The Braindump Blog

We live in a world where gangs of armed, poorly-trained state-sponsored masked thugs are apparently roaming the streets of our former ally, the United States are apparently killing, assaulting and abducting entirely innocent people, many of which are perfectly regular US citizens, with total impunity.

Once upon a time one might have thought the large, often progressive-in-origin “don’t be evil” American big tech firms would have had something less than positive to say about the situation, or at the very least not felt compelled to actively support and enable these damaging, dangerous, immoral actions.

The present day being what the present day is, of course the opposite is true.

Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump’s Mass Deportation Effort - and it is of course the bad side, the oppressive side, the violent side. They’ve deleted and banned various apps that some of the poor, beleaguered US citizenry were using to keep track of where ICE officials were and what they were doing - ICEBlock, Red Dot, those sort of apps.

The ban was seemingly under the absolutely ludicrous premise that ICE officials are “a vulnerable group in need of protection”.

For most Android users this, in practical terms, means they cannot use these services any more.

At the same time, Google are happy to host a Customers and Border Patrol app that is used by the authorities to facially-recognise a truly vulnerable group in need of protection (especially under the current regime) - immigrants - and call ICE on them.

After a user scans someone’s face with Mobile Identify, the app tells users to contact ICE and provides a reference number, or to not detain the person depending on the result, a source with knowledge of the app previously told 404 Media. 404 Media also examined the app’s code and found multiple references to face scanning.

Obviously, and correctly:

“Providing tech services to supercharge ICE operations while blocking tools that support accountability of ICE officers is entirely backwards,” Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project,

After all using these sort of tools was exactly what the governor of the state where some of the most atrocious ICE indecencies are taking place, Minnesota, asked his residents to do.

Gov. Tim Walz encouraged Minnesota residents to carry their phones at all times to record federal immigration actions, promising during a statewide address on Wednesday night that “accountability is coming” for abuses by federal officers.

“Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity but to bank evidence for future prosecution,” Walz said.

OK, time to buy an iPhone? Well, no, even if one did have the ludicrous amount of money spare to do so, it doesn’t matter. Apple already blocked all the same sort of apps.

In a statement US Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had “demanded” the removal of ICEBlock saying it was “designed to put ICE agents at risk”.

Sure enough, whilst they were not legally compelled to comply as far as I can see, Apple nonetheless rolled over, forgot about that concepts of free speech et al supposedly so precious to Americans, and did what exactly what their oppressive government asked them to do. Presumably, to curry favour with Trump, to make rich people richer, to prioritise personal and shareholder wealth over the common goo.

Per NPR:

“When companies agree to the administration’s demands in order to achieve some other goal, whether it be avoiding tariffs or getting merger approval, they send a message to others that it’s ok to do the same,“Ruane said. “What’s worse, they erode the promise of the First Amendment for all of us at the same time.”

Both companies, and their peers, have of course funnelled vast sums of money in Trump’s direction. In one of the more crass attempts at bribery to win favour, the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, personally gave Trump a big lump of “America First” gold at one of this meeting.

Contrary to their app store guidelines - one of the few selling points of the very existence of their app stores - they both failed to remove an app, X, that very recently had been used to generate non-consensual sexual images of women and children at a peak rate of 1 a minute. Outside of the self-evident horror of creating a child porn generator, perhaps the sickest example of this that I heard about was is some depraved folk using it to generate fake sexualised images of Renee Nicole Good - one of the innocent American citizens that the aforementioned ICE needlessly murdered.

Apps have been banned in the past for enabling the display of sexual imagery. Why did this app escape the many calls for its banning? Because it was owned by the richest man in the world, and one of the worst of the tech bros, who has close connections to the US government - Elon Musk. They were presumably too scared to take it down. Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards

…booting X from these app stores for its flagrant violation of policy means upsetting Musk and the entire right-wing media ecosystem he controls through X — and with it, directly upsetting the clout-chasing content vampires who currently run the United States

…

This is the trap these men have gotten themselves into: They sold their principles for power, and now they don’t even control their own companies. Welcome to gangster tech regulation!

The hypocrisy. In a past court case:

Apple argued that an indie storefront that users could install via Epic was a problem because it hosted porny games, calling games on Itch.io “offensive and sexualized.”

You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces

Then there’s Tiktok, the ownership of the US version of which has recently been mandatorily handed over to a “group of investors loyal to President Trump”. Several users are claiming that since the switchover they have been unable to make and/or widely distribute posts mentioning Epstein, criticising Trump or talking about the disgusting travesty that are recent ICE operations.

Even celebs have noticed.

Celebrities who have spoken out on TikTok against the killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota by Border Patrol claim that their posts are being silenced.

On Instagram, Billie Eilish posted a TikTok made by her brother, Finneas O’Connell, which criticizes those defending the killing, along with a follow-up image revealing that her brother’s video had a mere 114 likes, writing: “tiktok is silencing people btw…”

Tiktok US seems to be claiming that the cause of such phenomena are just unfortunate technical issues, nothing intentional. And I suppose it might be, however unlikely that sounds. But because of how these platforms are designed, we cannot know:

It would be incredibly difficult to prove TikTok is censoring content about ICE because the platform’s content recommendation process is so opaque, said Jeffrey Blevins, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who studies media law and ethics, among other subjects. Plus, if TikTok were intentionally censoring content about ICE, it would be within its legal right.

It’s never ending. OpenAI’s president is a Trump mega-donor. A horde of big tech bosses gave Trump huge sums of money so they could sit in the audience at his inauguration, presumably in an attempt to “cozy up to the incoming Trump administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation and buy favor”. Since then, big tech continues to bend the knee. in so many ways. And, I mean, it’s worked out well for them in many ways.

Standing alongside him that day were the leaders of the tech industry’s most powerful companies, who had donated to him in an unprecedented bending of the knee. In the ensuing year, the companies have reaped enormous rewards from their alliance with Trump, which my colleague Nick Robins-Early and I wrote about last month after Trump signed an executive order prohibiting states from passing laws regulating AI. Trump has sponsored the tech industry with billions in government funding and with diplomatic visits that featured CEOs as his fellow negotiators in massive, lucrative deals.

As year two of Trump’s second term begins, Silicon Valley’s titans appear poised to enrich themselves even more with the president’s enthusiastic aid.

The whole sector seems rotten to the core. I know not how, but somehow it is morally imperative to find a way to replace it, or, as a very minimum, stop personally supporting it.

🎥Watched Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale .

Surely the last Downton Abbey film, the famous history-inspired drama surround the lives of the aristocratic yet benevolent Crawley family and their happy-to-be-there servants.

It must be said that the story didn’t seem all that engaging and was potentially even less realistic than most of the entries. But for those of us that have enjoyed watching the series so far, there’s no reason not to finish it off.

📚 Finished reading: Year of the Rat by Harry Shukman.

This is Harry Shukman’s self-authored book about his time as an undercover journalist trying to infiltrate himself into various groups associated with the ghastly British far-right political movement in order to learn and expose what really goes on behind closed doors. Who is involved, and why? What do they do? How do they work? What do they say behind closed doors, to one of “their own”? How do they interact with each other? Who is pulling the strings? How are they funded?

You might have already seen parts of his story as blog posts from his employer, Hope Not Hate, or as part of a reasonably famous Channel 4 documentary - “Undercover: Exposing the Far Right”. This book is a provides far more detail on those operations as well as a further swathe of experiences from his time encountering and attempted to be accepted as a play in the various other unsavoury groups and individuals that he encountered along the way. It felt like one lesson here is that movement is more networked than it might seem. He found himself able to use his membership of one particular group to ingratiate himself into being invited to join another.

Reading what does actually go on in these groups, how they think and so on is of course, very unpleasant reading. Whether it will shock you in a world where each day the news appears to be full of the sort of racism, hatred and prejudice that a younger, more hopeful version of myself might have hoped had been crushed down to a handful of insignificant madmen - the vast majority of people featured are indeed men - who form the last impotent remnants of the horrendous rise of the 1970s National Front, I don’t know.

But we all live in different filter bubbles. And if you have any doubt that the very worst kind of prejudices from people, some of whom have violent fantasies based on delusional levels of hatred, are still out there in a way that still very much matters to the future of Britain and its population then this book might set you straight.

It seemed to me like there are two distinct sides of the movement, albeit with some connective tissue, both of which are necessary to understand.

There’s the version that some folk like to portray as just being “the average man in the street” who has “reasonable concerns” about his brown neighbours; the unstructured grassroots movement of self-selected citizens with a (twisted kind of) conscience. You and me. If we hated “foreigners”.

There’s potentially some truth to that idea. Shukman starts off by joining the Basketweavers, at a gathering of ostensibly fairly “normal” men who have no discernible interest in weaving baskets but are instead happen to be very paranoid, and have horrendous opinions. And are lonely. So lonely.

But unfortunately the salve they sought for their loneliness led them down the YouTube influencer wormhole or equivalent until they too feared the Great Replacement conspiracy, loved eugenics, hated (and believed in the existence of) “low iq races” and disbelieved the Holocaust. They actually believed that some traumatised asylum seeker was in fact only here to destroy England from their state-provided 5* hotel experience.

A grievance against women and tinges of incel culture were also common in this milieu. There seemed to be quite some overlap with the “manosphere”. Shukman encounters dating advice here and there, mostly culled from the pick-up-artist scene.

You can’t help but feel the “men would do anything except go to therapy” meme fully applies here. This is in no way to excuse their vile views or actions. They do terrible harm. They must be stopped, convinced to see that reality is not what they think it is. But there’s a sense of desperation in many of this group, and that if only they’d found a five-a-side social football club or clicked on a different Facebook post they might not be furtively meeting up in a pub in order to egg each other on to the say N word out loud - and everyone’s life would be better.

Then there’s the side that us normies, and possibly most of the folk in the above groups, are not supposed to know anything about - the radical right elites.

Here we’re talking about rich business men, race-science obsessed “scientists”, politicians and their acolytes, investors, and, inevitably, the occasional Silicon Valley tech bro. These people fancy themselves as the intellectual elite of the movement, “saving” British society from whatever conspiracy addled delusion they at least claim to believe whilst, in many cases, uncoincidentally vastly enriching themselves with money, power and status. Often by manipulating the pub-going people from the previous paragraph into doing their bidding.

We all know that the likes of Tommy Robinson, for all their working-class pretensions, are extremely wealthy. How? A mix of exploiting their followers - endless requests for donation - and secretive wealthy investors would seem to be the order of the day for these folk. In fact pretending to be an investor with money to burn was one way that the author successfully managed to get into some of this scene.

If ever one thought the modern-day British far right scene emanated from a miscellanea of average folk with concerns coming together to fly a flag, well, no. That’s what we are often told we are seeing. But behind the scenes it’s a lot more organised than that. And it has much worse intentions.

The elite are the people who, in a direct facsimile of their generally unfounded conspiracy theories, themselves infiltrate our everyday institutions, deliberately concealing their true views in a conscious strategy to leverage their privilege and access in the name of rapidly shifting the Overton window further in the direction of their despicable ideology. Recent news-watchers cannot not fail to have noticed that British mainstream political parties are openly and enthusiastically discussing ideas that would have been totally unacceptable not all that long ago.

What we actually do about all this is less obvious. The book is very readable, and I would recommend we all do so. A handful of parts are even deadpan amusing, in amongst the general horror. It is very important for us all, no matter what our political leanings are, to know what is really going on out there - how the structure of the British far right works to promote the interests of a few appalling and avaricious ideologues who manipulate groups of desperate lonely men in order to promote their own sick interests.

But the first step to solving a problem is to understand what it is and we should be entirely grateful to the author for potentially putting his life in jeopardy in order to reveal the truth behind the movement’s headlines. I already valued and supported Hope Not Hate who often do this kind of critical research amongst other action against the far right, and this has only convinced me further, and I hope you will consider doing so too.

I’m just not certain at present what the best next step is.

📚 Finished reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari.

This is recent book from the author probably most famous for writing “Sapiens”. There is likely some overlap with regards to humanity and its development, but here the focus is very specifically on the topic of the past, present and future of “information networks”. The latter half of the book drills down further on his concerns about how AI may dramatically affect such networks for the worse, potentially at great cost to humanity.

I know there have been some criticism of Harari’s past work around overconfidence and a potential lack of factual veracity. Not being a historian or having followed up each reference, I can’t speak too much to that. But he remains, to me, an extremely skilled story-teller and introduces several concepts here that feel useful for at least trying to understand some of the fundamental dynamics of the world around us.

His starting point is the idea that the reason humans have come to dominate the planet and its various species is largely down to our ability to form information networks in a way that enables mass cooperation. At first this was realised in small tribal groups. More recently of course we have developed the ability to communicate and cooperate throughout a nation, a continent, or across the entire planet.

We do this by leveraging “intersubjective realities”. These are socially-shared fictions that exist beyond the classical dichotomy of objective and vs reality. Intersubjective realities are ones that have no basis in the physical world but nonetheless a group all convince themselves, or at least act like, they are true - but would hold little sway with a rival group who set no stead in them.

Examples include the idea of a nation (the borders on a map often do not reflect any necessary physical boundary), money (what would the intrinsic value of a piece of paper with “£5” written on it be in a society that doesn’t believe in your currency?) or, no doubt controversially to some, religion. Collective belief in these sorts of imaginary things allows a large group of people to cooperate - and can in fact change objective and subjective reality.

However, intersubjective realities exist only within specific information networks. The bible or a £50 banknote would have little impact over a group of people who have never heard of Christianity or currency.

These realities then are mostly informational realities, not based in a necessary physical truth. They’re not the result of us finding out something empirical about the world. Which neatly brings us onto the topic of the purpose of information.

Naively, information is about finding truth. Scientists discover something. Their finding is a true representation of the world. Their facts becomes information. We all learn something. Life is all the better for it.

That sometimes happens of course, but it’s far from the whole story. Since time immemorial information has been leveraged both in the pursuit of truth, but also to create order. In fact the view of some populists is that the value of information is all about using it as a weapon to impose control. The truth of information matters little; what matters is whether you can wield it as a form of power. This is perhaps not a very surprising revelation when one looks at the recent words and actions of various famous populists currently spreading their falsehoods across the planet.

By Harari’s telling, neither view is right in isolation. In reality, the utility of information is a mix of the two, although, by his telling, over time humans have often chosen to prioritise creating order over truth. After all, for a society to work - at least for a while - its people do not need to know the truth about everything. But they do need to believe some of the same stories as each other in order to cooperate. And it is, beyond anything else, that cooperation which empowers humanity to do what it does.

Information doesn’t necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things in formation.

This is why in a modern world where each day humans gain an incredible amount of information - far too much for any individual keep up with - we don’t necessarily learn a whole lot of uncontested objective “truth”. In fact, it’s often quite the opposite. This has led to the situation where in today’s world it is not uncommon for many of us to simply disagree with each other on the what should be the literal basic facts of the world - let alone what should be done in reaction to those facts.

Presently this is likely most visible in the political world, especially around topics that could be classified as “culture war”. No amount of refreshing your Facebook feed and slurping in all that “information” seems like it could possibly to bring humanity together as one - not even in the sense of grounding us all to believe on a single objective truth (or, in some cases, even the possibility of a single truth).

Harari, being a historian cites several example from days past. For instance, sure, the invention of the printing press was an enabler the scientific revolution and the consequent discovery of a whole lot of truth. But it also enabled the mass distribution of nonsensical conspiracy theories with tremendously deleterious effects.

Consider for example the “Malleus Maleficarum”. That was the definitive 15th century book that claimed to describe how to categorised, identify and prosecute witches. These days most of us would realise that the witches they described therein were a made up category of people, not grounded in any reality. But enough people entered into the intersubjective reality that these wicked folk did and that instructions contained within the Malleus Maleficarum was the best way to deal with them.

This of course, led to untold harm and cruelty to the at-least-thousands of people that were tortured and killed as a result of this shared delusion. There was nothing about truth revealed in this tome. But it sure imposed an unconscionable type of order and control over a certain set of people.

Skipping ahead, Harari greatly worries about the impact of current and future AI on the the information networks that govern today’s world. In his view, AI should be thought of as an agent unto itself in the information network. This would mark the first time a non-human entity has gained that status.

Information networks originated as human-to-human things; people verbally told each other stories. This necessarily limited how far and fast they could spread. Then technologies such as documents and books were invented and utilised within the networks. This allowed information to spread far further and far faster. The internet only added to that. But at the end of the day, books were only a method of transmission - the flow only made sense and affected the world if it had humans at both ends: human to book to human.

Books didn’t make decisions. Books didn’t write themselves. Books were necessarily fully controlled by humans. Harari sees modern AI as something different - that it’s not a tool in the conventional sense. It’s not a passive participant in the information network. It can make decisions. It can “write itself”. This makes it an active agent in the information network. And a mysterious, alien one at that. Even today, even experts often can’t really understand the true specifics of how certain incarnations of it works or why it “decides” what it does in any given case.

We already see harms from this in a world where whether you are sent to jail can be dependent on some unknown algorithm. How can anyone possibly challenge the accuracy of a decision when they have no sense of how it was made?

Right now the damage from these systems, as life-ruining as it might be for any given individual subject or group to it, is often limited due to some human’s ability at the end of the day to control it or regulate it. We can ban black box algorithms from the court system and they’d be gone. But Harari worries that this might not always be the case.

At some point - I guess we are there already - no-one really “understands” the precise inner workings of AI (we know how it was trained, sure - but why did ChatGPT say the exact sentence it did? ). So whenever we decide to give it control over something, then we risk at least becoming subject to the decisions made by a kind of unprecedented alien intelligence.

The most terrible results from this could come either from its leveraging by human dictators, or, if we proceed without truly understanding how to make AI have goals that are fully in the interests of humanity (which right now we don’t know how to do) from AI as acting as its own agent.

AI would be the first technology capable of surveilling us every minute of every day, annihilating our privacy in a way that even the worst totalitarian dictators of the past, for all their horrendous crimes against humanity, could not.

Stalin had to sleep. He could only recruit so many informants. He had to trust that they wouldn’t let him down or turn on him. Modern-day computerised surveillance has no such intrinsic limits. You may well right now be wearing a device that constantly uploads your biometric signals to a “cloud” beyond your control. You almost certainly are carrying a device that has the ability to upload your precise location to whosoever wants to know where you are. You probably share your thinking and opinions on someone else’s network such that you could quite easily be marked in real time as a dissident vs supporter of whichever state happens to be in control of your country.

And if AI was to somehow get out of human control, there’s no reason to suspect it has the intuition necessary for or desire to protect humans from disaster by default.

Even if it does not escape its confines, Harari worries that this technology could lead to a new kind of “digital colonialism” wherein only a few rich nations or private organisations have the wealth and power to harvest the necessary training data from the rest of the world in order to train the most powerful AI models. Which they could then hoard for themselves, or sell back fragments to the less privileged folk whose data enabled it.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if you were a colony of an industrial power like Belgium or Britain, it usually meant that you provided raw materials, while the cutting- edge industries that made the biggest profits remained in the imperial hub….In a new imperial information economy, raw data will be harvested throughout the world and will flow to the imperial hub.

There are after all already a ton of products out there that rather depend on tiny handful of very advanced generative AI models from providers such as OpenAI. If America and China decided to block other countries from using their AI models tomorrow then it’s not like there’s all that many comparable alternatives. As it stands, the UK simply does not have its own ChatGPT at present.

This is rather a gloomy picture. What’s to be done about all this? Happily, the author does not think the situation is hopeless - although I didn’t get the sense that he thinks we are all that likely to solve the impending catastrophe.

Firstly, we have to understand AI as being an agent. Normal bombs do not decide which cities to destroy. AI bombs might well. Maybe they already do.

Secondly, we have to get over our naïve view that more information leads to more truth. Information connects us. It doesn’t need to represent the truth to do that. At best, it produces a balance of truth and order.

…Information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn’t. But it always connects.

But whilst information connects us, it only connects those of us within a given network. Harari introduces the concept of the “silicon curtain”. Imagined as an evolution of the Cold War’s “iron curtain”, this refers to as the situation where citizens divided by geography, ideology or some other such factor become entirely divided into separate “information cocoons”. This will only exacerbate both inequality and the destruction of any sense of a shared reality. And, amongst other unfortunate consequences, without reasonably universal agreements on certain sets of basic facts we would stand little chance of figuring out and enacting the sort of collective action that is necessary to mitigate any number of pending planetary-wide crises.

Thirdly, we must understand the importance of self-correcting mechanisms. Even without any AI doomerism, these are, and always have been, critical for democracies to function, and a strength of them when they do.

Human dictators usually have to pretend that they’re infallible. There are no independent courts or media to push back against their decisions. Information is used for order, not truth. The people around the dictator rarely have any personal incentive to do anything else. Eventually the lack of truth-grounding this leads to is one why dictatorships are, thankfully, vulnerable to rapid destruction.

In a democracy though, as slow and annoying as the process can be, the assumption is that any individual human is fallible and that it is only through some combination of numerous actors with differing motivations in communication with each other that makes the state likely to remain somewhat tethered to truth - and hence more stable and increasingly capable over the long term

Regulation will be key. Our laws aren’t yet designed for today’s technologies, let alone tomorrow’s. Harari notes that we fairly successfully outlawed counterfeit money. This was essential for the story of money as a trustworthy store of value to persist. So how about we consider outlawing counterfeit humans?

If democracies do collapse, it will likely result not from some kind of technological inevitability but from a human failure to regulate.

For regulation to work we will need to build and maintain a variety of strong and resilient institutions. Doing so is a critical part of how we must actively promote the well-functioning of the all-important societal self-correcting mechanisms. Weakening the courts, censoring the media, banning the scientific study of certain topics weaken these self-correcting mechanisms and hence the future society we live in.

The author bids us to think about how the US Constitution was explicitly designed with the knowledge that humans - including those that wrote it - are fallible. Article 5 provides a clear and explicit mechanism as to how the Constitution can be changed, as it invariably has been and will have to over time. Contrast this with, for example, the Holy Bible, which by claiming to originate from divine infallibility has no built in a mechanism for change.

All in all, we must not forget that whilst AI has agency (by Harari’s definition at least), so do we. Harari rails against the idea of technological determinism. For now at least, our decisions matter. And so we must make good ones so as to avoid a world where our decisions no longer mean anything. In his view, we can get a lot of way towards making those good decisions that avoid appalling outcomes by looking towards history, which is, by his telling, in reality the study of change.

It looks like some clever coders have figured out how to remove DRM from newer Kindle books now. It’s a bit more of an involved process than previously, but totally doable - only if of course it is legal where you live!

You will need version 2.8ish of Kindle for Windows (which is the current version at the time of writing), Calibre and a couple of Calibre addins installed:

• DeDrm version 10.0.15 (at least that’s the current one that works)
• A recent version of KFX input, which you can get from Calibre’s inbuilt “Get new plugins” feature. I am on version 2.28.0.

The DeDrm plugin needs a bit of configuring before it will work. I will likely do a proper writeup soon, but for now, following “solution 1” here should work.

📚Finished reading Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey.

This book is a mixture of the author’s autobiography and his beliefs and policy prescriptions of how we could and should improve the lives of some of the most economically-deprived struggling Britons out there.

He himself grew up in a deprived area of Scotland, and certainly had a very tough early- life experience. This included bouts of violence, addiction, homelessness, the death of his mother and various other huge challenges, the impact of all of which were exacerbated by the lack of resources available to him and his community after years of austerity and social change hollowing out traditional community resources, amongst others.

His lived experience thus gives him, and hence his readers, some deep insights as to what a life of poverty is really like and what should be done to tackle this perfectly preventable social ill that blights the lives of so many of us today.

By his telling, poverty should be thought of as being far wider in scope than simply financial deprivation. The struggles of such a life also produce social exclusion, emotional distress - including anger, shame, resentment - and a kind of psychological trauma that those of us who do not experience these hardships may not intuitively understand. There is a strong association with what today we call adverse childhood experiences, which commonly will play out in negative ways in later life.

It’s largely taken as read that the right wing tradition has no understanding of and probably very little interest in fixing this issue. In fact the Thatcherite revolution et al was likely a primary cause of the cruelty that resulted in the status quo. But whilst he comes from a background of left-wing politics, he - unlike what you might predict from the earlier autobiographical sections of the book - does often harshly criticise the modern left’s admittedly well-meaning approach .

He critiques most of the institutions that are set up ostensibly to help with such matters as being totally out of touch with the reality of the real life experience of poverty. They don’t talk to the people who are subject to it, they don’t listen to what they have to say. Hence they, at best, design and promote policy “solutions” that are useless or worse.

He sees such institutions and their leaders as frequently focusing on big vision overthrowing-the-system type thinking. Nice in theory, sure, academically fascinating perhaps. but, in his view, unrealistic and hence unhelpful. Instead, he would prefer them to promote and implement practical solutions that will actually benefit folk in poverty concretely today - resources such as community centres, mental health support and education. Instead, the blue-sky thinking apparent in many such institutions mainly create everlasting jobs for the typically middle class employees who work on these problems (and who might be put out of a job should the problem they’re addressing actually be solved) - but do little to meet their stated aim of improving the lot of poorer people.

This is not to say he doesn’t believe in some of the possibly more academia-associated ideas such as structural concepts of injustice. But rather, whilst tackling them, insists that we must not overlook any alleviating solutions that we know will work today, right now - lessening the unjust suffering of poorer communities immediately rather than in some supposed decades-hence utopia.

He also has some criticism some of those folk who suffer poverty which I have to say did not sit so instinctually comfortably with me - perhaps then I am part of the problem in his view. He instructs them to not wait for solutions from above but rather inculcate a sense of personal responsibility, of realising that they have agency in their lives, of not making excuses that result in the blame for an unhappy life being situated entirely in a bad government rather than their own life choices, of not failing to take advantage to the non-zero modes of assistance that are actually available to them. It is incumbent on the governing classes to listen to those voices of those who struggle - but also incumbent on those excluded from society by poverty to make their voices heard.

This all feels like good, sensible, sometimes research-backed advice, but it is of course always a fine line between “personal responsibility” type lines and victim blaming. Nonetheless, I can certainly believe that if we do not actually believe we can do something to improve our lives then it is much less likely that our lives will in fact be improved. And there are certainly links between feelings of agency and mental health conditions such as depression.

He also calls to us all to subject ourselves to some rigorous intellectual introspection and honesty. Think about your beliefs on this subject (and others). Why do you believe what you believe? Why do you think a specific solution to poverty is the right one? Do, by any chance, you happen to believe the same things as your parents and your peer group do? What would it take to change your mind?

Sure, what you intuitively think might be right - but it is rather unlikely you were born with a perfect grasp of reality and the solutions to social ills in your brain. He uses his own journey, which started off from a place of futile resignation, anger, self-destructive tendencies and a deep resentment and prejudice against anyone he believed was not “working-class” into a far more nuanced and, let’s hope, helpful to him and to society in general mindset - part of which has been channelled into writing this book.

📺 Watched This Country seasons 1-3.

I’m a sucker for a spoof documentary, and this BBC production was no exception. The purported focus is to study how the youth of today that live in the deep countryside fare where there is little work or entertainment on offer - and decades of austerity have naturally wreaked havoc on most community resources. Awkward, hilarious stuff.

The stars of the show - cousins Kerry and Lee Muckloe - are played by real-life siblings , Daisy and Charlie Cooper. They created and co-wrote the show. And whilst This Country is over, they’ve recently come back to the screens in the form of “Daisy May and Charlie Cooper’s NightWatch”, which I’m sure I’ll watch at some point.

There is nothing in this world less patriotic than calling on a foreign leader to come abduct your democratically elected leader and take over your country.

And yet:

TOMMY Robinson has called on Donald Trump to invade and “free” the UK from the “tyrannical dictator” Keir Starmer following the United States’s attack on Venezuela.

Anyone who has any love of any part of the UK should do their best to help reduce any impact that this dangerous, violent, lying, ignorant criminal has on the way our country is governed, now or in the future. He is, at times, nothing short of treasonous.

And the fact that, as far as I know, he hasn’t been arrested for this comment would seem to show that the whole ‘you can’t say anything any more without getting arrested’, sentiment - whilst there are probably a few legitimate arguments to be had on the topic - is totally overblown.

FTSE 100 CEOs earn more than average worker’s yearly pay by noon on 6 January

Statistics like these really make Britain’s economic inequality quite stark.

Median annual pay for FTSE 100 chief executives is £4.4m, the High Pay Centre thinktank calculated, 113 times higher than the £39,039 earned by the median full-time worker.

The median such chief executive is earning £23 per minute according to the High Pay Centre’s calculations, even if we assume they’re working a 62.5 hr week.

Even after the recent rises, minimum wage in the UK is set at a maximum of £12.21 an hour - and less if you’re younger than 21.

It was interesting to read that (at least) the New York Times and the Washington Post learned about the covert US military mission to abduct the President of Venezula sometime before it actually happened - not just after Trump tweeted some meandering string full of capital letters about the subject like the rest of us did. . They chose not to publish anything on it though, apparently to avoid putting the US troops involved in more danger than they otherwise would have been.

The decisions in the New York and Washington newsrooms to maintain official secrecy is in keeping with longstanding American journalistic traditions — even at a moment of unprecedented mutual hostility between the American president and a legacy media that continues to dominate national security reporting.

I imagine that was not an entirely trivial decision to make given the current environment in the US and beyond. The mission in question was after all, for all its potential upsides and downsides, very likely an internationally and nationally illegal act that hadn’t yet taken place, being planned and actioned in the absence of any sign of democratic oversight.

It was also interesting for me to realise that there is no official mechanism for the US government to ask the press to stop reporting on whatever the highly sensitive topic of the day is. It sounds like the system simply relies on the media and the government coming to a mutual agreement.

Over here in the UK it is a bit different - we have, for example, the infamous “D-Notices”, or DSMA-Notices as they have now apparently been rebranded to. Our government can issue these to request the media not publish stories that they think will endanger national security . Wikipedia has a short list of a few times we know that these have been issued.

D-Notices aren’t actually legally enforceable, although they are typically adhered to. Beyond that though, we have seen the UK government take out injunctions - or even “super injunctions” - which do legally prevent information being shared. That was how the government covered up the catastrophic data leak which revealed the personal details of the thousands of Afghans who secretly helped the UK’s armed forces for a couple of years.

📺 Watched Return To Paradise seasons 1 and 2.

Yet another Death In Paradise spinoff. This time it’s set in Australia and the weird/genius/awkward/reluctant detective who is always just about to quit her job is a lady, Mackenzie Clarke. She returns to her homeland for a break after being suspended from her job the police force over here in London. But will she get a break as such? Well, obviously not.

The format and storylines are basically exactly the same as the original and all the other spinoffs - some variant of “cozy murder” - so you might as well watch this one if you liked those. I did.

Yet more of the apparent hypocrisy:

November 28 2025: Trump issues a full pardon to ex-Honduran president Hernandez who was in a US jail based on charges around drug trafficking and weapons.

January 4 2026: Trump authorises the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Mandura and intends to try him in US courts on charges around drug trafficking and weapons.

Weird date coincidence (I assume):

January 3 1990: US captures Panamas’s ruler Noriega on foreign soil in a probably illegal military operation.

January 3 2026: US captures Venezuela’s president Maduro on foreign soil in a probably illegal military operation.

Trump authorises his military to bomb Venezuela and kidnap its president, Maduro, which they have successfully done.

Trump now thinks he’s going to run Venezuela, which will include seizing its oil industry, presumably so that the mega rich US oil companies can become even richer.

Apparently gone are the days where the US used proxy wars and secret funding to depose Latin American governments it disliked. Now they show no shame in directly doing it themselves and then tweeting about it.

Gone are the days when their government at least pretended at the time that their foreign military incursions were not actually mostly about seizing their opponents natural resources.

Rather:

Just two weeks ago, Trump mentioned oil as a justification for his military buildup off Venezuela’s coast.

They took our oil rights, removed our companies, and we want them back," he told reporters on the Joint Base Andrews tarmac beside Air Force One.

Trump has, for years, expressed his belief that the United States had the right to confiscate oil using the military

Maduro was a bad man, a horrible president. No one needs to venerate him as anything other than that.

Maduro was widely considered to be leading an authoritarian government characterized by electoral fraud, human rights abuses, corruption, and severe economic hardship

But one can’t just invade other countries and abduct people you don’t like. The US operation was almost certainly illegal under international law, although I have seen many of the relevant organisations look like they’re going to do anything about it so far. Given the US can veto any relevant UN decision there’s little likelihood of much happening there.

It is perhaps less mind-blowingly unprecedented than it seems. The US did something vaguely similar in Panama, at least to my recent reading, back in 1989.

The United States invaded Panama in mid-December 1989 during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. The purpose of the invasion was to depose the de facto ruler of Panama, General Manuel Noriega, who was wanted by U.S. authorities for racketeering and drug trafficking. The operation, codenamed Operation Just Cause, concluded in late January 1990 with the surrender of Noriega

Although in that case it seems like they were rather more provoked rather than it being seemingly the whim of a corrupt, criminal and at times seemingly mad, US president.

Following the declaration of a state of war between Panama and the United States passed by the Panamanian general assembly, as well as the lethal shooting of a Colombia-born U.S. Marineofficer Lt. Robert Paz at a PDF roadblock, Bush authorized the execution of the Panama invasion plan.

Nontheless, Bush’s operation was condemned as illegal by much of the global community.

The U.S. government invoked as a legal justification for the invasion. Several scholars and observers have opined that the invasion was illegal under international law, arguing that the government’s justifications were, according to these sources, factually groundless, and moreover, even if they had been true they would have provided inadequate support for the invasion under international law

So there’s little doubt that Trump’s actions were, once again, not in line with the law. The question is, can and will anyone with power do anything about it, or is this the new norm for the country formerly known as a kind of global policeman?

On the one hand, Reform UK heavily promote and feature Lucy Connolly at their annual conference - a lady who was arrested and plead guilty to stirring up racial hatred via her offensive tweets.

But they’re only this kind of “free speech advocates” when it suits them. As soon as its not someone whose views agree with at the vibe of the Reform higher-ups it’s a totally different story.

Regarding Abd el-Fattah, who has also been found to have produced some very offensive tweets, which he has since apologised for- well, in that case, he wants to go beyond merely arresting him, instead desiring to remove his British citizenship and deport him. Even though there would seem to be no legal basis for doing so whatsoever:

The Conservatives and Reform UK have both suggested the activist should be deported from the UK for the posts and have his British citizenship revoked, even though the law does not appear to provide grounds for either action. Nigel Farage has promoted a petition for people to sign in favour of deporting Abd el-Fattah to Egypt.

It’s yet another example of Reform and some of their ideological allies' hypocritically switching their views on some of the fundamental tenets of British society - law and order - depending on whether they like the person concerned.

Here are the books I finished reading in 2025.

Innumerable start up ventures from the often morality-free seeming tech bros that control most of our digital lives seem to be named after Lord of The Rings stuff. Business Insider gives us a few examples:

• Erebor - a bank
• Anduril - defense tech
• Palantir - how to describe? BI says “a government-focused software giant”.
• Mithril Capital - an investment firm
• Durin - mining
• Rivendell One LLC - a trust that manages Peter Thiel’s shares.
• Lembas LLC - an investment firm
• Valar Ventures - a venture captial firm
• Sauron Systems - a home security system

But often in doing so, some of these pretention and shallow thinkers betray their actual ignorance of the book, or, if it’s not that, well, it’s a bad sign for other reasons.

The latest one that crossed my radar was Sauron Systems.

They’re trying to build:

…what they envisioned as a military-grade home security system for tech elites.

…a system combining AI-driven intelligence, advanced sensors like LiDAR and thermal imaging, and 24/7 human monitoring by former military and law enforcement personnel.

Like all good tech start up products, apparently it doesn’t actually exist yet other than as something investors can throw money at.

It is also named after the famously evil baddie from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and elsewhere in Tolkien’s literary world.

So who or what exactly is Sauron? According to Wikipedia:

Tolkien stated in his Letters that although he did not think “Absolute Evil” could exist as it would be “Zero”, “Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible.”

He explained that, like “all tyrants”, Sauron had started out with good intentions but was corrupted by power. Tolkien added that Sauron “went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination”,

Bold, and I suppose potentially honest, of a surveillance company to represent itself as an entity well known for it’s evil-doing.

Some might say that “started out with good intentions but was corrupted by power” and “went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination” isn’t a particularly terrible description of a few of Silicon Valley’s wannabe digital empires.

Yet another way in which the often appalling, often racist, anti-immigrant sentiment being successfully whipped up in Britain by various politicians and media is making our country a weaker, worse place to live in for even its ‘native’ citizens.

The health service is being put at risk because overseas health professionals increasingly see the UK as an “unwelcoming, racist” country, in part because of the government’s tough approach to immigration, Jeanette Dickson said.

Record numbers of foreign-born doctors are quitting the NHS and the post-Brexit surge in those coming to work in it has stalled. At the same time, the number of nurses and midwives joining the NHS has fallen sharply over the past year.

Our health system is already seemingly in a desperate condition. Without the migrants that come to our country and generously bestow their skills on us for the good of the entire British population it can only ever move further towards being totally doomed. For which we will all tremendously suffer.

Foreign-born doctors and nurses were being put off by antagonism by politicians towards migrants, media coverage of immigration, the racist abuse of international medical graduates by NHS colleagues and racist aggression by patients toward minority ethnic NHS staff, she said.

📚 Finished reading: The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown.

This is Dan Brown’s sixth book in the Professor Langdon series. This time he’s got a girlfriend - Professor of Noetics Katherine Solomon. She’s about to publish a book that not even Langdon is allowed to know the details of its contents, other than that it’s something fairly revelatory about consciousness.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t go all that smoothly. Powerful people don’t want the book to get to print. And they’ll go to even greater lengths than Meta did to stop it.

As ever, Brown’s book feels well-researched. Some of the studies it mentions and the descriptions of the few notable locations I’m aware of ring true, even if the events themselves are a little credulity-stretching at times. But hey, who wants to read about a load of boring normal stuff. And the Institute of Noetics is a real organisation. What is there is engaging and fast paced.

As to the topic of Katherine’s book, well, who knows. But I did come away with the curious feeling that, despite being fictional, this book presented arguments for a “non-conventional reality”, let’s say, as convincing as some non-fiction books on the topic, albeit a lot more abbreviated.

I know people love to hate the author, Dan Brown. I have no idea how to judge his literary style. But nor do I really care when I do know that I really enjoy basically every one of his books.

For all their plastic patriotism, Reform sure do get financed by a lot of people with extensive foreign interests.

About 66% of all the money donated to Reform during this parliament came from donors who are resident overseas or with offshore interests overseas.

For all their man of the poor beleaguered common people shtick, they sure do get heavily financed by a few extraordinarily wealthy donors.

New research from Democracy for Sale shows that three-quarters of all donations to Reform have come from just three men: Christopher Harborne, Jeremy Hosking and Richard Tice

Not to get all conspiracy theoryish over this - I’ll leave that to some of their more deluded candidates - but it is surely of note that all these mega-rich folk with foreign interests - the very people that Reform at times pretend are the enemies of the people that only they can defend us against - are so enthusiastic for Reform to win.

Follow the money, cui bono, and all that jazz.

Peter Kellner uses Yougov data to estimate how many British people might vote or against Brexit if the referendum happened again today. He comes out with a figure suggesting a rather anti-Brexit verdict today:

…the combined impact of demographics and changed minds is to convert a 1.3 million majority for leaving the EU into an 8.1 million majority for rejoining it.

Something like this can only be a rough estimate that is riddled with assumptions. But, if nothing else, it reminds us that, as with every election, whatever the result was in the past, it might not remain the same in the future. Things change. People change. Priorities change. That is after all why we have governmental elections every few years!

There are several dynamics at play here.

Firstly, older people were more likely to vote at all, and more likely to vote for Brexit. They are also, sadly, more likely to have died since the original referendum in 2016.

Secondly, some people who were too young to vote in 2016 are now old enough to vote. And the youngest cohort of voters poll as very pro rejoining the EU.

As Kellner, somewhat harshly, puts it:

We are told that it would be undemocratic to overturn the 2016 referendum result. After almost ten years, that requires a belief that the votes of the dead count for more than the views of the young.

Thirdly, some people who did vote in the previous referendum and are still alive to vote today have changed their minds. Changed their minds in either direction of course, but Yougov polling suggests that shifting from pro-Brexit to anti-Brexit is rather more prevalent than the reverse; probably no surprise after the general catastrophe it turned out to be.

8% of those who voted Remain would now vote to stay out, while 29% of Leave voters want to rejoin.

All in all, the estimates of the volumes involved in this dynamics can be visualised, as he does for his New World article, like this:

The National Bureau of Economic Research recently released a working paper looking at The Economic Impact of Brexit on the UK. They set out to use various simulations and estimation techniques as to estimate what would have happened had Brexit never happened.

It doesn’t make for pleasant reading and undoubtedly helps explain some of the current mess that our country appears to be in. Whilst I haven’t been through the whole thing in detail as yet, in the abstract we learn that:

These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process.

Back in the days of the referendum, the folk who raised concerns and produced analysis suggesting that there would likely be some adverse economic impact from disassociating ourselves from our nearest trading partner et al were often accused by the more rabid Brexiteers as creating a “project fear”, i.e. making fake doom-laden predictions just to scare the population from not voting exactly as the likes of Farage, Johnson et al wanted them to.

It turns out that some of the forecasts were in fact wrong in the longer term. But wrong in the other direction; underestimating the damage that would be done to the UK economy.

Comparing these with contemporary forecasts…shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.

Often I feel that those of us who dislike the continuous and unpatriotic efforts of various politicians, media and others to illegitimately demonise immigrants in order to mask the real source of the country’s poor know what we hate - we know abject immorality and counter-productive policies of hostility when we see them - but not so much what the concrete positive policy for the future should exactly be.

The report “Time for change: The evidence-based policies that can actually fix the immigration system”, from Zoe Gardner, presents 9 key recommendations. The full thing should perhaps be compulsory reading for anyone who is trying to form an opinion on the matter.

Below are the 9 key reforms the report demands:

1. Safe routes
2. The right to work and faster, better asylum decisions
3. A not-for-profit asylum accommodation system
4. Reform labour inspection and protections from workplace exploitation
5. Scrap restrictive employer-sponsored visas
6. Integrate asylum seekers into the points-based system
7. A simplified, universal pathway to settlement after five years
8. Reintroduce birthright citizenship and reduce integration barriers for children
9. Embrace a positive narrative about immigration, diversity and belonging

The “why?” and “what about?” side of things is argued at length in the full report of course.

Something else the report brings up that I hadn’t thought of in a while is how the UK (and other countries) reacted to Ukrainian folk who wanted to flee Putin’s violence. We did not see nearly the negative frenzy surrounding the relatively large numbers of people involved then than when the average small boat containing a few people from amongst the world’s least privileged imaginable lands on our shores. Nor do we see endless newspaper stories today about whichever the self-contradicting hot topic of the day is about Ukranians “relying on handouts” or “stealing our jobs”.

There are obvious reasons why this is the case. But it is further evidence that another way is possible; indeed another way is essential.

In the UK, people who receive certain types of benefits get a £10 Christmas bonus each year.

Whilst that’s a cute and, given the current state of things, desperately needed extra from a kind of state Santa, it’s of note that this policy has existed since 1972. And, incredibly, it’s always been a nominal £10 every year since then.

Hence the amount been absolutely ravaged by inflation. £10 in 1972 would be worth around £120 today. It’s probably about time the amount received was updated.

After a lead up mired in chaos and leaks, the UK’s new budget dropped last week. At first glance it is substantially less terrible than I had feared.

Not everyone agrees of course, because not everyone agrees on anything any more. Yougov did some interesting polling on the public reaction to its individual components , shown below.

Probably the one I’m most confused / despondent about is the negative public reaction to the eradicating of the 2 child benefit limit.

A majority of Britons though this was a bad move. But how anyone could imagine this was the wrong thing to do given it was a policy that condemned hundreds of thousand of children to poverty whilst seemingly failing to achieve its self-declared aims whatsoever is beyond me.

Innocent children should not be punished no matter how poorly you believe their parents have behaved.