Two people

Two rather different people have been in the news over the past few days. Rather different, but both swimming in money.

First, we have Alison Rose, tipped out of the top job at NatWest a few months ago over a silly spat about whether a posh bank should be allowed to pick and chose its clients. And now she looks set to lose more than £5m worth of golden goodbye. Leaving aside the unseemly amounts of money that bankers pay each other, my first thought was that it was a bit rum that the client in question, not to everyone's taste, should have been able to make such a storm in a teacup. Doesn't do the image of our country much good in the eyes of others. Makes us look like a bit of a joke. But my second thought was that Rose got paid her huge salary for her unerring skill in navigating the treacherous waters that the great and the good seem to swim in. But she did err and she paid the price.

Second, we have Vivek Ramaswamy, wannabee Republican candidate for the Presidency of the United States. Still something under 40, he is clearly very gifted, having made his first millions before he left law school and is now worth getting on for a billion. He appears to have made his money out of financial shenanigans in pharmaceuticals, otherwise facilitating the efficient allocation of resources to healthcare. One of his vehicles is called Roivant, a company which does not actually do stuff - and which, according to Wikipedia at reference 1, has never made a profit. 'We develop transformative medicines and technologies by building agile, focused companies called Vants'. Maybe the model is to create a Vant, puff it up and then flog it off to some greedy private finance operation before the going starts to get rough. With the profits, mysteriously, never going through Roivant's books.

And we now have Roivant Social Ventures at reference 3: 'a social impact organization that invests in health technologies and new therapeutics that lead to systemic improvements to health equity'. Maybe the words 'social' and 'equity' will make him some new friends.

According to Wikipedia, politically, well to the right. A Hindu, he works hard on the Republican Christian vote. Anti abortion. Anti LGBTQ. Anti affirmative action. Anti woke in general, whatever that might mean. Supports Taiwan but appears to favour dumping the Ukraine. Favours legalising marijuana but will smash the Mexican drug cartels. Proposes to dispense with Congress and to rule by Executive Order. Can be a bit free with his mouth, rather in the way of Musk - or, indeed, Trump. Veggie. Sporty. Family man.

Only in America.

PS 1: online OED on woke. Very up to date. And I did not have to pay - maybe that would have come later had I persisted in my inquiries. Not at all the same as what you get in Volume X, Part II of the print edition, V-Z, dated 1928, quite possibly the very last chunk of this long running venture. There the word gets about two thirds of a column, so a lot more words than you get online. Two thirds of that for the adjective, roughly meaning weak or lowly, from before the Conquest. Then the last third for the verbal form. More or less as the third and fourth meanings above. Both pushed out in favour of 'weak' by the 15th century. Curiously, we also have 'woke fish' for salt cod, a staple of the middle ages in western Europe.

PS 2: 09:53 Friday: the old 'Insert image' dialogue box for Blogger has been reinstated on Windows 11. The one that works. A problem which has been around for about two weeks now.

PS 3: and some bad new in that I was thoroughly trounced at Scrabble yesterday. Nothing seemed to go my way and I ended up with around half the score that BH had collected up. This despite my getting most of the big letters.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivek_Ramaswamy.

Reference 2: https://www.roivant.com/.

Reference 3: https://roivantsv.org/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke. Wikipedia on woke.

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