Well, it finally happened. The Queen of Canada died, at 96 years old. She passed a couple days ago at her Scotland estate, and I still haven’t heard a cause of death, but I doubt the COVID bout she had earlier this year helped her any. Prince Charles gets promoted to King Charles III, and is now the King of Canada. That looks so weird to write, like it’s the 1950s again.
Tag Archives: UK
Plague Update: BoJo Caught Lying To Parliament, Again
This is not Boris Johnson’s first rodeo. His party excused him before, will they again protect him and MET police too? Do ducks love water?
https://saskboy.wordpress.com/2022/04/20/plague-update-bojos-contempt-for-parliament/
Plague Update: BoJo’s Contempt For Parliament
Two years ago the UK PM Boris Johnson almost died from COVID-19.
About 3 months after that, he broke his own government’s COVID-19 public safety measures and had a birthday party for which he was recently fined for attending. He became the first British PM to be found to have broken the law while in office. Rather than resigning in disgrace as Pie argues for in his satirical video here, BoJo stayed on and is expected to avoid sanction in Parliament because of his party’s corruption and support in a majority government situation.
BoJo is among the worst human beings, and the British have him as Prime Minister, of course.
Plague Update: Worst Among Us
I practically couldn’t believe this, except I know BoJo is not a fine bloke.
Man too stupid to realize he brainstormed how to commit suicide on live TV, with the intention to instead calm the public down, has additional ideas regarding how to handle a more contagious virus:
And on the subject of brain-dead idiots in charge of governments, Premier Moe went on the radio with Saskatchewan’s Shock Joke, err Jock, to wax poetic about the days when restaurants didn’t have screening for irresponsible plague rats like himself.
Every other time Moe reopened Saskatchewan it was an unqualified success, so why wouldn’t the next time be as awesome?
Oh, right, the thousands* of dead people.
😬
*Mortality during the pandemic has been about 4000 people more than the standard death rate.
What does it take for newspaper columnists, who don’t write for the Prairie Dog Mag, to speak frankly about the Sask Government deciding to let more people die? We don’t find out, in the next link:
BoJo Unwell, Like The Economy And Environment
Boris Johnson is at death’s doorstep. This would otherwise be an unremarkable point, except he’s inexplicably the Prime Minister of the UK.
It turns out to be a bad idea to ignore the best advice by the world’s best epidemiologists and doctors.
We’re all familiar with politicians ignoring the advice of scientists, it’s just rare that we so quickly see the consequences of that haughtiness bite one of them so squarely in the ass.
If someone puts the economy before the survivability of our species and public health systems, they’re unfit to lead. This isn’t new, I’ve felt this way about leaders long before Greta Thunberg got well deserved global press for pointing that very obvious point out so clearly to so many.
Leave Or Remain In? The Former UK Chooses Out And About Does Itself In
Brexit: It’s a term I first heard months ago on Twitter in relation to people mostly angry with immigration in the UK. It means “British Exit from the European Union”. The country narrowly voted to leave the EU, and the economy/currency Pound Sterling soon crashed from the uncertainty of the Prime Minister resigning, the opposition leader being turfed by MPs, and the Brexit Leave leaders having no effing plan. One of the Brexit leaders is the former mayor of London, and the other is the leader of the UK Independence Party, a sort of extreme Reform Party hell bent on blocking Muslim immigrants much how Trump has envisioned for the United States.
A great British comic in the US, John Oliver, says there are no do-overs for the Brexit referendum vote. I tend to disagree on this point, even though the rest of his analysis is fine and funny.
There are do-overs, because we have elections every few years or if the loss of confidence in the ruling government takes place. It’s pretty obvious Britons have no confidence in the current government or the choice to Leave. Therefore it’s not anti-democratic to take another vote to determine public opinion following the initial consequences of their earlier vote last week. After all, if people are still satisfied with all of the Brexit results, they’ll again vote for it, correct? It might keep the UK united, otherwise Scotland is set to leave so they’ll stay with the EU, as is Ireland which may unite with Northern Ireland.
Keep in mind I’m no expert on British politics, so if you’ve a correction to make to this summary, please leave it in the comments.
ADDED:
Assange Illegally Detained by UK Police
The London police force has wasted millions of pounds on detaining Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy for years.
People Are Not Pigeons
You needn’t go farther than the comment section of a UK rag to find the sort of people who are okay with torture devices beging designed into their buildings.
“Now I’m lying on the cold, hard ground.”
Some sick cities are dealing with homeless people as if they were pigeons crapping from the roof of Wrigley Field.
Now there may be a municipality crazy and cruel enough to install this 5 year old pay-bench idea.
PAY & SIT: the private bench (HD) from Fabian Brunsing on Vimeo.
ADDED:
He Called Himself a Journalist – UPDATED
The Independent got a black eye today from a former editor who shamelessly confessed to being an authoritarian.
Blackhurst, in explaining why he would never have allowed his newspaper to publish any of the documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, actually wrote:
If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operations, who am I (despite my grounding from Watergate onwards) to disbelieve them?”
Most people, let alone journalists, would be far too embarrassed to admit they harbor such subservient, obsequious sentiments.
Greenwald sums up:
But it does still surprise me when people calling themselves “journalists” openly admit to thinking this way. But when they do so, they do us a service, as it lays so vividly bare just how wide the gap is between the claimed function of establishment journalists and the actual role they fulfill.
—
Caution about The Guardian*. While they may be publishing Greenwald right now, I don’t expect that to go on forever. Blackhurt gives a clue as to why:
The former Labour cabinet minister was incandescent with rage. […]
I was puzzled as to why she would be so angry – normally she and The Guardian would be of one mind.
Social Media Intelligence
I’m so sick of the government reading all of my Facebook status updates, and never liking any of them.
(Seen on a graphic going around Facebook)
SOCMINT
“It had been used, in one case, to arrest ten people who threatened to protest in front of UK Prime Minister David Cameron after organising a meet-up over Twitter.”
Holy, that’s disturbing. Majority Report, anyone? Protesters arrested for planning to protest? Newsflash: Protesting isn’t illegal in a ‘free’ country like England. I guess that rules England out as being free.
“It almost acts like CCTV on the ground for us really,” he said. “When there’s a protest, people go out and record video and we know 2 minutes later they’ll be on YouTube and because people on the internet are very silly they’ll say ‘that’s my mate Joe Bloggs’.”
Police are not supposed to care about free citizens airing grievances against political leadership. It makes the country unfree, if they so much as care to monitor innocent people.
“A lot of newspapers out there report on are we becoming a police state, are the police monitoring everything out there,” [Mr Ertogral] said. “It’s kind of finding the balance and using that information to our advantage, but also staying ethical.”
No shit, NDEU Sherlock. You’re doing a bloody awful job of staying ethical in your police state.
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 