From the consultation on digital identity verification:

Has the threat of the database state ever involved people who actually understood databases and how to maintain them?

It’s always nice to see stout defences of intellectual liberty:

It's reported that a transport minister wants to move away from 20th-century thinking centred around private vehicle ownership.

Reportedly the new rationale for mandating Covid vaccines for children is as a psychological measure ‘to help them avoid worrying about the pandemic and learning to get on with their peer group’.

Among the numerous things I did not foresee, narrow rollout of ’phone OS updates as a bulwark against illiberalism must rank fairly high:

Thanks, Doctor Irvine. Now I get to spend the rest of the day speculating about who this was.

Now that we know the entire fabric of statutory protection for listed buildings and scheduled monuments can be suspended at the local police commander’s whim, it has been a grimly fascinating exercise in social psychology to see how rapidly the iconoclastic impulse spread from slaver to abolitionist. I toyed with the idea of a spoof campaign …

After suggestions that Greece would push the Marbles onto the EU’s post-Brexit agenda, it’s unclear whether this is still being run up the flagpole:

It’s not often that news of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales reaches my redoubt in England, but today I learn that the Commissioner is proposing scrappage of GCSEs. Which doesn’t seem quite what I thought was anticipated when the role was set up.

Out of 2077-inspired curiosity I picked up the Cyberpunk 2020 Bundle of Holding, which is why I find myself reading a sourcebook from 1994 called the Rough Guide to the U.K. Its ‘brief recent history’ begins thus: The United Kingdom has been going through some turbulent times recently.

Everyone’s a post-election haruspex, and the pundits have it that Corbyn drew the ‘youth vote’.

What a sad day it is when someone high up in the government makes illiberal pronouncements about technology policy without even knowing a hash from a hashtag, provoking jaded sighs from the better informed.

Despite our both having links to Durham’s Philosophy Dept. I’ve never met Thom Brooks, who I think came to Durham shortly before I stopped being physically there. Occasionally he makes waves I notice: once some students contacted me hoping I could advise on getting a critical response published to something he’d written (they were into polyamory …

Backward-looking, reactionary, left behind by the pace of change and resenting the modern world. But enough of those demanding a rerun...