It’s been a long time since a post was written on Sparrow Chat. On April 11th 2021 I wrote an article entitled, “When The Tears Have Dried,”  following the loss of my wife to cancer. I did try to keep the blog going, but when grief is paramount everything I would normally consider writing about seemed somehow trivial and not worthy of effort.

I really wanted to write about the loss of my wife, but it was impossible. To try was to induce a flood of tears, and even now I cannot find the stamina to keep them at bay long enough to write even these two short paragraphs.

So, a change of subject is required, and I found it in today’s Guardian newspaper. It appears that Mastercard has been fined £31.5 million for price fixing with other companies involved in running and distributing pre-paid debit  cards.

I’d not had much to do with pre-paid plastic cards, but after twelve months on my own in a foreign country with no friends and only one neighbour who speaks an unintelligible amalgam of Breton French, I was in desperate need of some company, preferably of the female variety. As I live in the wilds of Brittany and the only females around, apart from cows, are farmer’s wives I turned somewhat reluctantly to the internet chat and dating sites.

My late wife and I met on a dating site. She was in America and I was in Wales in the UK, and the site was Yahoo’s “Find a Friend.”  Totally free, with no adverts, and even a box to tick for “Pen Pals Only,” it bore no relation to the highly commercialized, advert-ridden, glossy, expensive, caricatures pervading this genre today.

I rapidly learned that ‘Free’ meant you didn’t pay an exorbitant fee to become a member. That came later, after going to much trouble to input a ton of information on yourself that took a good hour or more. The relief of completion and the exhilaration of expecting at any moment a bevy of suitable ladies to be paraded before one’s eyes, rapidly dwindled when the resulting next page was a price list of what was available for a considerable sum of money.

Having just expended all that energy setting up my ‘profile’ I muttered a few well chosen expletives at what I perceived to be the gang of crooks who ran the site, then did what I imagine most fellows did at this point, begrudgingly coughed up the minimum sum required.

Finally, the ladies began to show themselves. It wasn’t long before I was selecting likely females and offering myself as the answer to these maiden’s prayers.  After a goodly selection, I settled back and waited for the responses to come flooding in. Needless to say, there weren’t any. Not one of my selected ladies bothered to show any response, least of all swooning at my photos or pledging undying love.

Meanwhile, my ‘profile’ had gone live, and messages began to appear in my site ‘Inbox’. Oh dear, now I’m no spring chicken, but it was obvious these were ladies of very advanced years. It saddened me that loneliness drove them to expose themselves in this way, but they were not for me.

Eventually, I cancelled my subscription and a friend suggested I try a site called Mingle2. In hindsight I’m not sure I should call him a friend.

“Oh, yes,” he enthused, “there’s great girls on Mingle2!“

Yes, there are great girls on Mingle2. It also houses probably the greatest collection of scammers, fraudsters, and general criminals of any dating site online.

At first glance, many of the photos could have come straight from Vogue. I’m sure many of them did. I was inundated with offers of lifelong love from ladies young enough to not just be my daughter, but my grand-daughter. Their persistence, assurances that “age means nothing in love,” and even offers to move in with me right away, were at first an effective boost to my ego, until I learned a new phrase that rapidly took some of that shine away.

“I need a recharge.”

The first time I heard it, from a young woman in her thirties, left me scratching my head. Was this some new sexual proposition I’d not heard before? It certainly conjured up a myriad of possibilities in my fertile imagination. I asked, as delicately as I could manage, for clarification.

“A recharge,” was the response, “I need a recharge on my PCS card. Are you going to help me out?”

Okay, I was now beginning to comprehend that this wasn’t some new method of engaging in any romantic activity. Further investigation revealed that the lady in question held a pre-paid debit card issued by Mastercard. In order to use it, she – or more likely, me – would go to a website online that sold ‘codes’, colloquially known as ‘coupons’, and for a fee it was possible to buy one of these codes, with a value ranging from 50€ to 250€, present the code to the lady who would then upload it to her PCS card, which she could then use to purchase anything that could be purchased using a credit card such as Mastercard.

After explaining that I never gave money to someone I hadn’t met, and was not going to make an exception for her, I rapidly found myself no longer chatting with the lady. Oh well, better luck next time.

No, there was no better luck, although some women would happily keep up a conversation for weeks before raising the subject. It was lulling the unfortunate male into a false sense of security.

I soon came to realize that Mingle2 was awash with women whose only reason for being there was to make a dishonest living. If they had no joy with one man, they simply moved on to another.

It was prostitution without sex. I’m quite sure some of these ‘girls’ were actually men who downloaded photos of beautiful women and used them to entrap their victims. One I encountered, used images of an America porn star. Google ‘Lens’ brought that to light, though it’s not such a good tool since Google has discovered they make a lot of money from it by using it to sell stuff.

There are some genuine ladies on Mingle2, but they’re hard to find. Usually, like me, they’ve been directed there by an ill-informed friend.

Mastercard’s large £31.5 million fine, as reported in the Guardian today, was not specifically about PCS cards, but there is no doubt much of the business they make from such cards is through their use for fraudulent scamming on the internet. I’m sure Mingle2  isn’t the only site where it’s prevalent.  From my experience, it’s obvious that there’s a whole host of women, mainly French on Mingle2, making a good living by offering their love and affection to men in return for a ‘coupon’.  Once the man has made the mistake of coughing up the money, they find their loved-one either disappears, or stays until that particular well runs dry, before moving on to their next victim.

As for Mastercard, they’ll always make a profit. A fine of £31.5 million is a drop in the ocean to them.

Meanwhile their product is a great tool for the anonymous scammers and fraudsters who prey on lonely men.

^{(With acknowledgement to the New Yorker Magazine)}

No fuel at the pumps, Mister Brit? No food on the supermarket shelves, Mrs Brit?  Who is to blame for this catastrophe? Apparently not your government, Mr and Mrs Brit. It can’t all be because of Brexit, can it? No, of course not, that nice Mister Johnson is quite adamant about that.

It’s such a pity he’s a liar. Or, maybe he’s just deluding himself? The evidence just doesn’t seem to back him up. Certainly, the pandemic has caused economic problems worldwide, but there’s plenty of fuel and food available throughout Europe – that’s the set of nations you guys once belonged to – and British politician’s don’t seem to have noticed there’s no shortage of fuel at the pumps or food on the supermarket shelves, in Northern Ireland. How can that be? Because Northern Ireland is still technically a part of the European Union. Remember that border down the Irish Sea, that Boris Johnson said he’d never agree to when Theresa May projected it, yet soon latched onto when it was his turn at  negotiating Brexit.

Northern Ireland can get it’s fuel and food through the south, again an EU member, because there’s an open border between the two.  Which seems to prove Mister Johnson and his bunch of political gangsters are somewhat skewed in their assessments.

Most Europeans agree. The general consensus is that you guys on your tiny island only have yourselves to blame.

“We tried to talk you out of it,” they cry, “but you decided otherwise. Now you have to face the consequences.”

According to a recent editorial in the French newspaper, ‘Libération’:

La sortie du Royaume-Uni de l’UE entraîne de nombreuses pénuries en main-d’œuvre et en produits outre-Manche. Pendant ce temps-là, Boris Johnson préfère, lui, disserter sur l’affaire des sous-marins français…

“After Brexit, the risk of disaster
The UK’s exit from the EU is causing numerous labor and product shortages across the Channel. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson prefers to discuss the affair of the French submarines.

There is already a shortage of English condoms, which the English call French letters. The foreign plumbers have gone to the English, translated as “take French leave”. And the shortage of vegetables means that many people have to make do with an English-style dish, the famous French cuts. And nothing is more embarrassing than the disappearance from supermarkets of toilet paper, an English derivative of the French word “toile”. Two years after the start of Brexit, hundreds of thousands of drivers, farmers, waiters, plumbers and even doctors, working in Britain with their European passports, have returned to their country with no intention of returning. The consequences were said to be unforeseeable, and yet observers had predicted, for example, that McDonald’s restaurants would no longer be able to serve milkshakes or that it would be difficult to find cans of Coca-Cola…”

Numerous other European media outlets contain similar, somewhat scathing, reports of the British government’s ineptitude and the consequences of abandoning a huge trading partner on their doorstep, for the vain hope of obtaining a “very substantial” trade deal with Donald Trump’s USA.

It’s not just the Europeans calling out the British government over its bungling of Brexit, America’s largest news media outlet, CNN, carried the September 29  headline:

“Boris Johnson’s Brexit choices are making Britain’s fuel and food shortages worse”

“Although shortages, supply chain delays and rising food and energy costs are affecting several major economies, including the United States, China and Germany, Britain is suffering more than most because of Brexit.

Specifically, the form of Brexit pursued by the UK government — which introduced stringent immigration policies and took Britain out the EU market for goods and energy, making it much harder for British companies to hire European workers and much more costly for them to do business with the country’s single biggest trading partner.

It didn’t have to be this way — there were other options for a future EU-UK relationship. Worker shortages, for example, were not an inevitable outcome of Brexit, nor was going it alone on energy. But in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ideological rush to “get Brexit done” amid fraught negotiations with the European Union, agreements in several crucial areas, including energy, were sidelined…”

No fuel at the pumps, Mister Brit? No food on the supermarket shelves, Mrs Brit? But you’re not holding Boris Johnson to blame, are you?

It seems the rest of the world isn’t fully in agreement with you.

 

 

 

What’s the point of writing about climate change? So much has already been written on the subject (4,000 pages) that the world should by now be embroiled in a major shift in everyone’s way of living, governments steering us through the maze of alterations necessary to reverse our planet’s steadily increasing plunge into chaos and destruction.

The planet will survive. It’s been through these types of climate upheavals many times in it’s four billion years existence. Never at this fast a rate, and never at the hands of evolution’s greatest mistake. For, let’s not kid ourselves, despite the best efforts of the egos of some eight billion organisms known as Homo sapiens, they or rather us, are totally responsible for our planet’s rush into instability and the ensuing chaos and destruction now certain to engulf us.

We are evolution’s greatest mistake. It’s created some weird and wonderful creatures and plants in four billion years, but without doubt Homo sapiens is the most outlandish and destructive.  We slaughter each other by the millions, then invent weapons of mass destruction, ostensibly to prevent us slaughtering each other by the millions. We rip our planet apart in a fervour of greed for it’s contents, whether coal, or oil, or gas, or precious minerals. We use them by altering their states, creating vast quantities of poisonous, noxious, gases and other by-products that pollute our rivers, seas, and atmosphere in the process. The end result of this is a mass of so-called “products” we then throw back onto the planet’s surface as waste, by the billions of tons.

We expect our planet to just accept this without complaint, but when it doesn’t, and it becomes obvious that things are going sadly wrong, what do we do about it – nothing! It’s business as usual. We carry on digging up the precious metals, the fossil fuels that poison the atmosphere,  the huge mounds of waste products that poison the soil, the rivers, the seas, and ourselves. All the while expecting the planet can take it.

Thankfully, it’s true, the planet will take care of it, very effectively.  It will do so by destroying the cause of the problem. For while Homo sapiens with its immense ego is happily thinking it’ll solve the problem by using its fabulous brains and technology (but later, at some vague time in the future), the planet will be successfully destroying it.

In the great Universal order of things, Homo sapiens is just another animal that’s overrun the planet, destroyed millions of other species in the process, and thinks it’s the Great I Am. It’s not. Planet Earth is the Great I Am. Homo sapiens is just another Dinosaur that’s got too big for its boots.

The world is not coming to an end, but we are. It may be difficult for mankind to envisage the vastness of the Universe, but it’s a million times more difficult for him to consider the possibility of his own annihilation. So he’ll happily bury his head deep in the sand, because the Olympics are more interesting, or the soccer season is beginning, or a sleazebag politician has been caught with his trousers down, or some billionaire has fired himself into space and managed to return without killing himself.

Still, at least when the time comes the head’s of mankind will be well placed to kiss their ass’s goodbye.

That’s why there is no point in writing about climate change.