News Brief 25/09/21
News Brief 25/09/21
Because the definition of "news" is pretty flexible, these days.
Detailed Answers to Stupid Questions.
A quick look at your nearest petrol station might give you the impression that there’s a fuel shortage in the UK at the moment.
There probably isn’t, in fairness, but the suggestion that there might be one on the horizon has led the usual armies of fuckwits to descend on the pumps and panic buy as much petrol as they can physically carry. So there might not have been a fuel shortage, but as soon as you talk about one you can guarantee that there will be. It’s sort of like Candyman or Voldemort - best not mentioned in case you summon it into being.
Fortunately, the Government has been reassuring us that there is no fuel shortage because depots all over the country have plenty of stocks. It’s not anywhere near the pumps or accessible to the public, but that’s just nitpicking. It’s also fair to claim that there isn’t a housing crisis, because there are far more empty homes than there are unhoused people, and there’s no such thing as hunger because plenty of food exists.
It’s almost like the system we live in is grotesquely broken, but that wasn’t what I was going to bring up. Instead, I wanted to focus on Britain’s crippling lack of lorry drivers, which has been a factor in not being able to get our copious supplies of petrol anywhere near a petrol station.
Last week, I was at work and walked in on the tail end of a conversation about the shortage of heavy goods drivers. A woman was complaining to my colleague that she couldn’t see why we hadn’t just deployed the army to drive lorries. She was presumably doing this because she had misplaced the number for the Jeremy Vine show but still wanted an audience. Still, woman I overheard at work, let’s break it down.
The standing strength of the British military is (according to Google) 153,290 souls, with the potential to call on reserves numbering 44,600 personnel. Call it two hundred thousand troops for the sake of easy maths.
These are then divided between the Army, Navy and Air Force and various subdivisions therein. We also, at last count, had 11,000 troops deployed, meaning we’re down to a pool of 189,000 people (ish) before we start, assuming all reserves have been called up.
There are just under eight thousand Royal Marines (technically a subset of the Navy), and the whole point of the Royal Marines is that they’re a rapid reaction force. We need them to be available, so we can’t really tie them up driving lorries, leaving us unable to have a war because of traffic on the M5 or because half the troops had driven more than their alloted miles for the day and we have to wait for them to have a nap in a service station before they can blow anything up. A hundred and eighty one thousand troops would therefore be left to drive the lorries.
About forty five thousand British service personnel are in the Royal Navy, the Navy itself consisting of seventy six commissioned ships and eighty seven auxilliary vessels. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure that most people on a boat have jobs to do that are pretty essential to things like “not sinking,” especially when you consider that some of these vessels are nuclear submarines. This means we should probably leave the Navy in place, so a hundred and thirty six thousand potential drivers are left.
Except that thirty eight thousand people and reserves work for the Royal Air Force, and whilst we could probably spare a few of them (we don’t currently have thirty eight thousand people each flying a plane, as far as I’m aware) they’re once again mostly busy doing things that they can’t really walk away from to deliver groceries. So ninety eight thousand troops are still up for grabs.
Which brings us to the Army. I guess the initial question, “Why don’t they just get the army to do it?” might have been more specific than I gave credit for. Somewhere around five hundred of these people are in the SAS, although for some picky reason they don’t list their membership anywhere - or if they do I couldn’t find the relevant Facebook group. Sixteen percent of the Army are Officer class (15,680 people) and as we all know from Bridge on the River Kwai, Officers won’t work. They’re far too important to actually do anything.
The good news is that during basic training the army will teach recruits to drive. Or at least attempt it - figures are not available on how many recruits pass their test or how many serving soldiers have a license. Although, perhaps due to lazy, woke Gen Z having a snowflake aversion to getting their legs blown off in the Middle East for no discernable reason, the average age of members of the British army is now thirty. So we assume most of them can drive a car. But of the eighty two thousand people left, about 25% are between sixteen and twenty five years old, and I’m not sure we want the age bracket most prone to dying in crashes to be put in charge of twenty ton juggernauts.
This leaves us with about sixty thousand people who might theoretically be deployed to deliver goods and make up the shortfall. Except that even the rosiest estimates say we’re already seventy thousand drivers short, and this is before we mention that the UK is also worryingly short on warehouse staff, nurses, welders, carpenters, and so on, and so on.
Perhaps the most pertinent fact is ultimately this: In the British army, only two thousand people are actually qualified to drive a Heavy Goods Vehicle.
So, random idiot customer, you actually can call in the army to do this work at any time. It just won’t make the slightest fucking difference.
Contraception: Now More Expensive AND Dangerous!
We are starting to see ads in the UK for a version of the female contraceptive pill that can be bought over the counter. This is deeply troubling for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the pill is free. Women can just go to the doctor and request it, and they are given it at no charge, paid for by everyone’s taxes, because that’s how universal healthcare works. Or should.
Instead, we’re now being presented with the “freedom to choose” to pay for a service that we’re actually already paying for. You might recognise this as the American model of healthcare, and it’s fucking terrible. It’s yet another back-door incursion of privatised healthcare into the once-admirable British model.
It gets worse. The reason women not only can but should consult a doctor before taking the pill is that monkeying around with your own hormones is inherently dangerous. Doctors are qualfied to prescribe contraceptive pills because they are qualified to look over a person’s medical records and spot potential pitfalls. Some people can’t take the pill because it would have complicated side effects. If young women (or any other people) start buying whatever medication they feel they should be taking without proper medical advice, they’re putting themselves at risk.
If you want to see where this ends up, look no further than the current American trend of taking Ivermectin (a horse worming medication) to prevent Covid. It doesn’t work, of course, but Americans are so suspicious of their for-profit doctors that they’re happier to take something designed to kill a horseload of worms on the off chance it will stop Covid than they are to accept the free vaccine designed to actually stop Covid. No less an idiot that Joe Rogan endorses this line of thinking, and look what it’s done to him:
The only upside of the ongoing anti-vax debacle in the States was the recent study from Brazil that showed pit viper venom may be effective in counteracting Covid. As soon as the Ivermectin crowd learn about this, things are going to get fucking WILD in a lot of American states.
Still, for the love of god, let’s try, just this one time, not to follow America’s lead. Get your contraceptive pills from a doctor, ladies, both on principle and for safety’s sake.
Linda Evangelista Is A Stupid Bitch.
I appreciate that my feminist credentials have been somewhat up and down this week, between lambasting a random woman at my job, trying to look out for reproductive health, and then abusing a model, but hear me out.
Supermodel Linda Evangelista is suing her plastic surgeon after she underwent a not-fully-understood fat reduction prodcedure which backfired (again, for reasons we can’t yet explain) and left her with fat deposits.
Evangelista, 56, has said that she has been left “disfigured” and “a recluse.” We have no idea how different she looks, as she’s retreated from the public eye, and so we’re forced to use an artist’s impression:
Maybe I shouldn’t joke. Maybe she’s been left with horrible deformities. But y’know what? It shouldn’t matter.
Linda Evangelista made a fortune off of being pretty in a way that was seen as aspirational. That’s already pretty gross, but we can’t really judge her for it - if someone had offered me a million dollars when I was a teenager because I was so good looking, I’m sure I would have taken it.
Unfortunately, Evangelista - who still looked great for a woman in her mid fifties - was so desperate to cling to her looks that she underwent an elective procedure and it went wrong. This could have been a watershed moment in her life; a middle age realisation that beauty inevitably fades but that she had more to offer the world than just her pretty face and trim appearance.
Instead, a woman who made her name off of society’s toxically shallow expectations has failed to learn anything and doubled down on everything that was wrong with her life. Instead of standing proud and deciding that she would no longer let appearances define her, she has elected to go into hiding rather than allow the world to see her as anything other than aesthetically perfect.
Even if the damage to her formerly trim outline has been catastrophic, she could have been a standard bearer for other victims of botched surgery, or a spokesperson for the idea that appearances are immaterial for a species such as ours which is made up of minds and souls and imaginations.
Instead, she’s suing the surgeon and declaring her million-dollar lifestyle to be ruined because she now has to look more like the rest of us.
I’m probably being too harsh. Evangelista is ultimately the victim here. Not of a failed surgery, but of a failed society that taught her that her only worth was in the way she looked. A vapid, empty zeitgeist that meant a woman who could afford the finest things in life based solely on her appearance never managed, in half a century, to absorb the storybook lesson we teach our kids that it’s what’s on the inside that matters.
Unfortunately, the fact that she is complaining so publicly and declaring herself deformed means that she has gone from being a victim of that ideology to a perpetrator of it, reinforcing the message to other women - and other humans in general - that if they’re physically imperfect they should stay indoors and feel ashamed, because they have no further worth.
For that, I can’t feel sympathy no matter how “disfigured” she is.
Probably no e-mail tomorrow as I’m a little tapped out, but I have two long reads in the pipeline, one of which is a confessional piece about my mental health stuff and the other of which has the tentative headline “Sexy Nazi Men’s Magazines.” You were warned.