Life was simpler back when all we had was our dog to blame when our homework or something went missing. Now it is a creature that we don’t understand, can’t see, don’t know how it works—a computer-driven algorithm.

I met my first algorithm—let’s call him Al— back in 2010 or thereabouts. I had a whisky life-style website at the time, an online magazine about the whisky experience, wine, women and song. (A dormant version of it is here, if you want to check it out.) We set up a Facebook page to help promote the site and back in those early days we got big numbers on Facebook, regularly clocking 250,000 likes. We were small bit advertisers, until they banned an ad with Tennessee Williams sitting at his typewriter with a cigarette in his ashtray. Then we stopped advertising for all practical purposes: it was petty censorship. Today they accept ads that sell fentanyl on the internet. At about the same time, we started to discover what everyone knows now: Facebook is more of a look medium than a read medium. But we preserved and attracted some sponsors and advertisers.

Then one day, without notice, about 60 percent of my timeline posts vanished. Gone. Zip. Nil. Zilch. Poof. Hasta leugo. They didn’t even leave a trail. They were the most popular posts on my Facebook page. (We still have a record of those posts by name and likes.)

Now what do you do? At the time Facebook had no face. Likes dope dealers and money launderers, they had a faceless store front in some rundown strip mall. You knew they were in California, but there was no phone number unless you persevered.

Before I finish the story, remember that Mark, the Zuck, has repeatedly told Congress in two days of testimony, that the user controls his or her content. He made it a point, again and again: Facebook does not control content, except when they do.

We’ve grown accustomed to folks lying, especially folks in high places: politics, business, culture, publishing, broadcasting, academia, locker rooms, pulpits, casting couches. It used to be covert: now it is overt.

I finally got through to a human voice at Facebook who asked the obvious questions and I suggested he simply look at the site and I would talk him through the problem. He did and he said he was impressed with the traffic we were generating for our size. He then said, his guess was an algorithm caused the problem. He then reported that Facebook had the same problem in the prior year when Al was on the loose. He then said they had fixed the problem–fired him. Not really, but they did their best to humanize the algorithm, much the same way the US Supreme Court said companies are people too.

Then I asked the obvious: when were they going to restore the posts? They said they couldn’t do that. Somehow they were gone. Somehow Al hid them somewhere. That’s all they said. They didn’t say they were sorry. They didn’t offer to make amends by giving me some free advertising. They didn’t offer to give me a statement I could post or show my sponsors. They simply said it was Al’s fault and there was nothing they could do.

I have not used Facebook since.

At the moment my mind is preoccupied with the melange of politics, sport, doping and the hydra that is Russia

At one extreme I am vexed by the recent alleged poisoning of a former Russian Spy and his daughter by the Russian State on British soil, apparently with the Russian President’s knowledge. At the other extreme I am concerned about the consequences for the England Football Team and its supporters of this attempted murder on British Soil when the FIFA World Cup starts on 14^th June 2018.

Soccer is one of my passions, especially Arsenal Football Club, and when the England team performs well, everyone at home is happy. Sad to say in recent years that sense of joy surrounding the England soccer team has been markedly absent.

In the current war of words between Russia and the UK, some UK politicians are demanding, that the list of retributions to be enacted against Russia should include the UK Government banning the England Football Team from participating in this summer’s World Cup.

Putin’s Russia is seen as an increasingly despotic regime and the British Government certainly needs to do something to defend its Sovereignty but, demanding that the England soccer team be in the front line of a response to this heinous act of attempted murder is wrong. They expect 23 young men, who happen to be good at kicking a ball around a soccer pitch (field) to be in the front line rather than, for instance, the UK government clamping down on the Russian oligarchs, aka friends of Mr. Putin, who have laundered millions of roubles on buying property in central London as well as contributing funds to the Conservative party.

It is low hanging fruit for the UK Politicians: a cheap shot. It will not make one iota of difference to the bigger picture. Mixing sport and politics in such an ad-hoc manner never delivers a successful outcome?

History shows that threats by one or more countries to withdraw from sporting events are rarely successful. For instance, in 1980, the USA led a boycott of the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In total, 65 nations refused to participate in the games. Eighty countries sent athletes to compete. Fifteen were not represented by their national flags at the opening, closing or medal ceremonies. They competed under the Olympic flag, a device most recently seen at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyongyang.

Today, Afghanistan remains a mess and although the Soviet Union did eventually retreat from that country it certainly wasn’t because of the US led boycott. The only tangible outcome of the 1980 boycott was that, four years later, in a tit-for-tat response, the Soviet Union and its friends boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

One example of a sporting boycott against a country that did work was the boycott of South Africa in a multitude of sports events over a 30-year period, starting in the 1960s and ending in the early 1990s. It is said a picture is worth a thousand words, but many more words would be needed to truly articulate the significance of seeing Nelson Mandela, the President of South Africa, walk onto the pitch at the start of the 1995 Rugby World Cup Final wearing the Springbok Jersey.

So, there is a big difference between a “one-off” boycott by one country of another in one particular sporting event in one moment in time, in comparison with a sporting boycott that lasts 30 years and has the support of a host of governments and the sporting administrations in those countries, alongside organisations such as the United Nations.

If the UK and other Governments around the world were to be as outraged as I am at the State funded doping of Russian Athletes and agreed to ban Russia from participating in all sporting competitions for the next 30 years, then we might get somewhere perhaps?

So, keep politics out of international sport gets my vote unless our Government and other like-minded countries are in it for the long run!

Where I am comfortable with mixing sport and politics is on the national stage. That, for me, seems perfectly legitimate. I remember the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico and the gesture made by Tommie Smith and John Carlos. It may have happened in a foreign land but the audience for the gesture was their own country.

Further back in time there is the dramatic example of the suffragette Emily Davison, who paid the ultimate price for her beliefs, either by design or accident.

More recently there has been the actions of a number of NFL players “taking the knee” in protest during the playing of the USA’s national anthem. It is worth noting for the record that, historically, and we are talking centuries here rather than decades, “taking the knee” was a gesture of submission, reverence and an action that was meant to show humility and adoration.

Using sport to drive change locally is easier to achieve than internationally and as Lord Coe, British Olympic Gold Medal winner in 1984 and Chair for the 2012 Olympics in London said “I have never found taking sport to challenging political environments to be an inhibitor over the long haul (author’s highlight), of social or political change.” So, let’s keep politics out of sport in the international arena but embrace it in the national environment. If we can all bend the knee to this guiding principle, then the vexation and concern I expressed at the start of this dispatch will be somewhat assuaged.

This one is fun, worth a laugh or two. God knows there is not much of that in politics these days.

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

“She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be an Obama Democrat.”

“I am,” replied the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.”

The man smiled and responded, “You must be a Republican.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You’ve risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it’s my fault.”

Remember—you can change the names and the affiliations to suit you.