Rick's b.log - entry 2025/09/17

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Wasted

Yesterday, brilliant. Well, not entirely brilliant, for reasons that I shall not get into, but for me in myself, yesterday was fine. I went to bed at 9pm on Monday when the sky was still a touch light, took a pill... seratonin? Not a regular sleeping pill as those things wipe me out. This was just a "politely suggests to your body that this is Zzz time" pill.
I got up just before 4am (that's 3am to you Brits, I would imagine some of my readers would just be hitting the sack at about that hour!), on the road for quarter past five, and then clocking in for something like 5:55am. Two hours for all of my stuff. Then passed the vacuum cleaner around the smoker's area - it's a covered place with seats outside, and if it seems bizarre to vacuum that, well, far too many people seem utterly incapable of placing their fag ends into the bin that's a good one and a half steps to the right. It, and the many ashes, end up on the ground. Then five hours busting my balls in the little plonge to make sure everything is just tickety-boo. I elected for a half hour break (my boss said I could choose) but fifteen minutes less means I go home earlier. So I just threw in some rice pudding and tea and then did more work until my day ended at 2:30pm. Straight home, worrying grey sky, so...

It felt like it was about to rain at one point, going so far as that spitty misty stuff, but that passed and the sun gave the odd hello here and there. I took the time to clean the mower, and noticed a crack in the deck from where a stone had been caught by the blades - that bloody mole keeps digging up stuff like that. Well, hasn't for a while since Anna did a number on it's lifeless corpse, but I'm sure there will be others.

Speaking of Anna, she came to inspect my work. In order to get all the crap out of the mechanism, I had to take the plastic shielding off. The handbook says I should give it a regular clean with compressed air. Like, okay, how many people do you think have a compressor in their garage? Jeez...

Dora is an explorer and Anna is a mechanic, what a world...

I wound myself down, made a Mac&Cheese, went to bed, and read something calm and pleasing - The Call of Cthulhu by Lovecraft, with a brief wiki walk to try to work out what exactly he meant by "Cyclopean vista". The first word is one used numerous times, and it seems like in olden days it seems like it refers to buildings constructed with interlocking stones that don't have rendering or cement. For me, at least, ancient Greek/Egyptian architecture comes to mind.

I woke several times during the night. This is normal for me. I woke again when my alarm went off at half four. Which gives me more time to pretend to sleep but less time to get ready.

On the road for twenty past four. Here's a really bad photo of me driving in the forest. You'll have to excuse the quality of the photo, I was able to get all of that sorted using one hand and touch (it's not as clever as it sounds, just grab phone, feel for the volume down button, then press it quickly twice; one more press will set a 2 sec timer to take a photo). So I was able to have one hand autonomously taking a photo while the rest of me was paying attention to the vast expanse of darkness. As the photo was being taken, I was listening to "J'En Ai Marre" (I'm Fed Up) by Alizée. That was followed by "Comfortably Numb" by David Gilmour (Pink Floyd). Both were appropriate descriptions.
As an aside, I like the synchronicity of the two needles. I also like that the speedometer is optimistic enough to go up to eighty. Uh... nope!

I passed two cars and a lorry on the way in to work this morning. That's two cars and a lorry more than yesterday.

Today's routine was almost identical, except for the vacuuming part. But... oh my god, I feel utterly devoid of life. Indeed the only reason I'm bothering to write this at all is because I cannot go to bed yet as that would completely wreck my brain. It's quarter past five as I write this line and I need to keep going for another five or so hours. I am expecting this will call for linguine. And maybe push out the boat and do a hot chocolate with little marshmallow bits floating on top - like basically a hug in a mug. I just had a good solid Tetley, that ought to keep me going for a while. Indeed I feel slightly less dead right now, but not alive enough to want to do anything other than stare at the wall. So writing this is about the best I can manage.

Tories and Defections

It's interesting seeing Kemi Badenoch scrambling to try to land a point or two in Parliament. She tried to shake down Sir Starmer over his deputy's tax irregularities except Angela Rayner referred herself to the Parliamentary Standards Committee, and then in view of the controversy, decided to step down. Which shows more integrity than we've seen from any Tory since <counts on fingers> many years. As if a dose of karma sent from god, this was swiftly followed by the news of The Boris Files and some of what Johnson got up to. Sir Starmer didn't think to stoop to Tory level by pointing out the bleedin' obvious.

More recently, there's the fallout of Lord Mandelson and his associations with Jeffrey Epstein. I wonder how long it will be until a prominent Tory's name turns up? That dirty old man had a lot of connections in a lot of high places, and I fully believe that Mandelson is the tip of the iceberg.

Even more recently, a judge stopped a migrant from Eritrea being sent back to France. Badenoch tried to score more points in a stunning pique of delusion given that the Tories poured millions into a Rwanda scheme to which the only British person that actually went there was Suella Braverman, and unfortunately she came back.
Arguably, the migrant issue is simply Yet Another Cockup that Labour inherited from the Tories. Not that they aren't cocking it up themselves, but it's not as if it started on their watch. But, then, accepting responsibility isn't in the Tory mindset so you won't hear anything like that out of Badenoch.

Meanwhile Nigel Farage was over in the US urging Americans to reject the UK's position on freedom of speech laws, liking the UK to North Korea.
As you'll know, I am NOT a fan of the utterly moronic "Online Safety Bill", but to have a British MP go over to the US to badmouth the country that he is supposed to be representing - how does that not count as a form of treason?

A US congressional committee is holding a hearing into whether European laws "threaten Americans' right to speak freely in the US". Farage said that he wanted American companies and politicians to have "honest conversations" with the UK about free speech.

Firstly, freedom of speech is NOT an absolute, and it should never ever be. The usual example cited is about shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre. But, given how politicised many modern issues are, a person's safety should be seen as more important than somebody's right to speak. When a person's speech is harmful, sorry, it should be curtailed.
Granted, it's tricky to define what exactly is "harmful", but there are (or ought to be) plenty of existing laws regarding discrimination, racism, abuse, hate speech, antisemitism, and so on. That ought to be a useful starting point.

Indeed, a person's right to exist and to not be enslaved should always - and without exception - be seen as more important than voices calling for the opposite, voices that really ought to be considered fundamentally incompatible with modern life.

Secondly, one must wonder why the Americans think that European laws even apply to the US. Most of Europe wants European laws (and ideals) to be applied to Europeans. This does, indeed, include Europeans that visit American websites because the internet is largely location agnostic. Now social media companies might scream about how can we possibly censor our American content for the Europeans? Well, have you even tried? An outfit like Netflix is more than capable of telling countries apart for the purposes of geographical licensing, so it is doable. You just don't want to waste time trying when your leaders can try to score points exporting America's highly dysfunctional so-called "freedom of speech" to the rest of the world.

The example Farage was leaning on was the co-creator of Father Ted who was arrested at Heathrow on suspicion of inciting violence in various tweets and that something similar could happen to any American that goes to Heathrow that has said something that the British government doesn't like; or that the sentence given to Lucy Connolly, who was imprisoned after pleading guilty to stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers, was proof of what can go wrong with restrictions on free speech.
Again, if one incites violence and/or hate in the UK than they should face consequences in the UK. Nobody is calling for Americans to be extradited to the UK for their part in the in the 6^th of January nonsense, as that was Americans trying to overthrow their own government. The UK cannot really do much if Americans start trying to talk the British into overthrowing their government because we all know that the "special relationship" is a one-way street. However, if that person is then dumb enough to fly into the UK, then yeah, body-slam them in the middle of LHR and toss them into a gulag on the Isle of Wight. Again, a person's safety and freedom to exist without discrimination, hate, and/or abuse should always be seen as much more important than somebody's right to verbal diarrhoea. But, you know, colour me not even remotely surprised that Farage has just outed himself as a massive racist.

And finally, as mentioned, the "freedom of speech" is massively broken in the US. It seems more and more as if it's a weapon being wielded by the right to allow them to regurgitate their awful propaganda unchallenged. A good example here is, let's be honest, a lot of the crap that Charlie Kirk said. Don't get me wrong here, I don't believe that he deserved to die for being an arsehole. It's simply worth noting that in a place with slightly less rigid belief in some divine right to freedom of speech, he might have been asked to scale it in a bit.
Examples of this dysfunction are easy to come by. Like the government's meddling with prestigious universities "because antisemitism". The "antisemitism" in question is supporting Palestine, deploring genocide (yes, the 'G' word again, and now the UN is agreeing). You can't be a free speech absolutist while not letting people support the side of their choice in the Middle East. And, no, supporting Palestinians does NOT equate to supporting Hamas. Just to make that exceedingly clear for the painfully dense that somehow manage to get themselves elected.
Or how about refusing to allow somebody to enter the country because of a bald Vance meme? Is that not freedom of speech? It's distasteful, certainly. I have seen it and there's not enough brain bleach to unsee it. But, then, so what? It's okay to refer to black people as affirmative action hires, but it's not okay to laugh at a fake picture of the VP with no hair? Why? Explain it in really simple terms that make sense.

Europe should be taking one look at this shitshow and thinking that the less of that there is around here, the better we'll all be. They should also be taking a lot more action over blatant meddling by powerful Americans in the European democratic processes (Musk, I'm looking right at you). It's just a shame that Europe is far more regulated and stick-up-it's-arse than the US, which is why all the big social media companies are American (except that Chinese one, but that's bad for an entirely different reason). It's a shame not because of the lack of liberty in the EU, but because there is no viable or useful EU equivalent to Twitter (no, I'm not bloody calling it 'X', 'X' is a letter) or Facebook or whatever. Because if there was, I'm quite sure we already have told the Americans to piss off long ago. But nobody wants to, not out of fear of upsetting Trump, but out of concern as to what to do with tens of millions of citizens that look at the blank space on their phones and have no idea what to do with their lives now.

Farage, meanwhile, is not only a traitor to his country, he also faces questions about who is paying for his jolly jaunts overseas, not to mention questions over his use of a property bought by his partner (thus avoiding a few tens of thousands in tax).

I can't help but think that those who are defecting to Reform are the Tories that know that the Tories are dead in the water come the next election. They're simply moving to where they hope to keep their snouts in the trough.
That Labour guy defecting to Reform was a bit odd, though. You'd have thought that Labour would have been ideologically opposed to Reform. But, then, I think the modern Labour party is about as far right as Thatcher; which is practically left wing compared to modern Conservatives, that are fast turning into their own little Reform tribute act.

Far too many political parties - and I'm looking right at Macron as I write this - have made the mistake of trying to say and act like the further right in order to try to appease right wing voters. This has actually had the effect of pushing the political spectrum further to the right as not only does it legitimise the parties that might have been less accepted, which makes them a viable option to voters now, and will be voted for because who wants a centrist dabbling at being right when they can go and have the real deal?

Uh-hu. If we swiftly step aside to avoid the rumbling irony passing by, I do wonder how many guns have actually been used to protect their other human-given (The Bill of Rights and the Constitutional Amendments were created by people, not gods) rights? Versus how many people, particularly children, are murdered using the weapons that idiots like Kirk think are necessary to protect anything. Isn't that what functional policing and judiciary are for? Or is The United States merely an illusion and really it all comes down to who has the bigger penis, sorry, I mean gun?
Because if you're a grown man (or woman) who thinks you need guns to protect rights, I'm sorry mate but you don't live in a functioning democratic country. You live in a hellhole with above-average propaganda. Or, to put it another way, the closest I've ever been to a gun is the one on the Gendarme's belt (clue in the name!); and I grew up in a country where the cops had rubber coated sticks and a whistle. And for all of the horrible pictures of teargassing you are likely to see tomorrow (yes, yet another big strike in France, whoo), I do not feel the need to fondle the gun rubbing gently against my midsection in order to assert my "rights". I have not, do not, and don't anticipate in the future that I ever will unless there's societal breakdown, war, zombies, or I do something dumb like move to Detroit (which ticks the societal breakdown and zombie boxes). The only time I've ever used a gun is when playing Quake (or similar). Long may it stay that way.

I am defending my God-given right to think that Oona was the best Agent.

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