May | 2025 | Steve Woods

For UK read England (and English)

14/05/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media

On Monday the country’s best known toolmaker’s son ‘Sir’ Keir Rodney Starmer, in a vain effort to stem the flow of support for the Farage fascist fan club otherwise known as the Reform Party UK Ltd., made a major announcement on ~~immigration~~ racism and xenophobia, namely to the effect that he was in favour of both, despite a side serving of the usual ‘I’m not racist, but…‘

His speech met generally with condemnation from the left and varying degrees of praise from those on the right, such as ‘Honest’ Bob Jenrick, some of whom also believed he hadn’t gone far enough to be beastly to those pesky forrins to whom they would have been even nastier.

Anyway, this was a speech in which Starmer embraced his inner Enoch Powell, echoing phrases from the latter’s notorious and deeply offensive ‘Rivers of blood‘ speech from 2nd April 1968. Where Powell remarked that the country’s white population ‘found themselves made strangers in their own country‘, Starmer stated that the UK risked becoming an ‘island of strangers‘.
Another ill-conceived utterance in his speech was that immigration and immigrants had done ‘incalculable harm‘ to the country. In particular, this drew justifiable ire from many whose grandparents or great-grandparents had migrated to Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries along the lines of ‘how dare he…‘. This reaction from tax campaigner Richard Murphy is a prime example of this sentiment.

Quite right, Richard. They come over here and do irreparable harm by (say) keeping the National Health Service running, paying their taxes and so on.

Another facet of the toolmaker’s son’s speech centred on his remarks about the use of the English language. Starmer is on record as saying:

Britain is an inclusive and tolerant country, but the public expect that people who come here should be expected to learn the language and integrate.

A remark of a similar nature and of the same import was also made on Starmer’s social media account.

Which language? Starmer is conflating English, the language of England with the whole of the Untied* Kingdom, parts of which have their own indigenous languages, like Cymraeg or Gaelic. He seems completely ignorant of the fact that modern English is the product of three waves of historical incomers, i.e. immigrants, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc. who arrived after the Romans left in the 5th century CE, Norse Vikings who settled here and the French-speaking Vikings from Normandy who invaded in 1066. There are very few words from Britain’s indigenous languages in modern English.

The fact that modern English is a mongrel language brought by immigrants also seems lost on Starmer.

However, this imperative to speak English has not gone down well in either Scotland or Cymru (where Cymraeg has equal legal status with the language of invasion. Ed.), as The National reports.

In Cymru, the radio personality, TV presenter and influencer Jessica Davies took to X/Twitter to make her feelings known.

Well done, Keir. By your racism you have shown that you are well and truly a product of your father’s profession.

* = Misspelling is deliberate.
Reform VE Day cock-up

09/05/2025 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Social Media

Politicians and thus by implication the parties to which they owe their allegiance have a relationship with the truth that can be described diplomatically as problematic and at worst non-existent.

Yesterday’s VE Day 80th anniversary provided ample proof of both.

Perhaps the most egregious example of being less than truthful was posted on the X/Twitter account of Reform UK Ltd., a limited company masquerading as a political party, the latest incarnation of the cult dedicated to the promotion and adoration of a perennial charlatan commonly known as Nigel Paul Farage, who also just happens to be a great pal of the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, who is on a one-man mission to Make America Grate Again (or something similar. Ed.). Whether Farage’s adoration is reciprocated in equal measure is not known. given The Felon‘s disposable relationships with the rest of the human race.

What the Farage Fan Club posted on X/Twitter is shown below.

There’ll be bullshit over the white cliffs of Dover…

So far, so patriotic at a first casual glance – the white cliffs, a union flag, Churchill at Buckingham Palace, a Royal Navy ship is glorious monochrome and any reference to the Brits in WW2 would be incomplete without a Spitfire.

However, this impression is debunked the closer one looks at the image. We’ll come back to the Spitfire, but first let’s look at that naval vessel used by Reform’s graphics whizz-kids. A special research technique otherwise known as using a search engine for five minutes reveals it is in fact HMS Vanguard, the last battleship ever to be built. Although her construction started during the war, she did not enter into naval service until 1946, i.e. after VE Day and even VJ Day, which marked the final official end of hostilities.

The vessel’s identity can be easily confirmed by looking at one of the photographs used by Wikipedia; the motor launch can be seen in both the image on Wikipedia and in the much edited image used by Reform.

HMS Vanguard. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Now let’s return to that Spitfire. Doing an image search for a Spitfire with the roundel identification AI yields not a single result; and your ‘umble scribe can find no reference anywhere to an actual squadron with that identification. Besides that, a search for AI or A1 Spitfire squadron identifications yielded zero results. Furthermore, the aircraft itself has a very glossy appearance, a feature that was shared by all the Spitfire images produced by generative AI that came up in your correspondent’s search. The conclusion I’ve reached is that the Spitfire exists solely in digital format and has never actually flown, let alone seen active service. This seems very reminiscent of the dishonesty shown by the equally right-wing British National Party, who attracted much derision in 2009 when in a supposedly patriotic poster where they used a Spitfire flown by a Polish squadron.

A final reminder to Farage and his fellow travellers; your side surrendered unconditionally on 8th August 1945.
LibreOffice advises don’t use OpenOffice!

07/05/2025 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Security, Social Media, Tech

The developers of LibreOffice, the most popular free and open source alternative to Microsoft’s ubiquitous office suite, are advising against the use of its OpenOffice progenitor due to security vulnerabilities and its lack of development, German news site heise reports.

In a post on Mastodon, they point to security vulnerabilities that have been known for years but still remain unfixed. According to minutes of the Apache board meeting in March 2025, there are three security vulnerabilities in OpenOffice that are more than a year old. This has been confirmed by a representative of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) security team.

According to the record there are numerous other, previously unaddressed issues with OpenOffice software, including vulnerabilities have existed since at least November 2023. “We are making progress in identifying improvements to address these issues,” the ASF security team representative explains.
LibreOffice: Apache Foundation is harming open source

Furthermore, the LibreOffice developers accuse the ASF of not developing OpenOffice actively any more, but of feigning to do so with minor changes to HTML tags and blank lines. This harms the entire open source community. The ASF has not commented on these allegations. However, OpenOffice has an active project management committee and retains its status as a top-level project within the ASF, according to spokesperson Brian Proffitt. In fact, the recent commits in the OpenOffice GitHub repository have primarily consisted of correcting typographical errors and making minor amendments to translations.

The current version of OpenOffice, 4.1.15, was released in December 2023. It included several bug fixes and dictionary updates, whilst it last received new features with the release of version 4.1 in April 2014. In the light of this, the LibreOffice team recommends using alternatives and in particular its own office suite.
Larry writes German

04/05/2025 Steve WoodsPolitics, Social Media

Earlier this week, one Marco Antonio Rubio, inexplicably elevated to the senior government position of US secretary state by the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, had to be given lessons in both history and governance by the German Foreign Ministry.

The reason? Take a look at what Rubio – allegedly the States’ top diplomat (the title comes with the job. Ed.) – posted social media. Note the casual racism in the middle sentence.

Rubio is not the only member of the current Trump regime to have shown support for Germany’s fascist AfD: a couple of months ago. just nine days before the German federal elections, the charm void known to the world as James David Vance, a man who does very poor vice-presidential impressions, was criticised for meeting the AfD’s Alice Weidel in Munich (how appropriate for right wingers! Ed.) in what could be regarded by some as electoral interference.

Anyway, back to Rubio. His social media post was prompted by the news that the AfD had been classified as extreme-right by German intelligence and placed under surveillance.

Rubio’s take on events did not go down well in the corridors of power in Berlin, earning him the following rebuke and and history lesson courtesy of the German Foreign Ministry’s social media account on X/Twitter.

That’s quite some rebuke.

Indeed it even prompted Larry the Downing Street Cat to post a response in German to the Foreign Ministry.

Whilst the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office has made his thoughts known, the ultimately man in charge of the Downing Street cat food supply, toolmaker’s son Keir Rodney Starmer, has yet to comment at all on this matter.
Generative AI art – the ultimate comment

02/05/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

The photograph below showed up in your ‘umble scribe’s social media feed today and is the best comment he has seen to date in respect of the so-called “AI slop” (or just plain “slop”. Ed.) produced by generative AI engines.

However, your ‘umble scribe is not the only person who questions the utility of generative AI, let alone its accuracy and/or faithfulness. Here’s the historian Dan Snow of History Hit clearly suffering from the output of generative AI in respect of great events in world history Whoever would have guessed the USA had ships in the thick of the Battle of Trafalgar? :-D.
Happy anniversary Open Document Format

01/05/2025 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the ratification of the Open Document Format (ODF) as an OASIS standard. Two decades after its approval in 2005, ODF is the only open standard for office documents, promoting digital independence, interoperability and content transparency worldwide.

Even though it was originally created as an XML-based format to enable universal access to documents across platforms and software from different vendors, ODF has become a technology policy pillar for governments, educational institutions and organisations that choose open, vendor-independent formats to assert their digital sovereignty.

ODF is the native file format of LibreOffice, the most widely used and well-known open source office suite and is supported by a wide range of other applications, including Microsoft’s ubiquitous office suite.

ODF has been adopted as an official standard by the ISO (as ISO/IEC 26300) and by many governments on all continents to support digital sovereignty strategies and public procurement policies to ensure persistent and transparent access to content. These administrations include the UK government, which has comprehensive information on sharing and collaborating on government documents using ODF.

If a reason were required besides those referred to above, one only has to hear the words of Eliane Domingos, Chair of The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind LibreOffice: “In a world increasingly dominated by proprietary ecosystems, ODF guarantees users complete control over their content, free from restrictions”.