Tag Archives: #Resist

Dementing, Despotic, Derranged. What To Do When The President’s Brain Is Missing.

We need to have a serious chat about the tidal wave of noise coming from the other side of the pond because it feels overwhelming. It feels like we are watching a grand, terrifying master plan unfold. Steve Bannon’s flood the zone with shit doctrine is running on steroids. However, I want us to pause, take a deep breath, and look closer at what is actually happening. We are not trapped in a room with a chess grandmaster. We are locked in a supermarket aisle with a toddler who has found a loaded gun and is demanding a chocolate bar.

This is the sceaming Toddler approach to governance. It screams “I want it now” with zero regard for the consequences or the cost. The regime threatens allies, bullies neutrals, and wages war on its own population all at once. It is a display of insatiable greed and grievance. Yet this chaotic flailing reveals a massive fragility. They have committed the classic blunder of Kaiser Wilhelm II by encircling themselves with incompetence. They have started a fight on every front while sitting on a crumbling economy and running on borrowed time.

We can find comfort in understanding the human reality here. The man at the centre is not an ideologue. He is a hollow vessel. Think of Louis XV, whose policy was merely an echo of the last person who flattered him. Trump holds conversations, not positions. He absorbs the energy of the most aggressive voice in the room because agreeing is easier than thinking. He is a paper tiger, terrified of genuine face-to-face conflict, governing by digital shouting because the friction of real human contact is too frightening for him. He loves the role of King but finds the actual job of President terribly boring.

Then we have the biology of it all. We must look at this with a clinician’s eye and a bit of kindness for the human condition, even as we acknowledge the danger. We are watching the collision of malignant narcissism with frontotemporal disinhibition. The frontal lobes are the brain’s braking system. They handle empathy and judgment. When those brakes fail, the engine still revs, but the car has no way to stop. The shift we see now is from theater to reality. The survival instinct that once kept the worst impulses in check is eroding. He is lashing out because he is losing control of his own narrative and perhaps even his own biology. It is the rage of a “Sundowning Caesar.”

So, how do we handle a regime that runs on impulse and borrowed credit? We do not fight the noise. We starve the beast.

We apply a strategy of “Supply Shock.” This regime relies on resources it does not own. It needs data, credit, legitimacy, and professional services to function. We simply make those things too expensive to maintain.

First, we look at the data. The regime runs on digital services. Our friends in the EU and the UK can turn off the tap. We say that if US tech giants want to act as the surveillance arm of a hostile state, their patent protections are void here. We force the shareholders to choose between the regime and the global market.

Next, we look at the money. The tantrums are funded by a national credit card. We need to shatter the illusion that this debt is safe. If pension funds and global investors view these bonds as toxic assets issued by an unstable government, borrowing costs will skyrocket. A tyrant with no money is effectively silenced.

Then we have the internal machinery. We call for a creative kind of friction. We encourage the civil servants and the workers to stay in the room and become the sand in the gears. We use malicious compliance. We demand written clarification for every order that is unclear. We slow-walk the paperwork. We weaponise the boredom. If a dangerous plan takes three weeks of tedious meetings to execute, this President will lose interest and move on to the next shiny object.

Finally, we address the enablers. We strip away the comfort of neutrality. The lawyers and consultants helping this operate need to feel the social cost. We make it clear that facilitating this regime is professional suicide. We decline their dinner invitations. We close our wallets to their firms.

The Trump regime is a Golden Goose demanding endless attention and resources. It has no strategy for when the larder is empty. They are counting on us to play by the old rules. Instead, we are going to cut the power, spike the costs, and block the data. They want everything, and they want it immediately.

We are going to ensure they get nothing but the bill, and you won’t believe the total…

Your New Digital ID Isn’t For Convenience. It’s For Control.

The Digital Back Door: Why a National ID is the End of a Free Society

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you

Lyric George Sumner – The Police

There’s a pitch being sold to the British public, dressed up in the language of convenience and national security. It’s the idea of a Digital ID for every adult, a neat, modern solution to complex problems like illegal migration.

I can tell you this isn’t progress. It’s the architecture of a control system, a Trojan horse that smuggles a surveillance state in under the guise of efficiency. It is the end of a free society, and we are sleepwalking towards it.

Let’s start by dismantling the primary justification: fixing the border. The claim that a Digital ID will stop the boats is, to put it plainly, bollocks. It will not stop trafficking gangs, nor will it fix a fundamentally broken system. Criminals and their networks are, by their very nature, experts at working around systems; they adapt faster than bureaucracies can legislate. The ones who will pay the price for this vast, expensive, and dangerous infrastructure will not be the criminals, but the honest, law-abiding citizens of this country.

The fundamental flaw lies in a concept I deal with daily: centralised risk. We spend hundreds of billions a year on cybersecurity, yet the volume and severity of data breaches are breaking records. The threat grows faster than the spend. From Jaguar Land Rover to major airports, no centralised system has proven impenetrable. Now, imagine that vulnerability scaled up to a national level, with a single database linking your identity to every checkpoint of daily life: where you go, what you buy, what you read, and who you speak to.

Here is the risk that ministers will not admit. A sophisticated ransomware attack, seeded quietly through a compromised supplier or a disgruntled insider, lies dormant for months. It slowly rolls through the backups, undetected. Then, on trigger day, the live registry and every recovery set are encrypted simultaneously. The country grinds to a halt. Payments fail. Health and benefits systems stall. Borders slow to a crawl. Citizens are frozen out of their own lives until a ransom is paid or the state is forced to rebuild the nation’s identity from scratch. To centralise identity is to centralise failure.

This, however, is only the technical risk. The greater political and social danger lies in the certainty of function creep. It will begin as an optional, convenient way to log in or prove your age. But it will not end there. It will inevitably become a mandatory prerequisite for accessing money, travel, employment, and essential public services. Our fundamental rights will be turned into permissions, granted or revoked by the state and its chosen corporate contractors.

This isn’t a theoretical dystopian future; it’s a documented reality. India’s Aadhaar system, initially for welfare, now underpins everything from banking to mobile phones and has been plagued by data leaks exposing millions to fraud. We are seeing the groundwork laid in the UK with the Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF), a federated model reliant on a network of private suppliers like Yoti, Hippo Digital, and IDEMIA. This multi-vendor approach doesn’t eliminate risk; it multiplies the potential points of failure through a web of interconnected APIs, each a potential back door for attackers.

Furthermore, this system is built on a foundation of exclusion. The assumption of universal digital literacy is a dangerous fiction. With a significant percentage of UK adults lacking basic digital skills, a mandatory Digital ID will create a two-tier society. The elderly, the poor, and the vulnerable—those who cannot or will not comply—risk being locked out of the services they need most, deepening inequality and fuelling social unrest.

The gravest danger, however, emerges when this infrastructure is placed in the context of a crisis. Economic collapse, social unrest, or an environmental emergency often serves as the justification for an expansion of state power. A Digital ID system provides the ready-made tool for authoritarianism. In a crisis, it could be repurposed to monitor dissent, freeze the bank accounts of protesters, or restrict the movement of individuals deemed a threat. It builds, by stealth, the machinery for a social credit system.

And this brings us to the corporate engine waiting to power this machine: Palantir. The US data-mining firm is already deeply embedded within the UK state, with contracts spanning the NHS and the Ministry of Defence. Palantir doesn’t need a specific contract for the “Brit Card”; its platforms, Foundry and Gotham, are designed to do precisely what a Digital ID enables on a mass scale: fuse disparate datasets into a single, all-encompassing profile for every citizen.

The Digital ID would be the “golden record” that connects your health data, your financial transactions, your movements, and your communications. In a crisis, Palantir’s AI could be used for predictive surveillance—flagging individuals who enter a “protest zone” or transactions to “undesirable” organisations. This isn’t just a British system; with Palantir’s deep ties to US intelligence, it becomes a system subject to foreign demands under legislation like the CLOUD Act. We would be outsourcing our national sovereignty.

The entire premise is flawed. If the government were serious about the border, it would enforce current laws, properly resource patrols and processing, and close existing loopholes. You do not need to build a panopticon to do that. We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason, recognising their threat to our fundamental liberties. Reintroducing them through the digital back door, outsourced to a network of private contractors and data-mining firms, is a monumental error.

There are better ways. Decentralised alternatives using cryptographic methods like zero-knowledge proofs can verify status or identity without creating a central honeypot of data. But these privacy-first solutions lack government traction because the true, unstated goal is not security or convenience. It is control. We must not fall for the pitch. This is a system that will centralise risk and outsource blame. It will punish the vulnerable while failing to stop the criminals it targets. It is the foundation for a future where our rights are contingent on our compliance. The choice is simple: yes to privacy-first proofs, no to a database state.

Beware the all-seeing eye!