(0514) Morning curmudgeons all. (0657)

 

5. Injustice yet again … this time downunder

4. The still daring and debonaire Steve at 1463

• Elon Musk is Putting up Big Money to Try to End Alaska’s ‘Ranked Choice’ Voting System
• ICE Issues Ultimatum to Sanctuary Sheriff Tom Dart: Serve Immigration Subpoenas or Face Criminal Witness Tampering Charges
• More Than Half of New York Students Grades 3-5 Failed Basic Reading Tests This Year
• Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier Chimes in on DiJonai Carrington Clotheslining Sophie Cunningham, Says She Should be Charged with Assault
• Israel Is Planning To Attack Iran On Its Own To Provoke War (JH: According to the Kremlin’s organ South Front)
• Russian Army Seizes Key Heights, Disrupts Ukrainian Logistics In Kharkov
• Resistance Training Improves Muscle Repair System, Study Finds; Gains Fade After Three Weeks (JH: I need to address this with a WARNING … plan to today, a must-read, says I)
• Abolish the District of Columbia’s Clown Courts.
• Much more.

3. Cold calling and other scams

Yesterday, DAD included in his drop, and I replied:

“Cold calling is about to come to an end. (JH: I’m taking this one up later, separately.)”

The way around cold calling and why it’s just as bad using answerphone or voicemail is the imperative that you need to disconnect your landline. Have one, yes, by all means, for official reasons but have an old, antediluvian phone, not plugged in and make sure you still pay the £4 a month or whatever for it.

Your primary phone is your mobile, one of the old dumbphones and remember to conduct no business whatever with organisations on it. Nothing. All in one? Forgeddit. Any attempt at getting you to one-login is an attempt to scam you out of your savings.

I’m talking there about any cold calls, not from someone in your address book. Oh yes, you old dumbphone has an address book but no voicemail set up. You in fact do not wish to speak to anyone outside of that address book. Inside the address book, you do include gummint depts you do need. You phoned them ling sgo to insist on texts as your primary method incoming … SMSes.

And of course, with it being a dumbphone, any time they say scroll down and click on … don’t … coz you can’t. Plus when you do eventually speak with them, via you calling the Indian at the other end, after all the “press onefers” … you sre 102 years old, remember, with querulous voice and zero understanding of this modern way.

And as for the ladies who wish to chat with you by phone, sorry, no can do … because it’s hacked and monitored. Ladies I know cannot stand this … to them, the only satisfying way is nattering on the phone. As all the ghouls and hackers expect you to. Thereby robbing you blind and comprising now extant threats. In fact there’s one right now, let’s call her Janice, lives in Alaska (naturally both names are made up), and that’s precisely what happened.

Some Brit firm had contacted her to say she was owed money, oodles of it … you see already where this is going? And she talked to them. She’d picked up her still-connected phone. “Go to your computer, dear and I’ll walk you through it.” Not even an English voice.

Going to stop here now. Has the message got through, dearests?

2. DAD (still venerable, even if I forget) at 1463

a) French Green leader calls for X to be shut down over ‘supremacist’ Musk’s support for Marine Le Pen.

b) UK. Local Government Policy reaches Peak Absurdity in latest move. Westminster Council’s proposed ban on standing while drinking in London pubs has sparked ridicule and renewed concerns about government overreach eroding personal freedoms in Britain.

c) Germany. Berlin Terror Suspect was under surveillance until an hour before attack.

d) There is seemingly no end to the fertilisation effect of carbon dioxide and warm weather. In 2025 there were more leaves on trees, more food on the farm and more grass in the grasslands.

1. Yesterday’s TPA newsletter

“Britain’s national debt has now surpassed £3 trillion. £3,000,000,000,000. That’s three thousand billion pounds that we’re all on the hook for. At over £100,000 per household, our national debt now means that every British child is born owing more than £44,000. This is quite simply a damning indictment of consecutive governments’ failure to get to grips with public spending. If all that wasn’t bad enough, as our debt clock shows, it’s still ticking up by over £4,000 per second. In the time it takes you to read this sentence, the national debt has increased by almost £13,000.”

Those are impressive numbers for sure in a negative way but I do ask, as I would have in days of yore when the Conservative preoccupation was balancing “the” national books above all else … just what do those numbers mean to you, personally? You in your little living space, in your returement or in your job or on your dole?

Do they not mean how secure are you from galloping inflation swallowing up your “incoming”, such as it is? Utilities bills for example? Personal credit debt? Council tax for no return, e.g. rubbish disposal? Inheritance tax? Govt raiding any part of your nest egg they can get their thieving hands on?

And why are the teeming millions on the state teat one way or the other not impressed by “the” national debt, as long as their own keeps coming in? What does that £3 trillion mean to you, personally? Truly? In your head? Is your only concern that the “govt” does not do something precipitate and the whole house of cards officially falls, on the numbers?

Where are you on the sliding scale with the left at one end seeing just “the wealth” which they want their “fair share of” and govt must rob you of it … or the “centre-right” at the other end, concerned with “balancing the national books” and protecting their own best eggs, not giving a damn about your miniscule savings?”