Tag Archives: Robert Jenrick

Who’s the prime minister today?

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Britain’s had a lot of prime ministers recently, and the average citizen could be forgiven for not caring who’s in charge anymore, but you might think the prime minister himself would remember. Not so. Rishi Sunak went to a pub for a photo op not long ago, trailed by the predictable photographers and reporters and hangers-on, to fill a pint glass and promote the government’s latest solution to our least pressing problem. So far, so boring. Then he referred to himself as the chancellor.

To be fair, he was once the chancellor, and I wouldn’t blame him if he got nostalgic for a job that didn’t involve sticking his head quite so far above the parapet. I mean it’s one thing to lust after the prime minister’s job, but it’s a whole ‘nother thing to actually be the prime minister. Of a crisis-laden country when your party’s best idea involves playing three-card monte with the taxes on alcohol.

Irrelevant photo: I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think this is called a balloon flower, for the shape of the blossom before it opens out.

Anyway, for one glorious moment he forgot that he was and is the prime minister, and I’m sure it served as a mini-break before his actual break, a week or so in California–a break he may have needed but Greenpeace needed even more, because it took advantage of his absence to drape his house in black, in honor of his expansion of oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

But back to our alleged prime minister: this isn’t the first time he’s forgotten what role he’s playing. Last year, when it was time for the prime minister to stand up and speak to the House of Commons, he kept his hind end blissfully planted on the bench, waiting for someone else to get up there and spout the required nonsense.

It doesn’t explain everything about what’s wrong in our political moment, but I do love it when they give me something new to make fun of.

 

Department of High Security

Meanwhile, our immigration minister, Robert Jenrick–well, to be fair, I don’t know that he forgot that he was the immigration minister, but he may have walked off and left his ministerial red box unattended on a train while he went to the toilet. Yes, ministers have to use the toilet no matter how powerful they become. Sad but true. 

What’s this about a ministerial red box? Well, ministers have red briefcases, called boxes, since they’re not really boxes but are at least boxy. The government’s website says they have to use them when they’re carrying papers that need to be kept secure. Why? Because they “offer a higher level of security.” At least if you don’t leave them on the train seat. 

A photo of Jenrick’s red box sitting all on its lonesome in an empty first class train seat, and Jenrick says it’s misleading since that he was sitting across the aisle. The person who took the photo says, “He 100% left it–it’s an important document case, we were baffled.”

Me, I haven’t a clue what happened but I’m putting my money on him having left it. Since we’ll probably never find out, it’s safe enough.

*

Since we’re talking about security, Britain’a Ministry of Defense accidentally sent a number of classified emails that were meant for the US to Mali, an Russian ally.  

How’d that happen? The US military uses “.mil” in its addresses. Mali uses “.ml.” So Britain sent what it says were a small number of messages that weren’t classified as either secret or more secret than secret. The US, on the other hand, sent millions of emails to Mali, including passwords, medical records, and the itineraries of high-ranking officers.

Who needs spies?

 

And also in the US

Activists who oppose self-driving cars wandering loose on the streets of San Francisco have discovered that if they put an orange traffic cone on the hood of the car, it forgets it’s a car. Or–well, who knows what goes on in the mind of a self-driving car? I was looking for a connection to forgetful politicians. It stops. It goes nowhere until a human being shows up to take the cone off. 

To avoid stranding riders, they’ve targeted empty self-driving taxis. 

 

But back in Britain . . .

. . . English Heritage, one of the massive nonprofits that run visitors through historic buildings, shaking some spare change out of their credit cards and some feelings of awe out of their souls along the way, has discovered that adults will forget whatever bits of dignity they pretend to have if the dress-up boxes that had formerly been for kids only include adult size clothing. 

But because no organization that large and respectable can be taken seriously unless it commissions research before introducing a change like that, it commissioned research into the adult imagination, discovering–surprise, surprise–that adults still have them, and that they seem to improve with age.

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this is all bullshit, but that’s okay because I’m not sure it matters anyway. The costumes aren’t available at all English Heritage sites and I’m not clear about whether the change is permanent or only runs through August. If you happen to visit, if you’re an adult, and if the adult costumes have been taken away, that doesn’t mean your last shot at imagination has left. At your age, you’re responsible for your own imagination. Don’t wait for someone to tell you when to imagine, or how.

Unintended consequences: from Brexit to bitcoins

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Ah, the unintended consequences of Brexit.

Forget the fish rotting on the docks and the emptying of supermarket shelves in Northern Ireland. One of the least expected consequences may be that Dutch customs officers are confiscating sandwiches from drivers as they enter from Britain. The new rules don’t allow anyone to import meat or dairy products from Britain. Or–in case you need a fuller list–fruit, vegetables, or fish. I’m not sure what that leaves. Is chewing gum made from organic substances?

Water, maybe. 

One driver asked if he could give up his sandwich fillings but keep the bread. 

No, the customs official said. “Welcome to the Brexit, sir. I’m sorry.”

Irrelevant photo: primroses.

Another unintended consequence is that truckers now need a permit to enter Kent if they’re planning to go on to Europe. 

Yes, Kent’s still part of Britain. But the system avoids pile-ups at the channel ports, or at least it’s meant to. Who know what unintended consequences it’ll have. The permit’s called a Kent access permit, or kermit. If truckers don’t have one, they’re liable for a £300 fine and they’ll be turned back.

The good news is that they can keep their sandwiches until they cross the channel. 

 

Bitcoins

With the price of bitcoins soaring, two people have been in the papers lately over lost coins.

One is a computer engineer in Wales who managed to throw away a hard drive “containing,” as the paper put it, bitcoins worth £200 million.

Yeah, it could happen to anyone. 

He’s offered the local government £50 million if they’ll dig it out. Assuming of course that they find it. And if it still works. He says there’s a good chance he could rescue the data. The local government–called the council in British–says it would cost millions of pounds to dig up the landfill, it would have a huge environmental impact, and anyway their licensing permit doesn’t allow them to do that. 

It also says it’s told him all this before.

He started mining bitcoins in 2009, when they were worth nothing much and when mining them was something you did on the computer, not physically in the local dump. He says he has an international hedge fund “willing to put up anywhere between £2.5m to £3.5m to do a professional search operation of the landfill.”

The council still doesn’t sound interested.

The other bitcoin owner is from San Francisco and hasn’t lost his computer but he has lost the password that would let him get at $250 million worth of bitcoins. He was given 7002 of them as payment for making–yes I do hear the irony–a video on how bitcoins worked, and I’m sure he included a snippet that said, “Don’t lose your password.” But no one listens to themselves, do they? You have to at least cross state lines to be an expert. He stored his bitcoins safely in an IronKey wallet, wrote the password on a piece of paper, had a nice cup of coffee, went on with his life, then discovered that he’d lost the paper.

When he got the coins, they were worth somewhere between $2 and $6 each. The price has gone wild during the pandemic, though, and at one point they were worth $40,000 each. They will have gone up since then. Or down. Or possibly sideways. Bitcoin’s a cryptocurrency. It can defy the laws of gravity and economics if it wants to.

He’s tried eight passwords. If he tries two more wrong ones, he might as well try searching a dump in Wales. 

Around the world, some $140 billion worth of bitcoins are either lost or locked away from their would-be owners, or so says Chainanalysis, which somehow knows these things.

 

“Baying mobs”

The government wants to introduce legislation to protect statues from being removed by “baying mobs” “on a whim.” 

Yeah, they really do talk that way. Or write that way, anyhow, since the quote’s from an article by the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, who’s just brimming over with understanding of the communities he–

Okay, I don’t actually know what a communities secretary’s supposed to do in relation to all those communities the country’s made up of. 

The statue of Edward Colston, which was dumped in the Bristol harbor last year, wasn’t pulled off its plinth on a whim. People had spent years trying to get rid of it through respectable avenues, and they’d gotten nowhere. Pull it down, though, and somehow the picture changes.

Jenrick mentioned an attempt to erase part of the nation’s history “at the hand of the flash mob, or by the decree of a ‘cultural committee’ of town hall militants and woke worthies.” I’d be interested to know what he had to say when the statues of Saddam Hussein were being pulled down with the help of Britain’s ally, the U.S. I seem to remember the papers in general greeting that as liberation, not an attempt to erase history.