Westminstenders: Operation Shock and Awe

[RedToothBrush]

The government is launching its get ready for the end of transition campaign which has been dubbed a 'shock and awe' campaign.

In this campaign we will learn all about what Brexit means and what amazing opportunities lie for having increased customs and borders, beaucracy and increased costs. Bet you are all really excited and looking forward to this.

We will also get a 'Farage Garage' in Kent to cope with these wonderful opportunities in traffic jams. This will be something that businesses throughout the country will be super excited to plan for in their socially distanced Zoom meetings or across warehouses with their face masks on. And banks will be delighted to see an uptick in applications in CCJs and debt reconstruction plans.

It will be a super fun time for the under 30s who have zero hours contracts, worked in retail or hospitality. Or should I say 'worked'.

Meanwhile the right to a jury trial has been binned due to 'long covid delays' which are shorter than they were several years ago. The NHS isn't getting the funding it expected, and waiting lists are longer than ever with no way to clear them. The plan to build more hospitals seems to have disappeared with the Nightingales. Many councils are about to go into insolvency and be taken over by accountancy firms. The civil service is being dismantled and conservative loyalists with no experience being put in charge of important functions of state. Communications with the press are being 'streamlined' to make them incredible of holding power to account and only able to repeat government public announcements.

Anyone looking forward to Christmas? When you write a letter to Santa remember to add 'visa application form', 'a sleeping bag for use at Dover', 'tinned tomatoes' and 'packets of seeds to grow your own' to the list.

York has historical significance for the government. It is also of course rather naice and has as much money as you'll find anywhere in England. It's nice to see sense emerging, perhaps even something of a spirit of compromise with the country, but I'd prefer, oh, Bradford, St Ann's in Nottingham, maybe Leicester. More realistically perhaps they could use the NEC in Birmingham, before it re-opens fully and makes other arrangements.

Or Stoke.

Matt Hancock trying time re-write history, claiming that lockdown started on 16 March at his instigation, not on 23 March like we all thought

The tweets are worth looking at - including the link to Hansard to demonstrate that he is lying misremembering.

Brexit will experience the same re-writing.

https://twitter.com/rossignoluk/status/1283812999396982786?s=21

@LouiseCollins28

Trident has “worked” round the clock everyday 24/7/365 since 1993. We know this because none of us has been vaporised.

My cousin has prayed to keep us from being vaporised over that time period. She’d say it’s the power of prayer that’s kept us safe. Both are fallacious arguments.

Louise! However did we manage not to be vaporized before we had it!

To me it seems just the world is waking up to the realisation that nuclear is being disarmed in favour of online hacking wars, the UK have decided to go it alone with nuclear as our biggest form of defence. We certainly don't seem to have a strong enough IT sector to hack other countries for information.

And yes Loud Leaver on FB has already posted about "Wondering why people are surprised that Russia was supporting Labour in the election" No mention of the expose of selling our NHS to US being that "support" of course. Does rather legitamise it as a real document IMO.

And your cousin is probably much less expensive?

The lockdown most definitely did not start on 16th March. We were in France at the time, where the lock down started on 17th and we wondered when it would happen in the UK or England.

I think at the time, France had it worse than the UK - so it wasn't entirely unreasonable. Then the impetus came from the general public.

Poulet Because the Americans were the first to weaponise its first forerunners and each succeeding improvement, at the time they achieved that feat we were bezzie mates with them.

In China, hand-picked students take university degrees in hacking.

Bozo is now apparently giving the entire NHS £3billion for the next wave of COVID. So, not as much as Cumming's mates companies then?

Is that all? Won't go far.

Louise! However did we manage not to be vaporized before we had it!
hmm

The RAF V-Force, then (from 1969) Polaris.

On the plus side its quite difficult to 'teach' hacking over and above what is just good coding practice. Script kiddies are dangerous yes but when so much 'hacking' relies on a dumb user doing something it's pretty basic teaching needed - the best defence being training users.

The number of people who actually understand the machine/software interface deep enough to be a serious threat is decreasing worldwide - to be good requires a specific mindset - which IMHO is not that common.

But good language (English, mandarin etc) skills can be taught, and are more of a threat, the quality of phishing etc messages is vastly improved today and of course the west doesn't really do non-English/spanish so we can't really compete.

I had almost forgotton about the UN report into poverty in UK, such revelations no longer seem shocking [[https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jul/16/dfid-merger-will-severely-impact-uks-status-concludes-cross-party-inquiry

link fail www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jul/16/dfid-merger-will-severely-impact-uks-status-concludes-cross-party-inquiry

They don't seem to be funding any specific sectors other than banking at the moment.

Looks like we'll be using Guv'nor Cummins' mates for "global aid" too then.

Although it didn't "Come out of the blue" - the right wing of the party have been desperate to cut down on overseas aid. Come on, it's only giving assistance to poor black and brown people overseas, and why should they want to do that, when they jib at assisting poor people, black, brown or white in their own country?

Not that I am both sarcastic and cynical, mind.

Presumably with a straight face.

eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/16/mcenany-science-should-not-stand-way-schools-reopening/5454168002/

'Science should not stand in the way' of schools reopening, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany says

...

I have just started hearing noise about Public Health England stats on Coronavirus deaths. Guardian live stream picked it up in their post at 09:39 😮

www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/jul/17/uk-coronavirus-live-boris-johnson-3bn-plan-nhs-battle-ready-for-winter-second-wave

The number of people who actually understand the machine/software interface deep enough to be a serious threat is decreasing worldwide - to be good requires a specific mindset - which IMHO is not that common.

It's amazing the number of "experts" who totally fail to acknowledge that unless you have built the silicon you run your code on from scratch, you really have no idea about security. Something I used to note when the FOSS evangelists started singing. And then we had Spectre and Meltdown.

Same will go for whoever supplies the 5G kit. Unless they supply the entire production process for the silicon, we have no idea if it's secure or not.

BA retiring it's 747s.

I'm still saying we passed peak long haul. No going back to how it was.

Good, frankly. I hope we’ve past peak everything so far as passenger aviation is concerned until the suppliers of services radically clean up their act.

@LouiseCollins28

Good, frankly. I hope we’ve past peak everything so far as passenger aviation is concerned until the suppliers of services radically clean up their act.

Mass global travel is a contraindication for successful pandemic prevention and control. You simply can't have both.

Louise - it's why I always look at excess deaths. That's the true cost of the pandemic interns of lives.
No doubt this debacle will be used to say we shouldn't have locked down (already happening on twitter) , that it's all a lie , and also a reason to dismantle the health structures in the country.