As elections in Britain and the United States are upon us (and all of a sudden also in France), it is time to look at the political landscape and how it has evolved. Once upon a time in the United Kingdom there used to be the Conservatives and the Labour Party – and to a […]
Author: Grumpy Old Man
Presidential Past, Criminal Present
The announcement on 30 May was not quite unexpected I suppose: a New York jury found former president Donald Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records. So the former and aspiring POTUS is now a convicted felon. This means, should he get re-elected in November, that the most powerful democracy in the […]
Behind the Suits: Big White Collar Criminals
Crime doesn’t pay, the saying goes, at least it doesn’t if you get caught. The sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried at the end of March to 25 years n prison for his role in the collapse of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, made me curious as to what other big white collar crimes and criminals there have […]
Not so Artificial Intelligence
AI as in artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, isn’t it. Any service assisted by AI is novel – and the company which provides it finds itself no doubt at the cutting edge of technology. At least until someone finds out that all is not what it seems. You may have heard of […]
Autocracy on the advance
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 […]
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 […]
The grumpy older man 