Should people who work for foreign governments and undermine Britain while promoting the interests of a third country lose their citizenship? The question came to mind after listening to Kate "HawHawsdottir" Laycock on German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle. DW is known to still recycle anti-British Second World War Nazi propaganda and combine it with present day material most probably scripted in Washington by the CIA. The coverage of the last major anniversary of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift was a disgrace. The one token former RAF pilot included in the fawning US worshipping programme grossly misrepresented the British contribution of almost 25% of the supplies flown in. I suspect the DW scripts are American written because Cambridge-educated Laycock employs Americanisms such as Gotten and uses the word Protest without saying whether it's For or Against something. And for a supposedly German broadcaster DW has an awful lot of American presenters or people who learned their English from Americans. Maybe perhaps there should be consequences for folk who denigrate their former neighbours for foreign government money. And the US Über Furhers who seem call the shots at DW don't even know their own history - The first St Patrick's Day parade was not in Boston but in the then Spanish colony of Florida in 1601. Or perhaps HawHaswdottir might just check what she is telling her audience is true.

One of the red flags when it comes to science on the radio is the number of Americans interviewed for an item. The more Americans, the more dubious the science. Good rule of thumb. If they ever interview four Americans, then we'll be in Food Causes Death territory. The Autopsies All Found Food In The Stomach - Food Causes Death. The reason much American science, when conducted by Americans, is poor is that during the Vietnam War the university faculties suddenly had to expand massively to cope with demand for higher education from draft dodgers like Donald J Trump. People who otherwise would have no hope of teaching in university suddenly found themselves on campus faculties after all. And if you're taught by an idiot...... This is why I ended up giving up on history books written by American academics. That was disappointment as I was interested in a non-British take on events but what I got was often really poorly researched and fantastically chauvinistic.

Lived experience. Is there any other kind of experience? The word "lived" is redundant. We know little to nothing about the experiences of dead people. Perhaps maybe they don't have any. The use of Lived Experience suggests a fuzzy, flabby and muddled thought process. It is a red flag when someone uses it in a sentence on the radio. Experience shows that what follows will be weak. Just turn the radio off. The same goes when some ignoramus who doesn't know how to use the word "literally" comes on. It's a pretty reliable red flag indicating that what follows will be worthless.

I don't think any sane person expects everyone in an Elizabethan era television drama to speak Shakespearean English. But is it too much to expect the folk in some detective drama set in England before 1975 not to talk about being "across" something? I don't remember when that phrase sadly entered the British lexicon but it wasn't that long ago. Certainly not before the 1990s. Nor did British people use that horrible trite American euphemism for dying, "passing". Not a part of everyday speech in 1950s or 60s Gloucestershire. I can see why the casting director wants to make Gloucestershire after the Second World War look far more multi-ethnic and multi-cultural than it was in a bid to pander to the "We want to see people who look like us on television" crowd. But it's a lie. And lies should be avoided. Though I would hate it if such programmes turned into a nostalgia-based fodder for racists. The kitschy television adaption of the Hamish McBeth stories erased the village Asian shopkeeper of the original books and replaced him with a white guy. That probably wasn't racism but more an example of the mess made of the adaptation.

No-one, or no-one I would rate, would deny that the Taliban are very wrong to deny females a proper education or jobs in the professions. But a few thoughts. There's no war going on within Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban. The education issue affects only a tiny proportion of women there. The fact that they come from the most privileged sections of society means that the Western Media, themselves bastions of privilege, identify with them and give their plight a lot of coverage. The vast majority of Afghan girls were, and are, never going to become doctors, airline pilots or lawyers and they are being hurt by Western sanctions. And I'm pretty sure the war against the Soviet Union and their Afghan Communist clients was in a large part inspired by their insistence on educational opportunity regardless of sex. The Red Army was fighting as much for girls' education as the US and NATO troops who propped up the corrupt Afghan government until recently. But we in the West supported the Mujahedin back then. What changed when it comes to the West's attitude to female education?