Today please remember the victims of the Katyn Massacre. In 1940, thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals were executed by the Soviet paramilitaries.
We will never let this be forgotten.
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“Why taxes are to blame for Britain’s fly-tipping problem” is the title of an article in today’s Telegraph by Patrick Galbraith, Environment Correspondent, and Emma Taggart, Economics Reporter, both of whom have earned their job titles. The standfirst is the title of this post. “Levy aimed at discouraging people from [X] is having the opposite effect” ought to win a National Recycling Award for ease of re-use. There’s a line that won’t be sent to landfill any time soon. I quote:
Unfortunately few people ever look past the mask of “face value”.
The results can be seen in the picture the Telegraph used to illustrate the article:
Up to 20,000 tonnes of waste was dumped beside the River Cherwell in 2025. Credit: Jacob King/PA Wire Added later: it’s easy to get the scale of that photograph wrong and think the foliage at the sides is merely a pair of hedges between which someone has dumped a truckful of waste. Those are not bushes. They are full grown trees. A better impression of the amount of rubbish there is given by this drone footage published by the Guardian, which shows the rubbish heap and cars running up and down the A34 beside it, all in the same shot. Fly-tipping on this scale did not used to happen in the UK. April 12th, 2026 | 24 comments
 “Comedians tell ministers lack of funding is no laughing matter”, says the BBC headline writer. Do not judge him too harshly; hanging would suffice. The article continues,
“Should be rewarded”, that’ll get a laugh from the actual entrepreneurs. According to the Cambridge dictionary, an entrepreneur is “a person who attempts to make a profit by starting a company or by operating alone in the business world, esp. when it involves taking risks”. Get it? They take the risk, they get the profit if it works out, and they take the loss if it does not. By definition, no one who has a guaranteed income from the state is an entrepreneur.
By definition, no industry that has a guaranteed subsidy from the state sustains itself. April 10th, 2026 | 19 comments
J.D. Vance, who is the Vice President of the USA, goes to Hungary, an EU member state, and delivers a campaign speech for Victor Orban, the president of Hungary, in which Vance accuses the EU of… interference in Hungary’s elections. Am I the only one who finds that absolutely hilarious? April 9th, 2026 | 46 comments
April 9th, 2026 | 50 comments
It seems to me that for Iran to use the Straits to squeeze the rest of the world into acquiescing into its brutality is a ploy that brings diminishing returns. Given that oil can be piped as well as shipped via a tanker, construction of more pipelines to take the stuff – and gas – over land rather than via sea seems screamingly obvious. Sure, pipelines can be attacked and that creates issues around security. Even so, the key is to have options. I have heard it said that one reason behind the Hamas Oct 7 attacks was that Iran wanted to stymie a pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would, as part of it, include a cross-region pipeline or set of pipelines (maybe with the oil reaching the Mediterranean coast in Israel).
Even if the Straits retain some value, that is going to erode and fast in the next few years, is my guess. And this whole saga also highlights the truth of a quote attributed to an American fracker business executive, who is supposed to have said that these folk are not just extracting more oil and gas, but are helping to save Western civilisation. Whoever that was, he or she wasn’t exaggerating. As of the time of going to press, President Trump has announced a two-week ceasefire. I worry that this gives Iran breathing space – I don’t think the region will be sorted out until or unless the regime in Tehran is overthrown, although this needs, ultimately, to come from Iranians themselves. That said, it is worth taking stock of what has happened in terms of the loss of military power in Iran, including its ability to make nukes. That’s not a trivial achievement. And the world – including China – has had a good look at the impressiveness of the US and Israeli air forces and special forces. It has, to be fair, also had a good look at the parlous state of the UK’s military, particularly its pitiful navy. April 8th, 2026 | 26 comments
[AIUI etc, etc.] In the beginning there were wireless sets. But the government worried that these could be used by spies for a foreign power. So it demanded that wireless owners took out licences. The licences were free the government just wanted to know who had a wireless. Just in case. Then someone came up with the idea of broadcasting. Music, lectures, news, that sort of thing. The government came up with a scheme. They would charge a fee for the licence. It would also demand that wireless manufacturers make a contribution. To sugar the pill it would make it illegal to sell a wireless set that wasn’t made by a member of the British Broadcasting Company. The minister responsible for this? One Neville Chamberlain. And so in late 1922 the BBC, in the shape of such regional broadcasters as 2LO, came into being. And it was very popular – save for the fact that building one’s own set was illegal. But the arrangement had an expiry date. And a committee was set up to decide what to do next. A hundred years ago it reported and as you can probably guess, the manufacturers were ditched with the recommendation that a public body to be known as the British Broadcasting Commission be put in its place financed entirely through the licence fee. Why? I seem to remember being told that the Company was in dire financial straits. But there’s not a hint of it in the report as published in The Times. Actually, there is very little justification at all. Although they do say this:
So you are getting rid of something you “readily acknowledge” is a success for something that might work?
I’ve got some bad news about how that’s going to work out.
The Times’s own report of the report has this to say:
So, the whole thing was a communist experiment. Great. And then there was this doozy:
Clearly that argument falls because it is not true that broadcasting is a monopoly. But even if it were, as a libertarian, in principle I would prefer such things to exist in an unfettered free market.  Before it became Lenin in the lounge Update 10/4/26. Incredulity has been expressed over the idea that d-i-y wireless sets were illegal. They were but only for about a year or so. And I don’t think there were any prosecutions. Oddly enough, when “interim” licences were first issued – for just such sets – the number of licences doubled more or less overnight. April 8th, 2026 | 17 comments
I know I keep droning on about drones, but this really is a paradigm shift happening in real-time. TL’DR… 100km from the FEBA is now a persistent danger zone due to the omnipresent threat of drones. Some were sceptical in an post earlier when drones were credited with 70% of battlefield casualties. Well, the number claimed now, based on video confirmation, is 90%. April 7th, 2026 | 24 comments
April 6th, 2026 | 8 comments
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults. It is breathtaking how much phenomenal music Jimi Hendrix squeezed into a recording career of not even four years. In addition to four authorized original albums released during his lifetime, many more would be culled from this period for decades to come. His incredible versatility as a guitarist and his brilliant ability to juggle rock, pop, blues, soul, funk, and jazz would leave a major mark on popular music still felt today. With his often-thrilling concerts, soulfully expressive voice, and ultrahip looks, Hendrix remains the ultimate rock star. His death in 1970 at 27 when his music was flowering in so many exciting directions remains rock’s greatest tragedy. There are many fine Hendrix biographies, but James Hawthorn’s Goodbye, Jimi: The Truth Behind the Tragedy is the first to focus on his death and disprove the myths spawned by so many supposed eyewitnesses’ conflicting (and changing) accounts. Despite dying in his sleep from “inhalation of vomit” caused by an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol, conspiracy theorists allege that Hendrix was actually either a victim of a tyrannical manager working him to death, a suicide, a negligent groupie bedmate, or murder. Marshalling an army of well-sourced facts, Hawthorn refutes each of these theories. Dispelling the notion that Hendrix’s manager, Mike Jeffery, tortured him to death as his “touring slave,” the new book makes clear that Jeffery shrewdly negotiated concert tours enabling his client to “become the highest-earning live act of the late 60s” and “very wealthy.” At his death, Hendrix was worth “half a million dollars (four to five million in today’s value).” Though Jimi knew Jeffery was a crook who was taking more than his fair share, a Hendrix office worker told how Jimi confided that “he would never leave Michael [because] Jimi knew Michael would make him the most money.” Having lived his first 24 years mired in poverty, Hendrix loved money and “enjoyed spending all his money as soon as it came in – perhaps through fear that it would disappear before he could get his hands on it.” He was not just extremely generous with his father, friends, and girlfriends, but even strangers. A Hendrix office secretary observed that “Jimi might spend $10,000 in a boutique on a girl he just met and never see her again.” His own consumer habits were also of such Elvis proportions that Hendrix had to keep touring to keep the money coming. April 5th, 2026 | 8 comments
The Wikipedia entry for apophasis, the rhetorical technique of raising an issue while claiming not to mention it, says,
From an article by Oliver Wright in yesterday’s Times called “Louis Mosley: Our critics are putting ideology over patient safety”:
I do not wish to divert attention from the many legitimate concerns about the use of Palantir’s data-gathering software – originally developed for police and military use – during the Covid pandemic and in other civilian contexts, so I won’t even mention what a hypocritical rabble-rouser Zack Polanski is. April 4th, 2026 | 5 comments
Hundreds of British girls were raped by grooming gangs while Mr Blair was the prime minister. Of course, this was a more diffuse, less murderous phenomenon than October 7. But it is hard to stomach lectures about what must be done in the face of evil from someone whose government did absolutely nothing. Of course, mistreating innocent people should have been unjustifiable in both cases. But Blair should be the last person to hold forth on “removing threats”. Anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism are certainly dangerous, but so is Tony Blair, and just as I don’t want to listen to a Wahhabi cleric on Western foreign policy, I don’t want to listen to Blair on Islamism. Can we pay him to go away? I’ll set up a GoFundMe. April 3rd, 2026 | 6 comments
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