What have Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Venezuela in common? They all repress democratic expression by their populations, be it in general or as part of recent or upcoming elections. In Russia Vladimir Putin’s reelection at 87% of the population’s vote following the death of Alexei Navalny in an arctic penal colony in February is […]
Author: Grumpy Old Man
The cost of making your home climate change proof
In a blog entry in December I talked about the push the British government is undertaking as far as the promotion of heat pumps is concerned. A recently published report by the National Audit Office (NAO) shows that the assumptions on consumer demand for heat pumps are ‘optimistic’: Between May 2022 and December 2023 only […]
Political correctness gone mad? Or not? Or what?
Last summer the president of the Spanish football federation, Luis Rubiales, had come in for justified criticism after he kissed the forward Jenni Hermoso on the lips following Spain’s 1-0 victory over England in the final in Sydney at the end of the women’s World Cup. And for a while in the days and weeks […]
Fear of eating out
There can be no doubt that the cost of living crisis is taking its toll: but while we all are more cost conscious, personally I wasn’t prepared for what a study by the British restaurant chain Prezzo found: 86% Gen Z (that’s people born from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s) encounters “menu anxiety,” a […]
The power of social media
According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations. More recently Pew found that 32% of those aged 18-29 get their news from TikTok. Social-media sites are rife with conspiracy theories, and research […]
Palestine
After a number of years of some calm, the Middle East has erupted again! On October 7, Hamas fighters, invaded Israel, killing scores of civilians and taking many more hostage, with Israel retaliating, killing more innocent civilians, this time, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Things have since gone from bad to worse, with scores more […]
Climate Change – The Weakest Link
As the COP28 is underway in Dubai, the threats of climate change and its remedies are (or should) be on our minds and in this context I read an interesting article in The Economist in late summer, telling me that about 12% of the EU’s greenhouse-gas emissions emanate from residential heating. This is well below […]
Businessman, statesman or simply madman?
Elon Musk is a billionaire, that’s for sure, but besides being a no doubt shrewd business man, he also seems to be turning into a politician, expressing his opinions about global issues publicly and some of them being rather controversial. The his comments at a summit in Los Angeles in mid-September, that Taiwan was an […]
Free Speech
Not that I am watching GB News, never have and quite honestly most likely never will (I need to have my head checked the day I do watch them!), but the comments made with regard to political commentator Ava Edwards one evening on September on his talk show on a British TV channel you honestly […]
MP’s Earnings
In the middle of July we learned through the media what our MPs were earning outside their parliamentary roles: They earn on average £233 an hour, which is 17 times the national average wage and 22 times higher than the minimum hourly wage. The highest paid sitting MP was Liz Truss, remember, she’s the Prime […]
The grumpy older man 