Disorienting drink
THE first rule of politics is to give the answer you want reported, regardless of the question asked. So we can only speculate as to the inner monologue of the UK Liberal Democrat candidate Susan King. When asked for her thoughts on her party leader’s views on homosexuality, she managed to tell the Shropshire Star her theory that chemicals in the water supply are turning people gay.
“There are a lot of feminising hormones getting into the environment and that has to be taken into consideration. It’s affecting people’s sexuality basically,” she told journalists during the webchat, quickly adding that people “are at liberty to interpret how they want to live themselves”.
Advertisement
The Telford candidate said her views were the result of “lots of research” into water quality, although citations were not provided. Feedback isn’t sure how feminising hormones could alter sexuality – and indeed there’s no evidence that they can – but we do think any impact on women has been overlooked. Are they immune, or will this souped-up water turn them into wonder women?
“Mike Batten passes on news from his local free paper circulated in Nottinghamshire: “Young farmers in Clitheroe are preparing to celebrate their 70th anniversary.”
He wonders: “How old do you have to be to become an old farmer?””
Star line
LAST week, we discussed the soaring aspirations of South Suffolk UK Independence Party candidate Aidan Powlesland, who wants £1.2 billion to build his constituents spaceships for interstellar travel (10 June). If successful, perhaps he should consider getting a “Metro Galactic” print offered through Kickstarter.
Based on Harry Beck’s revolutionary diagram of the London Underground, the Metro Galactic boasts that each constellation in the night sky is represented with “perfect accuracy” on a map, connected by nine (as-yet non-existent) interstellar metro lines. This of course makes it superior to Beck’s map, which sacrificed geographical accuracy to present commuters with a clear topology for navigating the Underground network.
Creator Cillian Joseph McMinn says his goal is to “wildly reimagine traditional products and design”. We have to say, drawing sky-spanning constellations as single points with “perfect accuracy” inside a network of non-existent transport lines certainly takes some .
Terror trouble
WHAT, if anything, can be done to prevent further terrorist attacks in the UK? There is a dearth of sensible ideas but no shortage of suggestions from the nation’s politicians and columnists. UK prime minister Theresa May characterised last week’s atrocity as an attack on the UK’s liberal values, and suggested the nation could more expediently resolve this conflict by further abandoning those very same values (10 June, p 7).
May called for more to be done to make online communications less secure, echoing predecessor David Cameron’s sentiment that there should be no form of communication that the government cannot intercept.
While this strategy would effectively destroy the safe operation of the UK’s digital infrastructure, it does mean we can look forward to an end to religious strife, as gods of all denominations would be sidelined by an all-knowing state. At the pearly gates, British citizens could anticipate being met by a minister clutching their internet search history and a disapproving glare.
Danger dope
MEANWHILE, Daily Mail columnist and doctor Max Pemberton identified a hitherto overlooked strand connecting several terrorists. “Was he a psychopath? Was he evil?” Pemberton wrote of Salman Abedi, who detonated a shrapnel-filled bomb at a concert attended by young children in Manchester last month, killing 22. “I do not know,” he concludes. “But I do know that, according to his friends, Abedi was a frequent and heavy cannabis smoker.”
The Mail is known for campaigning for harsh punishments, but this is the first time we’ve seen them .
Hearts and minds
AND Daily Mail columnist Katie Hopkins, recently reported to the police for hate speech, called for hate preachers to be expelled from the country. And she joined her colleague Richard Littlejohn in calling for internment camps to lock up everyone suspected of doing wrong, although neither could explain what should happen next, short of inventing a Sorting Hat to divide from .
Washed away
FINALLY, Janey Stephenson at The Independent newspaper sought to avoid generalising the actions of a few terrorists with the wider community of Muslims or people with mental health issues, and instead made an even broader generalisation that the common factor was that they were male.
This is a correlation that may boast strong statistical significance, if little predictive value. Nonetheless, Feedback can only hope the any further rise in toxic masculinity will be neutralised by the feminising toxins in our water supply. Finally, a practical solution!
Seeding the universe
THANKS to Derek Woodroffe who writes in with another example of troublesome truncation. He reports that the automated Twitter feed for the Naked Scientists podcast reports that “Panspermia is the belief that life originated in space, and Milton Wainright from The University of Sheffield.”