Spare the Rat and Spoil the Child

The all-important punitive aspect of the great British prison system has taken on a new dimension with the co-opting of therapy animals to keep the rats down. Management at the country's largest children's prison authorised the use of ferrets, which have hitherto been retained as part of a programme for inmates who are deemed traumatised rather than Just Plain Evil, to help clear out a rodent infestation. At least one inmate witnessed the gory results, doubtless learning some salutary moral lessons in the process, above and beyond those inherent in the institution's high levels of violence and self-harm. Enthusiasts of traditional British justice will of course rejoice that children are being empowered to punish themselves and each other in rat-infested buildings, and that infestations are becoming ever more widespread thanks to efficiency measures by private contractors. With exemplary Britishness, the Prison Service blamed the rats at the children's prison on maintenance workers disturbing a nest. If the place had been left to crumble away on its own, without splurging money on repairs that might better have been used to augment boardroom bonuses and shareholder dividends, the whole problem would never have arisen.

Our Natural Home

A mere ten years after deciding that the best way for our great Nation to prosper was to cut the Continent off from the mainland, the great British public seems to be having one or two first thoughts. Even voters for the Farage Falange have noticed that the golden days of the nineteen-thirties have not yet dawned again; which presumably helps explain why the strutting Caudillo, his henchbeings and imitators are resorting more and more to overt racism rather than maintaining much pretence of concern for economic or social policy. Voters among the beastly Euro-wogs are also in favour, or at least not against, the mainland's readmission to the Strasbrussels imperium; while Britain's leading liberal newspaper notes that even the European far-right would not altogether object to the return of a country which has bidden fair to become as unreliable, xenophobic, self-pitying and backward-looking as they are themselves.

The Usual Reason

Even pathogen libertarianism has its limits, most notably with regard to the notorious woke mind virus; but even those germs which are tolerated and encouraged by the Trumpster and his head-tribble can occasionally be made subject to restrictions. In its capacity as chum and playmate to the head-tribble, the Kennedy brainworm has ordered that a Florida woman who came into contact with a hantavirus patient should be compulsorily detained in a facility at the other end of the country. As a non-believer in science and medicine, the brainworm naturally exercised its freedom of conscience by citing no medical or scientific rationale; much to the indignation of experts and other opponents of American values. The measure is permitted under current quarantine rules, but those who drafted the rules were assured that it would be very rare and not supposed to happen. Whether the brainworm was read the memo beyond the part that said "yes, you can" remains as yet unclear.

Damped Down

Despite the planned dismantlement of the Ocean Observatories Initiative being an act of supreme stupidity that would cost the taxpayer millions, the Trumpster and his head-tribble have rowed back on the rolling back. Presumably someone managed to inform the head-tribble that the OOI monitors ocean waters off both Alaska and Greenland, amassing potentially vital intelligence for the forthcoming crusades against the existential threats of North Korea and Denmark. Nevertheless, as a merely scientific deep-sea monitoring system the OOI is inevitably easy prey for the Heathen Chinee hoax that is climate change; thus the postponement of its demise is conditional upon stakeholders identifying ways to make it sustainable at a time when there are so many worthier projects into which the American taxpayer could be sinking.

They All Look Alike

Barely a month after a pseudo-coffee brand committed its little indiscretion in South Korea, a pseudo-clothing brand has accomplished a similar feat of marketing in China, by using a traditional Japanese drum in place of a traditional Chinese one. The error is all the more unfortunate in that the relationship between China and Japan is coloured by such historical incidents as the 1970s TV adaptations of Journey to the West and The Water Margin, and also (which may be scarcely less traumatic) the Second World War; and might therefore best be described as fraught. It is arguable that few more serious cultural misunderstandings have arisen since St Thomas Malory unaccountably decided to title his biography of the British hero King Arthur in the language of the beastly French. Fortunately, in the judgement of Britain's leading liberal newspaper the onus to adapt is on the customer rather than the merchant, so that the incident highlights the risks of "falling foul of domestic political and cultural sensibilities" rather than the risks of sheer bloody ignorance.

Tough Choices, Hard Decisions

Squeals of patriotic indignation are sounding over a video installation on display at the National Portrait Gallery, which compares Oliver Cromwell's notoriously cruel assault on Ireland with Winston Churchill's famously rigorous austerity measures in India. Defenders of Churchill's role in the Bengal famine apparently plead that he hadn't realised taking food away from people who don't have enough might potentially incline them towards a degree of unprofitable emaciation: a mathematical inexactitude which explains a good deal about the performance of many a Conservative chancellor of the exchequer. By contrast, Cromwell believed that Roman Catholics were beastly people with a beastly religion; which is certainly not something the Official Undisputed Greatest Ever Number One Greatest Briton Ever would ever have said about the Indians.

Just as Special as Ever

There are certain national leaders - mad mullahs and dirty dagoes prominent among them - who would presumably consider it a badge of honour to be snubbed by the Trumpster and his head-tribble. Fortunately for the global standing and domestic dignity of the United Kingdom and His Majesty's Government, the CEO of Team Starmer is above such immoderate and unsensible grandstanding. It is true that the Trumpster denied him the opportunity of a private grovel, and this despite an apparently unconditional offer to help America clean up the mess from its little accident in the Strait of Hormuz; but it seems the pair of them had as frank and honest a conversation as an empty suit and a fluorescent orange bladder farctate with the toxic excretions of a rabid radioactive head-tribble possibly could have. I'm sure we are all jolly proud.

You Can't Kill All of the People All of the Time

Assuming that the latest lull in the Persian Crusade continues past the Fourth of July, and that the Netanyahoo will rest content to forego the ethnic cleansing of the entire Middle East in favour of fomenting a Dolchstoßlegende, the ignorant and backsliding will no doubt complain vociferously about the paucity of the spoils. The Strait of Hormuz will be opened, as it was before the Trumpster and his head-tribble provoked the mad mullahs to close it; and Iran will refrain from seeking a nuclear deterrent, as under the provisions of a treaty that the Trumpster and his head-tribble blithely tore up during their first term in office. Of course, any naysayers determined to remain unsatisfied by the partial flattening of Lebanon, in accordance with one of the Righteous State's most long-standing hobbies, and the demise of a few thousand Untermenschen including more than a hundred and fifty schoolgirls who might easily have grown up wrong, would probably not be satisfied with anything.

Economic Warfare

Despite their desperate need for new toys and lots of them, Britain's plucky little servicepersons have somehow managed to foil the beastly Russians yet again. The beastly Russians have a shadow fleet of some seven hundred vessels, one of which was caught doing something nasty in the English Channel. Although the toys utilised in its capture seem to have been verging on the functional, the operation of course justifies any amount of welfare cuts to prevent our imminent obliteration; though whether it also provides a viable pretext for taxing the rich will doubtless remain a matter for vigorous democratic denial. In any case, it was certainly a fortunate whim of chance that the interception just happened to become necessary at exactly the moment when the Ministry for Wog-Bombing reached peak squeal about the sacrifices everyone else is going to have to make on behalf of King, Country, and certain anticipated careers in the private sector.

Low Art

It seems that some among the beastly Euro-wogs are dragging their feet in the race to replace mere human resources with squillionaire-serving, water-guzzling infoslop generation emporia. A Dutch far-right party helpfully attempted to remedy the situation by appropriating a court artist's sketch of two Syrian criminals and using AI to convert it into a caricature for use in a migrant-bashing propaganda video. It seems the Netherlands are so far behind the times as still to indulge in copyright protections, and even moral rights, for meat-based content production modules; and as a result the purveyors of legitimate and understandable concerns have had to apologise and cough up some pocket change from whichever squillionaire happens to be paying ther bills. Doubtless His Majesty's Government's preparations for the mainland's great infoslop boom will be free of all such anti-growth restrictions.