I won the lottery

I was in a shopping mall the other day, passing a lottery stall, when I was struck with the very distinct thought that if I were to buy a lottery ticket, I would win. They were advertising a prize of $20 million, which I thought might come in handy. So I bought a ticket. In order to minimise any prospect of mishap, I bought a 50 game ticket, which cost me $34.90. My instincts do not usually let me down.

The draw was a couple of days ago, and I did indeed win. But not $20 million.

No one won $20 million; the jackpot was spread out among a couple of dozen people. They got about $700,000 each.

But my win was more modest. I won $18.

I suppose if one looks through the small print, they warn you about this sort of outcome. In fact, I would be surprised if there was not such small print. But it is disappointing. Very disappointing.

Indo-China

The current border tensions between India and China are extraordinary.

It seems that both sides have agreed not to use their guns, but instead, the Chinese army has attacked the Indians with bars, wooden clubs studded with nails etc. They have apparently killed 20 Indian soldiers yesterday, including  a colonel. These casualties have been largely caused, it seems, by the Chinese soldiers manhandling Indian soldiers into steep ravines such that the Indian soldiers fell to their deaths.  The Indians say that there were casualties on both sides, but the Chinese have not said how many of their people were killed.

One’s heart goes out, of course, to the families of the soldiers. Most (some would say all) deaths caused in this sort of conflict should be unnecessary.

But it is worth noting that

Here comes the story of the Hurricane…

My continued trawl through the Netflix catalogue this week included Martin Scorsese’s interesting movie about Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review tour.

One of the most interesting songs from that tour was Hurricane, arguably Dylan’s most compelling protest song, about the wrongful conviction of black boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in the 1960’s:

Here comes the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin’ that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world

Curious, I looked the case up. An analysis of the actual facts suggests that Rubin Carter – a thoroughly unpleasant criminal – almost certainly was guilty of this nasty triple murder. He was in fact tried twice and on each occasion all of the jurors – including the black jurors – were unanimous that the evidence against him was overwhelming. It further turns out that

Barbarous History

The Black Lives Matter movement does cause us to take another look at the issue of slavery, and one thing that is all too apparent is that the popular picture of white Europeans enslaving black Africans is massively distorted. Less than 10% of the slavery we know about falls in that category. As regards modern slavery, Wikipedia notes:

The number of people currently enslaved around the world is far greater than the number of slaves during the historical Atlantic slave trade.[1]

All slavery is detestable, and it is much to the credit of the British government that the British largely led the abolition of slavery around the world. Slavery has been more or less unknown in England for over a thousand years, and was formally declared illegal in England in the 18^th century and throughout the British Empire early in the 19^th century. Other countries – United States and Brazil for example – retained slavery for decades after that.

What is frequently overlooked these days is that one of the most prevalent slave trades in relatively recent times was the slave trade perpetrated by Africans, who enslaved not only other Africans, but also large numbers of Europeans. These slavers known variously as the Barbary Pirates or the Corsairs, carried out

raids on European coastal towns and villages, mainly in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, but also in the British Isles,^[1] the Netherlands, and Iceland.^[2]

The numbers were not small. Again, according to Wikipedia:

Between 1580 and 1680 corsairs were said to have captured about 850,000 people as slaves and from 1530 to 1780 as many as 1,250,000 people were enslaved.^[1]

It didn’t stop there; they continued capturing white slaves, typically

VPOTUS?

Joe Biden says he wants to choose a female black running mate in his presidential bid.

Diane Abbott is not too busy these days. I wonder if perhaps the UK could spare her?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diane-abbott-lbc-interview-video-jeremy-corbyn-ira-meetings-platform-car-crash-iain-dale-a7759241.html

Just a

The Lighter Side of Rioting, Pillaging and Looting I

The world is going through a troubled time at the moment, for sure. And part of the problem is the somewhat abrupt, not to say discourteous, nature of exchanges between offenders and the police in the United States. Things, it seems, go rather along the following lines:

POLICE: Freeze!

SUSPECT: [ATTEMPTING TO FLEE] Fuck you, pigs!

[BANG. SUSPECT FALLS TO THE GROUND, SHOT DEAD]

The statistics on this topic, which are somewhat shaky, suggest that the police in the United States more frequently kill unarmed white suspects than unarmed black suspects, but we do want to upset people who already frothing with moral outrage, and so we are not going there. Instead, let’s look across the pond, where a different sort of regime applies. In the above circumstances, the police in the UK are unlikely to shoot the suspect dead, but instead the suspect is, more or less willingly, brought to the police station, where something like the following ensues, as it might be

Woken up

 

It is been a hell of a week. But at least I have woken up to some things I didn’t know before, thanks to some brave campaigners.

Thanks to these guys, protesting at Downing Street in London, I’ve woken up to the realisation that it was Boris Johnson who got a sadistic American policeman to kneel on the neck of an Afro-American suspect long enough to kill him. Until now, I had naïvely thought it was really nothing to do with the UK government at all.