My wishes for the new year come early - I'll be largely offline starting Monday morning, 2018's final day. This year has kept me occupied predominantly with family care and job responsibilities - no time for blogging, or much online activity whatsoever - though I've tried my best to pop up here to freshen threads or do some housekeeping whenever the opportunity arose. Thanks to the remaining gnomes and everyone else here to keep pitching in and keep things flowing - if there's any good that Brexit brings, it must be the consistency of Frank's excellent blogging and the community-input into Brexit diaries...

Speaking of exits, I do have one housekeeping announcement to make for 2019: coming April, I have an extended breakaway of three months in the offing and these will be spent primarily offline. So this gnome will doff his has during these months and move underground. If anyone is interested or keen enough in supporting and upholding the ET household during that period, please be so kind to leave a brief response - it'd be much appreciated!

Onwards with the interesting times - the year 2019 awaits... Best to all!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the difference between having lived abroad and having NOT lived abroad is not unlike the difference between having entered puberty and NOT having entered it. Yes, it's a dramatic and embarrassing comparison, but it's true. Once you've crossed that line, nothing is ever the same.

I asked jokes_on_you how they spotted the difference. "I've sucked enough toes in my life to recognize when something doesn't look right," they told me in a Reddit direct message. "Because we can't dorsi- or plantarflex our 2nd-5th toes independently I knew it wasn't a matter of the toe being bent. I thought that maybe she has some form of brachydactyly but her Wikifeet page has clear evidence to the contrary. So it was clear to me that it wasn't her feet."

Last Wednesday, the conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson started a fire on the right after airing a prolonged monologue on his show that was, in essence, an indictment of American capitalism.

America's "ruling class," Carlson says, are the "mercenaries" behind the failures of the middle class -- including sinking marriage rates -- and "the ugliest parts of our financial system." He went on: "Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society."

He concluded with a demand for "a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don't accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement."

The monologue was stunning in itself, an incredible moment in which a Fox News host stated that for generations, "Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars." More broadly, though, Carlson's position and the ensuing controversy reveals an ongoing and nearly unsolvable tension in conservative politics about the meaning of populism, a political ideology that Trump campaigned on but Carlson argues he may not truly understand.

job creationism pic.twitter.com/pnPzvex6H5

— dr. diana thirst (@wifebanger) 6. Januar 2019

We in the West love our apocalyptic science fiction, in which cartoonishly evil authorities ruthlessly oppress all who so much as wonder about their absolute power, enforced via ubiquitous surveillance technology. Think The Hunger Games, Blade Runner 2049, V for Vendetta, just to pick a few. Well -- to trot out that infamous William Gibson line, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.

 

  Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.

    -- Kyle Marquis (@Moochava) July 10, 2013
 

I'm thinking of Xinjiang, northwest China, which, according to panoply of reports over the last year, has become an oppressive surveillance police state: Georgetown professor James Millward conjures it:

 

   While on your way to work or on an errand, every 100 meters you pass a police blockhouse. Video cameras on street corners and lamp posts recognize your face and track your movements. At multiple checkpoints, police officers scan your ID card, your irises and the contents of your phone. At the supermarket or the bank, you are scanned again, your bags are X-rayed and an officer runs a wand over your body [...] The system crunches all of this into a composite score ... [Based on it] you may or may not be allowed to visit a museum, pass through certain neighborhoods, go to the mall, check into a hotel, rent an apartment, apply for a job or buy a train ticket. Or you may be detained to undergo re-education.

 

In the speech, set to be delivered at a factory in Stoke-on-Trent later today, Theresa May is expected to compare the 1997 Welsh devolution referendum to the vote for Brexit, by stating:

"On the rare occasions when Parliament puts a question to the British people directly we have always understood that their response carries a profound significance."

"When the people of Wales voted by a margin of 0.3%, on a turnout of just over 50%, to endorse the creation of the Welsh Assembly, that result was accepted by both sides and the popular legitimacy of that institution has never seriously been questioned."

However, as uncovered in several fantastically-researched Twitter threads, Theresa May's assertion that "both sides" accepted the result of the Welsh referendum is a complete and utter lie.

Indeed, following the 1997 vote, the Conservative Party completely opposed respecting the result of this referendum for more than 8 years - with the now Prime Minister Theresa May herself even voting against the bill in Parliament to respect the result and initiate the formation of the Welsh assembly.

And it seems they regarded the vote in favour of the Scottish assembly (67%) as tiddly widdly and easily ignored.

keep to the Fen Causeway

when I was a kid I read a movie review of Titanic where the critic said he enjoyed the movie a lot but gave it 2 stars because he feared what cynical, copycat dreck it would unleash on the world. Today this is how I feel about AOC's social media. https://t.co/1AXGdeo1U4

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) 17. Januar 2019

Er wurde nur 67: Erfinder der Autokorrektur unerwartet gestohlen

Sand Französische (dpo) - Ein ganz Grober ist von und gegangen: Am Sonntagabend ist der Erfinder der beleibten Autokorrektur Mark Umsatzsteuer in Sand Französische an Herzversand gestorben. Der 67-jährige Pioneer hinterlässt eine Frau und zwei Rinder.

Im Silikon Ball galt Umsatzsteuer bereits seit den früher 80er Jahren als absolute Koriander und einer der größten Sofort wäre Entwickler überhaupt. Wirklich berührt machte ihn jedoch erst die Erfindung der Autokorrektur im Jagd 1994.

Describing Britain's calamitous exit from its Indian empire in 1947, the novelist Paul Scott wrote that in India the British "came to the end of themselves as they were" -- that is, to the end of their exalted idea about themselves. Scott was among those shocked by how hastily and ruthlessly the British, who had ruled India for more than a century, condemned it to fragmentation and anarchy; how Louis Mountbatten, accurately described by the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts as a "mendacious, intellectually limited hustler," came to preside, as the last British viceroy of India, over the destiny of some 400 million people.

Britain's rupture with the European Union is proving to be another act of moral dereliction by the country's rulers. The Brexiteers, pursuing a fantasy of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency, have repeatedly revealed their hubris, mulishness and ineptitude over the past two years. Though originally a "Remainer," Prime Minister Theresa May has matched their arrogant obduracy, imposing a patently unworkable timetable of two years on Brexit and laying down red lines that undermined negotiations with Brussels and doomed her deal to resoundingly bipartisan rejection this week in Parliament.

Such a pattern of egotistic and destructive behavior by the British elite flabbergasts many people today. But it was already manifest seven decades ago during Britain's rash exit from India.

The end of America's unchallenged global economic dominance has arrived sooner than expected, thanks to the very same Neocons who gave the world the Iraq, Syria and the dirty wars in Latin America. Just as the Vietnam War drove the United States off gold by 1971, its sponsorship and funding of violent regime change wars against Venezuela and Syria - and threatening other countries with sanctions if they do not join this crusade - is now driving European and other nations to create their alternative financial institutions.

This break has been building for quite some time, and was bound to occur. But who would have thought that Donald Trump would become the catalytic agent? No left-wing party, no socialist, anarchist or foreign nationalist leader anywhere in the world could have achieved what he is doing to break up the American Empire. The Deep State is reacting with shock at how this right-wing real estate grifter has been able to drive other countries to defend themselves by dismantling the U.S.-centered world order. To rub it in, he is using Bush and Reagan-era Neocon arsonists, John Bolton and now Elliott Abrams, to fan the flames in Venezuela. It is almost like a black political comedy. The world of international diplomacy is being turned inside-out. A world where there is no longer even a pretense that we might adhere to international norms, let alone laws or treaties.