Boris Johnson, Jacinda Ardern & why the Compendium of Courage might save Humanity

When The Slog was barely off the ground nearly fifteen years ago, I wrote a post referring to Harriet Harman and Boris Johnson as “probably the two most dangerous politicians in the United Kingdom”. I reached this conclusion on the basis of their tendencies – respectively – to hold anti-social views on ‘the rainbow of sexuality’ and indulge in serial mendacity as a stepping stone to power at any price.

As with Harris now in the US, Harman’s career fell off the rails when the unpleasant unpopularity of her Looney Labourisms became fully apparent. I was right about her – she was dangerous – but thankfully she was also unelectable in a leadership role.

If only the same could be said of the feckless NWO lackey Johnson. From time to time in this online commentating lark, we all make terrible mistakes. My most notable clanger was to endorse Boris Jobsdone as Prime Minister in December 2019 on the spurious grounds that he was the only senior Tory likely to oppose the EUNATO plot to drag my homeland back into the Brussels bloc of monopolist bullshit and unrepayable sovereign debt.

I wasn’t paying full attention….that much is, five years on, very clear. Johnson had been at best a conveniently late convert to the Brexit cause. The sole reason for his adoption of the Brexit cause was the desire to pass through the hallowed entrance to Ten Downing Street.

God forgive me for being a half-assed dupe of his agitprop BS.

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And yet despite all that, once one has the measure of them, people like BoJo can be very useful because first of all they never change, and secondly they always lie. This means that – as weather vanes – such sociopathic reprobates are unbeatable. When he was Mayor of London, Johnson dismissed the phone-hacking accusations against Murdoch journalists as “a load of left-wing poppycock”. As an intimate of the Dirty Digger, he knew his assertion was a jet-black lie; but not content with the lie, he summoned the head of the Met Police to his office and [with all the normal recording equipment turned off] tried to get his chief of police to drop the case. In short, he tried to pervert the course of justice.

Earlier in his career as an MP, when an opponent called Boris out for lies he told during a parliamentary enquiry, Johnson contacted schoolmate Darius Guppy and asked him to organise a “duffing up” of the whistle-blower.

Throughout the Russo-Ukrainian war, BoJo has lied about the lead-up to it, the broader intentions of Putin, the nature of Zelenskyy’s truly depraved personality and the intentions of the EUNATO alliance.

Now this week, he’s at it again – propping up the insupportable US Secret State “case” for election tampering in Georgia:

“The picture emerging from Georgia is clear – yesterday’s election has been stolen by Putin’s puppet government in Tbilisi. I back the people of Georgia as they stand up for their freedom, their rights and their future.”

As an analysis, the BoJo statement is so far from the Truth, you’d have to measure the distance in light years. The CIA’s gal Madame Coucou [an interesting surname given that in French slang, to “fair coucou” means to give someone the eye about being up for sex] is nothing more than Washington’s cypher.

But that’s always been Johnson’s metier. I spent a hilarious two hours in Manzi’s [now sadly defunct] restaurant some years ago with a senior Telegraph Group staffer who proffered numerous examples of why one simply couldn’t trust anything BoJo wrote as a journalist.

“Boris makes up whoppers and then get’s dismissed under a cloud for doing it,” he alleged, adding, “and of course the other big weakness is a total inability to keep his willy in his underwear”.

In short, a hack’s life is made easier with Boris around, because whatever he says on any subject, all one has to do is assume the verité to be the diametric opposite of what has emerged from his rentagob. From there, there’s but a short distance to travel in order to work out the ‘cui Bojo’ involved.

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Life, culture and civilisation do not, however, emerge via the process of making a journalist’s life easier. On the contrary: the performance of the Fourth Estate – in the face of two decades during which the monied power of bourse capitalism and secret States triumphed over free speech – has been more like that of residents in a high-crime, high-rise Sink Estate.

The media’s failure to defend civilisation has been exceeded only by the terrifyingly complete purchase of pretty much every judiciary in the world….and most of it in plain sight.

As we approach the end of the first quarter of the Twenty-first century, most of the liars who should be in jail are still in power.

Only when this dire situation starts to change can we be justified in having some faith in a better kind of future. A world in which the individual innocent citizen no longer creeps about in fear of his or her shadow, or “saying the wrong thing”.

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And so The Slog’s Compendium of Couragecontinues….it remains an attempt to build evidence that brave but outnumbered observers and commentators are still out there with a belief that Homo sapiens has some kind of role as a force for Good on this and other planets.

Given that New Zealand spawned the ghastly Blair babe Jacinda Ardern, I am sure most Sloggers would appreciate just how much the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties has it’s work cut out defending innocent citizens against the New World Disorder.

This link will take you to the NZCCL page relating to what the site headlines as ‘New Zealand is failing on controlling facial recognition technology’. The piece quite rightly asserts as follows:

‘The drive of the surveillance age is towards more. More cameras. More tracking. More detail. More data. More aggregation. More sharing. More analysis. Advances in technology drive the increase in capability, and there are people willing to turn these new capabilities into products, and people willing to buy and implement them.

The only thing stopping or slowing the surveillance machine are the rules we choose to impose. We can allow people to encrypt their data. We can decide that the privacy of medical records outweighs the need to feed the machine. We can stop companies from collecting more data than they need and from sharing it with others. Our rules, our laws, are the only things stopping us from living in a panopticon where governments, corporations, and other snoops monitor everything we do.

Which is why the draft Biometrics Code from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner is such a disappointment.

Remote Biometric Identification

Remote biometric identification (RBI) is where our attributes – our face, the way we walk, our height, our emotions – are captured by cameras and then processed in a computer in order to identify us. It turns camera-based surveillance of the behaviour of relatively anonymous people into a system that identifies individuals and stores information about them.

The most obvious example is facial recognition technology (FRT). Supermarkets are using it to recognise people on their watchlists, marketers use it to identify which ads to serve to people, police forces are using it to look for criminals. 

When RBI identifies you it captures more than just your identity. It means that the people who own the system know where you were at that time, what you did while you were there, maybe even judging you by what you’re wearing, your facial expressions, or how you move. It knows who you were with, who you talked to, and for how long.

RBI is worrying enough in corporate and retail environments but gets even more worrying when used in areas where you might want more privacy. It can be used to identify protesters at a political demonstration, patients entering a health clinic, or people attending a social function.

Facial recognition systems take away our:

Privacy of location – the ability to be somewhere without others knowing where we are. It allows anyone with a camera and access to the FRT to determine where we were at a particular time. 

Privacy of identity – the ability to be anonymous in public places. 

Importantly, RBI is something that is done to you with no opportunity to consent or refuse. The technology is cheap and cameras keep getting better. You can’t exactly change the way you walk or leave your face at home. You can be captured by an RBI system just by existing.

Data captured using RBI isn’t the same as most other forms of private data we talk about. We know that government agencies and private companies capture data about us when we deal with them. We give them the data and generally have a reasonable understanding of what use it’s being put to. 

There’s no choosing when it comes to RBI, rather you’ve just walked past a camera that you might not have even noticed. You’re identified and recorded in a database without your consent or knowledge.

We believe that RBI is a fundamentally different class of threat to our privacy and calls for a different kind of response.’

Well said, NZCCL people.

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Source: https://therealslog.com/2024/11/01/boris-johnson-jacinda-ardern-why-the-compendium-of-courage-might-save-humanity/