Category: Satire

Buy now! One-time exclusive Brexit offer!

Official Britain is all in a tizzy. They are going to get an exclusive Brexit deal from the EU! Different from what international hoi polloi gets!

The pound has managed to stay above the $1.30 mark, after comments from Michel Barnier boosted hopes that a Brexit deal will be struck.

The EU’s chief negotiator said “we are prepared to offer Britain a partnership such as there never has been with any other third country”.

Is Barnier a used-car salesman? Is he mocking the UK? It’s like he read pop sociology about the British, and realised, they don’t care what you offer them, as long as it’s exclusive. They’ll eat shit, as long as you tell them they’re getting special access to rare hand-selected microturds.

The world’s easiest job

In six US states — Arizona, Idaho, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Dakota — pharmacists are permitted to refuse to fill prescriptions to which they have moral or religious objections. In Idaho they can still be required to fill the prescription in life-threatening situations if no one else is available, and in Arizona they must at least return the prescription so they can get it filled from another pharmacist. In the other four, apparently they don’t even have to do that much.

So, I’m thinking, there’s hardly an easier job that Christian Scientists, in the last four states particularly, if they’re looking for easy work should apply to pharmacies. No matter what prescription anyone brings to them they can toss it in the bin and go back to playing solitaire, or reading the works of Mary Baker Eddy.

(You may think they’d have difficulties getting hired, and they may indeed have to acquire some formal qualifications. No lunch is completely free, though presumably they can obtain religious exemptions from most of the requirements of their course. But the drug store can’t refuse to hire them on religious grounds.)

The theosophy of Trump’s valets

“Il existe quelqu’un de pire que le bourreau, c’est son valet.”
— Mirabeau
There is someone more horrible than the hangman, and that is his servant.

For all the epic pathology of the Trump character spewing itself onto the stage of world affairs, one of his undoubted successes has been the ability to find lieutenants who are more depraved than the mad king himself, or are willing to learn to mimic and then exceed his madness. (It was almost amusing, in this regard, to read that White House staff mimic his lapses of grammar, spelling, and logical coherence in writing tweets in his name.
Now we have, after Trump tweeted a gratuitous insult of the Canadian prime minister, this comment by Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro:

There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.

The thing is, of all the insane boasts coming out of the White House, this is probably one of the more credible. I believe that there is a special place in Hell expressly for enemies of Donald Trump. At least, he surely has the right connections to get it set up. It probably looks just like any other Trump property, except that… Actually, probably no difference. The Trump Tartarus. Has a nice ring to it.

You can’t fight in here! This is the war cabinet.

After the unfortunate decision of the UK press to call Theresa May’s European Union Exit and Trade (Strategy and Negotiations) sub-Committee the Brexit war cabinet, we now have this:

Theresa May to hold Brexit peace summit for feuding cabinet

Maybe it should be called the civil war cabinet.

May-December

People shouldn’t be mocked or discriminated against because of their names. But I really wonder whether the Tories sufficiently considered the practical drawbacks of putting time-sensitive negotiations under the command of a prime minister whose name is also a month. I was disturbed by this report from the Guardian on a press conference of EU negotiator Michel Barnier:

Barnier says he has never spoken about the need for “sufficient progress” by June, as he did before the December summit.

He says May agreed to the backstop in March. She cannot go back on that, he says.

I fear worse may come…

Unwritten rules of the road for Oxford

  1. Bicycles and pedestrians are stationary objects. You need to pass them, especially when turning directly ahead of them.
  2. Electric turn signals are a major energy drain! Signals should be activated only after you are well into the turn.
  3. Opening the driver-side door should be done in one fluid motion, as rapidly as possible. Don’t look back!
  4. When trapped by traffic you are exposed to attack from the sides and behind. Protect yourself and your fellow drivers by advancing your vehicle to block the pedestrian crossings, which are points of major vulnerability.
  5. “Cycle lane” is just a newfangled word for “free parking”.* Double yellow lines are there to remind you; where no cycle lane is available parking on the pavement is recommended.
  6. Killing pedestrians is wrong if you’ve been drinking. Otherwise, you’re the victim. (Don’t forget, insurance will pay for the damage. Be bold!)

* There is some uncertainty about the origin of this odd expression. Most experts believe that it has its origin in the Italian sulla collina — “on the hill” — referring to the practice, brought back by 17th century travellers, of establishing resting spots for travellers on hills in the countryside. From there it evolved into the modern usage, meaning “a strip of land set aside for parking vehicles”.

I wanna hold your (geopolitical) hand

The trans-Atlantic romcom goes into its next season. We recall the highlight of last season, when Theresa and Donald were sharing a personal moment in their “special relationship”.

donald-trump-theresa-may

At the start of the new season, Melania confirms that she really would rather hold almost anything than Donald’s hand:

Theresa was dancing around Number 10, like, “I can have him all to myself.” But then this French dude came into the picture.

5568

They look so happy together. Macron is even boasting about their “very special relationship”. And Theresa is saying, but Donald, I thought our relationship was the special one. I left Europa for you…

Do loony leftists use the right-hand rule?

So Leave.EU is still active, and apparently last year they were soliciting a graphic to ridicule journalist Carole Cadwalladr:

As a mathematical scientist it strikes me as significant that she is considered to be discredited by association with three images: Flat Earth, Illuminati (though it looks to me like the Masonic eye from the US dollar bill), and what looks like a cheat sheet for an introductory electromagnetism course. Down in the corner we see that she’s been learning the right-hand rule for multiplying vectors. Right above it she has the formula for calculating power, which seems problematic.

The president’s dilemma

In the classic prisoners’ dilemma, two members of a criminal gang have been caught by police. There is enough evidence to convict them of minor crimes, but without testimony from one of them they will receive only a light sentence, say one year in prison. If one of them agrees to cooperate with the investigation, prosecutors will let him out for time served, and be able to send the other to prison for ten years. But if they both cooperate with the investigation, both will go to prison for five years (perhaps because the prosecutors will have their information, but not their testimony). Key to the game is that the players are unable to coordinate their strategy. Clearly the best for both of them would be to keep quiet, but the strategy of cooperating with the investigation is superior, from their private perspective, regardless of what the other player does. So they both talk, and both get heavy sentences.

One weird thing about the story here is that the symmetry really doesn’t make sense. It’s not impossible, but it’s peculiar to imagine prosecutors being so interested in pinning the major crime on someone that they’re willing to let a confederate walk free, but indifferent to who flips on whom. That suggests we consider a less-known hierarchical version of this game, where one player is the powerful boss of a crime syndicate — let’s call him “The President” — and the other one is “The Attorney”, who knows all the details of his crimes, and is sufficiently involved to be criminally liable himself. Let’s call this game “The President’s Dilemma”. Continue reading “The president’s dilemma”