Minack Theatre - Educating Rita

 

About time to see some live theatre. This was Educating Rita at Minack Theatre, in Cornwall. It was actually our second attempt, having previously been along on a day that it was cancelled because of high winds and rain. When we were told, we had just set out from St Ives, and were slightly surprised that it had been cancelled. Sure enough, that evening, sitting in the pub garden, we got well-and-truly soaked. The rain came down like some kind of comedy show. I retreated inside at one point for a complete change of clothes. Yes, Minack had got their weather forecast right.

We managed to get some more tickets for another day, and decided to make a round trip of it. The show was early evening and didn't finish too late. Thoroughly enjoyable, with Stephen Thompkinson and Jessica Johnson as Frank and Rita, performing on the cliff edges as if it was the spires of Oxford. Around two thirds of the way through, the weather changed. Frank and Rita continued unabashed. The audience shuffled slightly and battened down for the rest of the performance. To the credit of the cast and the rest of the production crew, the show really did go on, and you'd be hard pressed to tell that they were combatting the elements. Only in the last encore did the main characters turn around and we all saw they were - well - soaked through.

you're unbelievable

There is a bit more effort required from the UK to watch the US political conventions, compared with being in America when they air. They are on those difficult-to-find channels at the back of Virgin's menus and the broadcasts are generally at uncivil hours.

Nonetheless, there's a kind of evil fascination to watch the worst of them at work. The  Republican National Convention’s defence of  “Western civilization,” shout-outs to the COVID's discredited treatment hydroxychloroquine, curious words about Democrats keeping Black people on “mental plantations,” and denunciations of the “China virus.”  

Awful twisted stuff designed to snare the less-educated.

There was gratitude that President Trump gave up his “life of luxury” to rule the country. 
That St. Louis couple who recently waved firearms at Black Lives Matter demonstrators from their front lawn, and a different elderly stunt-couple who spoke of wanting “this nation to continue to be the beacon of hope for the world,” while they looked lovingly at a section of border wall being installed. 

Dangerous rabble-rousing stuff.

There was talk of Donald Trump not being racist, juxtaposed without irony against racist warnings to white voters that Democrats want to “abolish the suburbs.” 

Inflammatory stuff showing Donald just doesn't care about anything except himself.

My favourite for blatant bombast was Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality who dialled it up to the max and strutted onto the flag-bedecked stage.  

Guilfoyle brought the convention’s fascist timbre to the next level.

“They want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear,” Guilfoyle said, describing the Democrats. “They want to steal your liberty, your freedom, they want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live. They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.” 

Old school fear, uncertainty and doubt. Curious that Kimberly Guilfoyle-Newsom was once married to a Democrat.  

Her message riffed on a hidden (dog-whistled?) "Democrats Make America Weak Again" theme and wasn't officially in line with the positive and uplifting tone that the Convention announced. 

Trump Senior hugged her afterwards.

Blame the servants

Statistics lesson: Neither of the men in ties has a clue although they both know 'ego sum stultus'

Bozza has fired top DfE civil servant Jonathan Slater over the exam results fiasco. Gavin Williamson earlier denied making the resigning Ofqual boss Sally Collier a scapegoat for the exam results.

It goes to show how little attention the top people gave to the statistics before they went public and Bozza himself demonstrates the lack of understanding of a statistical haircut. But then, why should he, when the number of independent schools reaching a 9 grading was five times higher than all schools.

I also notice the modest curve on the all schools graph, compared with the laughably immodest curve on that from the 529 ISC. Pay Per Performance (PPP/P3) anyone?

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has retained his position, ironically, despite his sacking for allegedly leaking information from Defence about Huawei the last time he held senior office. 

Play On, Christina Nott

 

I've already got 2 or 3 books in the release pipeline, so I reckon this one will hit the streets in early December.

This is a further follow-on to the Archangel series, comprising:

• Archangel - where Christina Nott's backstory is established (Icelandic, but trained mainly in Russia)
• Raven - Corporate corruption.
• Raven's Card - Political corruption.

Then, finally we get Christina back on the road with a band. The only thing is, she's still beholden to the FSB and gets mixed up in some tricky business in Saint Petersburg. 

We get to see her perform with a band acting as a support act to another band who are danger of splitting up. 

Music, Money, Manipulation and I daresay some Mayhem too.

Maybe I'll serialise a couple of sections from the novel, whilst I decide whether to ARC (Advanced Readers' Copy) it.

Play On, Christina Nott.

The bamboo forests of Norton Security

Sometimes it is like walking through a bamboo forest. 

This was supposed to be an easy one, but I knew in advance it would be difficult. 

I was removing Norton Security from an Apple Mac. I decided the system is designed to make it almost impossible. 

it is socially engineered to make the merest enquiry about the use of the removal tool fail. 

A few examples. 

1) Ask the help system. It froze only allowing entry whilst simultaneously holding down a mouse button. 

2) Checking with Google. Symantec has packed the top of a Google search with pages they control, all of which offer misleading advice. 

3) Attempting to use the so-called remove button built into the utility. Except the helper agent that runs the button was not working so the button didn't show. 

{Most people will have given up by around here}

4) Attempting to download the uninstall helper. Except every copy of it was the one for Windows. 

5) Being pointed to a (you must be joking) separate page to download someone else's utility (Nope).

6) Being patronisingly asked after I'd looked at each of their help pages, whether it was useful (No)

7) Being pop-up asked if I needed help (Chat) but then ignored.

In the end, I used the Activity Monitor to force crash the Norton helper agents that were still running. This simulated a Norton failure. 

Then I pretended I wanted to re-install the product. Norton gave me a link to a failed installation page for Mac and from there I was able to navigate to find this helpful page:

https://support.norton.com/sp/en/uk/home/current/solutions/kb20080427024142EN 

 It includes a link to the utility file: 

 https://buy-download.norton.com/downloads/mac/tools/RemoveNortonMacFiles.zip 

which in turn requires one to boot up and run a Mac Terminal Session (ie in Unix) to work through the script. 

 Halfway through, the script failed too and simply hung. 

I rebooted and then re-ran it and sure enough, it carried on to delete about 100 Norton files scattered all over the Mac. I know these files are used to provide nag scripts to re-install the product, so it was necessary to get rid of them all. 

 However, it worked.

Testing the limits of lock-down.

Time to test the limits of the lock-down. We're off for a few days recreation.

Maybe we should take to the sea?

Perhaps find some exotic shores?

Should we enjoy the local culture?

Maybe look for signs of civilisation?

Or we could enjoy the views?

Perhaps we could chill by the pool?

Then again, we could do all of these things.

similar themes

That recent Metro newspaper cover intrigued me. I'd written a couple of novels about the same kind of things - Russian interference and so-on.

My first was years ago, when I first penned The Triangle. It is only since the February 2020 re-issue that it had my painterly revised cover with The Houses of Parliament and Red Square's Saint Basil's somewhat like the Metro newspaper.

Then there's the Archangel Trilogy, the three books of which are all linked in various ways with Russia. Please feel free to click the book pile to grab a free copy of the Triangle eBook.

Searching that HMG Russia report - over-bloat to obfuscate

I read that HMG Russia Response report and noticed the language it used was all 'going forward' language and 'we wills'. Considering it was a chance to deep-dive into the manipulation of democracy by a Foreign state, there seemed to be little to say about any of it.

I was going to half-heartedly type in 'click-farms' to my search through the document but decided instead to go for 'click'. Nil results.

I did a double-take but then thought I'd try 'Facebook'. Again nil results.

I worried that my Search option wasn't working so I typed in 'Russia'. Yes, my search still worked, I got 20 pages this time.

What about 'advertising'? Maybe best to shorten to 'advert'? Two results (and a spurious 'inadvertently').

I decided that the 100-word headlines to the paragraphs were too long and had been written in consultant-speak. So here's their some of their conclusions, pasted directly from their own words with my simplified headlines (i.e. my headings, their words).

INEPT OVERCOMPLICATION PREVENTS DEFENCE FROM HOSTILES
"This focus has led us to question who is responsible for broader work against the Russian threat and whether those organisations are sufficiently empowered to tackle a hostile state threat such as Russia. In some instances, we have therefore recommended a shift in responsibilities. In other cases we have recommended a simplification: there are a number of unnecessarily complicated wiring diagrams that do not provide the clear lines of accountability that are needed."

TEFLON COATED LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY
"Accountability is an issue in particular – whilst the Foreign Secretary has responsibility for the NCSC, which is responsible for incident response, the Home Secretary leads on the response to major cyber incidents. Indeed, there are a number of other Ministers with some form of responsibility for Cyber – the Defence Secretary has overall responsibility for Offensive Cyber as a ‘warfighting tool’ and for the National Offensive Cyber Programme, while the Secretary of State for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) leads on digital matters, with the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster being responsible for the National Cyber Security Strategy and the National Cyber Security Programme."

INHERENT INEFFICIENCIES
"...Reacting to the here and now is inherently inefficient and – in our opinion – until recently the Government had badly underestimated the Russian threat and the response it required.”

RUSSIAN MONEY SWAMPS THE SECURITY SERVICES
"We have previously discussed the extent to which economic policy dictated the opening of the UK to Russian investment. This indicates a failure of the security policy departments to engage with this issue – to the extent that the UK now faces a threat from Russia within its own borders. What appears to have been a somewhat laissez-faire policy approach is less easy to forgive than that of the busy Agencies. We welcome the fact that this has now been recognised and appears to be changing."

SLOW DECISION MAKING BY HMG
"It is not clear to the Committee whether HMG and our allies have yet found an effective way to respond to the pace of Russian decision-making. This has severely undermined the West’s ability to respond effectively to Russian aggressions in the past – for example, the annexation of Crimea in 2014."

NAIVE ACCEPTANCE OF DARK RUSSIAN FINANCE
"The UK welcomed Russian money, and few questions – if any – were asked, regarding the provenance of this considerable wealth. It appears that the UK Government at the time held the belief (more perhaps in hope than expectation) that developing links with major Russian companies would promote good governance by encouraging ethical and transparent practices, and the adoption of a law-based commercial environment."

CHARITY AND HOUSE OF LORDS USED AS A RUSSIAN MONEY FUNNEL
"Several members of the Russian elite who are closely linked to Putin are identified as being involved with charitable and/or political organisations in the UK, having donated to political parties, with a public profile which positions them to assist Russian influence operations. It is notable that a number of Members of the House of Lords have business interests linked to Russia, or work directly for major Russian companies linked to the Russian state – these relationships should be carefully scrutinised, given the potential for the Russian state to exploit them. It is important that the Code of Conduct for Members of the House of Lords, and the Registry of Lords’ interests, including financial interests, provide the necessary transparency and are enforced. In this respect we note that the Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament requires that MPs register individual payments of more than £100 which they receive for any employment outside the House – this does not apply to the House of Lords, and consideration should be given to introducing such a requirement.” (incidentally they are crystal-clear 43/47/31/53 word sentences)

RUSSIAN STANDING JOKE THAT LONDONGRAD CAN BE USED AS A MONEY LAUNDROMAT
"What is now clear is that it was, in fact, counter-productive, in that it offered ideal mechanisms by which illicit finance could be recycled through what has been referred to as the London ‘laundromat’. […] This level of integration – in ‘Londongrad’ in particular – means that any measures now being taken by the Government are not preventative, but rather constitute damage limitation."



ANOTHER 'BUSY' COMMITTEE - THE DEFENDING DEMOCRACY GROUP
"The Cabinet Office established the Defending Democracy programme to bring together our work to safeguard our democratic processes and to make sure that our democracy remains safe and inclusive, now and into the future. The Programme ... brings together capabilities and expertise from Government departments, the Security and Intelligence Agencies and civil society to ensure UK democracy remains open and vibrant as well as secure. The programme has four priorities:
* Protect and secure UK democratic processes, systems and institutions from interference, including from cyber, personnel and physical threats.
* Strengthen the integrity of UK elections.
* Encourage Respect for open, fair and safe democratic participation.
* Promote fact-based and open discourse, including online."

OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE
"We recognise the need to get legislation right. Nevertheless, it is very clear that the Official Secrets Act regime is not fit for purpose and the longer this goes unrectified, the longer the security and intelligence community’s hands are tied. It is essential that there is a clear commitment to bring forward new legislation to replace it (and a timetable within which it will be introduced) that can be used by MI5 to defend the UK against agents of a hostile foreign power such as Russia."


THE COMPUTER MISUSE ACT SHOULD BE UPDATED TO REFLECT MODERN USE OF PERSONAL ELECTRONIC DEVICES
(No further paragraphs on this one)

There were few other items, mainly covering working together with other countries. I've left them out because now we have been cut loose from the EU and Interpol some of them may no longer apply.

I thought I'd use the space to list a few of Boris's alleged Russian Chums instead. Let's not forget whose party he went to the night after his election win.


BORIS CHUMS?

List of alleged @BorisJohnson Russian oligarch friends- some made whilst creating Londongrad.

* Alexander Temerko (led 2016 Leader campaign)
* Evgeny Lebedev (Bunga Parties in Italy)
* Alexander Lebedev (ex-KGB, Secret mtg)
* Roman Abramovich (2016)
* Dasha Zhukova (private mtg 2012)
* Lubov Chernukin (£160,000 tennis match)
* Ambassador Yakovenko (2013 City Hall mtg)
* FSB Spy Sergei Nalobin (2010-15)
* Russia Spy Joseph Mifsud (2017 mtg)
* Robert Hanson/Masha Markova (2009 mtg)
* Andrei Borodin
* Pitroyr Birynkov
* Mayor Sobyanin
* Yuri Luzhkov (2008- came to UK)
* Yelena Baturina (City Hall)

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1199326561297674243.html

Here's Boris after one of the parties with everything in the balance.

now the science

I've always suspected Facebook is a law unto itself. Now we are hearing about all the latest allegations about Russian interference with elections/referendums and so on. It's good material for my novel writing but a suspicious way to conduct asymmetric sanctions.

In that context, I have also encountered the censorship from Facebook directly. Once, when I was putting up a post about Archangel, I used that go-to typeface 'Armalite Rifle' for a strapline. And guess what? It was rejected because I might have been trying to disguise something I was saying by using a camouflaged typeface! I solved the problem by making the image a bit more blurry and then the cunningly concealed bullet holes didn't show up.

Another time I was promoting 'The Triangle', which is the first novel I wrote and was recently relaunched with a few story changes, geographical updates and a character modification. On this one, I decided to use the strapline 'Dirty Money: here's how to clean it." For unfathomable reasons, it sloshed around in the Facebook system for ages.

It was just not allowed for release. Then I changed the strap to 'A novel about dirty money and how it gets cleaned.' or something similar and whoosh, it went straight through!

Thank goodness I'll have time to prepare for the launch of 'Now the Science', which isn't due out until mid-November.

Anyway, Why not join in the fun with this couple of FREE eBooks?



or maybe:

Lily Cole: Who cares wins

I just read that Lily Cole book about the world we live in. It raises the interesting question: How we can all have a tangible impact through action? 

I'm a great believer in positivism 'Fun going forward' and all that. As the blook's blurb says: 'Optimism is not naïve and it is not impossible. Many people perceive this to be a moment of despair. Global warming has reached terrifying heights of severity, human expansion has caused the extinction of countless species and neoliberalism has led to a destructive divide in wealth and a polarization of mainstream politics. '

...and breathe. 

Lily's simple words (simpler than the blurb writer imho) explain how we can do things differently and why we should. Lily Cole is well-educated and level-headed about the issues, which include positive thoughts on how we can all change the future. 

It is written conversationally too, like having an extended discussion with Lily - not a lecture, but a chat interspersed with frogs jumping out of hot water, a few sweary bits, and the premise that living is petrochemical. 

Cole has the advantage of access; she can sit in a cafe in San Francisco to meet the CEO of a biotech company, or assist in the creation of a new no-plastic glasses company. That's a kind of privilege, but it's one that Lily doesn't appear to squander, instead signing up for various thoughtful and righteous initiatives. 

 I enjoyed the read which left my thoughts buzzing. We are all ancestors of our future.

Thingiverse

I've previously blogged about the IoT - Internet of Things, and realise it has more or less embedded itself into the house now, with even the morning coffee and the garden lights being IFTTT controlled.

The outside lights are an interesting example where I can set them to switch on at 'sunset' and off at a particular time. Even unplugging them and then later replugging them doesn't affect the performance.

I suppose some folk would worry that the house will get hijacked by a Chinese or Russian web-crawler, but I suppose they have more interesting things to do with their hacking into politicians accounts and various governmental systems.

The vacuum cleaner has been given the house name of George (for Alexa purposes) and automatically fires up at an alarming 2am to sweep quietly around the house. Of course, it suffers from the first-generation Dalek problem in that it can't deal with stairs -although it is pretty good at getting back to a charging base concealed underneath a sofa.

Latterly I've also been playing around with webhooks to link web-side applications together. The keys for such services are quite lengthy and I notice that not all webhook services are compatible with one another.

Some of this is symptomatic of everyone having an interest in whether particular interfaces can be monetised, like cats' eyes on a road or those wire coathangers that laundry is returned upon.

It becomes a kind of jigsaw puzzle, to find the most efficient and effective ways to join pieces together, using as few components as possible.

It is still too complicated for the layman, but presumably it will become packaged and the services will then become 'just make it so'. Just like I discovered when I issued asked Alexa "turn off the garden lights" and to my slight astonishment, they turned off, and George the vacuum cleaner will send phone notifications if it really gets stuck. Fortunately, they are fairly infrequent.

masking reality

Sometimes the stories about a single politician come along thick and fast, like so many lorries jammed in a border park.