Singer R Kelly got sentenced to 30 years in jail and Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years in jail. Yet another example of a woman being given less for doing the same work as a man.

Ukraine has urged the world to respond after a Russian ship left Berdyansk with 7,000 tons of stolen grain. Putin said, they ‘corn’ have it back.

After the railway workers, apparently Barristers are going to go on strike. That presumably means that it’s going to be more dangerous to go up and down the stairs this summer

This week it’s the 4th of July so I thought we’d look a bit more at the current insanity that has swept over America. There’s a set of important elections coming up later in the year and the democrats are expected to lose so badly that some of them have actually welcomed the recent Roe vs Wade decision because it finally gave them something a platform to actually campaign on that might get them some votes. The ongoing fallout from that continues to of course demonstrate hypocrisy at the highest order with examples of “my body my choice” townhall meetings where to take part you have to show a proof of vaccination. The corporate response has been also largely cynical: a number of corporations been very public about how they will stump up the cost for women in, for instance, Texas or Utah to travel out of state, although then I read an article about how this is largely because paying for an out of state abortion is cheaper than the company having to pay for maternity leave.

Presiding over all of this is sleepy uncle Joe Biden who looks set to add the house and the senate to the list of things he’s lost which currently includes authority and his marbles. A recent photo showed him with a cheat sheet explaining how to sit in his chair and reminding him to say hello to people, it’s the sort of thing you’d give a 6 year old. I personally know people who saw him at a rally 2 years ago and responded by not voting, for anyone, because even then it was clear he had serious mental decline. You’d almost feel sorry were it not for the fact that he and his family have spent half a century grifting and lining their pockets from the public purse in a way that even the Clintons must think is a bit corrupt and unseemly.

In the mean time, the news media continue to place the blame elsewhere, whether it’s Russia or Covid or billionaires not paying enough taxes. Certainly not the current President though, who displays a level of surreal incompetence that makes you half wonder he’s really a character being played by Rowan Atkinson. In the real world nobody cares what his defenders like CNN or NBC say because fewer people watch the news these days, after it spent years liquidating its authority with a witch-hunt about how Donald Trump was a secret KGB agent. Or how green energy was going to be cheap and reliable if people would just lie down and let the politicians get on with running things. Energy could be cheap and reliable again if Biden agreed to let oil companies replace those Russian imports by drilling at home, or building a pipeline or at the very least not continuing to regulate what’s left of existing infrastructure into closure. Five US refineries have closed in the last 2 years, despite claims that they’re licenses to print money. The US was a net energy exporter until recently, but the people that benefit from cheap energy are the sort of people that Biden’s friends call a basket of deplorables and when it comes to the environment, ideological obstructionism is all that counts. All their friends think the same so therefore it must be true and the ends justify the means. A terrifying prospect is therefore if the Ukraine war were to come to an end and prices never came down again and people realised what was going on, and started paying attention to how the myriad of problems at home are one of the few things that still come with a label stating ‘Made in America’