Roundup of 2017- part 1

Well, it's been another year of surprises and our understanding of the world is just a bit different at the turn of this year from the turn of last. From my point of view, some of the more significant changes include

AI
Video footage new this year showing entire factories with not a single visible human, just scores of robotic articulated entities cutting, grinding, milling, pressing, welding and finishing. And of course the porn market is driving refinements to produce a robot hand that can grip a, er, cucumber safely. Last year I printed this chart as a warning against the directions from which migrant waves will come; this year I print it to show the blocs most vulnerable to stage 1 manufacturing robotic replacement. They're the same. We face a double whammy. 

Regulation of Social Media
The headlines this year have been about the abuse issues on social media; MPs in particular, who want to use social media to self-publicise, are unaccustomed the level of vitriol that they attract from some folk - some clearly illegal, but much of it just robust abusive invective. They are pushing for more regulation. 

In fact the real issue about social media in 2017 is how vital to democracy unencumbered access to it is. With Facebook and Twitter struggling to control unacceptable content, crude and thus unfair shortcuts, including AI, are being used to censor postings. 

I think 2018 may bring the realisation that access to social media equals access to democracy - and attempts to restrict access for legal uses equal attempts to gag voters. As facebook in particular is looking to the lucrative political advertising stream, the Electoral Commission must speed up from its snail's pace to face this challenge. 

Yvette Cooper will never escape the internet's long memory

House of Peers
A year ago I suggested the HoL would prove in 2017 a Brexit thorn that needed desperate remedies. Well, in the event it didn't. The government's stated intention - to 'let them talk until they wet themselves' - proved effective. The prospect of damp red benches with no effective outcome clearly didn't appeal to their Lordships. I'm going to recycle this for 2018 - it's all or bust this year for the anti-democratic refuseniks. They may destroy their privilege in the process, or see TM flood the Lords with People's Peers (I'm still free, Prime Minister) but will they emerge over the parapit?

No puddles on the leather in 2017 - but in 2018?

For Hope, and our Future

It's now eighteen months since that momentous referendum, and we're still leaving. With every single day it becomes more and more difficult for the saboteurs to derail the process. The global corporates, their Federast and globalist dags, the Euro bien pensants, has-been politicians, are daily nearer to meltdown and daily more furious. This also makes them daily more dangerous; the dags are being goaded into petty acts of spite, with Remoaner HMRC officials prodded by the Treasury now demanding tax from private Leave referendum donors whilst the vastly richer global corporates escape scot free for their Remain gifts. We may have sighted land, but it will still take some skillful pilotage before we're tied up alongside. 

ISIS are also just another terrorist organisation rather than a putative Caliphate. The government of Syria, with Russian help, have succeeded against the global corporates and their puppets, against the stupidity and venality of our own government and Foreign Office. We have reached the morning of the eve of Christmas with no successful Islamist attack on the West, just a failed terrorist act in Australia, a nation now more Eddie Izzard than Crocodile Dundee. There is a perceptible hardening of attitude towards Islamism, and the faint start of some pushback. 

More than anything else, social media has enabled the idiocies of neoliberalism, the insanity of distorted morality, the fake news, lies, distortions and deceits of the malign, to be exposed to the disinfectant of sunlight and to laughter. Social media means a FTSE100 firm and a sharp witted nobody are equal. Nothing is more painful to these evils than laughter. May St Isidore, patron saint of the internet, intercede for succour and protection of universal access to social media.  

At home and abroad we still face human challenges - abroad we have human populations outgrowing food, water, wealth and work, and with the richness of the West visible on their 3G screens forming a tsunami of human migration towards Europe. Do not, I beg you, direct hatred or vituperation towards these people, no matter how devious, dishonest, manipulating or self-interested their behaviour. We must work to keep them in their own nations, to emulate themselves the prizes of Western post-enlightenment Christian nations by adopting our norms and ways, however cruel we must be to keep them from our shores. 

At home we are still failing our own people; ex-armed forces living rough, enduring hardship and privation without complaint. They stood on the line for you and me. We owe them. For our semi-feral urban children, victims of gross sexual abuse and exploitation, victims also of failed official care, of moral relativism, and of our selfishness. We must help them. And heartfelt thanks to all those who keep the law, demand nothing, discharge their social responsibility and ask only for a little pride, a little identity and a little recognition. We owe them, too.  

As each day grows a little brighter I am inspired with hope. Not a surge, but a fleeting butterfly shadow of hope that flickers over the heart and soul. There is a future, a good future, and we can all help shape it. God really is with us if we allow him to be. 

It is easy here, in the snow and the beauty, to the sound of bells and in a little 14th century church with vivid ancient wall paintings, to understand the miracle of the Nativity and the joy that the birth of the Christ child, Son of God, born to save the world, brought to mankind. With all my gratitude and thanks to you all, may you all have a peaceful Christmas.