So, inevitably, David Frost¹ wants us all to know that it's the EU's fault that brexit has not been quite as smooth as we were led to believe it would be².

Of course it is: because it's never our fault, is it (especially not if our name is Johnson, Gove or, well, Frost)? There always someone else to blame, isn't there? The Europeans, the judges, the liberal elite, the intellectuals, socialists, the Gypsies, the Jews. Always, it is their fault, never ours.

This leads where it has always led: to camps and to ovens.

Lots of people like to attack those of us who think that brexit was, at best, a bad idea by saying that we are uncritical admirers of the EU who ignore any inconvenient flaws, rather in the way groups of people once admired the Soviet Union.

Well, let me then say that, while I don't fully understand what happened, the EU have clearly made a very serious mess of their CV19 vaccination programme and the recent threats over the Eire / NI border were just fucking stupid: that's not acceptable behaviour. The UK, so far and against my expectations, has done very much better with its vaccination programme.

Does that mean brexit was a good idea? No.

Yes, Boris, of course you must travel hundreds of miles to visit Scotland, while the people you laughingly pretend to govern can't go outside more than once a day, because of course achieving your political ends is essential, or, if not quite essential, certainly more important than the lives of a few more peasants.

And, if those peasants decide that, well, if you can do it, they can do it too, well then, some of them will probably die as a result. But what of that: they are but serfs. Their lives don't count as much as the lives of proper people who went to Eton, do they? Their lives don't really count at all. And certainly those deaths will not be your responsibility, any more than the deaths of the people who decided that what Cummings could do they could do as well were your responsibility. Because it's all just a jolly game to you, isn't it?

Fuck you, Boris Johnson.

Rodney and Ekaterina Baker, who are Canadian, chartered a private plane to the Yukon. There they masqueraded as local workers and got vaccinated against CV19. Those vaccines were intended for, among other people, elderly members of the White River First Nation.

For this they have been fined C$500. As they're the kind of people who can afford to charter a private plane they are probably not very worried about that.

These people are living where they do only because their ancestors committed genocide and stole the land of the people who lived there previously. But that's not enough for them: they have now stolen the vaccines which were intended for the descendants of the survivors of the genocide, and also perhaps helped spread CV19 to the very same people.

Fuck them.

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

– Winston Churchill, 10th November 1942

In the month leading up to Trump's idiot coup attempt on the 6th of January 2020, the phrase 'storm the Capitol' was used 100,000 times on various forums. The NSA's job is

[...] global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign and domestic intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT).

The US national intelligence program appropriation for 2020 was $62.7 billion: the NSA and related agencies are not short of funding.

So why on earth didn't they notice what was happening? Either they are, simply, useless at the job they are meant to do or they did notice what was happening and either decided not to tell anyone or were ignored when they did.

The second possibility is perhaps more frightening. It is very obvious that there has been infiltration of various US agencies by nazis¹: if the entire intelligence system has been compromised then there is a very serious problem, something quite close to the denazification of Germany after the 1939-1945 war. Except this is much worse: the denazification of Germany was done by the allies, who could safely assume that they were not themselves significantly infested with nazis, while this time no such assumption is safe. Trying to denazify US institutions will be rather like what happens in a scanner darkly, where nothing and no-one can be trusted and no information can be assumed to be reliable.

In fact, this has to happen whether or not the NSA actually has been compromised by nazis, since other organisations certainly have been.

Alternatively, perhaps the NSA has not been compromised, in which case it is simply useless: missing something this obvious is a catastrophic error. Well, it was obvious when Snowden stole a vast trove of information from it that the NSA was an extremely expensive joke: perhaps, seven years later, it still is.

There's that moment when, suddenly, you realise that you're done with all the bullshit: it's stopped meaning anything and all that's left now is to leave.

Well, that's just happened with England¹ and me. When the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016 I was, like many other people, heartbroken: the choice to burn the future of the nation's young people, and hence of the nation itself, on an alter of bigotry and invented nostalgia for a glorious past that never existed wasn't completely surprising, but it was still upsetting. Like other people I spent a long time trying to explain the result to myself in terms which both made some kind of sense – I refuse to believe the idea that all the people who voted for brexit were simply too stupid to understand what they were voting for because I don't believe that the people who voted were brexit were stupid. But I couldn't find another answer which didn't lead to horrible conclusions.

And, of course, the horrible conclusions are the right conclusions: the people who voted for brexit indeed were not stupid, but they did then and do now believe deeply horrible things. It took me a long time to accept this, but events in the US since late 2016 have really made it very clear that very many people – perhaps most people – perhaps me – are, simply, terrible human beings.

What wasn't clear at the time of the referendum was that the people who so desperately wanted to leave the EU considered it far beneath their dignity to spend any time thinking about what would be involved in doing so. Rather they assumed that other people would sort out the details for them. And when those other people turned out to be either imaginary, unwilling to do the brexiteers' work for them, or both, why they got on with what they do best: whining and blaming other people for the problems they have brought upon themselves.

And of course the catastrophe will never be their fault: nothing ever is. A succession of easily-identifiable groups are already being found to blame and more will follow: people who voted to remain, the Poles, the EU, the BBC, the metropolitan elite, the 'mainstream media', the judges, the intellectuals, the liberals, the gypsies, the gays, the Muslims, and, inevitably soon, somehow, the Jews. We know where this leads.

And still I was heartbroken, because I loved England, the country I where was born and where my ancestors have lived for a thousand years or more, and I could not bear to see it turn into this nationalist caricature of itself ruled over by a laughing clown prince who cares no more for his subjects than he cares for ants. And as the end approached I dreaded the final, irrevocable loss of the future and the real start of the journey that ends with camps, gas and mass graves.

And then, suddenly, at the start of January, I discovered I was free of it. Suddenly I realised I was done with the bullshit and the whining: that I no longer cared, and that all that is left now is to find somewhere to go, and to leave. Not yet physically – I have family & friends here still – and perhaps not ever physically if nowhere else will take me. But I am done with England's bullshit: the relationship is over. I am free of the dream of England. And I am so glad.

So, two medical journals, the Health Service Journal and the British Medical Journal, have jointly written an editorial saying that

[...] Rather than lifting restrictions over Christmas as currently planned, the UK should follow the more cautious examples of Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.

[...]

This joint editorial is only the second in the more than 100 year histories of The BMJ and HSJ. We are publishing it because we believe the government is about to blunder into another major error that will cost many lives. If our political leaders fail to take swift and decisive action, they can no longer claim to be 'protecting the NHS.'

In the face of this the UK has decided that it will not tighten its rules around Christmas. The rules say that between 23rd and 27th December, three households in a 'Christmas bubble' can mix indoors and stay overnight, while Northern Ireland has a window of 22nd to 28th December, to allow time to travel between the nations.

Rather than tightening the rules our noble and illustrious leader has said that people must act responsibly, because 'we don't want to criminalise people's long-made plans'. Of course he does not: he thinks that it is better to let them die and risk the collapse of the NHS than to be seen to have changed his mind. The little people are, after all, rather less than cattle to him.

If the UK government ever again says that they are 'following the science' or 'protecting the NHS' you will know that they are lying: they don't care at all for the NHS, they don't understand what science is and if they did they certainly would not be following it.

The relaxation of the rules lasts from the 23rd to the 27th Of December. It's probably safe to assume that the peak transmission will be between the 24th and 26th of December. The incubation period for CV19 is about ten days, so between the 3rd and 5th of January 2021 people will start to get sick in significant numbers. There will no doubt be another big peak around the 10th of January, ten days after hogmanay, to make things worse. This is already at the worst possible time of year: the depths of winter, just after new year.

But this is just the start: the UK will finally effectively leave the EU overnight between the 31st December 2020 and the 1st January 2021. It is likely there will be no trade deal, with the resulting chaos possibly including food and medicine shortages. Supermarkets keep a few days of food, so things will be getting bad around the second week of January 2021.

These are the great and glorious works of the mighty Boris Johnson, laughing clown emperor of England: look on them and despair.

What's the difference between a brexiteer and a terrorist?

You can negotiate with a terrorist.

It seems appropriate that the national science foundation of a nation that, 51 years ago, put two humans on the Moon, is now proudly attaching its logo to footage of parts of the scientific infrastructure of the nation collapsing as a result of long-term neglect. What could be done at Arecibo can not be done anywhere now. If, in due course, another installation is built which can do what Arecibo could do, it will almost certainly be at FAST, in China. And Americans will continue to stare at their phones, lost in a dream world where they live in a country which is not rotting from within.

As with everything to do with the UK's wonderful government and its glorious leader – a man who, if not actually Churchill reborn for our times, certainly wants to be him – it is appropriate to compare current events to the second world war.

The UK entered that war on the first of September 1939, woefully ill-prepared for it. Ten months later they fought, and won, the battle of Britain. If we choose the start of February, 2020 as the date that it became clear that the CV19 pandemic was very serious indeed, then it is now nine months since that date.

In the ten months between the start of the second war and the start of the battle of Britain, the UK built up an air force – pilots, aeroplanes, ground crew, infrastructure, radar – which could and did defeat the Germans.

In the nine months from the start of February and now the UK government has entirely failed to build a track and trace system which could have kept infections under control, has actively encouraged people to do things such eating out and going back to work in offices which have make the pandemic worse and, finally, has failed to take heed of the advice of the scientists who were advocating for a short lockdown in September.

It is as if, between September 1939 and July 1940, the UK had thought about building some Spitfires and Hurricanes and doing everything else they needed to do not to lose the war, but somehow kept getting the wings on backwards and when they did manage to fit them the right way they fell off because they were made of cardboard. While doing this they would simultaneously be shouting down the scientists and engineers who kept talking to them about this silly 'radar' idea.

If the Cummings-Johnson government had been responsible for fighting the second world war, it would have ended with a Nazi victory in 1940.

Boris Johnson is an entitled clown, Dominic Cummings is a crank and an idiot, and the rest of them are no better. These fuckwit crypto-fascists are in the process of killing a huge number of the people they govern and blighting the lives of many, many others.

They must to be held to account for this.

If Donald Trump wins in November then this is clearly a disaster for world – whether he wins legitimately or, as seems more likely, by dismantling democracy. His victory will not only be a disaster in itself: it will also accelerate the slide from democracy to authoritarianism elsewhere in the world.

But, well, this has happened before, hasn't it? The free world did succeed, eventually, in defeating the Nazis, and it at least seems plausible that it¹ will defeat this latter-day incarnation of fascism. Millions will die, appalling atrocities will be committed, but the world will recover. Won't it?

It probably won't. Because this time is not like what happened in the 1930s and 1940s. By the time Trump and his followers-on are defeated it will be too late: billions, not millions will probably die if Trump wins in November.

Why? Climate change. We have no more than a decade, and probably less, to deal with climate change. If we fail to take serious steps to address it that time it will be, simply, too late. The world will not end in a decade, but if nothing is done in that time then enough warming will already be committed that nothing we can do will prevent catastrophic levels of warming happening later in the 21st century and into the 22nd. This will almost certainly end any recognisably modern civilisation and very probably kill most humans then alive.

Trump and the other authoritarians either do not believe in anthropogenic climate change or simply do not care about it – either because they will be dead by the time it matters or because they believe they can extract enough wealth from their positions to isolate themselves from its effects, as other very rich people plan to do. This means that, if he wins, nothing will be done for at least another four years, and almost certainly nothing will be done until it is far too late.

It is not certain that, if Trump loses, enough will be done to deal with climate change. It is certain that, if he wins, it won't be.

This means that billions of lives are at stake in this election, not millions. It is, quite literally, probably the last chance for our civilisation.

My first post was on 1st May 2020, so this post marks 5 months of daily entries, most of which were done without faking the dates later.

That seems like enough, for now: it's been an interesting experience, but I don't think I have enough to say to justify a daily entry, and it's becoming repetitive.

It's just time, now: just waiting for the end.

Of course he paid his taxes; of course he doesn't owe half a billion dollars to the Russians unknown people, who now control him.