100 suns

So the cronyism watchdog thinks the system needs urgent reform.

What a surprise! It's not as if, you know, we have a government which is entirely about funnelling money out of the taxes we pay to their mates, is it? It's not as if there have not been multiple obvious occurrences of corruption, is it?

Of course there will be an enquiry which, conveniently, will be headed by someone conveniently close to the government, and which will find that there was no real case to answer. How surprising that will be: the UK is of course not racist, the government is not corrupt.

And the Clown Emperor marches on into his glorious future, waving flags and making witty comments about watermelons.

So, the bitcoin ledger is both immutable (it can only be extended) and available to everyone:

• if it's not immutable then something is horribly wrong with the underlying cryptography, and bitcoin also fails at one of its main purposes;
• if it's not available to anyone then only the privileged elite to whom it is available can check and make transactions, which means they control bitcoin and again bitcoin fails at one of its main purposes.

And the bitcoin ledger consists of bits, which can encode transactions ... or anything else. Such as, you know, classified information, defamatory material, illegal pornography.

Oops.

She had come to stand and remember Sarah Everard, a woman who was abducted and murdered while walking home at night, for which a serving member of the metropolitan police has been arrested and charged. The vigil was outside, she was wearing a mask. And she ended up pinned to the ground by two, male, members of the metropolitan police. Somehow, of course, it was not their fault: this small woman had been so threatening that they had no option but to force her to the ground. Somehow, of course, no-one will resign and it will be no-one's fault.

This is what they will do to you if you protest: remember this.

If we are to believe The Society of Editors

The UK media is not bigoted and will not be swayed from its vital role holding the rich and powerful to account
[...]
Ian Murray, executive director of the Society of Editors, said it was untrue that sections of the UK press were bigoted.

Remind me, which UK media organisations did Katie Hopkins work for? You know, Katie Hopkins: the person who compared migrants to cockroaches and who lied that a photograph of a dead Syrian boy on a beach had been staged; the person who said that dementia sufferers should not block hospital beds. The person who, eventually, was permanently suspended from Twitter in June 2020 for multiple violations of their hateful conduct policy.

Because Katie Hopkins is not at all bigoted: of course she's not. And if she was, why, the people who hired her could not have known she was: after all, it's not their responsibility what awful lies the people they pay produce, is it? Merely employing a bigot (not, I repeat, that Katie Hopkins is a bigot) to spew hate does not raise any questions, at all, about the organisation that employed them, does it? And anyway that's all long in the past now, isn't it? None of that happens now. Of course not, no.

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.