• For UK read England (and English)

    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.

    Starmer's original post reads If you want to live in the UK, you should speak English. That’s common sense. So we're raising English language requirements across every main immigration route. Jessica Davies responds with If you live in Wales you should speak Welsh. Or are we not doing that?

    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

    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.

    Image from Reform UK VE Day post with Spitfire on right and HMS Vanguard on the left.
    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
    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!

    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.

    Post reads 
Hi everyone! We still see people on the fediverse recommending OpenOffice, despite it having year-old unfixed security issues. So if you see someone recommending it, please inform them about the risks - but also that there are actively maintained successor projects (like LibreOffice).

    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

    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.

    Post reads Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy - it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD - which took second in the recent election - but rather the establishment's deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes. Germany should reverse course.

    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.

    Post reads This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough and independent investigation to protect our Constitutionand the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.

    That’s quite some rebuke.

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

    Post reads gut gesagt - well said - in German

    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

    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.

    Message reads Say no to generative AI art. Buy art from a real degenerate.

    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

    ODF logoToday 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”.

  • German state to move to ODF

    ODF file iconGermany’s IT Planning Council, whose duties include IT co-ordination, standards, administrative digitisation and e-government projects, published its decision on open formats for document exchange a couple of days ago. In particular, it specifically mentions the Open Document Format (ODF) as an example of the open formats being used to a greater extent.

    The decision itself consists of three sections, as follows:

    1. The IT Planning Council recognises that open exchange formats are necessary for nationwide collaboration and welcomes the resolution of the Digital Ministers’ Conference. Open formats and open interfaces are an important building block for the necessary process of setting the German public sector on the road to greater digital sovereignty and innovation.

    2. The IT Planning Council is committed to ensuring that open formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF) are increasingly used in the public sector and become the standard for document exchange by 2027. It has commissioned the Standardisation Board to implement this.

    3. The IT Planning Council further recognises that the exchange of documents via email is no longer appropriate for cross-border collaboration, especially for the preparation and follow-up of ministerial conferences, and advocates – in line with the approach of the First Ministers Conference (MPK) – the use of open collaboration solutions in inter-state cooperation. It instructs the Federal IT Co-ordination organisation (FITKO) to present a plan for providing a collaboration solution by its 48th meeting.

    The decision is sure to receive widespread support from the opensource community, as has already happened with The Document Foundation, curators of the LibreOffice suite.

  • Another Bristol Live exclusive

    Another day, other news.

    Your ‘umble scribe awoke this morning to hear that Pope Francis, head of the Roman Catholic church, had died aged 88 years.

    In a situation eerily reminiscent of the demise of Mrs Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Mountbatten-Windsor in September 2022, when she had been visited just two days beforehand by a certain Mary Elizabeth Truss, the pontiff’s death comes very shortly after an audience with a certain James David Vance, who has been appointed to preside over vice 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.

    Social media has been awash this morning with posts about the similarities between the two deaths

    However, all this speculation is pointless, as is any explanation that the pope was a very ill man.

    For the real reason for the passing of the pontiff, one has to consult Bristol ‘Live’, the West Country’s newspaper of (warped) record.

    Under the Bristol News header, this Reach plc title seems to have an exclusive scoop at to what or who was actually liable for Francis’ demise – West Country folk reacting.

    Screenshot from Bristol Live website showing article filed under Bristol News with the headline Pope Francis dies as South West reacts.

    Now look what you’ve done, Bristolians and neighbours!

    Unless, of course, it’s yet another example of bad English usage and even worse journalism of the putting the cart before the horse variety.

  • God? No!

    My social media feed on the federated Mastodon network is a source of news, conversation, merriment and occasional consternation. In particular, consternation nowadays concerns mostly information emanating from the authoritarian regime 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 mission to Make America Grate Again (or something like that. Ed.).

    The latest barminess to cross over from the eastern shores of the Atlantic and land in my timeline is shown below.

    A group of four people all wearing t-shirts bearing the wording Trump is God

    On seeing the image, your ‘umble scribe’s immediate reaction was along the lines of Brian’s mum in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.


    I was then reminded how the god of the Semitic religions has allegedly never liked to share the limelight with any other deities and/or beings, as exemplified in the words of Exodus 20:7.

    Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

    There are going to be some awkward questions asked of the MAGA louts above when they turn up at the pearly gates… 😉

    Tip of the hat: SufferForMe.

  • Katy Perry’s space tourism – the backlash

    Last week six women – singer Katy Perry, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, US TV personality Gayle King, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn and Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez – boarded Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket for a frivolous 11 minute flight. The crew were weightless for just four minutes after passing the Kármán line, a 100 km-high boundary that is internationally recognised as the boundary of space.

    The stunt has attracted plenty of criticism, not least because Blue Origin is owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, a man not renowned for paying much income tax.

    Part of the backlash consisted of the bus shelter poster below which was seen this week somewhere near Amazon’s UK headquarters in London.

    Poster showing Jeff Bezos and Katy Perry with the caption If you can afford to send Katy Perry into space you can afford to pay more taxes

    The criticism wasn’t just confined to Perry and Bezos, but his low tax, anti-union sweatshop Amazon too.

    Poster with Amazon logo at head and reading Our tax avoidance is out of this world. Just ask Katy Perry.

    No further comment is necessary.

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