Brexit Leavers can push Humpty Dumpty off the wall, but can they put all the pieces back together again?

In the previous two satirical posts (Goal, goal goal and Euro 2016 players) I equated the Brexit referendum result to a football own goal.

Now that British PM David Cameron has announced his resignation, it is clear that the Leavers will have to form a new government, negotiate the actual break with the EU, and make good on their myriad miraculous promises. Such as that the £350 million pounds the UK supposedly transferred net per week to Brussels would now be a windfall ready to be redeployed as a domestic welfare bounty.

But already, prominent Leavers are backpedaling, like UKIP's Nigel Farage, who now claims he never said this sum would be available for investment in the National Health Service, according to yesterday's Independent.

Thus a more fitting metaphor for the next stage of the Brexit process is the English nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Alice's repartee with Humpty Dumpty from Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" seems even more appropriate to characterize the semantic confusion around the Brexit debate:

    "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
    Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "
    "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
    "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
    "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
    "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

    Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

posted from Bloggeroid

Euro 2016 players pledge to only shoot own goals in deference to Brexit

English squad kit may not be the most stylish, but it is leading by example. Image: Guardian

CIB breaking news: Coachs from all participating teams have committed their players to only attempt own goals from now on, out of respect for yesterday's Brexit vote.

German coach Joachim Löw said that "in view of the recent turn in EU public sentiment, own goals were a more fitting reflection of what the electorate wants than traditional scoring. Own goals are now clearly the way to go in European football."

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the Brexit vote has sparked calls in other EU countries for similar referenda on leaving the union. Populist parties in France, Italy and the Netherlands apparently now smell blood.

posted from Bloggeroid

Goal, goal, goal!!! Sorry: Own goal , own goal, own goal!!!

BBC forecasts UK referendum vote to leave EU 52% to 48%.

UK voters decide to call George Soros' bluff that Brexit would be tantamount to a 'Black Friday'.

Is Soros trying to pull another Nathan Rothschild/Waterloo number on Britain, or has Britain really shot one of the greatest world historical economic own goals by gratuitously leaving the EU?

Stay tuned to this station for breaking news and analysis of this unprecedented real-time experiment in economic theory and policy.

posted from Bloggeroid

‘I predicted it!’ Trump now calls for ban on wild animals entering the US, and impugns Obama’s loyalty for celebrating in Jersey City on 7/11

ORLANDO, Fla. - The Creditanstalt Information Bureau has obtained an exclusive advance teleprompter copy of presumptive Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump’s forthcoming, definitively presidential address on Terrorism and National Security.

 

In Manchester, New Hampshire on June 13, Donald Trump (bottom) pointed out he had correctly predicted after the May 28 rampage of radical silverback gorilla Harambe (top) in Cincinnati that yesterday’s tragedy in Orlando would happen (all the more remarkable since it had not yet happened at the time of the speech). Photo left: Handout/Reuters via The Guardian; right: AFP/Getty via Politico

Officials searching last night at Orlando lagoon for missing toddler (above photos: Twitter) and archive photo of 2013, non-fatal, Orlando alligator attack.

Triggered by the recent carnage in Orlando, Florida, Trump modestly played down congratulations for the accuracy of his predictions from his many supporters. But he reiterated his yuuuge prescience after a 17-year-old, 400lb adult male silverback lowland gorilla named Harambe grabbed hold of an American child at the Cincinnati zoo and had to be shot by zookeepers on May 28. Right after that event he tweeted:

This will happen again! American children are not safe as long as wild animals are allowed to enter the country. I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than shooting.

And, indeed, radical wild animals soon struck again, this time in Orlando, Florida, where an alligator dragged a two-year-old child into a lagoon at the Disney Grand Floridian Hotel yesterday.
Trump immediately tweeted:

I predicted this would happen on May 28, but FBI alligator trappers have had their hands tied by the animal rights politically correct Obama administration. He won’t even say “radical animalistic terrorism”! He doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands.

Trump asserts in his speech that it can hardly be a coincidence that the silverback gorilla, the alligator, and Obama all come from Africa, although the reviled “mainstream press” has repeatedly pointed out that all three were demonstrably born in the United States, and that alligators are not even native to Africa.
He goes on to say that “as long as we don’t know what is going on, as president I will ban the entry of all wild animals into the United States. We can't afford to be politically correct anymore.”
To forestall criticism that this is a form of animal racism, Trump points out that he employs hundreds of “domesticated animals” at his Mar-a-Lago private club in Palm Beach, Florida. But the club has had a long-standing policy against employing alligators, gorillas, or indeed any other wild animals from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition.
To underscore his doubts about the loyalty of the present administration, Trump closes his speech by not only doubling down on his claim to have seen Arabs celebrating in the streets of Jersey City after 7/11. He now claims that he also saw Barack and Michelle Obama celebrating with crowds at a rooftop party.

Trump will claim that this picture from The National Enquirer proves that the Obamas were part of the crowd celebrating 7/11 at a Jersey City rooftop party.

Additional reporting was contributed by CIB staffers George Orwell in London and Jonathan Swift in Dublin.

Trump apologizes for Sadiq "Klan" confusion and revokes exception

Donald Trump apologized to London's newly elected mayor Sadiq Khan today for proposing that he might be made an "exception" to any future ban on Muslims entering the US should Trump be elected president. Khan had already rejected the offer.

Trump said that he had been under the mistaken impression that the Right Honourable Sadiq Khan "was a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan" because of the similarity of the two exotic expressions. Now that the mayor has outed himself as a non-Klan Muslim-Khan, the exception would have to be revoked, Trump told one of our Creditanstalt Information Bureau reporters.

Trump claimed his congenital Alliterative Memory Disorder was responsible for the confusion.

This is not the first time that auditory difficulties have gotten Trump into awkward situations regarding the Klan, according to knowledgeable sources. Last February, for example, he claimed that a faulty earpiece was behind his failure to disavow the support of white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke during a CNN interview.


Trump emphasized that an exception could only be entertained if Mayor Khan were willing to don the appropriate attire and give the "Trump salute" at one of his rallies. Moreover, Trump suggested that Khan claim to be of less threatening Indian rather than Pakistani descent, just as he and his father Fred Trump had claimed to be of Swedish, not German descent. (Image: Mirror Co.)

More Views of the World from Trump Tower: New York’s South Bronx Legacy follows thick and fast on Jersey City Juxtaposition

View of London from Trump Tower: Can you find the police no-go areas? Hint: Try using a relativistic space-time drone!

The New York Times reports today that Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has again doubled down after his modestly provocative proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US, with more controversial contentions:

“Paris is no longer the same city it was,” he said, before adding, without citing any evidence: “They have sections in Paris that are radicalized where the police refuse to go there. They’re petrified. The police refuse to go in there. We have places in London and other places that are so radicalized that the police are afraid for their own lives.”

Mr. Trump’s statement about Paris has no basis in fact: There are no districts there or outside Paris where the police have said they are unwilling to go. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, meanwhile, said that Mr. Trump’s claim about his city was “complete and utter nonsense.” Saying crime was falling in London and New York, he added: “The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.”

Is The Donald once again confusing distant geographical locations and historical periods with places closer to home, such as the South Bronx and the Lower East Side during his formative years in the 1970s? This time he cannot plead diminished responsibility due to his Alliterative Memory Disorder.

Was New York’s Lower East Side during the 1970s the police no-go area Donald Trump actually had in mind (left)? Or the South Bronx, where firemen were routinely greeted with bricks and garbage (right)? (Photographs: New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images, Alain Le Garsmeur/Getty Images, both via The Guardian)

View of the World from Trump Tower (with Apologies to Saul Steinberg): Alliterative Memory Disorder (AMD) for President, Anyone?

View of the world from Trump Tower on Sept. 11, 2001. East Jerusalem is now located just over the Hudson River in an alliterative New Jersey, and thus is easily confused with Jersey City.

Republican frontrunner presidential candidate Donald Trump (“The Donald”) has doubled down on his claim that he saw TV news video of “thousands” of American Arabs/Muslims celebrating in the streets of Jersey City after the 9/11 attack brought down the Twin Towers:

“It did happen. I saw it. It was on television. I saw it. There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.” ABC’s “This Week”, Nov. 22

Until now, no one has turned up any TV footage substantiating this claim, although fellow candidate Ben Carson also recalls seeing it (see FactCheck.org’s 24 Nov. debunking of these claims).

However, US TV news did broadcast video footage of Palestinians in East Jerusalem apparently celebrating the 9/11 attack (although not “thousands”):

• CNN on Sept. 11, 2001
• Fox News on Sept. 11, 2001, with similar footage

While it now seems clear that The Donald could not have seen TV video on 9/11 of Muslims celebrating in the streets of Jersey City, it is highly likely that he was watching CNN or Fox News (I’ll bet on the latter) and saw these reports, which were frequently recycled throughout the day.

Could it be that The Donald is suffering from Alliterative Memory Disorder (AMD)—confounding two cities halfway around the world because they begin with the same consonant (Jersey City and Jerusalem)?

Psychologists have long been aware that alliteration can be an aid to memory, but only now have they discovered that particularly susceptible individuals can be subject to the reverse effect: false memories derived from confusing two trigger words that begin with the same consonant. This is a particularly insidious instance of False Memory Syndrome:

False memory syndrome is a condition in which a person's identity and interpersonal relationships center on a memory of a traumatic experience that is objectively false but that the person strongly believes. Note that the syndrome is not characterized by false memories as such. We all have inaccurate memories. Rather, the syndrome is diagnosed when the memory is so deeply ingrained that it orients the individual's entire personality and lifestyle—disrupting other adaptive behavior. False memory syndrome is destructive because the person assiduously avoids confronting evidence that challenges the memory. Thus it takes on a life of its own; the memory becomes encapsulated and resistant to correction. Subjects may focus so strongly on the memory that it effectively distracts them from coping with real problems in their life. [Wikipedia, following PR McHugh,  2008, Try to remember: Psychiatry's clash over meaning, memory and mind. New York: Dana Press. pp. 66–7]

Do we really want to elect someone to the US presidency suffering from Alliterative Memory Disorder (take your pick of The Donald or Ben Carson) who, in the heat of battle against ISIS, for example, might accidently bomb Rochester, New York, instead of Raqqa, Syria, because they both start with an R?

 

What do Rochester, New York (left) and Raqqa, Syria (right) have in common? Hint: Try to Recall people dancing in the streets. They might be easy to confuse from a drone if you suffered from Alliterative Memory Disorder.