A global status update

After a hectic few days, here’s a quick status update for those of you who have been too busy weather-sealing your homes against plummeting space debris ahead of ERS-2/Lindsay Holye re-entering the atmosphere AT ANY MOMENT!

Here in the UK right now…

Big ugly London buildings resembling Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber: good.

Natural tributaries flowing through the heart of England: bad.

Or that’s what we can take away from two bits of news this week: the first being that BT Tower has been sold for £275m and will be turned into a luxury hotel. Severn Trent Water, meanwhile, has been fined £2m for polluting the Severn, now considered the UK’s most toxic river. 

At least we now know that a river is worth 100 times less than some slab of vertical concrete. If only somebody could stick a roof over it and call it an indoor swimming pool, it might gain enough value to be cleaned up before the Russians arrive.

Because at this stage, it’s not clear what’s stopping Putin from marching west. It’s certainly not our nuclear submarines. Maybe with Russia increasingly belligerent and looking beyond Ukraine, this would have been a good time to have a working nuclear deterrent because it’s not much of a deterrent if it doesn’t bloody work… 

During the latest test of Trident, the missile “plopped into the sea” which is not how it’s meant to work. Just ask Trent Water. It was meant to plop in the river. You know… just like the rest of us.

Grim jokes for grim times. Things have got so bad that even Prince William has started to speak up, though obviously not to his brother. It’s time they healed that rift. We live in dangerous times, and we might need every Apache helicopter pilot we have should our plans fail to deter those Russian invaders with the lamentable state of our smiles and our smelly rivers. 

But at least they’ll have somewhere nice to stay once they get here.

Just out of curiosity: Is there anybody interested in actually running this country who isn’t Vladimir Putin? 

No? 

I suppose we’re all too involved in important business such as getting our movies made, books written, and paintings done before Sora AI arrives. 

In case you missed it, Sora is the latest AI engine working miracles, turning text cues into high-quality video. Soon there will be no need for filmmakers, which perhaps explains why Sam Mendes is rushing to make not one but four movies about The Beatles. One film makes sense. Two would be a stretch. But are we really waiting for “The Ringo Strikes Back”? The second-best drummer in Fab Four thinks that we are. 

“Have you heard the news? Oh boy,” tweeted Starr. “We all support the Sam Mendes movie project. Yes, indeed. peace and love.”  

Ringo Starr bleating on about “peace and love” always made peace and love sound a lot worse than they are but I’m not sure anymore. What a time to be alive: trapped between Ringo’s irritating positivity on one hand, and Vladimir Putin’s cynical machinations on the other.

Meanwhile, Jacob Rees Mogg has now gone to war against milk alternatives, which he refuses to call “milk” as he celebrates the virtues of full fat, no doubt straight from the udder. “Only liberals drink skimmed milk to go with their faux leather sandals,” he tweeted. “Full fat, creamy milk will nourish your inner Tory.”

It will certainly nourish an inner something among those of us who are lactose intolerant. Will our rivers be able to handle the sudden surge in effluent “inner Tory” (his words, not mine)? But it does show that there’s nothing we can’t argue about. Even in the arena of lactose-free alternatives to milk, there are so many ways to get upset. It seems we are ignoring how consumer choice was the plan all along. 

Remember the free market? Remember “the customer knows best”? No? Well, don’t worry. Vlad will sort us out and we’ll soon love to put potato milk in our lattes. 

We live in such peculiar times. This week we discovered that they have all manner of wonderful things in Russia such as a type of shopping trolley where you insert a coin to unlock it, and then recover your money when you return it. Discovering what it’s like shopping at any UK supermarket for the past twenty years was one of the takeaways from Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia, where he also “grilled” Putin, by which we mean barely turned up the heat.

By coincidence, I watched the 1952 film Deadline USA this week, in which Humphrey Bogart played an old-school editor for a proper city newspaper. It’s a great black-and-white movie that’s full of wisdom about the nature of news. At one point, there’s a meeting of staff. “Are you a journalist or a reporter?” asks one of the old hacks facing unemployment before answering: “A journalist makes himself the hero of the story; a reporter is only a witness.”

It’s the best description for the kind of journalism spread by Carlson and his ilk. One should remember what the story pretends to be and what the story is really about; in this case, less about revealing the reality of Putin, and more about the state of American politics. 

Carlson used the example of Mayakovskaya Metro station in Moscow to ask why America doesn’t have ostentatiously decorated subway stops. His thesis was subsequently undermined by the death of Alexei Navalny, which cast further light on Carlson’s comments when interviewed in Egypt shortly after his meeting with Putin. “Every leader kills people,” he said in continued attempts to equate Russian and American politics. “Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.”

Carlson is on the leading edge of this media strategy that has become undercurrent to our news. If one were of a suspicious mind, one might begin to wonder if the lamentable state of our public services is entirely an accident. As the West eats itself with culture wars, corporate greed increasingly looks like it’s been weaponised to destroy our faith in the old certainties: water, energy, food, and the air we breathe. Soon we’ll have AI making it increasingly difficult to establish the truth about anything. And all the time we are being fed a diet of naïve traditionalism. 

In Moscow, Carlson took time to sniff some Russian bread as if America had somehow lost touch with how to bake a crusty cob. Rees-Mogg might not be any Putin apologist but opining about full-fat milk comes from the same playbook. If only we could put aside our liberal values, we could get back to basics and live wholesome lives. If only we could stop eating oat milk, we could have biblical triptychs on our subway walls. If only we could eat some Russian bread, there’d be no war. 

Peace and love… so long as we ignore the wholemeal, full-fat, sugar-free dictatorship operating in Russia and soon coming to a subway station near you. 

@DavidWaywell

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