Pushbacks and Brainwaves: The Weekly Roundup

Please post accounts involving situations in which you feel ground has been gained; whether or not they involved you directly, from the individual level upwards. What worked?

Also, what ideas have you had for making a difference to the things that you do, or that are most affecting you?

Equilibrium?

👇

https://twitter.com/JustStop_Oil/status/1675129382828924935?t=kqtpol4tDX4JZS3ctuUYcg&s=19

It seems that this channel has received enough attention in recent days to merit the arrival of bots! So, if you appear to get messages from me–directly–please disregard and delete.

It is not even possible for me to send direct messages as 'Charles Malet x Unbound Today', except as replies to comments in the chat, which are visible for all.

This does provide an opportunity to highlight the many practical issues with the introduction of digital identity and digital currency. Neither can be presented as anything other than fraud waiting to happen. The notion of 'cyber security', especially when bought with public money, is farcical.

To follow the above message, I should point out that I am several decades too old to use as many of these smiley face and heart emojicons (or whatever they're called) as the bots. And, I think our lexicons differ, a bit.

So, if you get a message that looks like the one below, it is certainly NOT from me!

👇

This…

The Revolution will eat itself!
One bunch of agenda pushers fighting another. It's a bit like the Judean People's Front Vs the People's Front of Judea.

Good morning,

May I encourage you, most heartily, to go through the excellent comments made in response to these questions?

The theme of listening, asking questions and engaging face to face comes through powerfully, as you may expect. There are some intelligent and very productive actions in there, which we could all learn from.

I plan to collate such a summary on a weekly basis, as I am sure that we all stand to benefit from the knowledge of experience.

Contributions and thoughts on this subject are so valid, no matter how apparently trivial the effect. Please do work with one another.

Charles

A very good question, Sharon. As far as I understand, she was offered a Penalty Notice for Disorder (PND), which I believe she accepted. In most cases, I believe its presentation by police is, in effect, a misrepresentation. The suspect is told that all their troubles will go away if they cough up £90 and accept the PND.

Very rarely is it made clear enough that, if you do not accept the PND, you may well avoid any form of sanction at all. In other words, if you are confident of your defence, you should refuse to accept the PND and face the lengthier and more psychologically challenging process of being cleared by the investigation.

Of course, once a suspect is in custody (and PNDs are usually offered to first time offenders), they are on the back foot and much more likely to accept what is perceived as the 'easy' option. It is not hard for police to convince a suspect of their guilt without the need of running an investigation, which means £90 in the kitty and saving a great deal of time having to investigate what is often a load of nonsense. Charles

👆🏼This was in answer to this question about the Abi Roberts arrest: 'Should Abi have refused to accept the 'slap on the wrist' (can't remember the official description but it wasn't a caution)?'

I’d rather buy a used car from James Delingpole than from Marianna Spring, or from the clergyman whose sermon at the Cathedral on Sunday included the assertion that Trump never believed in the Pro-Life argument until it suited him... I’m not really a Trump fan, but 1) how does the Canon know what Trump believes, 2) whatever happened to someone’s right and ability to change their mind and 3) what’s leftie politics doing in a sermon (for the millionth time)?

Humanists UK seem to belong in the well-populated category of people that would think nothing of turning up at a golf club with their hockey sticks and expecting to do as they please. At least, this is their position on same-sex marriage with the Church of England and it is one of the reasons that they are campaigning to remove the 26 bishops from the House of Lords.

The Humanists UK agenda looks to be to the detriment of society, but it is hard to justify the station of these bishops as a 'check' to the legislative process. In general, they provide no such service. In recent years, it has become more and more reasonable to ask if they have any faith at all.

👇🏼

https://humanists.uk/2023/06/23/131796/

I hope the message trail below (forwarded from the comments) gives a good steer on the flavour of this channel.

👇

Ok, shoot me, perhaps, but I’m wondering: people ask themselves how/why James Delingpole is still allowed to do his podcasts. I wonder whether the govt find it practical to know which emerging journalists and channels to put under surveillance: the last one to be on Delingpod?

I’m hoping this channel may be one of the few I’ve found where you don’t get shot for asking questions like this 🤞
This last few years have honed questioning skills and ensured that we interrogate without fear or favour and many of us, having asked this very question, have been burned for doing so.
I share your concerns.

This is absolutely that channel, Joni, and I am glad that you have recognised it. No 'shootings' here. If we cannot ask and answer questions in an open fashion, even when it may expose a difference of opinion, then we become the same as those that have accepted the lies foisted upon them. Charles

Twitter strikes deal with BBC, as the scent of Musk changes, completely in accordance with expectations.

Mike Yeadon (a contributor to this channel), is looking for chinks of light coming through the clouds, and finding them. Like Mike, I believe there are many reasons for remaining optimistic. More than that, I think the position of feeling overwhelmed by what is perceived to be coming down the track is such an obstacle to finding the right path. With resourcefulness and determination, it will be possible to either ignore completely, or navigate one's way around, whatever changes are to be made. Just consider how you have got yourself through the last three and a half years.

Below is a recent post from Mike on this topic.

👇🏼

Folks,

I’ve had an optimistic insight just now.

Their digital enslavement systems do not (yet) work. Even the components that I’d imagine are at the simpler end either do not work reliably enough to put into routine use as a component of a control grid or are actually pantomime & not real at all.

Examples:

1. Vaccine passports & negative tests required for travel from LHRT5 to USA. Guy at the check-in desk recognised me and was telling me he let anyone who had something vaguely ok to board. Tells me the system is a complete pantomime and not a fully integrated system. Faked images often worked.

2. Railway & underground tickets quite often do not open the turnstiles, even though they were just purchased. So much so that every gate has to have a human assistant letting those with duff tickets through manually. Lady in front of me (at a Tube exit turnstile) let through a non English speaker even though his ticket was three weeks old! She asked him, “how did you get here today?” because his ticket wouldn’t have let him into the station either. Someone must have subverted the other end, too. Good for them.

3. Cash notes checkers. Spending in Nice yesterday, we used a couple of €50 notes. Girl ran them through a checking device, first one way up, then the other, then flipped on long edge to start at the other end. Four fails. Moved to a second checking machine. One went right through ok, the other took 2-3 goes to be ok. I infer they don’t even have a reliable way to check bank notes with a high speed check, high accuracy and low false results. I was stunned. They know it pretty much doesn’t work.

Will digital ID fare better? Obviously it will have much more computing power. But it’s going to have to do a much more difficult job if it’s going to be the central part of the control system. I’m not sure they’ll be able to make it work fast enough, reliably enough to give the correct response 99.5%+ of the time. Imagine if it gets it wrong even 1% of the time. Every couple of days the compliant person is going to be caught in its trap. Unacceptable. Would fall into disrepute in weeks.

Where it comes to CBDC, I’ve heard experts in finance, IT security and AI say “They’re so far from having a high speed, high fidelity system. It has to integrate ID, physical location, transaction proposed (which in a supermarket could be scores of individual items), what have you bought recently, any flags and restrictions against you, then integrate that to the CBDC system….now this must work fast for every item, from loo roll to steak, 99.9%++ accuracy, very very few false denials of service. I seriously doubt that this will work well enough for it to have the control power we’re imagining it’s going to have”.

This is all without a single person trying to cheat or a single employee or hacker narfing up the system. Imagine it freezes again for the third time in a week with fifty people in the supermarket queue. Riot time.

Chin up! It’s a pantomime, possibly. I’m definitely no expert but I’m good at joining dots 😎

Cheers
Mike

Don't forget that, in large part, the reason that the country ground to a halt in 2020 was not because the government and its agencies did such a good job of physically prohibiting people from conducting their everyday activities. It was because there was near total compliance and, indeed, gold-plating of the 'guidance' by organisations. This caught people out. In light of these recent experiences and, in considering what we have learned, the chances of this—or anything like it—happening in the near future are, I would say, extremely remote.

The consistent theme running through all of these diabolical schemes is that they are driven by technology rather than pragmatism, and the house of cards comes down when this is set up poorly.

Though wasting yet more of our money, some of these recent fails should be considered as feathers in our caps.

👇🏼

'Test and Trace' debacle, even after having £37bn thrown at it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56340831

'Smart Motorways' scrapped this year, very quietly: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/all-new-smart-motorways-scrapped

UK Govt track record with IT disasters: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/09/the-uk-government-is-prone-to-it-disasters-here-s-what-it-should-do/

Southwark Council (among others) scrapped their Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN)/15 min city: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/southwark-council-dulwich-village-low-traffic-neighbourhood-plans-scrapped-b1082607.html

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is one of very few organisations that does not actively 'recommend' digital identity as a 'secure' alternative: https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/identity-theft

This should be because the ICO knows it is not, and I think this should form the basis of the campaign against it. Since every other 'cyber-security' defence has been jumped, why should we believe in the infallibility of digital identity? We shouldn't. The security protocols associated with it are feeble. It is far easier for a would-be fraudster to get into your digital life than to risk breaking into your house to find a collection of documents.

Whilst the complete implementation of a digital ID and CBDC would likely end freedom as we think we know it, this should not form the counter-argument. As a position to hold, it is too hard to justify to anybody that detects even the vaguest whiff of 'conspiracy theory'. However, it is completely reasonable to express profound concern at the government's total inability to run a large scale IT project and even more concern about the eternal failure of tech platforms to be genuinely 'secure'.