If the sky is pure, you may this evening see the three-day-old Moon spring into it.
Venus, Mercury, and the Sun are below ground, and if you go down even deeper you might find the fourth circle of Dante’s Inferno, reserved for those guilty of Greed.
You Couldn’t Make It Up Department
An 18-year-old model named Michelle Allan converted to Catholicism so as to marry Michael Mone. They set up lingerie businesses that made her rich. After 20 years she left Mone for a billionaire named Barrowman. They profited from real estate in Dubai, “the first ever to be priced in bitcoin,” and a cryptocurrency scheme. Barrowman has a mansion on the Isle of Man, a tax haven. Because the Labour prime minister (Gordon Brown) raised the tax rate for the richest, Ms. Mone became a Conservative supporter. She called for the army to be used against protesters. The Conservative government appointed her to make a review of entrepreneurship and small businesses. Whether she is a donor to the Conservative party I don’t know. Prime minister Cameron put her in his “honours list,” so that she became Baroness Mone, in the House of Lords. During the Covid pandemic, she tipped a favorable word to government ministers for a four-week-old company called PPE Medpro, so that it got into the “VIP fast-track lane,” and received an £80,000,000 and then a £122,000,000 contract to supply personal protective equipment – masks and sterile gowns – to the National Health Serv. The company secretly rewarded her with £29,000,000 of the profit. The mechanism was that it was given to Barrowman, who put it into offshore accounts for Mone and her adult children. The equipment failed tests and had to be thrown away. The company has not found a way to refund the taxpayer money.
In London’s grim city
Where the streets are so gritty,
I first set my eyes on the Barrowness Mone,
As she wheeled her Man-Barrow
Through lobbies so narrow,
Crying “Contracts and kickbacks, alive alive oh!
Alive alive oh, alive alive oh!”
Crying “Contracts and kickbacks, alive alive oh!””
(With apologies to “Molly Malone.”)
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She’s also a British nationalist and against Scottish independence but probably the kind of person who chuckled when Czechoslovakia, the USSR and Yugoslavia broke up because of course they are not natural unions of peoples whereas the United Kingdom somehow is.