Archie Battersbee’s wishes and feelings

Could, and should, greater effort have been expended attempting to ascertain whether Archie Battersbee was alive and conscious, and his wishes and feelings about the proposed ending of his life-support treatment?

Archie Battersbee was in hospital when he died, brain-injured so badly that if he was conscious, he was unable to exhibit consciousness by (say) responding verbally to ordinary enquiries addressed to him, questions such as, “Are you comfortable?”, or by moving fingers or facial muscles to answer such questions.  He may even have been brain-stem dead by the time his treatment was withdrawn.  I hope he was already brain dead for his sake, given what has been done to him.  Perhaps a post-mortem will shed more light on that unknown.

Reportedly, Archie was in a coma, apparently unable to breathe without artificial support.  The learned barrister and blogger Matthew Scott has posted today saying that Mr Justice Hayden was right to bring Archie’s futile treatment to an end.  On the limited evidence before the public and Hayden J, I am not minded to dispute the rightness of the learned judge’s ruling, or of Matthew’s applauding of it.  However, I suspect that, by all accounts, the hospital may have fallen short of the need to make adequate accommodations for a patient who may have suffered from a communication disability rather than a loss of all consciousness, as in the case of the late Scott Routley.

# Trans girl

Young Girl by Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, 1968 – click image to listen to the original track on Youtube

Faking charms of a woman

You kept a secret of your sex
You led me to believe you’d lady bits
As well as ( . )( . )
– By which I mean your flabby pecks

Whoa, oh, oh, trans girl
Get out of my mind
Your sex at birth wasn’t “assigned”
Better run, girl
You’re too well hung, girl

Do the science, Mr President, to give peace a chance

In the still-unfolding, still-unfinished aftermath of the bitterly-disputed US Presidential Election of 2020, it seems like only yesterday – because it was only yesterday – that the United States of America was reportedly teetering on the brink of turmoil on the streets.  Turmoil that would be at least a nuisance and, perhaps, far worse, internecine.   The nation had also seemed to be in peril of the state meting out repression upon those who manifested their heterodox belief in a conspiracy theory opposed to the opposing conspiracy theory in which believe those who now have the upper hand politically.

Dying for a drink

How easy it can sometimes be nowadays, to listen to a locked-in patient’s silent answers to questions! (If the doctor can be bothered, that is, because he cares what his patient thinks and is feeling.)

Star post

Dying for a drink isn’t a pleasant way for anyone to be forced to spend Christmas, but it is the fate chosen by his British NHS doctors, his wife, and the British judiciary, for one unfortunate Polish fellow, despite the objections of the Polish government and his Polish mother and two Polish  sisters.  This patient has been prescribed death by thirst. The slow taking of his life began yesterday,

Who really won, Biden or Trump?

“I see no evidence of vote fraud”

WHAT WOULD SOLOMON DO?

Why aren’t Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the unhappy Americans one encounters online these days all clamouring for science to be used to find out objectively which candidate would emerge as the real winner of the presidential election if only valid votes could be counted?  (It wouldn’t be necessary to weed out all the invalid votes and start the counting all over again in every state, just to answer this simple question.)

Boris Johnson “acted unlawfully”. ~ Does that make him a criminal?

Star post

“Mummy-eee … it said on the news that Boris Johnson had acted unlawfully.  Does that mean he’s a crook and will have to go to prison?”

“I don’t know, darling.  Mr Corbyn and his party will have to decide that.  Let’s wait and see what they say.”

 

^ click to watch Lady Hale reading the official summary of the judgment ^

Read the official summary of the judgment yourself

Read the official judgment in PDF or HTML format

Comprehension questions

1. Has Boris been “found guilty”, of “breaking the law”?
2. Is Boris now officially a “criminal”?
3. Should Boris be impeached?

The queering of primary schools

In 2017, on this page, in connection with my fifth Parliamentary candidacy, I referred to the threatened queering of primary education.  We have since begun to witness this.  For example there is a well-researched article here about one now-c0ntroversial project, called No Outsiders, that was set up in 2006 with the aim of “queering” primary education.

There has been a rumpus at two of Birmingham’s 258 primary schools, where indoctrination of the children aimed at procuring LGBT-acceptance had been introduced clandestinely, without the knowledge, let alone the permission, of the parents of the children who had thus been indoctrinated.  Or so it has been said.

There has been a jolly informative debate about this in the House of Commons.  The MP who brought that debate has been rewarded with calls for his deselection and deprivation of the party whip.  Charming.

What would it take to “block” Brexit?

Another court case I brought because nobody else did:

There has been renewed talk lately of “Parliament” (meaning the House of Commons) somehow “blocking” a so-called “no-deal Brexit”, the outcome for which Parliament (meaning both houses) has already legislated, unless the Commons, in a “meaningful vote”, approves a withdrawal agreement that is actually on offer, before the statutory “exit day” arrives.  Exit day has been 29th March 2019, either 12th April 2019 or 22nd May 2019, definitely 12th April 2019, and is now 31st October 2019.

The day I tried to save Brexit

Another exciting episode in my courtroom drama of a life

Mentle J

As reported here on Tuesday 9th April 2019, I suspected then that the Prime Minister might purport to revoke the UK’s article 50 notice to leave the EU before exit day, then defined as Friday 12th April 2019 at 23:00.  That is, if the Council didn’t give her an extension that night (which, in the event, the Council did).

I therefore attended the Royal Courts of Justice on Wednesday 10th April, clutching these papers.  I was seeking an emergency injunction to prevent the Prime Minister from canceling Brexit off her own bat.  There had been dangerous talk on the BBC news since the Sunday of that week (when I’d listened to Radio 4 online in Bucharest) that led me to fear that summary cancelation of Brexit on the Prime Minister’s part might be her back-up plan if denied her extension.

I have recently obtained a transcript of what was said in court that day.

Please, miss, please may I watch my son’s school Christmas play?

An episode filmed in the lifelong family tragedy of one child’s ruined childhood, when he was only 4, helped lead to a courtroom comedy more than two years later.

Events including (but not confined to) those caught on camera as shown in the video, led to a court case that ended somewhat comically in 2017.  Comically, but, alas, not happily for the child concerned.

First, the incident that, in part, kicked off the court case.  The following video was shot in December 2014.