100 suns

Kwasi Kwarteng, a former investment banker now chancellor of the exchequer, has removed the cap on bankers' bonuses. The current government stands no real chance of winning the next election¹ and when it loses he will, very probably, return to investment banking.

How very convenient that all will be for him.

An era has ended

Trump claims that the documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago were declassified as, while he was president, he had the right to do that. That's true: he did have the right to do that, although there seems to be no evidence he followed the process for doing it.

So, all that needs to happen now is that one or more expert witnesses who are familiar with the content of the TS/SCI documents should testify that, if they were to be declassified, this would cause significant harm to the national interest of the USA. In other words:

• if Trump did declassify them he was working against the national interest of the USA and is thus a traitor;
• if he did not declassify them then he is guilty of espionage.

Either way.

The Giant Brain speaks.

Net Zero has nothing to do with fighting climate change.

I see. Stopping net greenhouse gas emissions will not prevent a process caused by the emission of greenhouse gasses. The Giant Brain speaks, and we must listen. Never mind that climate scientists tell us otherwise: they are merely experts, not Giant Brains. Many of them are, you know, members of the hidden elite: do not trust them.

It cannot have any effect unless the big countries get onboard; China, India Russia and the USA. All of whom will drop NetZero as their internal politics demands.

Again the Giant Brain blesses us with its vast wisdom. So 'because, perhaps, some other people, bigger people, may choose to murder their children, why, we can just choose to murder ours, it will make no difference. And we certainly should not be, you know, setting a good example by showing that we can do what is necessary not to do that, no no'. Gosh, we can apply this reasoning quite generally can't we? 'Because a lot of people fiddle their taxes I should fiddle mine as well.' 'Because lots of people exceed the speed limit, I should do that as well.' 'Because my vote is just one vote and will not make any difference, I should not vote.' Oh Great Brain you are so wise! Your wisdom, truly, is endless and without bound!

Fighting Climate Change means adaptation. Which means increasing wealth to build infrastructure. NetZero wastes resources for no benefit.

Again the pearly drops of wisdom drip upon us from the Great Brain! But wait, hold on, hold on. Adaptation, you say: we should not care about emissions but adapt. Because it won't be so bad here, will it? I mean, there will be floods, heatwaves which kill people and so on. The seas will keep rising and in due course we'll lose most of our coastal cities like, you know, London, but that won't be for a while: sea-level rise with unabated emissions will only be 2.2m by 2100, so we can probably keep the coastal cities alive until then although at the cost of, well, trillions of pounds perhaps. And of course all the beaches will be gone and so on, but no-one will miss those. So, yes, it will be shit – much, much shitter than it is now – but we can adapt. We can maintain growth. I mean physics says that's not possible when that growth has any physical correlate, but that's just physics. We can invent a new, more convenient physics. A physics for the people, not a physics that only elite scientists with their elite ability to do hard sums understand. You know, an alternative physics, with alternative facts. Yes.

Except, except, except, there is more. There are, after all, other parts of the world. parts of the world where it will get too hot too often for humans to stay alive. Well, we don't care much about those people, of course: most of them don't even have skin the right colour. But those people care about those people, unfortunately. So those people are going to want not to die. They're going to, you know, move. Hundreds of millions of them, a vast tide of humanity moving (mostly) north. And here we are in our comfortable (well, not comfortable, but still habitable) country. How are we going to adapt to a refugee crisis hundreds of times larger than anything anyone has ever seen, do you think? We await your drops of wisdom, O Giant Brain.

Or, I don't know, perhaps you're just repeating whatever nonsense you heard in whichever nest of lies you inhabit?

If Rishi Sunak is the next prime minister he will, apparently, make 'vilifying Britain' a terrorist offence.

You know what? Fuck Britain. I was born here and have lived most of my life here and just fuck it: any country that can end up with a choice between Rishi 'plutocrat' Sunak and Liz 'moron' Truss as prime minister is a country which I want nothing to do with. I'd like to say that these prople were cryptofascists, but they're not: they're fascists, and England (which is what they mean when they say 'Britain') is a country which needs to be simply wiped from the face of the Earth.

(Why am I still here? Elderly relatives who need care. Because unlike Sunak or Truss I actually care about people other than myself.)

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. / Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. / Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. / Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. / Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. / Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.

The NHS has a really serious staffing crisis. This is, obviously, partly a result of brexit, and was widely predicted.

But in the fantasy world we all now live in – the world where our next prime minister will be a plutocrat or a moron, and probably the moron because she's white¹ – we are not allowed to say that. Because truth now counts less than slavish adherence to ideology, and we must all dutifully believe that the catastrophically bad brexit deal Johnson and 'lord' Frost² arranged for us was perfect, and if it was not perfect, why, it's those devilish Europeans, not us, to blame, isn't it?

In the real world the UK is in the middle of a heatwave and may record the highest ever temperature seen here. In the real world climate change will cause events like this to become increasingly common. In the real world, people will die, in significant numbers because of this.

In the real world, it is really fucking obvious that addressing climate change is an urgent problem.

Meanwhile, in tory-wannabe-leader fantasy world, they're saying that, well, net zero may be too expensive. Because, in tory-wannabe-leader fantasy world, it is more important to keep a bunch of decrepit elderly voters who don't believe in climate-change happy than to give their grandchildren and great-grandchildren a future. In tory-wannabe-leader fantasy world climate change is someone else's problem. In tory-wannabe-leader fantasy world climate change doesn't really exist. In tory-wannabe-leader fantasy world no-one gives a fuck about their own children and grandchildren's future, because it's all about them.

Can we call the tory party what it is now? Because the tory party is a death cult.

Candidate: "FAMILY its about family you see yes family. Traditional values yes family."

Person with brain: "But candidate what about net zero"

Candidate: "Oh no none of that green hippy nonsense no. FAMILY its about traditional white FAMILY yes. Send the immigrants home burn the gypsies and the wogs. FAMILY."

Person with brain: "But, candidate, unless we deal with climate change, which means net zero, then most of our grandchildren will die. That's not 'family' is it?"

Candidate: "Yes FAMILY, fuck the grandchildren they're not FAMILY are they not really no-one cares about them or really children actually, not really FAMILY are they you might as well just eat them all its about FAMILY yes. My brain is enormous look at my giant brain. Eat the poor, eat your grandchildren. Up with boomers. FAMILY yes."

Person with brain: "..."

Candidate (foaming): "FAMILY FAMILY FAMLY FMABILY burn the poor eat the children kill the gypsies send the wogs home FAMILY FAMILY."

Suella Braverman wheels out her giant brain:

In order to deal with the energy crisis we need to suspend the all-consuming desire to achieve net zero by 2050. If we keep it up, especially before businesses and families can adjust, our economy will end up with net zero growth.

Right, right. let's burn the entire fucking future on the altar of the present, shall we?

Johnson is at last on the way out. And Johnson was awful: a dishonest, incompetent, narcissist who was and is quite willing to sacrifice anything at all on the altar of his own glorification. A man caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, who has probably destroyed the tory party and who has at least badly damaged and possibly destroyed democracy in the UK, and perhaps the UK itself.

But that's all he was: Johnson was simply a machine for making more Johnson. For him nothing else mattered – nothing else matters – than increasing the glory and power of Johnson. For Johnson other people do not really exist other than to serve the goal of increasing Johnson. He is simply a parasite whose only purpose is to make more of itself, at any cost to its host.

That's not the worst thing that could happen. The wreckage of the tory party, like the wreckage of the republican party in the US, is busily breeding really awful people. People who actively want to burn the future by doing nothing, or less than nothing, about climate change, people who actively want to remove women's rights over their own bodies, people who are explicitly racist.

We could get one of those people. That would be bad.

Boris Johnson is like a vast bit of unwanted furniture in Downing Street. No-one wants him there any more, but the only way to remove him is pretty clearly to saw him up and take out the bits.

Johnson is not 'fighting for the future': he's fighting against the future.

He is directly damaging the futures of billions of people in order that he might spend a little more time feeling all big and important. Every fucking day we spend staring at his shitshow is another day we spend not paying attention to climate change, not paying attention to what is happening in Ukraine, not paying attention to what the US supreme court is doing to women's rights, not paying attention to anything but Boris fucking Johnson, the bloated parasitic worm infesting Downing Street.

'Look at me, look at me, lookatmelookatme look at me just look at me in my magnificent segmented self' it burbles in everyone's ears. And we watch in horror as it slowly digests some more people from within, digests some more ancient rights, some more decency. And we fail to notice that while it is digesting, while it is shedding its stinking white segments, the fucking world is burning.

It is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately. In the name of God go.
– Cromwell

When I checked the BBC news a few hours ago, the top five stories were about various aspects of Johnson appointing Pincher, whether he knew (hint: he knew) and so on and so on.

In the meantime, while Boris Johnson's fuckwittery and lying distracts us, the US supreme court, not satisfied with removing women's rights over their own bodies, has ruled to greatly reduce the US government's ability to limit carbon emissions from power generation.

Between 2016 and 2020 we all watched in horror and amazement while Trump fell about and fucked the US and the world over with levels of incompetence and dishonesty it's really hard to parody. And the world burnt four years it didn't have to do something about climate change.

Between 2019 and today we've stared in horror and amazement at the new Johnsonite shitshow, complete with a cast of second-rate wannabe-fascist sidekicks. Watched as a group of posh entitled fucks lie, fuck everything up, lie about fucking it up, grope everyone in sight, and puke on the walls.

And that's another three years of eroding rights and dismantling inequality, another three years when nothing's been done about climate change: another three years we don't have. Another three years of doing fucking nothing that our children and grandchildren are going to thank us for.

Thanks, fuckers.

The allegations against Chris pincher are not that he drunkenly groped two men. They are that he sexually assaulted two men.

It's not groping or fondling – it is sexual assault

Using euphemistic language downplays the severity of an offence and enforces a dangerous message: it isn’t a big deal, and victims won’t be taken seriously

Numerous high-profile cases of sexual violence and abuse have have been exposed in recent years, with the same words cropping up again and again: "groping", "fondling", "inappropriate touching". What each of these terms usually means is sexual assault. But both in casual conversation and in the press, we will go to almost any lengths to avoid saying it.

According to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the elements of the offence of sexual assault are:

• person (A) intentionally touches another person (B)
• the touching is sexual
• (B) does not consent to the touching, and (A) does not reasonably believe that (B) consents.

– Laura Bates, The Guardian

Groping people is something that many people have done: the traditional place for it in the UK is 'behind the bike sheds', and it can be extremely consensual. If Chris Pincher merely groped people, consensually, then while that might be embarrassing for him and them (and I suppose might involve public indecency or something), that's probably the most it involves.

But that's not what he is alleged to have done: the allegations against Chris Pincher are not that he 'groped' two men, they are that he sexually assaulted two men. 'Groping' in this case is a deliberately ambiguous euphemism used by people who want to make sexual assault seem less serious than it is.

By the way: he was one of the tory whips, and thus in a position of considerable power over many people.

They are only allegations, and he is innocent until proven guilty. But the johnsonite husk of the tory pary has not suspended an MP with a credible allegation of sexual assault against him¹. That tells you all you need to know about the johnsonites, I think.