Passing Observations 122
Dr Vernon Coleman
This is a long standing series of small items which have caught my eye or mind and which seem relevant, startling, amusing or all three. Occasionally, items which appear here may return as a longer piece. Mostly they will not.
1. Half of Britain’s butterflies are now endangered and likely to disappear. The nutters claim it’s because of global warming but it isn’t. Butterflies are being killed off by all the nasty chemicals which farmers and gardeners are using.
2. In a shop the other day I had to help a teenage assistant who was having a panic attack because her till wasn’t working properly. I’d given her £5 for something that cost £4.90 and she couldn’t work out what change to give me. And teachers want a pay rise.
3. Three out of four adults in the UK can’t read a map – even to understand the symbols for `pub’. Since half of all adults are illiterate or semi-literate that really isn’t all that surprising.
4. A hacker who broke into the Shanghai police database is offering to sell the online records of about one billion Chinese citizens. He or she has names, ID numbers, phone numbers, addresses, criminal records and details of online orders. No one seems to have asked why the Shanghai police had all that information on one billion citizens. Do one billion Chinese people really all have criminal records?
5. Women are more likely to fail the driving test than men. So, some women now want to be given special treatment – they want the driving test to be easier for women.
6. In China, a writer working online had her novel deleted because the authorities decided that it contained forbidden material. I sympathise. All my books were banned in China some years ago – even though several of them were big bestsellers there.
7. Dog owners should be prepared for new laws introducing expensive dog licences and rules allowing dog catchers to take away and put down any dogs seen out in public without a lead.
8. The British royal family is, it seems to me, now famous only for being greedy, hypocritical, entitled and irrelevant. It’s time for the nonsense to end. Sell the royal palaces and split the loot among the old, the sick and the needy.
9. One of the reasons given for my expulsion from the Royal Society of Arts was that I had publicly questioned the global warming myth. The other reason was that I’d dare to tell the truth about covid. Free speech, eh?
10. The game of rugby was invented by a boy called Ellis who picked up a football and ran with it at Rugby School. If Master Ellis had been a pupil at my school – Chuckery Mixed Infants School in Walsall – the game would have been called `chuckery mixed infants’ as in `England beat Wales at chuckery mixed infants’ on Saturday.
11. Elon Musk says that `Environmental, social and governance’ investments (known as ESG funds) are a scam and for once I agree with him. And an article in the Harvard Business Review points out that ESG funds have underperformed, that firms boasting their ESG credentials have worse compliance records for labour and environment rules than other companies and that firms use ESG as a cover for bad business performance.
12. The shares of Deliveroo (a food delivery company) have risen despite the fact that customers are placing smaller orders. Why can this possibly be? Apparently, the company makes losses on orders and has to subsidise them. So the less it sells, the smaller the losses will be. What a great business model. The company is apparently forecast to lose £150 million to £200 million until 2024. I must rush out and not buy the shares.
13. Governments deliberately create problems for their electorates and then offer solutions which remove freedom and add oppression.
14. France is said to be planning to get rid of its TV licence (which is added to property taxes and, I can tell you, difficult to avoid paying).
15. There is more real news on the back of a beermat than you’ll ever find on the BBC. Bias within the BBC seems to me to be part of the organisation’s genetic make-up. And in the world of the media, bias is unforgiveable. The BBC needs to be closed down immediately and its staff found work sweeping streets and cleaning lavatories (though they will need training).
16. The Ten Commandments were carved in stone. Shakespeare used a quill pen. Dickens wrote with a pen. Mark Twain was the first to use a typewriter. Smartphones gave us gibberish from footballers’ wives.
17. We have a seagull with a bad leg which visits daily. He stands all day under the bird feeders. Above him a crow shakes the feeders so that seeds fall to the ground. Charity or a parasitic partnership? Dunno, but it’s illegal to feed seagulls so the poor crow could be in trouble if he’s spotted.
18. `Girls can’t really play cricket, and when you are watching their futile efforts, you make funny sounds at them.’ – J.M.Barrie.
19. The UK has once again announced plans to build nuclear reactors to solve the power problem. The reactors should be ready sometime in the mid to late 2030s. Just about every other country on earth is building reactors so the cost of uranium might go up a bit.
20. The woke folk have abolished the word `different’ and replaced it with the word `wrong’.
Copyright Vernon Coleman July 2022
Vernon Coleman’s book `Covid-19: The Greatest Hoax in History’ was banned four times. But it is now available as a paperback and an eBook. If you’d like a copy please go to www.korsgaardpublishing.com
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