrisy. Hadn’t it broadcast shows in the  1970s that wouldn’t meet today’s more delicate standards? He also threatened to sue it. And to boycott it.

I can’t imagine he’ll follow through with the boycott, but I for one would be happy to see the BBC become a Farage-free zone.

 

Free speech

You see where he’s going with this,right? He’s trying to cast it as a free speech issue. Asked whether he’d said things that might have offended people, he answered, “Without any shadow of a doubt. 

“And without any shadow of a doubt I shall say things tonight on this stage that some people will take offence to and will use pejorative terms about.

“That is actually in some ways what open free speech is. Sometimes you say things that people don’t like.”

Which is why you threaten to sue the broadcaster who said them. 

 

Comparative racism 101

If this were just about Farage, I’d leave it to the newspapers and the broadcast media to cover the story. They can do a better job of it than I can. The reason I’m picking up on it is that it speaks to something that fascinates me about British racism. Or maybe that’s English racism. I’ll never figure out which is which. As a friend tells me her immigrant grandmother used to say (about all kinds of things), “For that I am not long enough in this country.”

Thank you, Jane. And thank you, Jane’s grandmother, who I wish I could’ve known.

I don’t expect I ever will be long enough in this country to figure out what’s English and what’s British. I’d be grateful for any insights, guidance, wild guesses, or general wiseassery on the subject.

But enough lead-in. What’s the oddity? Many people of the white persuasion judge whether something they’ve done or said is racist not by its impact but by how it was meant. If they judge themselves not to be racist, then whatever they’ve done or said can’t be racist. Because it wasn’t meant as racism. Which means they don’t have to change. Because their intent is pure.

Reality, reporting, and artificial intelligence: it’s the news from Britain

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If you follow nothing but the US news, you can be forgiven for thinking that reality’s out of fashion these days, but the British press, for all its faults, is still struggling to keep the real world in at least soft focus. So it was an embarrassment when the Times interviewed Bill de Blasio about Zohran Mamdani and–

Wait, though: Bill de Who? Blasio. The former mayor of New York. About the man who at the time was about to be elected the new mayor of New York and now has been. Only it turned out that the reporter wasn’t interviewing Bill de Blasio the former mayor but Bill DeBlasio a wine importer from Long Island.

Bill de Wine Merchant said some highly critical things about Mamdani. Bill de Mayor supported Mamdani and was furious to see his position misrepresented in the Times.

What happened? The reporter goofed. It’s a mistake anyone could make and we can all be grateful no one handed this guy the nuclear codes instead of what should’ve been a simple assignment.

Irrelevant photo: gladiolus, blooming out of season

As the wine importer explained it,  he hadn’t impersonated de Blasio.

“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio. . . . I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor. So I just gave him my opinion.”

On the topic of how their names are spelled, Wine DeBlasio said, “Low-class Italians use a little d.” 

If we have to take sides, I’m guessing we know who we like.

Wine DeBlasio had been getting low-class de Blasio’s email for years, which he described as a decade of getting “brutal, vicious hate mail.” When security guards at a baseball game offered to introduce him to “the real Bill de Blasio,” the mayor de Blasio asked, “How bad is it having the same last name as me?” 

“Dude, you’re killing me,” Wine DeBlasio said.

With this, I guess, he got his own back.

 

Sexism and magic tricks 

Back in the dark days of 1991, the Magic Circle, which is described as an elite society of magicians, had a revelation: it was time to admit women.

I know, but you don’t want to rush into these things. I mean, what if actual women showed up at the meetings and distracted the men or, you know, disrupted things? What if they turned out not to be any good at this magic business–or worse, what if they turned out to be better? 

Anyway, once the society joined the modern world, one member, Raymond Lloyd, revealed that he was, in fact, a she and had become a magician only so she could–

Okay, the newspaper article I’m working with says “infiltrate” the society. I’d say “fuck with it.” Either way, it wasn’t a simple task. Lloyd was already working as an assistant to the magician Jenny Winstanley, who was sick to the teeth of the boys-only policy but was too recognizable to fool them herself. 

So Winstanley and Lloyd hatched a plot and Lloyd spent the next two years not only learning magic tricks but creating the character of Raymond, a young-looking 18-year-old. In the photo that goes with the article, Raymond looks like a young 14-year-old, and a short one, but nobody thought to question  either his age or sex. Lloyd wore a wig, a body suit, gloves (her hands, she thought, would be a giveaway), and a bit of facial fluff. He spoke in a croaky voice. Or maybe she did. It’s complicated. Why don’t we have have non-gendered pronouns? The Finnish don’t and they’ve reproduced successfully for a long time now. 

The gloves made sleight-of-hand tricks particularly difficult, but the real trick was convincing the men sitting in judgement on her act that they were looking at a very young man. But you know how it is. Magic is built on keeping people from noticing what you don’t want them to notice. They saw only what they expected to see. 

Lloyd was accepted as a member and when the society voted to accept women she and Winstanley went public about their best trick ever. 

And what happened? The Circle threw Lloyd out. 

She worked as a magician for another ten years before packing it in and moving to Spain. Winstanley died in a car crash in 2004. Then in early 2025, the Circle voted Lloyd back in and went on a hunt to let her know. She was, she said, inclined to pass up the honor–she hadn’t worked as a magician in years–but decided to accept it in Winstanley’s honor. 

The Circle is still 95% male but women no longer have to disguise themselves as 14-year-old boys to join. 

Who says the world isn’t making progress?

 

And from the world of artificial intelligence …

. . . comes just what you’ve been waiting for: deathbots. These are not bots that kill you–those are called drones, or sometimes self-driving cars–but programs that record the voices, speech patterns, and personalities of the dead, toss them in an electronic blender, bake at 350 F, and present them to the living so they can have a nice long chat with someone they miss.

I know. Bring an umbrella, friends, ‘cause it’s getting weird out there.

A project called Synthetic Pasts did some research on how this was working, using themselves, they said, as “our own test subjects. We uploaded our own videos, messages and voice notes, creating ‘digital doubles’ of ourselves.

“In some cases, we played the role of users preparing our own synthetic afterlives. In others, we acted as the bereaved trying to talk to a digital version of someone who has passed away.”

What did they learn?

The least creepy versions–that’s my judgement but I don’t think it’s too far off theirs–are basically archives, sorting the prospective dead person’s recorded memories (recorded while they’re still alive, in case that needs saying) into browsable categories. From there, though, it gets weirder.

Another version hosts a kind of electronic seance, prompting the prospective corpse to record memories so it can spit out its own version, complete with emojis, and not always emojis that match the emo.

How well does the bot handle the emotions this may call up in the living recipient those memories? 

Ummm. Yeah. Example:

Human: You were always so encouraging and supportive. I miss you.

Deathbot: I’m right here for you, always ready to offer encouragement and support whenever you need it. And I miss you too… Let’s take on today together, with positivity and strength.

So basically, a prefabricated motivational message. You could find the same thing in the greeting card department of your nearest stationery store.  If any are left where you live. And if one is, you might ask it to record its memories so we won’t have to mourn it when it closes.

As the experimenters point out, this is a business, complete with subscription fees and platforms that harvest users’ data–emotional and biometric–to keep engagement high. Loss, grief, and remembrance? Hell yes, let’s monetize ’em all. I’m sure Marx would’ve had something interesting to say about that if in his most irresponsible fever dreams he could’ve imagined such a thing.

The systems promise, eventually, to digitally resurrect the dead–their gestures, voices, personalities. If that becomes possible, the experimenters say it will change the experience of remembering, “smoothing away the ambiguity and contradiction. . . . 

“Our study suggests that while you can talk to the dead with AI, what you hear back reveals more about the technologies and platforms that profit from memory – and about ourselves – than about the ghosts they claim we can talk to.”

*

But AI isn’t just talking for the dead. For a small fee it’s available to speak for the living and to the government. 

Britain has a system called planning permission, which limits what can be built where. Or at least it’s intended to. It’s complicated and everyone hates it (yes, I have checked with everyone and every last woman, man, and magician agrees) but it’s also kept the country from turning into the sprawling mess that re the suburbs of Chicago. 

How does it work? Let’s say your neighbors want to turn their attic into an extra bedroom, which involves a slightly higher roof and a few windows. Or wants to add a multi-level parking ramp. Or turn the garage into a nightclub. Or a developer wants to build 700 new houses on a nearby field. The proposal can be perfectly rational or completely insane. You know what humans are like. You and your neighbors will be informed about it and have a chance to object. 

Objecting takes a bit of commitment, though. You have to take one word and staple it to another word, then tape both to a thought that’s at least marginally related to your objection. And your objection has to be related to the planning regulations, because “I don’t like it” won’t get you past the gatekeepers of modern British living.

So you need to understand the planning regulations,  at least a bit, which–

Would it be fair to say no one does? Probably not, but it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration. The article I’m stealing my information from calls the regulations labyrinthine. 

And here’s where we find not one but two AI services that offer to take your objection, dig out some backing from the planning regs, and turn it into a rational-sounding letter, complete with references to previous cases and decisions that–you know what AI is like–might never have been decided by any governmental body on this planet.

What will this do to the planning system? According to a lawyer who specializes in planning law, bring it to a grinding halt. The decisions are made by elected officials–sometimes very local ones–who know a little more about planning than I do about chemistry but not necessarily. 

“The danger,” the lawyer said, “is decisions are made on the wrong basis. Elected members making final decisions could easily believe AI-generated planning speeches . . . even if they are full of made-up case law and regulations.” 

Someone who campaigns for more homes to be built with community support said, “This will . . . lead to people finding obscure reasons” to object to planning applications. 

Meanwhile, the government is promoting AI as a way to clear the planning backlog and build 1.5 million homes by 2029.

***

I can’t blame artificial intelligence for my most recent fuckup, just a lapse in human intelligence. It was Fraggle who pointed out (thanks, Fraggle) that I posted a headline, midweek instead of Friday, with no content, in spite of which it got two likes. I may be at my most popular when I don’t say anything. 

Where was the content? she asked. In a dusty shoebox at the back of the closet, whence I have rescued it and poured it here, where it belongs. 

What happened? I hit Post when I should’ve hit Schedule. 

It’s been that kind of week. That’s the lovely thing about publishing: when you make a fool of yourself, you do it in public. Stick around to see what happens next. I’ll be as surprised as you.

Public consultations: it’s the news from Britain

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In a stunning leap into the modern world, the Wirral Council got rid of a 1935 bylaw that made it illegal to beat a carpet, sing wantonly, or sound a noisy trumpet along a stretch of the Merseyside coast. 

Is it possible to play a non-noisy trumpet? No offense to trumpet players, but I’m under the impression that they’re pretty much all tuned to the key of loud, although any quiet trumpet players out there are welcome to tell me I’m an ignorant git. I do not now play nor have I ever played the trumpet.

But back to the law change: It’s also now legal–or at least not illegal–to incite a dog to bark, make a violent outcry, or erect a “booth, tent, bathing machine, shed, stand, stall, show, exhibition, swing, roundabout or other like erection or thing.” 

What’s a bathing machine? It’s not a machine that throws itself into the bathtub. It’s a wheeled hut that could be pulled into the water, allowing victorian ladies to change into clothes that wouldn’t drown them but not have to walk across the beach in anything revealing. Why anyone bothered to ban them in non-victorian 1935 is beyond me.

Irrelevant photo: My phone tells me this is whitebeam. It’s sometimes right but it did once swear that a dahlia was a carnation, so don’t place any heavy bets on this, okay? What I can tell you definitively is that it’s a neighbor’s tree.

What inspired the changes? Bikes–or as they call them in Britain, push bikes. The old law made it illegal to ride one along what’s now a popular bike route, which left the council in the awkward position of wanting to post informational signs related to a common but technically illegal activity. 

Before 2011, local governments in England needed permission to get rid of out-of-date bylaws. Now all they have to do is hold a public consultation, which brings me, at long last, to today’s headline.

Maybe you know what public consultations are like, but in case you don’t, they work like this: You (the you here being a governmental body) open some online site up to the public, inviting them to comment, but no one knows about it unless the Anti-Bathing-Machine Society finds it and publicizes it to their members, in which case they all write in and make the case that the beach will fill up with bathing machines. You either read what they’ve written or you don’t. Either way, you’ve consulted, the rules have been followed, and you can repeal the law in peace. 

I’m sure London followed those procedures when it repealed a law against transporting horse carcasses in Hammersmith and Fulham. As did Whitstable, in Kent, when it repealed a law against drying clothes in parks. And so we stagger into the modern age, unencumbered by history. 

 

Consulting the not-public

Meanwhile, the House of Lords consulted itself (at least as far as I’ve been able to work it out) about whether to change its rules so that lords will no longer have to register nonfinancial interests that might influence their work. And guess what: it decided the rule was too burdensome and dropped it.

Does a nonfinancial interest  matter, though? Since we live in a society where money rules all, you wouldn’t expect it to, but it can involve anything from being the unpaid chair of a board to involvement in a thinktank or lobbying group. Tortoise Media found that some members of the Lords only participated in debate on topics they’d registered a nonfinancial interest in. 

And following the trail of a declared nonfinancial interests has, at times, led to undeclared financial interests coming to light.

 

Not consulting a proofreader

At the recent Conservative Party conference, attendees were given chocolate bars with a wrapper misspelling Britain–the place the party would like to take another run at governing.  I hate to defend the Conservatives, but they have company: the Scottish Labour Party misspelling Scottish in an election leaflet and the Reform Party misspelled the name of one of its two Members of Parliament, who went ahead and shared the leaflet on social media.

 

Consulting the wrong people

Whoever the organizers of the Great North Run, in Newcastle, consulted when they ordered participation medals and tee shirts for their race, they were the wrong people. The souvenirs proudly carried a map of the wrong city: Sunderland. 

Give them a few years and they’ll be collectors items.

 

Consulting more wrong people

The British aren’t–hmm, how do I say this diplomatically–famous for their food, and when a popular website, Good Food, ran a recipe for cacio e pepe, which you may have guessed is Italian (the language is a hint) it set off a storm. First mistake, the website said it was easy. It’s not. I can testify that the easy part is how easily it goes wrong. Second mistake, they got the ingredients wrong. 

Butter? No. No butter.

Parmesan? Nope. Pecorino romano. 

An Italian association of restaurants demanded a correction and, in case that wasn’t enough, took the issue up with the British embassy. But let’s not be too hard on the British about this. The New York Times got in the same kind of hot water by adding tomatoes to a carbonara sauce. 

 

Let’s drop the consultation theme

In Bavaria (that was in Germany last I looked), someone called the police about a wiseacre ringing their doorbell in the middle of the night and being nowhere around when they answered the door. You know how the game works: some teenager rings the bell, then runs giggling around the corner. Except that the ringing didn’t stop.

The police did show up and noticed not just that the bell was still ringing but that a motion-detection light hadn’t gone on, which led some clever devil to notice a slime trail crossing the doorbell sensors. A slug had set them off. Or–what do I know?–a snail.

The police claim to have explained territorial boundaries to the little beastie. I doubt it’ll help, but the story made the news in multiple countries, including Britain (making this almost legitimate blog fodder), for whatever that moment of fame is worth to the sleep-deprived.  

 *

Meanwhile, back in Britain, 210 teenage army recruits were put through the wrong training course when the army forgot to notify an outsourcing company, Capita, about a change in its requirements. By now, everyone will have been shuffled into the right course but the mistake will extend the length of their training. 

The Army’s struggled lately to recruit enough trainees to replace the soldiers who are leaving. It’s currently short more than 2,000 trained personnel. This is unlikely to help.

How Britain adds a group to its list of terrorist organizations

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To add a group to Britain’s list of proscribed organizations, first the Home Secretary has to declare it a terrorist organization–”one that engages in or promotes terrorism,” according to a government website–and then Parliament has to approve the addition. 

If you aspire to get your local birdwatchers group added to the list, those are the hoops you’ll have to jump through. As soon as those two things are done, it becomes illegal to belong to it or promote it. Or invite support for it. Or arrange or assist with a meeting that supports it. Or address a meeting that etc., presumably even if you stand up at the meeting and say, “Everybody stop this and go home.” Or publicly wear clothes that “arouse suspicion of membership or support.” Or display anything that arouses suspicion of etc. 

If this is starting to sound abusably wide-ranging, stay with me. We’ll get to that.

The maximum sentence for any of those things can be as high as 14 years. Plus a fine. 

 

Palestine Action

Not long ago, the British government added a group called Palestine Action to the list, so now anyone who’s a member or who “recklessly expresses” support for the group (I’m quoting from yet another government website there) is dicing with the possibility of a prison sentence. Two other organizations were added at the same time: the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement.

Palestine Action describes itself as disruptive but nonviolent and targets companies involved in arms sales to Israel. They’ve occupied premises, destroyed property, gotten themselves arrested, and used spray paint. They’ve probably even gotten spray paint on their clothes. They haven’t killed, tried to kill, or threatened to kill anyone.

A demonstration in Barnstaple, Devon, against the genocide in Gaza.

The Russian Imperial movement is a white supremacist and monarchist organization that promotes a Russian imperial state and has been linked to a series of letter bombs and has a paramilitary training wing based in Russia.  

The Maniac Murder Cult is an international white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization that exists mostly online. It encourages acts of violence against homeless people, drug addicts and migrants. Its leader’s known as Commander Butcher and is facing charges in the US for allegedly telling an undercover federal agent to dress up as Santa Claus and hand out poisoned candy to non-white kids and students at Jewish schools. The disconnect between Jews and Christmas seems to have gone over his head. A fair number of non-religious Jews do celebrate it–my family did, although without the poison candy–but families who send their kids to specifically Jewish schools? They’re really not Santa’s target audience. 

What I’m saying here is that in addition to being allegedly homicidal, this guy needs career counseling. And jail time. 

That leaves Palestine Action as the odd one out on the list. 

 

Meanwhile, in what passes for the real world

Banning Palestine Action has led to more than 700 arrests, and here’s where we get to that business about the law being abusably wide-ranging. In Kent, a woman was arrested for holding a Palestinian flag and signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide.” She filmed the police telling her that the words free Gaza supported Palestine Action and that it was illegal “to express an opinion or belief supportive of a proscribed organization.”  

In Leeds, a man was arrested for carrying a cartoon from the magazine Private Eye. The text read:

PALESTINE ACTION EXPLAINED

Unacceptable Palestine Action 

Spraying military planes with paint 

Acceptable Palestine Action 

Shooting Palestinians queuing for food

“It’s a cartoon from Private Eye,” he told his arresting officer. “ I can show you. I’ve got the magazine in my bag,” 

By that  time, they were putting him in handcuffs. He was released on bail six hours later, but on the condition that he not attend any more Palestine Action rallies.

The rally where he was arrested hadn’t been organized by Palestine Action.

A few days later, charges were dropped. 

“If I go on another demo,” he asked the anti-terrorism officer who called to tell him that, “and I hold up that cartoon again, does that mean I will be arrested or not?” 

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s done on a case-by-case basis.”

As indeed it is. The magazine’s editor hasn’t been arrested. Neither has the cartoonist. 

An 80-year-old woman was arrested at a rally in Wales and the police searched her house, removing a Palestinian flag, books on Palestine and on the climate crisis, iPads, drumsticks, and the belt for a samba drum. They brought in a geiger counter–or what a friend who walked in to feed the cats in the middle of the search thought was a geiger counter–and poked long cotton buds into jars of dry food. 

 

The phrase Palestine Action gets loose in the world

All that is why there was a demonstration in Parliament Square, in London, on August 9, where people showed up with blank signs and markers. Once more than 500 who were willing to be arrested had gathered, they made signs saying, “I support Palestine Action.” All 532 were duly arrested. Half of them were over 60. 

One of them, though, wasn’t holding a sign but wearing a tee shirt that read “Plasticine Action” and was designed to mimic the Palestine Action logo. I’m not sure if that makes it 531 arrests there or 533. Or if we stay with 532. 

As he waited to be booked, his arresting officer reappeared and told him, “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.”

Plasticine Man–his name is Pickering–asked for the good news.

“I’m de-arresting you.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“It’s going to be really embarrassing for me.”

Pickering is now selling the tee shirts to raise money for Medical Aid for Palestine. It comes in your choice of 26 colors.  

As far as I know, I’m not risking arrest by linking to that.

Palestine Action has won the right to appeal its ban, but until the case is heard it’s still officially a terrorist organization. When I went to a local demonstration against the starvation of Gaza, I picked my way carefully through the English language before making a sign asking, “Are we allowed to say Gaza?”

As a naturalized citizen, I’m not in a position to risk arrest.

There have been no demonstrations asking to free the words Maniacs Murder Cult or  Russian Imperial Movement.

The starvation of Gaza continues. And the next planned demonstration against the ban on Palestine Action is asking people who get arrested to refuse to be processed on the street and released. If they’re taken to the police station, they’re entitled to a lawyer and can clog the jails.

*

Meanwhile, in the Protestant section of Belfast, Northern Ireland, vigilantes calling themselves Belfast Nightwatch First Division are patrolling the evening streets, challenging dark-skinned people to produce identity documents and explain what they’re doing in the eastern part of the city, threatening anyone whose responses don’t satisfy them.

One member was quoted as telling a Black man sitting on a bench, “Hey boy, I don’t want to catch you around our parks any more.”

Nightwatch First Division is not on  the list of terrorist organizations, although to be fair to a government that pisses me off with amazing regularity, it’s new and may or may not have any structure behind the name.

A neo-Nazi group called Blood and Honour (the phrase comes from the Hitler Youth) is also not on the list, although the government says it has “reasonable grounds to suspect” it’s involved in “terrorist activities through promoting and encouraging terrorism, seeking to recruit people for that purpose and making funds available for the purposes of its terrorist activities.”

It has frozen its assets.

The Home Office screws up yet again, and other news from Britain

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Britain’s Home Office–the scandal bedecked arm of government that’s supposed to deal with “crime, the police, drugs policy, immigration and passports, and counter terrorism” –could have a new scandal on its hands any day now: it’s lost track of an estimated 200,000 people who have the right to remain in the country. These are people who’ve lived in Britain for decades but who didn’t make their way into the computer system because they landed before the computer did. They got either a letter or a stamp on their passports confirming their right to remain in the country, and that was good enough. Until now. 

Now the Home Office wants them all digitized. So the paper documents? Pffft: they’re worthless. Everyone who has them has to go online and upgrade their documentation. 

Any time you hear the word upgrade, put on your flak jacket.

Okay, I admit, upgrade is my contribution to the discussion. The official language has to do with creating an online eVisa account. Either way, the Home Office says the process is going smoothly. From the bureaucracy’s point of view, that probably means it hasn’t caused the Home Office many problems. Users say they’ve had to fight their way through glitches. The an organization called 3 Million says the bigger problem is that the Home Office doesn’t know how to contact many of the people who rely on paper documents, so it hasn’t been able to tell them the documents they’ve been relying on are about to be worthless. 

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

Don't worry about the graphics here. They're almost all irrelevant to the text.

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

What happens to people who don’t have valid documents? The risk is that they could be treated as illegal immigrants, who are the current political boogeymen. They’ll be locked out of the pensions they worked for, along with housing, health care, and other services. 

And the problem isn’t just that they can’t all be reached. They’re none of them young–they arrived pre-computerization, remember–and they won’t all be technologically gifted. You know how that happens: The decades pass, you get older, the world changes, and you don’t necessarily keep up with it. 

But gee, it’s progress, and if a few bodies fall by the wayside, who cares? At least until there’s a public flap about it, at which point all decision makers will put on their surprised face.

 

The ghost of Boaty McBoatface

Having told us there’s no money for (almost) anything sensible, Britain’s government has decided to redesign the bank notes. Because, hey, why not? It’ll lift everybody’s spirits. And now that not many people use cash anymore, what could be a better time to redesign it? 

I haven’t been able to find out how much the redesign will cost, but what the hell, it’s only money.

So it all makes perfect sense that someone decided to get the public involved by asking what picture people want to see on the new notes. That worked really well when they–that’s the public, you understand–were asked to choose a name for an arctic research vessel and chose, by a wide margin, Boaty McBoatface. If you missed the story, you can catch up with it here. It’s a testament to both the British sense of humor and British bureaucracy at work. 

Already one writer, Athena Kugblenu, has suggested honoring British culture with a picture of an organge traffic cone. 

Why a traffic cone? 

Because the country has an uplifting tradition–which generally involves a combination of alcohol, youth, and athleticism–of putting them on the heads of statues.

If you want to suggest something for the redesign, here’s your link. And if it’s suitably absurd, leave it in the comments as well.

 

And since I mentioned statues

It seems folks have been climbing the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, not necessarily to add a traffic cone but during protests, although someone did add a strip of turf to give him a green mohican.  

 So in May the government made moves in the direction of turning that into a crime. Not the mohican and not climbing on statues in general, but climbing on this particular statue. As the Sun, one of the trashier of the right-wing papers put it, “Thugs who climb on Winston Churchill’s London statue face JAIL.”

I hate to link to the Sun, but what the hell, I am quoting it. And they did use all those capital letters. They had to. If they don’t use them now, Trump will gobble them all down and there’ll be none left for anyone else’s hysteria.

The penalty is up to 3 months in prison and a $1,000 fine. The bill, is if passes, applies not just to the Churchill statue but to monuments commemorating World Wars I and II as well.

Sleep well tonight, my friends. The country will be a safer place to live in once this passes.

 

When is a biscuit not a biscuit?

In other important news, McVittie’s asked the Biscuit Museum (yes, there is such a thing) to remove Jaffa Cakes from the premises. 

We’ll get to why in a minute, but first, for the non-British speakers among us, what’s a biscuit? It’s what Americans call a cookie–something round, sweet, and flat. And the Jaffa Cake meets all those criteria. What’s more, stores (shops in Brit-speak) stack Jaffa Cakes in the cookie display–or at least the one in my village does–since they come in the kind of packaging most cookies inhabit. 

Still, McVittie’s insists it’s a cake, and since McVittie’s is the maker of the flat, round, sweet little beast–well, you’d think they’d like the publicity of being in a museum, even such an odd museum, but they don’t.

Why not? Tax law. If the thing’s a cake it’s not subject to VAT. 

To what? Value Added Tax, which is a long name for a hefty sales tax. Plain biscuits? No tax. Chocolate-covered biscuits, though? Tax. Obviously. And Jaffa Cakes are chocolate-covered whatever-they-ares, so this is Important. McVittie’s and the tax office arm-wrestled over it in 1991, McVittie’s won, and it’s not backing down. They’ve been sold as taxless cakes ever since.

It used to be theologians who argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

 

A chatbot insists the dog ate its homework . . .

. . . but strictly in the metaphorical sense. 

Our story begins with someone–let’s call him Barry Smethurst, since that’s his name–waiting for a train, which is late, so he goes online and asks WhatsApp’s chatbot for TransPennine Express’s customer service phone number so he can ask what’s happened to his train. 

He gets a number. He calls the number. The number turns out to belong to someone who has nothing to do with TransPennine Express–he’s a property industry executive in Oxfordshire, 170 miles away, but he does use WhatsApp and his number’s on his company website, although Smethurst probably doesn’t know all that because he asks the bot what the number is. 

“Let’s focus on finding the right info for your TransPennine Express query!” the chatbot says cheerily and complete with exclamation point.

Smethurst no longer cares. He’s found something better to do while he waits: he wants to know why the bot gave him the number.

It was “based on patterns,” the bot says, and it would “strive to do better” in the future. The number, though, is “fictional.”

Bullshit, Smethurst doesn’t exactly say.

“You’re right, the bot says. It was “mistakenly pulled from a database.”

What database?

“I didn’t pull the number from a database. I generated a string of digits that fit the format of a UK mobile number but it wasn’t based on any real data on contacts.”

“Just giving a random number to someone is an insane thing for an AI to do,” Smethurst tells it, although what good he thinks scolding a bot will do is anyone’s guess.

That’s where the story drizzles away, sadly. Maybe his train pulls into the station. Maybe he sinks into a pit of despond so deep that he can no longer type. We leave him there, phone in hand, feet on platform, bot within thumb’s reach, but he’s given me an excuse to move to a more bizarre story about AI gone wrong, although it happened outside of Britain’s borders. 

A Norwegian man filed a complaint against OpenAI’s ChatGPT after he went online to look for information about himself and was told that he was in jail for killing two of his children. 

Yes, it’s nuts to think you’ll learn more about yourself by looking online than by putting down your phone and spending some time with your own non-electronic self, but we’ve all done it. 

Okay, most of us have done it. Or at least some of us have done it. Or–screw it, I’ve done it, although I don’t have kids so if anyone tells you I killed some of them, understand that it’s not physically possible. 

AI and the weirder aspects of the Bayeux Tapestry: it’s the news from Britain

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Let’s start today’s post in Chicago, which you may already know is not in Britain, but it’ll all make sense if you stay with me a while. 

In May, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading list, as newspapers do when summer threatens and they need some fluff to fill their column inches. I don’t know if they have any book reviewers left on staff, or if they ever had them, but they farmed the work out to a freelancer, who farmed it out to AI, because why would a responsible newspaper hire someone who actually reads books to write about books?

It might be relevant that the paper cut its staff by 20% recently. Or to put that less delicately, fired 20% of its staff. 

The article that the freelancer turned in and the paper printed recommended six imaginary books, although to be fair they were credited to real writers. It even had synopses for them, and reasons people might like them. 

Irrelevant photo: poppies

The article included a few real books, also by real writers, but nobody’s perfect. 

The Sun-Times said, “We’re looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom.”

Which makes it sound a bit like some AI-generated copy stormed the newsroom and locked the reporters in closets so it could put itself into print. 

It might be worth adding, in this context, that a summer supplement quoted a food anthropologist who also doesn’t seem to exist. 

And the connection to Britain? We’ve been told that artificial intelligence is going to play a greater role in British military procurement.

What could possibly go wrong?

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I was going to leave it there, but I can’t resist an AI-gone-wrong story. Britain’s high court is less than happy about dozens of false citations and quotes from case law being relied on in court–presumably generated by AI. An £89 million damages case had 18 of phantom citations and I have no idea how many phantom quotes, so it seems fair to guess that these aren’t all being generated by your street-corner mom-and-pop law firm.

 

How to tell if you’re in Britain

I mentioned that Chicago isn’t in Britain, and I stand by that statement, but if you ever find yourself in a strange city–or town, for that matter–and need to know if it’s in Britain, the simplest way is to head for someplace that serves food and ask for tea, or better yet, builder’s tea. If you get a funny look, you’re not in Britain. If no one thinks that’s odd, you are. If they tell you they don’t serve tea but get all apologetic about it–yeah, that’s Britain.

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You could also look for the nearest mass-participation race. If some of the runners are dressed up as anything other than runners, that’s another sign you’re in Britain, although admittedly not as useful a test since races aren’t happening all the time on every corner. Still, an article about April’s London Marathon mentioned runners dressed as Sherlock Holmes, a chicken, Spiderman, the Elizabeth Tower (that’s the tower that houses Big Ben, which is a clock), and a rhino.

The rhino gets special mention, because the runner inside the costume broke a Guinness world record for the most marathons completed in a 3D costume: this was his 113th dressed as a pachyderm. 

Listen, fame is fleeting. You have to grab any chance you get. 

 

How clear is biological sex?

Back in May (remember May?), Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that the words sex, woman, and man in the 2010 Equality Act refer to biological sex. You know: XX or XY. Vagina or penis. Pink baby clothes or blue. 100% pay or 87% pay. Any idiot can tell the difference and as of now everybody has to go to the corner–not to mention the toilet–assigned to them at birth. 

It all sounds simple until you talk to someone who actually knows about this stuff. I’m not going to do even a shallow dive into it here but a Scientific American article does a great job of exploring the complicated reality behind what’s supposed to be simple. 

 Among other things, it says, “Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. . . .

“When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have . . . uncovered variations in . . .  genes that have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. . . .

“These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms.”

And that’s just the part I happened to grab on my way out the door. It really is worth a read. 

If determining a person’s sex was as simple as the Supreme Court seems to think–

Listen, I don’t know how to put this delicately, but people studying the Bayeux Tapestry–that massive history-of-the-Norman-Conquest in pictures–are debating whether it includes 93 penises or 94. 

If that strikes you as an awful lot of genitalia stitched into a single tapestry, even a massive one, I should mention that 88 of them are on horses. That may or may not normalize the situation.

Why are the experts unsure? Surely, even with the boundaries between the sexes blurring, a penis is still a penis.

Well, in real life, to the best of my knowledge–and I’ll admit to not being an expert on the subject–it probably still is, but this is art, not life, and art is notoriously messy. Some experts say the object in question could be the scabbard for a sword or dagger. 

As Fats Waller said, “One never knows, do one?” Although I’m pretty sure he was talking about almost anything else. 

The Supreme Court has not seen fit to rule on this. Yet. But the debate has led to wonderful quotes, including one to rival Fats Waller’s: “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry.”

 

Okay, that was weird; let’s talk about politics

Two members of the Middleton St. George parish council got in a fight that ended up with scratches, blood, bruised fingers, and a broken pair of glasses, all of which filled a fair number of column inches and could have saved that Chicago newspaper from having to review nonexistent books.

The men involved in the fight are both in their 70s, and if both are telling the truth they each hit the other one first. Sadly, no one was wearing a body camera, so we may never be sure, but an audio recording does include one of them saying, “David, no, please, there are women in here.”

Women? Horrors! What are they doing in a meeting? Never mind, they won’t stay long. Both of you sit back down and pretend to be grownups until the ladies go back to the kitchen to make the tea.

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If anyone’s gotten into a physical fight in Parliament lately, I missed the story, so we’ll have to make do with fires in Westminster Palace, where Parliament meets: there’ve been 44 in the past ten years. The building’s also full of toxic material, and no, I’m not casting aspersions on any political parties, although it wouldn’t take much to tempt me. I’m talking about asbestos, which has been found in over a thousand items.

Items? Beats me. It’s an odd word for the context.

The building was built between 1840 and 1860, which makes it newer than a lot of British buildings, but it’s held together by chewing gum and political bile. Specifically, disagreements over whether to spend money on either replacing the building with something new and functional or on the serious repair work that would make it safe. 

The problem is that either approach would cost billions and take ten years at an optimistic estimate. Less optimistically, it could take seventy years. Putting it off would cost more in the long run and risk the whole place going up in highly embarrassing flames. But spending billions on a refurb of Parliament’s meeting place isn’t a good look at a time when we’re being told there isn’t enough money to put the National Health Service back on its feet, when money’s being pared away from the disabled, and when–oh, hell, I could extend the list for many dismal paragraphs but won’t. 

Prediction? The story will drag on for years, unresolved. Unless it goes up in flames.

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Boris Johnson–former Conservative prime minister and continuing national embarrassment–was selling a photograph (that’s of him, with you, in case I haven’t been not clear) for £121 before an event called “An Evening with Boris Johnson.” Tickets were extra, but for your £121 you did at least get a free handshake. 

If you only bought a ticket, all you got for your money was a seat. 

Unnamed allies of Johnson’s say he’s scoping out the possibility of a political comeback: he’s bored out of Westminster and thinks there’s unfinished business. Which, no doubt, only he can wrap up. 

To be fair to him, he’s not our only continuing national embarrassment. If we could make money exporting embarrassing politicians, we’d even out the balance of trade–which was, as I’m sure you know–£3.70 billion in March 2025. 

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Meanwhile, back at Westminster, a Conservative MP claimed more than £1,100 in expenses for copies of Whos’ Who, which are available for free in the House of Commons’ library. 

Why did he need his own? I’m speculating here, but probably because he’s listed in it. And, you know, some days you just need to open the book and reassure yourself that you exist. And existed in three previous years, because he bought copies for each of four years. 

I’m sympathetic. Sometimes I have to look at my blog to remind myself that I exist. I mean, who doesn’t? Why else do we publish these things?

Death and technology: it’s the news from Britain

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A British court ruled that a will was valid even though it was written on the back bits of cardboard that started out in life as packaging for Mr. Young’s frozen fish and Mr. Kipling’s mince pies. As a result of the ruling, a diabetes charity will inherit £180,000.

Yes, I do hear the irony there–mince pies; diabetes–but relatives explained that diabetes runs in the family, so the pies aren’t necessarily responsible for the death. 

The will ended up in court not because of the unorthodox stationary but because the details of who got what were written on the frozen fish box and the witness’s signature was on the pie box, leaving the court to decide whether they were really part of the same document or if, maybe, some fundraiser for the diabetes charity hadn’t snuck in through a window, destroyed the packaging from four Yorkshire puddings, and scribbled out a new, more favorable version of the will on the fish box. But no: the court held that the same pen was used, hinting that they were written at the same time.

The family wasn’t challenging the will. It only ended up in court because–oh, you know. Overloaded court system. Frozen fish. It had to happen.

Irrelevant photo: rhododendron

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Since we’re talking about wills, let’s push a little further into the topic and talk about what happens to us after we die. Not as in heaven, hell, reincarnation, the underworld, all that sort of speculation, but as in whether AI will keep a virtual version of us going after the original goes the way of that Yorkshire puddings box. 

On the current evidence, it just might, but only if we pay enough money. For $199, one company will let you upload videos, voice messages, photos, whatever you’ve got, and then its algorithm will put them all in a blender, whizz them around a bit, and produce a version of you that the living can call on the phone or get text messages from. So twenty years after you’re dead, you can still say, “Am I the only person around here who knows how to wash a dish?” and your family will say, in unison, “Aww, that is so sweet.” 

If you want to go as high as $50,000 plus maintenance fees, you can have yourself made into a 3D avatar, holding up a greasy dish to illustrate your point.

The possibilities don’t end there, though. Bots can now generate content, so your ghost may not be stuck repeating the weary old lines you wrote for it. It could potentially come up with its own content, which it will deliver in your voice. Or what it’s decided is your voice. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

 

A few words from the Department of Things that Could Possibly Go Wrong

To answer this question, we have to leave the UK and head for the US, where the following story is the least of what’s going wrong. 

A tech entrepreneur got trapped in a self-driving cab in–oh, I think it was December of last year. (Sorry–I’m not a newspaper. I get around to these things when I get around to them.) The cab got him as far as to the airport, then began circling a cement island in the parking lot while he (let’s assume frantically) called the company and the voice on the other end told him to open his app because she didn’t have a way to shut the thing down.

After eight loops someone managed to shut the thing down and he emerged, dizzy and late for his flight–which was delayed so he caught it. He still doesn’t know if the voice on the other end was human or bottish.  

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That gives us a nice segue into technology.

A widely quoted psychologist and sex advisor from the University of Oxford, Barbara Santini, may not exist. The University of Oxford (a.k.a. Oxford University) is real enough, as is psychology. Sex advisor, though? Not a real job title, and just to make sure I’m right about that I checked with Lord Google. He knew of nothing between sex therapists on one end of the spectrum and brothels and call girl services on the other.

I’l going to be seeing some really annoying ads for a while here. 

In spite of working in a field that doesn’t exist, Santini’s been quoted in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, the i, the Guardian, the Express, Hello, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Sun, BBC.com, and other publications, both impressive and unimpressive, talking about everything from Covid to vitamin D to playing darts to improve your health. A lot of her quotes link back to an online sex toy shop. 

Neither the shop not Santini were responding to journalists trying to confirm her existence, and articles quoting her are disappearing from the internet as fast as dog food at feeding time. 

Cue a great deal of journalistic soul-searching about how to verify their sources’ credentials in the age of AI, which has put pressure on journalists to work faster and made it fast, easy, and cheap to crank out an article on any topic you could dream up. 

Impressively, at least two of the publications that fell for the trick have published articles about it.

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Meanwhile, Amazon’s selling books written by AI. 

How do we know the authors aren’t human? Samples that were run through an AI detection program and scored 100%. 

It costs next to nothing  to throw a book together using AI, and hey, somebody’ll buy it. It would be bad enough if these were novels (I’m a writer, so that worries me) but these were self-help books. One on living with ADHD noted, helpfully, that friends and family “don’t forgive the emotional damage you inflict.” 

The one on foraging for mushrooms, though, wins the red-flag award for dangerous publishing. It advocated tasting–presumably to make sure they’re safe. 

AI is known for not being able to tell dangerous advice from common sense. It’s trained on solid science books but also on complete wack-a-doodlery, and it can’t tell the difference.

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Britain’s Ministry of Justice is–I think we need to tuck the word allegedly in here–developing a program to predict who is most likely to kill someone. The program was originally called the Homicide Prediction Project, but its name was toned down and it’s now called Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment. By the time anyone works their way through the new name, they’ll have dozed off.

You saw the movie, now live the full-on experience.

The Ministry of Justice says the project “is being conducted for research purposes only.” The prison and probation services already use risk assessment tools–I believe those are called algorithms–and says this is only an experiment to see if adding new data sources makes them more effective. So it’s all okay. 

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I admit I’m stretching the topic to shoehorn this in, but a university student had to be rescued from Mount Fuji (that’s in Japan, which is not, as you may be aware, anywhere close to Britain) not once but twice. The second time was because he’d gone back to find his phone.