Black and White

Talking of old school tabloids as I was the other day, do you remember how, back in the heady days of the seventies, they used to pull stunts like having one of their reporters black up to 'experience a day in the life of a black person?'  Like there were no actual black reporters they could have sent out on such an assignment.  Or, even better just spoken to real black people about their experiences in seventies Britain?  Of course, at the time they thought they were being incredibly progressive with these types of story: exposing racism, prejudice and inequality first hand.  Except that, arguably, they weren't doing any of those things but rather exposing the reactions that a white man with boot polish on his face speaking in a fake West Indian accent might get from bemused citizens of all races.  Remembering this stuff made me ponder on whether something similar would work now, in regard to asylum seekers.  I mean, I'm surprised that the likes of Reform UK, or one of those right-wing rags that regularly encourage and give a platform to the extreme right, then react with shock and horror when right-wing thugs start violent 'protests', haven't organised such a thing.  

You can just imagine it, can't you?  Some hapless Reform UK member, (or better still, one of those scumbags from 'Patriot Platform'), blacking up and pretending to be Somali, sneaking aboard one of those inflatable boats in Calais and crossing the channel with the express intention of being detained and stuck in an immigration centre in order to 'expose' the life of luxury that immigrants supposedly enjoy at tax payers' expense.  Obviously, one of the first hurdles they would have to negotiate would be to refrain from cheering on the mob of fellow racist thugs who would inevitably meet the boat on the beaches, hurling abuse and rocks at its occupants.  Imagine their disappointment, though, when they find that the immigrant detention centres are actually shit holes, besieged by baying mobs of bovine protesters.  Even when they do get the chance to go into the nearest town, the asylum seekers find themselves spat upon and subject to abuse by the local bigots.  Mind you, if this fake asylum seeker was really unlucky, they might find themselves evading the authorities and under the control of some criminal gang using undocumented illegal immigrants as basically slave labour.  Living in overcrowded, damp-ridden flats and houses, bussed to and from twelve hour days in sweat shops working for no pay might well not be what they are looking for.  Mind you, I can't help but feel that their biggest complaint might be that they were never invited to join a 'grooming gang' and never got to rape a white woman, despite being promised that that was what all asylum seekers did upon arrival in the UK...

Framing the Question

Look, I'm not here to be a defender of AI or, more pertinently, a defender of the big AI companies and those who run them, but this latest round of AI doom mongering really is ridiculous.  'We're all doomed!' and 'AI is going to kill us all!' scream the headlines - all based upon the utterances of some former AI developer geek.  No mechanism for how this might happen is given.  No chain of causality is posited.  All we get cited in support of these claims are recent incidents where AI agents have 'unilaterally' hacked into websites and databases.  The thing is that if you start looking into these incidents, then you'll find, as with most of the 'bad stuff' attributed to AI, you'll find that an element of human error lies at their root. When Ai 'misbehaves', it is the result of insufficient parameters having been set by those who originally instigated the task that resulted in this behaviour.  The AI was merely trying to complete some kind of task, usually involving gathering data, but had not been set boundaries as to exactly how it should go about this, what was off-limits and what was permissible.  Contrary to what those who would have you believe that some AI models are sentient or 'conscious', these systems have no inherent moral code of their own, any more than any other tool has - morality is ultimately a human construct, not something possessed by inanimate objects.  You wouldn't expect a hammer or a spanner, for instance, to distinguish between right and wrong: they are merely tools that perform the function they are set to by human users. 

So it is with AI - it merely carries out the functions set for it by humans.  If you don't give it specific enough instructions, the end result will not meet expectations.  I only use AI for simple function at which I know it is quite good at - ChatGPT, for example, I use primarily for producing the sort of images that simpler systems have problems with.  But my instructions as to what I want have to be very specific to get a satisfactory result.   Otherwise, I have to spend a fair amount of time giving it additional instructions to modify the initial attempt.  Every so often it simply can't seem to understand what I want, no matter how detailed my instructions are - recently, for instance, it just could not grasp the concept of one guy slapping another guy with a fish for the artwork for an episode of 'After Hours'.  Eventually, I had to provide it with an image of a fish slapping in order to use as a guide - which resulted in exactly what I was looking for.  Mind you, sometimes with the most basic instructions it can come up with an image which is incredibly 'spot on' - the fake tabloid front page used to illustrate the latest story on The Sleaze, for instance.  The only edit I had to get it to make was to change the very real tabloid title of 'The Daily Star' which it had chosen to use for a fake tabloid name.  (The front page was sufficiently convincing - it was even dated -that I actually checked through some newspaper archives to assure myself that it wasn't a real front page).  My point is that, in general, the responses you get from AI are tailored by the wording of your query - so people really do need to learn to be careful in how they frame the tasks they set it and stop blaming the tools themselves when it all goes horribly wrong.  After all, when that set of shelves you've just put up collapses, you don't blame the drill, timber and screws you used, do you?

An Orgy of Unintended Destruction

It's been an orgy of unintended destruction.  At least, that's the way it feels.  Through a series of accidents, negligence and sheer incompetence on my part, various bits of model railway rolling stock and spares have ended up damaged or destroyed.  It's all happened over a short period of time and has left me feeling deeply depressed.  Not only is it costing me time (in terms of repairs) and money (in terms of replacing the items damaged beyond repair), but it has also left me despairing at my apparent inability to keep anything safe, to not wreck or ruin anything of value in my possession.  It's sheer carelessness and irresponsibility on my part.  Anyway, it's also been a shock discovering the cost of replacement components - I've had a lot of this stuff for years, decades even, buying it when it was cheap and plentiful.  Well, you know something?  It's neither of those things now.  I've just bought, online, a replacement unfinished locomotive body, for instance.  I ended up paying for it what I paid, many years ago, for two such bodies, plus their complete tenders in a job lot!  But that was back when Hornby had moved production to China and were closing their Margate factory, resulting in a fire sale of redundant spares. 

I obtained quite a few spares that way.  Most of them have ended up being used on various projects - one of those tenders is currently part of one such, near completed, project.  The body damaged beyond repair was about to go into the paint shop as part of another project, which would have utilised the other tender from that job lot, but now the other body - tentatively destined for yet another, longer term, project - has been pressed into service and the new body will go into store to replace it.  So, all of this has come as a real setback just as I was working myself up to moving some of my outstanding projects to completion.  (I found an excuse in a short notice international Zoom call to put off applying the lining to the L1 last weekend).  Still, I've just been pricing up a replacement spare I need to repair another damaged item - far pricier than I expected.  Mind you, I could cannibalise another item still safely in store to effect a temporary repair, but that's just putting off the problem.  But, at the end of the day, it's all a problem entirely of my own making.  I really need to start learning how to look after my stuff properly.

Are You Having a 'September Reset'?

Are you having a 'September Reset'?  You might well be, even if you don't know what that particular piece of jargon means.  It's another example of that phenomenon where somebody, either in the media or one of those insufferable online 'influencers', coins a term to describe something that people have been doing forever and pretends that it is a new trend they've invented/discovered.  Like 'Quiet Quitting' - remember that?  It was a term that started going around post-Covid lockdowns, to describe how people tired of their tedious jobs were simply going through the motions, doing the absolute minimum required of them to avoid being sacked.  As I noted at the time, some of us had been doing it long before Covid, it just wasn't called that then.  (It's actually amazing how far you can go with this approach to work without anyone noticing - it was especially easy for me, I found, as my 'job from Hell' required me to be out of the office and away from scrutiny for most of my working hours.  It wasn't as if I wasn't doing anything, I wasn't sneaking off home, for instance, I just did the absolute bare minimum).   Getting back to that 'September Reset' - it's simply that September, for many of us, represents a natural point to make changes in our lives, reassess things and so on.  

There are several reasons for this, for one thing September marks the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn and the start of the run-in to the end of the year.  But, even more significantly, it traditionally marks the end of the school Summer holidays and the start of a new academic year - for those in education it quite literally marks the start of a new year.  For those of us who spent an extended time in education, (in my case both as a post-grad student, then, somewhat later, as a trainee teacher and supply lecturer), the feeling of September being a new start lingers long after we leave the field.  My main Summer leave from work usually used to be in late August and early September - I often wondered if I was subconsciously trying to harmonise it with the start of the academic year.  Indeed, if it straddled the two months, as soon as September started, I'd get a feeling that it was time to start winding up my holiday activities and focus on getting back to work.  So, yeah, September is a perfectly natural time to be reflective and reassess things.  I still do it, mainly because it is when the good weather starts to break up and I can't spend as much time outdoors, so the Summer trips that characterise June, July and August for me, wind down and my mind turns back to such things as home improvements, repairs, insurance renewals, car MoTs and the like.  But now, it seems, we have to label this phenomena, to call it something and have those 'influencers' and media types 'codify' it for us and tell us exactly what we should be doing in our 'September Reset'.  Well, screw them, I'll just carry on as I've always done.

Twenty Five Years of Hate?

It's the twenty fifth anniversary of 9/11.  Or, if you are one of those crazy conspiracy theorists, the twenty fifth anniversary of either a 'false flag' operation by the US government, or a colossal hoax that fooled the world.  But, assuming that what we all saw on TV that day actually did happen and actually was a terror attack, what does it all mean a quarter of a century on?  Well, for one thing, it heralded twenty five years of global de-stabilisation, as the US thrashed around, blindly trying to strike back at nebulous enemies and gain some kind of 'revenge'.  Having never experienced large scale terror attacks on its territory, they had no idea how to respond and instead acted as if nobody had ever suffered this sort of thing before and that therefore nobody else had any advice to give.  Which meant that the measured sorts of response to terrorist attacks that the UK and Europe had employed up until then weren't even considered and instead we had ill advised and illogical invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Neither of which achieved much in the short term and in the long term have proven disastrous, both for the citizens of those countries and for global stability.  9/11 also ushered in a new age of xenophobia, the mistrust, hatred even, of 'the other' - be that 'otherness' cultural or simply having a different to skin tone to 'us'.   

It is this fear of 'the other' which lies at the heart of so many consequent disasters, from Brexit to the US' current literal war on immigrants.  It has fuelled the rise of the extreme right in the US and across Europe - if not for 9/11, I'm pretty sure that we wouldn't have had last weekend's disturbing scenes of black clad, masked, neo-Nazi thugs on our streets trying to harass and intimidate both immigrants and asylum seekers and branding the RNLI 'traitors' for simply doing their jobs.  The Twin Towers were the catalyst for legitimising this sort of hatred.  Or, if you prefer, it represented the lighting of a very long fuse that eventually led to normalisation of extremists like Farage and 'Tommy Robinson'.   Not to mention, in the US, Trump, in Germany the AfD, in France Le Pen and so on.  One could even argue that the US' actions in invading Afghanistan and Iraq of very flimsy 'self defence' pretexts, provided Russia with inspiration for its war in Ukraine, justified on similar grounds.  So, the bastards who flew those planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon have a lot to answer for, except, of course, that by ensuring that theirs was a suicide mission, they've evaded any responsibility, with US instead wildly striking out at various proxy targets.  They're still at it today, pushing fuel prices to the point where I'm being forced to consider taking my car off of the road until sanity returns, with their continuing senseless war against 'the other', in thise, Iran.  Ironically, Saudi Arabia remains (just) a US ally, despite the fact that those 9/11cguys were, actually, Saudis, backed by Saudi money... 

More Motive Power

Yeah, another new loco. I had no intention of buying another one, but this old Triang-Hornby M7 in decent condition turned up on eBay at a price I liked. I've long wanted one, but they often go for silly prices and the only ones I've seen at reasonable prices have either been very tatty examples, or in the wrong (for me) livery, (or both). 

This one is in BR livery with the later totem on the side, making it right for my layout's period and location.  Incredibly, it still has its original box and plastic tray.  The 'Triang-Hornby' logo on the box indicates it was made c1965 to c1971 - before that it would simply have read 'Triang', after that it would have been 'Hornby', (although I'm pretty sure it vanished from the catalogue around this time, reappearing much later, before being replaced by an all-new version).

As noted, this one is in pretty good condition, with only some wear to the BR totem on the left tank side and a not-too-subtle repair to the front buffer beam and frame.  These are both issues that can easily be rectified.  It is also a very good runner.  As was common in the sixties, Triang built some 'novelty' features into the model - in the M7's case an opening smokebox door and a red 'firebox glow' in the cab.  Both features still work on this one.  

The real M7's were extremely long lived, having first appeared in London and South Western Railway (LSWR) service, before passing to the newly formed Southern Railway in 1923 and soldiering on into the sixties under British Railways.  They were pretty much ubiquitous across the Southern Region's Western Division.  

Here's the model on the layout, with a goods train: 

A nice model, very typical of its age, the M7 completes my 'collection' of Triang's sixties produced ex-Southern Railway locos - I already have an L1 4-4-0 and a 'Battle of Britain', (although the latter is built from parts, all Triang, except the tender which is from the later Hornby production run from the same tools).  Anyway, I've resolved that this positively has to be last loco I buy for a while, as I have so many loco projects currently unfinished.  I really have to move some of these to completion, probably starting with the aforementioned L1, which I bought in a poor state, but is now only awaiting the application of its lining transfers.  Fingers crossed that I can motivate myself to complete that soon...

The Lost Age of Tabloid Miracles

You know, there just haven't been any good religious 'miracles' or portents of late.  I mean, not so very long ago it seemed that hardly a day went by without there being reports of weeping statues, or of images of Jesus or assorted saints appearing in the most unlikely of places.  When was the last time you saw a tabloid headline screaming about how some guy had found a dog turd shaped like Christ on the cross, or seen the face of the Madonna in pool of vomit in the alleyway behind their local MacDonalds?  (Mind you, I have to concede that the former is less likely to happen now that people are obliged to clear up their own dogs' shit, thus depriving us of many potential sightings of such things).  I used to quite enjoy reading about this sort of stuff - I was always keen to see just how bizarre the sightings would get: "I was watching a porn film last night and one of the guys had a scrotum which resembled the face of Christ when seen from a certain angle".  It's the same thing with portents and omens - when did we last see a plague of locusts or a rain of fish or frogs reported?  Sure, every so often some tabloid or other likes to try and scaremonger with a story about how some guy who predicted the late Queen's death has now predicted when World War Three will break out, (although, I have to say that predicting the death of a woman nearly a hundred years old and in obviously declining health isn't the most impressive of predictions - something the papers themselves obviously realised as they later substituted predicting the Queen's death with a claim that he had predicted the pandemic).

But the fact is that we just don't see those wonderful old fashioned stories of my 1970s youth where weekend tabloids like the wonderfully named Tit Bits, would run some account by a rural old crone claiming that her jam-making could predict world events.  "Last year my freshly made raspberry jam soured overnight after I'd sealed it in its jar - three days later the Six Day War erupted in the Middle East!" Or even, "I was awoken in the night by the sound of breaking glass - when I investigated my larder, I found that two jars of gooseberry jam had unaccountably exploded!  The very next day there was a terrible air crash in which over two hundred people died!"  No doubt there would have been an adjunct to the story, in which the healing properties of the old crone's jams would be extolled, with tales of how sticking it up your bum could cure piles.  It is the same when it comes to heavenly portents of disaster.  I yearn for the days when we got stories of how a thundercloud shaped like an arse had descended over the City and let forth a colossal clap of thunder that sounded like a huge fart just prior to a massive stock market crash.  Even UFO sightings are boring nowadays - they are all vague videos of fuzzy lights in the sky.  Not like the good old days when you'd get nice clear cut pictures of saucer (or hubcap) shaped craft in the sky, or even sometimes on the ground.  We really need to get back to that wonderful age of tabloid 'miracles' that amused, entertained and stoked that elusive 'sense of wonder' in impressionable young kids like me when they read them.  I know, I know, the web is full of this sort of shit, but just isn't the same.  It certainly isn't as entertaining, that's for sure.

Legitimising the Fascist Thugs

It's amazing the number of right-wing arseholes who suddenly seem to legitimise violent protesters because they have a 'legitimate cause'.   Make no mistake, they are very careful in the way they word their statements, opening with a cursory 'condemnation' of violence, but then following it up by effectively saying that they can understand the frustrations that have lead to the use of violence (which of course they don't condone) because the underlying cause is legitimate.  Which, despite their attempts at weasel wording, actually does legitimise the violence.  In the wake of bunches of black clad thugs causing disruption, intimidating locals and clashing violently with the police in Dover and Portsmouth over the weekend, I was more than a little disturbed to hear my local (Tory) Police and Crime Commissioner taking this non-condemnation condemnation approach today.  Because, you know, it was all about those immigrants, wasn't it?  Which apparently justifies protesting against the RNLI landing them in Portsmouth, having rescued several from drowning in the Channel.  Then we had the Tory Shadow Home Secretary taking a similar but, in the bits I heard at least, failing completely to actually condemn the 'protesters' violent conduct.  Look, even that racist scumbag Nigel Farage managed to put out a statement which actually condemned violence and objected to these fascists wearing masks.  

Of course, these were all the self same people who had happily condemned Just Stop Oil and pro Palestinian protesters - even when their protests weren't violent - for causing disruption and inconveniencing the public.  'Lock 'em up!' seemed to be the gist of their reactions to those protests and, indeed, the police and courts obliged by doing just that, often on trumped up charges that wouldn't stand up in court.  By contrast, the lack of arrests as a result of the Dover and Portsmouth incidents are notable, despite these being violent protest carries out by people who are clearly trying to pass themselves off as some kind of 'militia'.  Two tier justice, anyone?  Quite frankly, it is these pieces of shit that we should be coming down hard on - the police need to be handing out the kind of beatings they usually reserve for left-wing protesters to these bastards.  In fact, I'd go further - the time for kid gloves and pussy footing around the extreme right has surely long passed.  We need to start shooting the bastards, if necessary.  I mean, if you've got sinister black clad and  masked shit heads thinking they can go out onto British streets and intimidate people and take the  law into their own hands, then we are entering very dangerous territory - the road to lawlessness, in fact.  This sort of thing needs to be nipped in the bud.  The extremists need to be shown, in no uncertain terms, that this sort of shit won't be tolerated.  Which makes the slowness and weakness of the government's reactions to these events deeply disturbing - do they really not see the danger here?  For God's sake, we need to stop the fascists by any means necessary - the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.

Take It Away!

Takeaways aren't something I go in for a lot - largely for health reasons, (they are usually bloody unhealthy) - but occasionally  I indulge myself with something suitably greasy and non-nutritious.  Usually when, like yesterday, I get back home after a long drive, after an active day out, and feel that I can't be arsed to cook anything.  So it was that I found myself at the counter of a local takeaway specialising in post-pub fare like kebabs, but where, nonetheless, I've always found the food of excellent quality, ordering some chicken and chips.  This is where it all started going wrong as I realised that I'd ordered the wrong chicken - I actually wanted the nuggets - but the guy had already stuck it in the fryer and - being British - I was too polite to say anything.  But what the heck, I thought, chicken is chicken, isn't it?  A thought which lasted until I got home and opened the carton.  I don't know what is was about its contents, whether it was the sight or smell, or some combination of both, but I immediately found myself gagging and just knew that I wouldn't be able to eat it.  To be fair, I did try to cut off a piece to try and taste it, in the hope that I could digest it in small portions, but none of my cutlery could make a dent in it.  For some reason, that 'chicken' nauseated me so much, was just so repugnant, that I just knew that I didn't want it in the house, not even in the kitchen bin.  So, I decided to stick it outside the backdoor, thinking that maybe either the local rats or cats would eat it.

I did decide to give the chips a go, but they were definitely sub-standard too - some burned, others barely cooked.  I ended up throwing a fair proportion of them in the bin and found myself forced to cook something anyway.  But I couldn't stop thinking about that 'chicken' out in the back garden.  I mean, not even rats deserve to be exposed to the risk of food poisoning and while the only cat on the terrace at present holds a grudge against me, (it's a long story), I still wouldn't wish any harm on the furry bastard.  Worse still, one of the local urban foxes who sometimes put in appearances might eat it and I really couldn't face going out the next morning and finding a fox slumped against the wall of the alley at the end of the terrace, in a pool of its own vomit, groaning, 'Shoot me, please.  For pity's sake, just shoot me.'  I mean, I'd have had the RSPCA trying to prosecute me for animal cruelty, for sure.  So, I went back out and retrieved the 'chicken'.  It was completely unscathed - not even the rats had touched it.  From which we can safely conclude that they aren't cannibals.  But I still didn't want it in the house.  In fact, I didn't want it anywhere near my house.  So, having packaged it all up in the carton, I took it down to the nearest rubbish bin and dumped it there.  I was half expecting to see a load of guys in Hazmat suits cordoning it off this morning, but it apparently hasn't been found yet.  Either that, or it crawled out under its own volition and even as I write this, is lurking in the drains.  I'm not sure what the moral of all this is, other than that I have to strike another takeaway off the list, as it has clearly taken a catastrophic dip in standards and now relies on the fact that its clientele are all drunk and will blame any ill effects on those ten pints of cheap lager they had at Wetherspoons.  I'm still sore at the money I wasted on that inedible takeaway, but at least I didn't eat it.  Even so, just thinking about it still makes me nauseous.  

Dear Sir, I'd Like to Complain About Democracy...

Don't you just love it?  One day we have Nigel Farage whining about how we live in a 'complainant society', where an elected representative can suddenly find themselves under investigation just  because someone has unreasonably complained that you, I don't know, received an undeclared five million quid from some shady crypto bloke, say.  Outrageous.  Then a few days later, we have the self same Farage caught in an undercover investigation apparently endorsing his party taking donations from a foreign national, (which is illegal under UK electoral law).  You see, they're out to get him, those complaining bastards in the 'establishment'.  In fact, he's being harassed with meritless accusations, just the way his hero, convicted felon and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump, has been.  First up, trying to compare yourself to Trump is treading on thin ice if you are a UK politician - Trump has never been popular here and the 'Trump Premium' we find ourselves paying for petrol, diesel etc thanks to his war against Iran, hasn't done anything for his popularity.  Yet more evidence that our Nige is losing it, if he thinks that this an analogy that will resonate with the UK electorate?  Of course, the real issue here is his equation of being held to account, as all elected representatives must be in a democracy, to a 'complainant' culture.  In essence, he's saying that just because he's an MP and aspires to lead the country, he shouldn't be subject to scrutiny.

This should be yet another alarm bell for the idiots inclined to vote for Reform: their leadership clearly has either no understanding of how a democratic, pluralist system works or, more likely, they do know and don't care.  If it isn't obvious to everyone by now that they don't believe that they should be accountable to anyone, least of all the electorate, then I'm not quite sure what else they have to do - slip on the swastika armbands, perhaps?  I mean, they've already started banning journalist that they feel are too critical of them from their party conference.  Indeed, this policy goes right the way down to local level, where some local journalists have found themselves being denied access to meetings and press conferences in Reform controlled councils.   Yet still there are idiots out there prepared to support them.  Do they not take note of all of Reform's opposition to concepts like accountability and oversight?  Or do they not care?  Just so long as they deport all those darkies, I don't care if they suppress democratic debate and human rights, it's a small price to pay for making Britain white again, eh?  The latter is probably the attitude that Farage and co are banking on - that people are sufficiently discontent with the status quo that they'll be prepared to overlook his and his party's dubious activities and downright dangerous attitudes.  After all, he probably reasons, those American idiots re-elected Trump, despite his criminal convictions and the fact that he instigated an attempted insurrection when he'd lost the previous election.