The random, barely coherent thoughts of an old miser.
Florida, USA
Joined June 2024
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Random Miser retweeted
RIP Patrick Stewart. What an actor. I still can’t believe he agreed to do this scene. And he didn’t even mind when I ruined every take. Legend.
Random Miser retweeted
In 1952, an English teacher named Cecil Dormand secretly paid for a dirt-poor 11-year-old to take a drama course.
He never told him and the boy didn’t find out until decades later.
By then, he was a knight, that little boy’s name was Patrick Stewart.
He was born into a poor family in Mirfield, a small mill town in Yorkshire and his father came home from World War II a violent man, and he was violent toward Patrick’s mother.
Young Patrick learned exactly when to step between his father’s fist and his mother.
An English teacher put a copy of Shakespeare in his hand and told him to get up and perform.
He never stopped and left school at 15.
By 19 he was completely bald... most agencies told him he'd never make it because of that.
In 1987, the LA Times called him an “unknown British Shakespearean actor” when he was cast as Captain Picard.
Then he became one of the most famous faces on Earth.
You’ve probably heard that part.
Here’s the part you haven’t:
He spent decades as a patron of Refuge, sheltering women and children from domestic violence.
But he never stopped trying to understand his father.
He dug up a 1940 newspaper clipping that said his dad had come home with severe shell shock.
He went to France and walked the ground where his father’s unit was pinned down under bombing for hours.
He learned his father had PTSD, and nobody ever helped him.
So Patrick became an ambassador for Combat Stress, a charity that helps veterans.
In 2013, a young woman at a Texas convention told him she was a survivor of domestic violence.
He asked, “My dear, are you okay?”
Then he hopped off the stage, held her, and told her: “You never have to go through that again, you’re safe now.”
At Dragon Con, a Make-A-Wish girl dressed as Spock came to meet him.
2,000 people were waiting for him to speak... he sat down and talked with her for 15 minutes, making all of them wait.
He told her that since they were friends now, whenever she saw him on screen she could wave and say, “Hello Patrick.”
After 9/11, he felt helpless, so he brought his one-man A Christmas Carol back to Broadway for a full week of charity shows.
He played every character himself and donated every cent.
In 2019 he did it again, and every dollar went to feeding hungry New Yorkers.
In 2017, he fostered a pit bull named Ginger, who had been rescued from a dogfighting ring.
She was his first dog in more than 50 years.
He couldn’t bring her home to England, so he found her a family.
Then he kept fostering more.
When he said he was done with Star Trek so many people told him the show had gotten them through the hardest times of their lives.
So he wanted to see if Picard could do it one more time.
Rest in Peace, Sir Patrick 🖖
Random Miser retweeted
For a Labour Chancellor to declare during a Scrooge Budget in which a painful year is promised to his own people that he had “made the day” of a foreign leader by handing him an EXTRA £10 Billion desperately needed at home is such a cognitive dissonance as to be scarcely believable. That NOBODY in the House protested renders it a rubber-stamp assembly of a kind simply unrecognisable to a long-standing parliamentarian like me.
Random Miser retweeted
Of everything John Healey announced today, my favourite is the Pension Tax Allowance: a tax break for pensioners worth, at the very most, £94 a year, which exists, according to the Treasury's own guidance, to spare them the "administrative burden" of a letter from HMRC asking for "a relatively small amount of tax".
Why would a pensioner living on nothing but the state pension be getting a tax bill at all? Because the personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since 2021, Labour has stretched the freeze to 2031, and from next April the full state pension, £13,036.40, sails straight over it. So instead of unfreezing the allowance - the honest thing, the thing you could explain to a child - Healey has built a second allowance on top of the first, to cancel out the damage done by the first, for three years, after which it goes "under review", which is Treasury for "in the bin".
And since nothing this Treasury makes is permitted to work cleanly, the thing tapers away. Between £13,037 and £13,319 a year, every extra £3 a pensioner earns costs them £1.60 in tax. That is a marginal rate of 53%. A 70-year-old doing a few hours a week behind a till will hand over a bigger share of each extra pound than a millionaire does on his bonus.
Meanwhile a 30-year-old cleaner on exactly the same income, £13,036, will pay £93.28 - the very sum Healey's own guidance waives for the pensioner standing next to her at the bus stop.
The freeze costs a full-time worker on the minimum wage £759 a year. Labour signed up to taking that off every one of them until 2031, and today Healey expects applause for handing £94 back to some pensioners, for three years, with an expiry date stamped on the bottom.
Progress would end the freeze outright. We would restore the personal allowance to the level it would have reached had it never been frozen, about £15,480 today, lock it to inflation for good, and make any future freeze impossible without a vote of Parliament. One allowance, for everyone, worth having. The pensioner comes out of tax, the cleaner comes out of tax, and HMRC is spared the administrative burden of writing to either of them.
Random Miser retweeted
On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.
And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.
I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.
A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.
Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.
At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.
At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.
Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.
At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.
B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.
When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.
In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.
The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.
C. Suffering demands a culprit.
A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.
But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.
And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?
D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.
Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.
Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?
No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.
E. One lens, a thousand causes.
And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.
F. The perfect inversion.
Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.
It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.
G. The ballot box confirms it.
In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.
In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.
H. The way out.
These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.
The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.
That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.
Random Miser retweeted
🤡 Ok lets talk about foreign attempts to influence the Brexit vote (apart from Obama telling us we'd be at the "back of the queue" for a trade deal).... It's quite the list don't you think?
▪️ George Soros – Billionaire financier. Predicted sterling could fall by 15–20% or more, making British households poorer.
▪️ Bill Gates – Warned Britain would become significantly less attractive for business, investment and scientific research.
▪️WEF – published warnings that Brexit could cause profound recession, financial instability and falling investment.
▪️ François Hollande – French President. Warned of consequences for British trade & financial services.
▪️Hillary Clinton – US. Publicly backed Remain supporting Obama's position.
▪️ Angela Merkel – German Chancellor. Publicly backed remain.
▪️ Jean-Claude Juncker – European Commission President. Warned Britain not to leave.
▪️Justin Trudeau – Canadian Prime Minister. Warned that Britain would not get easy or automatic trade agreements after Brexit.
▪️ Donald Tusk – European Council President. Warned Brexit could have serious political and economic consequences.
▪️ Enda Kenny – Irish Prime Minister. Warned Brexit could threaten stability in Northern Ireland.
▪️ Shinzo Abe – Japanese Prime Minister. Warned Brexit could threaten Japanese investment and more than 100,000 British jobs.
▪️ Michael Bloomberg – American billionaire, former New York mayor. Supported Remain and warned of economic and employment consequences.
▪️ Li Ka-shing – Hong Kong billionaire. Warned Brexit would damage Britain.
▪️ Wang Jianlin – Chinese billionaire. Warned Brexit could affect Chinese investment in Britain.
▪️ Jamie Dimon – JPMorgan Chase CEO. Warned that thousands of British financial-services jobs could be at risk.
▪️ International Monetary Fund (IMF) – Christine Lagarde warned the economic consequences could range from "pretty bad to very, very bad".
▪️ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – Predicted Brexit would leave British households thousands of pounds worse off annually.
▪️ G7 – Formally declared Brexit a serious risk to global economic growth.
▪️ G20 – Identified Britain's possible departure from the EU as a potential shock to the global economy.
▪️ European Commission – Warned Britain would lose existing privileges and face new trade barriers.
▪️ Bono and U2 – Irish musicians. Supported Britain remaining in the EU.
▪️ Liam Neeson – Irish actor. Encouraged eligible Irish voters in Britain to vote Remain.
▪️ Patti Smith – American singer. Supported a public appeal asking Britain to stay.
▪️ Jean-Michel Jarre – French musician. Supported an appeal opposing Brexit.
▪️ Lilian Thuram – French former footballer. Supported an appeal asking Britain to remain.
The scale of attempted foreign interference in Brexit was extreme...
And in the face of ALL of the opposition, in the face of all the threats to force us to comply... the majority voted Leave anyway 💣
Random Miser retweeted
My vote on Brexit was affected by disinformation. I voted Remain because I was told if Leave won there would be terrible consequences.
The BoE Governor told me he would raise interest rates - he lowered them.
The Chancellor said he'd have an emergency budget - he didn't.
The Treasury said unemployment would go up - it went down.
Goldman Sachs and others said they would pull out of Britain - they spent billions on new HQs
The Chief Executive of the NHS Alliance said there would be an epidemic of super-gonorrhoea.
As for foreign interference - The EU, the US and Irish Presidents etc etc all weighed in on the side of Remain.
Random Miser retweeted
Globalism meant Western factories closed, borders opened and jobs relocated to wherever it was cheaper and convenient.
The industrial worker in Vienna, the Ruhr region, or Ohio, became unemployed or was pushed into low-wage service sector work.
Yet profits ballooned for the corporate middlemen, who produce nothing. Financial conglomerates, importers, logistics giants, tech platforms and consultants have pocketed the margin between cheap production in Asia (China) and expensive sales in the West.
The result is a super-rich global elite and a left-behind, indebted proletariat. The middle class—the backbone of every free society—was crushed. This represents the greatest surge in inequality in a century. Without globalism, China would never have risen.
The West gave China everything, including its 2001 admission to the WTO, even though China lacked a true market economy, democracy or rule-of-law system. It was a voluntary technology transfer: anyone who wanted to produce in China was forced to hand over their intellectual property. Yet now it seems that the Chinese were right all along.
The West looked the other way on forced labor, state subsidies, currency manipulation and technology theft. Capital on a scale of trillions of dollars has been pumped directly into China. Isn't this known as being entrepreneurial?
The West dismantled its own industrial base and rebuilt in China. The West financed what it claims is a totalitarian state, which uses Western money to rearm, buy up strategic ports, monopolise raw materials and exercise leverage over us. Wouldn't we do exactly the same?
China did not rise despite the West, but because the globalist West built it that way. Short-term profit was prioritised over national security, industrial sovereignty, and local workforce stability.
A rootless, stateless elite in New York, Brussels, Berlin, and Shanghai feels at home everywhere and takes responsibility nowhere. In its wake are stranded communities, stripped of industry and upward mobility, entirely dependent on supply chains controlled by a foreign power.
Globalism was sold with a promise of prosperity. In reality, it was the greatest - yet most absurd - redistribution of wealth in human history.
Random Miser retweeted
There is currently a debate on what it takes to be British. Can someone without British parents just decide to become British? Of course they can. I use this myself to great effect.
Last Saturday, for example, I wanted to take a second wife, so I decided to be Pakistani for the day. I lived there for three years, so I had a real connection to the country.
My wife found out on Sunday and got angry, so I became Afghan for the day, a culture in which physical violence against your wife is entirely acceptable. I have also spent time in Afghanistan.
Then it was back to work on Monday, so I became Swedish and called in sick with a clear conscience. I went to summer school there once.
Yesterday I had to be at the office, but at 11:00 I decided to be Spanish and took a three-hour lunch that HR could not complain about. Spain is where I always vacation.
Have a wonderful day,
Wolfgang
Random Miser retweeted
China Builds an Island in Nine Months. Britain Pulls Its Navy Out of the Same Ocean
In December, a satellite passing over a nameless sandbar in the South China Sea would have seen almost nothing. This week, the same stretch of ocean shows China's largest artificial island in the region, complete with buildings, a helipad, a quay, and the makings of a 10,000ft runway. Ten miles away, a second islet called Yagong is now under construction too, with structures that experts say resemble early warning radar facilities built elsewhere by Beijing. Nine months. A sandbar to a fortress.
Phoebe Pham, a researcher at Taiwan's Institute for National Defence and Security Research, describes what these smaller outposts give the larger ones nearby: eyes, ears, and a data link. Radar and sensing capability feed into wider maritime awareness. Networked outposts talk to each other, extend China's reach, and, crucially, help Beijing assert what Pham calls a valid administrative presence over waters claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Taiwan as well. China now holds 27 such outposts across the Paracel and Spratly islands. Woody Island, its main base in the Paracels, has 2,200 residents, a supermarket, a hair salon, and a 9,000ft runway that regularly hosts nuclear-capable H-6 bombers. Militarisation dressed as ordinary life, built to look permanent because permanence is the point.
This is what Beijing does with nine months and a sandbar. Consider, by contrast, what Britain has done in the same window. The Royal Navy has scaled back its training programme in the Indo-Pacific, not because the threat has diminished, but because the Ministry of Defence says it cannot afford to keep the fleet at sea. That decision did not arrive alone. It followed Keir Starmer's attempt at signing away the Chagos Islands, handing back Britain's last strategic foothold in the Indian Ocean, a hinge between the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific that Washington, Beijing and the Royal Navy all understood the value of, even as London treated it as a legal formality to be settled and forgotten. It followed the approval of China's vast new embassy at Royal Mint Court in London, 20,000 square metres overlooking the cables that carry the City's financial data, waved through in the same period MI5 was warning that Parliament itself was being actively targeted by Chinese intelligence.
Two governments, two trajectories, measured over the identical nine months. One is converting sandbars into military infrastructure at a pace that alarms its own regional rivals. The other is retreating from the waters where that expansion is happening, citing budget constraints, while extending diplomatic and physical footholds to the very state doing the expanding.
There is a historical irony worth sitting with. Two centuries ago, Britain refused to kowtow before the Chinese emperor, even when China held the stronger hand and demanded ritual submission from foreign envoys. That refusal became a point of national pride. Today the roles have reversed. China builds, tests, and asserts. Britain calculates what it can no longer afford, and calls the retreat clear-eyed realism.
A country that wants influence needs presence, and presence costs money nobody in Whitehall currently wants to find. Without it, deterrence is just a word ministers use in press releases. China has spent nine months proving what ambition looks like when a state commits to it. Britain has spent the same nine months proving what happens when a state doesn't. Beijing will have noticed the difference. The only question left is whether anyone in London has too.
"Two governments, two trajectories, measured over the identical nine months. One is converting sandbars into military infrastructure at pace [...]. The other retreated at pace from the waters where that expansion is happening"
Random Miser retweeted
GOOD POINT👇👇👇
To all the Supermarkets and big commercial stores that operate 'Self Check-outs'....... You are heading towards almost exclusively self-checkout now. Yesterday I went shopping at one such store and the lady checking receipts at the exit was stopping everyone.
I didn't choose to participate in that nonsense, I had already filled my trolly, emptied my trolly and scanned the items, refilled my trolly and so I just skipped the exit line and left.
I heard her saying "Umm - Excuse me “ as I kept walking and raised the receipt above my head, leaving the store.
You can either trust me to do self-checkout, or you can put your cashiers back in place like it used to be.
• I'm not interested in proving that I did your job for you.
• If you want me to be a cashier with no training then that's your problem not mine.
• Keep employing young people and give them job opportunities.
YOU DON'T PAY ME TO SCAN MY OWN SHOPPING.
YOU DON’T GIVE ME STAFF DISCOUNT FOR WORKING FOR YOU.
Signed ......All of us
People we need to share this statement its basically about PROFIT to the stores AND putting People out of a JOB....!!!
Random Miser retweeted
When it comes to tax in the UK, a lot of people are deluding themselves, thinking the government will just go after the wealthy to pay for the ballooning commitments they’ve made.
The truth is, the real target is the middle class. And the reason is simple. The middle class is the only viable option for the kind of revenue the government wants.
Start with who’s off the table. A third of British adults pay no income tax at all. The bottom half of earners take home about a quarter of the income in this country and pay roughly a tenth of the tax. There’s no pot of gold buried down there, and every party has spent years promising to protect “working people.” Squeezing them is politically radioactive and would raise next to nothing anyway.
The rich are off the table too, whatever the Channel 4 documentaries say. The top 1% already pay 28% of all income tax. Their money is capital, dividends and gains, so they’re mobile, and they’ve already started leaving. One widely quoted forecast has Britain losing half a million millionaires by 2028. Push the rate on these people much higher and you collect less, not more. Threatening them polls brilliantly, but relying on them for a tax bonanza is pure fantasy.
Which leaves the middle class, and the middle class can’t run. Most are on PAYE, taxed at source before the money touches their account. They can’t turn a salary into a capital gain. They can’t declare residency in Monaco, because the job, the kids’ school and the mortgage are all here. Their wealth is a house they can’t hide under the mattress and a pension they can’t reach. Numerous, visible and immobile. The perfect target, and in some ways the only one.
And here’s how it’s already being done. They won’t raise your headline rate of income tax, because they promised not to. But the threshold freeze, the one that sounds like a non-event on Budget day, is quietly hammering you, and it’s now been extended to 2031.
Took out a student loan since 2012? You’ve been paying the graduate tax in all but name. Hold investments outside an ISA? You’ve watched CGT climb to 24%, and it’s likely to be equalised with income tax next. Sent your kids to private school? That’s the VAT charge. Saving into a cash ISA? That shelter just shrank from £20,000 to £12,000. And from 2027, your pension gets pulled into inheritance tax, so the pot you spent a career building can be taxed again on the way out.
There’s more coming. Mansion taxes, higher CGT, property levies, dividends. Most of the taxes we’re told will hit the ultra wealthy will actually land on the middle class. And in most cases they’re not sat on fortunes, they’re sat on assets they spent a working life building.
What’s worse, the burden grows with every Budget, because of the compounding commitments this government keeps making, and that nearly every other party has pledged too.
So who pays for the past, present and future spending of the UK government? The middle class. And there’s not a thing they can do about it. Debt-trapped, stuck in place, with nowhere to turn, and the government knows it.
If any of this resonated, you’re likely in the taxation crosshairs. I wish you luck.
Random Miser retweeted
🚨 THE BRUTAL BUSINESS REACTION TO BURNHAM'S PLOT.
Yesterday I warned you about Andy Burnham’s master plan to crash our economy and drag us straight back to Brussels.
Now, the actual backbone of the British economy has just delivered a devastating response. 🤡
Over 30 top British business owners and economists have signed an urgent open letter warning the Prime Minister-in-waiting not to give the EU a single inch.
The data they are exposing is absolute gold.
Only 8% of UK companies export to the EU single market.
By surrendering our sovereignty, Burnham would force the remaining 92% of domestic British businesses to be completely strangled by EU red tape.
They are actively trying to destroy the exact business model that made our country work, leaving the UK economy broken and defenceless.
RT if you see right through this globalist trap and demand we stay completely OUT! 🔁🇬🇧🔥