Passport to Pissington?

As for those idiots in that twee little English village - Pissington, or whatever the fuck it is called -  who have unilaterally declared themselves as an 'independent' state that has left the UK - what a bunch of utter tossers.  All because they don't like the idea of a nearby former military base being used to house asylum seekers.  Not actually in their village, you note, but several miles away. What, do they think that there'll be a nasty smell which might waft their way?  Racist bastards!  But what else should we expect of middle class Middle England, who derive all of their 'opinions' from the Daily Mail, The Express and GB News?  They're terrified of anything that isn't like them - white, well off, insulated and privileged - which might threaten their cosy existence.  Already, though, they've found that aligning yourself with the 'Stop the Boats' brigade will result in an invasion of your village by characters far more undesirable than immigrants - in this case racist boot boys in the shape of that arse who calls himself 'Tommo' and likes to try and intimidate RNLI staff as they try to do their jobs.  Like most of these would be 'hard men' of the extreme right, he has convictions for violence, in his case domestic violence, indicating that he's not just a racist, but a wife beater as well.  It's like they say - lie down with dogs and you get fleas.  Or wife beaters.

Obviously, their declaration of 'independence' is utterly meaningless.  You can bet that they will still expect the police to turn up when 'Tommo' and his thugs turn up in force for one of their trademark violent 'protests', or for the local fire brigade to come and put out fires, even though, by 'opting out' of the UK, they'd no longer be paying for these services.  Likewise things like power, water, sewage and so on - they'd have to negotiate new contracts with providers for these services, doubtless being forced to pay a premium.  To be quite frank, I think that if they really want to cede from the UK then Andy Burnham should give them a taste of real independence by setting up a hard border around the village, demanding passports and visas if they want to enter the UK, with the prospect of being treated as illegal immigrants if they leave their village without going through border control with this documentation.  Plus, of course, all services originating outside the village - in the UK - should be suspended.  I doubt very much that the middle class bastards would last more than a few hours under these circumstances.  That's the trouble with such twee fantasies - they simply won't survive their first contact with reality.  As soon as the pillocks find that they can no longer get their groceries delivered, they'll be begging to rejoin the UK.

The Craziness That Keeps on Giving

Donald Trump undoubtedly is the crazy who just keeps on giving - as his latest lunatic ramblings confirm.  This time he's claiming that the triumphal arch he wants to erect in his own honour in Washington DC will actually be some kind of military defence installation, housing drones, sniper positions and lots of sniper ammunition.  The obvious question, obviously, is just who or what this installation is meant to be defending DC against?  Is Trump expecting Canada to invade some time soon?  (Actually, with so much of the US military tied up in his vanity war in Iran, that might not be a bad idea - Mark Carney really needs to give the idea of seizing the US Eastern seaboard serious consideration).  Or maybe he's expecting an attack from further afield - perhaps he's somehow pissed off some aliens who are now poised to land their flying saucers in DC.  But, in truth, we all know what this is really about: let's face it, snipers and drones aren't going to repel any kind of invading army, but they could be deployed against large scale civilian protests.  And that's what Trump is afraid of - a popular uprising against him.  Probably when he refuses to leave office in 2028.  This time, of course, it wouldn't be a case of refusing to accept an election result, as he can't stand again, but of refusing to accept the Constitution.  Which he already has form for.

Sure, we also know that this nonsense about drones and snipers is pure fantasy - at best, another spurious attempt to justify the expense of building that monstrous edifice to his vanity - but it provides a valuable insight into the workings of his fevered mind.  He's running scared - the end of his presidency and the power and protection it gives him is in sight, with the likelihood that Congress will soon be controlled by his opponents even sooner. All of which makes him far more dangerous, more likely to start not just saying, but actually doing, even crazier stuff than he already is.  Let's face it, he's just itching to declare a state of emergency within the US and impose martial law and by all accounts is obsessed with the idea of deploying a nuclear against one of the US' enemies, (with Iran being the most likely target right now).  The recent poll which suggests that the majority of Americans would support his removal from office via either impeachment or the 25th Amendment, (they were slightly less keen on a military coup but pretty ambivalent about him dying in office of natural causes), probably isn't going to help Trump's mindset much, either.  (Interestingly, despite the number of alleged attempts against him, assassination wasn't an option, so we just don't know how Americans feel about the idea of a modern day Lee Harvey Oswald offing the fat bastard).  Heartening though it is to see US citizens finally grasping what the rest of us have known for years - that they have elected a dangerous madman to the highest office in the land - the trouble with all of these scenarios (including assassination), barring, possibly, the military coup - is that they would simply deliver a J D Vance presidency.  Which isn't necessarily an improvement - at least with Trump you know he's simply a demented and dangerous old man, but a snide, two-faced, slippery God-botherer like Vance is a potentially far more difficult prospect to deal with.

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.