So I am considering changing the design of the site & in doing so I’m toying with the thought of allowing a bit more interaction. In the past this has led to horrendous amounts of moderation of spam, which gets pretty tedious. However I’m not a fan of visual or audio tests or of sending people’s personal data to big tech companies.

Sometimes though compromise is necessary. So I have implemented google’s reCAPTCHA service, but only on pages where a submission is possible, ie the contact form & on any pages allowing comments. The privacy policy has been updated accordingly & pages on which it is implemented display the google reCAPTCHA widget, which includes links to their privacy & terms of use pages.

Testing comments & spam protection

Humanity’s last chance at staving off catastrophe slither off to their various bolt holes to fill the bunkers and increase their investments in artificial intelligence and automated farming, robotics & weapons.

It’s not very hard to extrapolate the plan. Let’s face it if the machines can do all that do those rich folk really need us fleshy automatons they traditionally rely on for manual labour? How much tax could they not pay? Is negative tax a thing? I’m not an accountant but I honestly suspect there is, somewhere, some business benefiting from negative tax rates. Probably in the UK but who would know? The BBC seems to think balance is maintained by parroting the Government at prime time while covering the corruption & lies on excellent outlier programmes almost designed to be ignored by the majority of the population.

I found two of the arguments against action particularly galling, the most egregious of which is obviously. I paraphrase multiple delegates…

We can’t be expected to change the entire energy infrastructure of the world overnight. There needs to be a transition period in order to phase out fossil fuels

It sounds so reasonable unless you are one of the billions who have been shouting this message for 30 years, minimising driving, flying, watching the bloody water level in the kettle, turning off lights, comforted by the empty green-wash shit constantly spewing from the sewer of the “free market”

We’ve been shouting for at least 30 years that this moment was coming. The public & politicians are perfectly happy to accept all the benefits of science from computing, modern medicine, farming, logistics, financial trading, communications, modern materials, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals but apparently climate science is all bollocks. This sentiment is usually expressed on a digital computer constructed of insanely complex multilayered silicone circuits utilising streams of electrons & artificial materials all powered by vast utility systems connecting hydro electric, nuclear, wind and who knows what else, cross continental power grids run by computers & need & greed.

I once tried to express this to an individual who raged on twitter when a politician suggested we all benefit from a university education. It is very hard to explain to someone in 140 characters that every single aspect of modern life is a benefit of university educations. That’s the fecking beauty. We don’t all have to be clever or motivated. Let’s face it when people say “humanity are amazing” and “look at what we have achieved!” they are not normally talking about you, forgive me if you are some national hero inadvertently caught up in the reader’s letters page while munching on your once yearly keep up with the plebs cod ‘n’ chips November special.

In public these COP26 representatives & influential billionaires act as if this is all new to them. Incredulous that the climate is in such a terrible state. That no one has acted until now. As if every flight they took in the last 20 years wasn’t undertaken with the full knowledge of the damage it was doing to the environment. Sound familiar reader?

Today’s politicians can’t be held accountable for the decisions of their predecessors. In the UK though the first past the post electoral system, abandoned by most modern democracies, means the majority government will almost always represent a minority of the electorate.

In the United Kingdom that majority party representing a minority of the electorate accepts huge donations at both party & candidate level from many fossil fuel interests, insists that public accountability is via a 17th century electoral system in which the government is its own judge & juror of its behaviour and is committed to licensing new North sea oil fields, commissioning new coal plants & reducing duty on internal flights which are already cheaper then the same journey by rail/.

The UK has reduced the duty on internal flights.
The UK is commissioning new coal plants.
The UK is granting new North Sea Gas licences.
The UK is a rogue state.

The sooner the international community rescinds the legitimacy of this regime, the shorter the period of painful chaos its inhabitants will have to endure.

Please remember half of us have had our EU rights unwillingly torn from us by an undemocratic and corrupt regime.

I’ve never yearned for spring more earnestly then this year. She has given us a brief glorious glimpse of some potential relief from our necessary incarceration. Although it’s about to get chillier again apparently. The papers are saying a polar blast with weeks worth of snow blanketing the country is forthcoming. The met office say, average temperatures, & generally unsettled.

For me February has been the worst yet since Covid19 struck. I can’t remember feeling so low in my life. Everyday I am thankful for my situation. I feel on the very edge & yet I am in one of the best possible situations with a garden & a beach.

When I exercise on the beach social distancing is, in theory, effortless. It ought to be impossible to violate the strongly suggested 2m metre guideline or whatever distance the hapless Johnson pulls out of a lobbyists wallet this week. So it is a bit disappointing that a few people choose to pass you within a matter of centimetres when there’s metres to either side.

There are times last month where I felt I hadn’t taken a single photograph, or achieved anything else either. Photography though is like an investment, deferred pleasure, or perhaps some form of psychological nostalgic masturbation. Now I look back at what I did I’m feeling a bit more positive again. I’m satisfied for the moment that I am not, after all, the Nancy Paula Millstone Jennings of photography.

Anyway a February gallery is being brewed along with some Kite surfing shots from the 19th where the light was so bad & my ability a little off that day that it’s 20 times more work to rescue a few poorly exposed action shots than it was to take the pictures.