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The Alt-Wrong in the UK, the Faragists, Brexiters, Tories and assorted hangers-on have long railed against the "liberal left bias" and "wokeness" of the BBC, despite it being run by Tories.

Veteran BBC journalist Andrew Neil recently left the BBC to start his own TV news channel, GB News, also known as Gammon Brexit News or GBeebies (after the BBC's channel for toddlers) whose remit is to provide unbiased, un-woke, uncensored news, current affairs and debate, free from liberal left bias and cancel culture.

Several well-known BBC colleagues also left the BBC to support Andrew Neil's new unbiased illiberal right regressive venture, to push the boundaries of debate and to be brave enough to say the things that ordinary people are thinking but dare not express in this new liberal fascist undemocratic Marxist dystopia.

One such TV journalist was Guto Harri, who apparently took the knee in solidarity with the England football (soccer) team who had suffered racist abuse.

Predictably, the gammon went into meltdown, and Harri was sacked.

After three days and a growing boycott, which led to some shows attracting zero viewers, the channel’s management felt the need to cut Harri loose. In a statement, GB News said it was “unacceptable” for any presenter to take the knee, a symbol associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, and said Harri had broken the channel’s editorial code.

But...

Friends of Harri said: “GB News is becoming an absurd parody of what it proclaimed to be – not defending free speech and combatting cancel culture but replicating it on the far right. Nasty.

Oh the Iron Knee.

The Harri incident has proved indicative of the issues facing GB News. Harri was a longserving BBC correspondent before moving into politics as Boris Johnson’s spokesperson during his first term as mayor of London. He then went to work for Rupert Murdoch’s News UK for several years, yet has found himself portrayed by some GB News viewers as a dangerous leftwing Marxist sleeper agent.

The Kipper paranoid delusion lives on.

As David Kurten, a former Ukip politician who now leads the niche rightwing Heritage party, gleefully tweeted at the channel after Harri took the knee: “Go woke, go broke.”

Smelly Kippers.

Now, will we once again be visited by the Fascist Maifesto parrot? Have at ye!

It's finally made it to the mainstream media this side of the pond, Critical Race Theory gets a mention in a Guardian article about a book highly critical of former President Trump.

Shortly before the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, told aides the US was facing a “Reichstag moment” because Donald Trump was preaching “the gospel of the Führer”, according to an eagerly awaited book about Trump’s last year in office.

The book is called I Alone Can Fix This and is by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

Milley’s invocation of Germany under the Third Reich follows a report in another book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election, by Michael C Bender, that Trump told his chief of staff, John Kelly, “Hitler did a lot of good things”.

Of course, Trump denies having made the remark.

This Milley chap seems to have his head screwed on the right way. It goes on:

Leonnig and Rucker report that Milley spoke to an “old friend”, who warned the general that Trump and his allies were trying to “overturn the government” in response to Joe Biden’s election victory, which Trump falsely maintains was the result of electoral fraud.

Milley refers to the Trump supporters as "Brownshirts" who were paramilitary supporters of Hitler in 1930s Germany, of course.

Trump’s supporters attacked Congress on 6 January, the day the electoral college results were certified . Five people died.

Leonnig and Rucker report that Milley called the attackers “Nazis” and, in reference to two far-right groups, said “they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys”.

“These are the same people we fought in [the second world war],” he reportedly said.

And now for the CRT part:

According to New York magazine, the authors also report that Milley, who made headlines and stoked rightwing ire last month by defending teaching about historic racism in army educational establishments, met former first lady Michelle Obama at the Capitol on 20 January, the day Biden was inaugurated.

And here's the link.

Milley thinks that learning from history is a good idea:

"I do think it's important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read," Milley said. "And it is important that we train and we understand.

"I want to understand white rage, and I'm white," he continued in reference to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. "And I want to understand it.

"I've read Karl Marx. I've read Lenin. That doesn't make me a communist," he added. "What is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend? And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, our noncommissioned officers, of being 'woke.'"

Critical Race Theory, hated by white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and Trump supporters. How very interesting! Thanks Aristarchus for bringing it to my attention.

That's the blue touchpaper lit. I shall retire to a safe distance.

George Monbiot has written an article in the Guardian entitled How the BBC let climate deniers walk all over it.

It summarisies his, and other journalists, attempts to get Climate Change reported and discussed properly in the mainstream media.

He begins:

In 1979, an internal study by Exxon concluded that burning carbon fuels “will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050”. In 1982, as the Guardian’s Climate Crimes series recalls, an Exxon memo concluded that the science of climate change was “unanimous”. Then it poured millions of dollars into lobby groups casting doubt on it.

It details the tactics employed by the lobbyists to cast doubt on the research findings of climate scientists and of the investigative journalists, labelling them "conspiracy theorists."

Broadcasters (TV and radio) have been guilty of giving false equivalence to climate change denial versus real science in the name of "impartiality" and "balance." Deniers have been invited onto news programmes to "debate the science" and to cast doubt on its authenticity. A prominent Conservative politician, Nigel Lawson, was frequently to be seen and heard on BBC news denying climate change, for example.

Channel 4 (the UK's other public service broadcaster) comes in for criticism for several programmes it aired which were blatant climate change denial propaganda pieces with no basis in scientific fact.

The BBC was even putting the "pros and cons" of climate change into exam revision material aimed at school age children.

Last week, a group of us revealed what the BBC has been teaching children about climate breakdown. The GCSE module on BBC Bitesize listed the “positive” impacts of our global catastrophe. Among them were “more resources, such as oil, becoming available in places such as Alaska and Siberia when the ice melts”; “new tourist destinations becoming available” (welcome to Derby-on-Sea); and “warmer temperatures could lead to healthier outdoor lifestyles”.

Apparently the farming industry is still in denial over climate change, and the BBC is giving members of that industry copious air time to mislead us without any right of reply or fact checking.

He finishes:

The lesson, to my mind, is obvious: if we fail to hold organisations to account for their mistakes and obfuscations, they’ll keep repeating them. Climate crimes have perpetrators. They also have facilitators.

Update: There are bad people on both sides.

The Guardian has an article called "The scientists hire by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago."

One of the scientists, a physicist called Dr Martin Hoffert, worked for Exxon from 1981 to 1987. In 1980 they predicted that there would be about a 1C temperature rise due to carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning by 2020, a number since experimentally confirmed.

However, one quote stands out in particular:

Back in 1980, there was a guy working for Exxon and he was one of the inventors of the lithium battery, which electric cars now use. This guy won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on lithium batteries. Just imagine if Exxon management had taken our prediction seriously! They could have easily built huge factories to make lithium batteries to facilitate the transition to electric cars. Instead, they fired this guy. They shut down all their energy work. And they started funding climate deniers.

Elon Musk is a clever fellow, there's no doubt about it, and he is exceedingly rich. If I were as rich and clever as him, I too would be building space rockets and going to Mars (and then on to Saturn with a nuclear engine, but that's a story for another day).

Cryptocurrency has come along in the last 20 years. I really should have invested in Bitcoin when it was new. If I'd put in £20, I would probably have so much money, I'd have been able to invest it in all sorts of things and I'd also be on my way to being a billionaire. However, at the time I was sufficiently financially challenged that I couldn't contemplate potentially throwing away that amount of money.

Now, when Elon Musk opens his mouth (or pontificates on Witter or other such anti-social media - is he on Farcebook? I'm not) the price of Bitcoin either goes up or down, and by quite a percentage. I spy an opportunity!

A few years ago when the UK was still friends with the EU, I got a fancy on-line bank account that you can use from a mobile phone which lets you convert from Pounds Sterling to Euros with no commission. You can use it to pay in Pounds or Euros electronically, so if and when you go abroad you don't need to convert cash up-front to foreign currency and carry it around with you. Before we left the EU, we took Turgid jr. to France for a weekend and we both got these accounts which were very useful indeed. (It's Revolut, by the way.)

Recently, new features have been added to the account. It can now do trading in commodities, stocks and shares and cryptocurrency. I thought I'd take a punt on crypto after Musk last crashed the market.

As with a lot of these things, when Musk talks down Bitcoin, the whole crypto market drops in sympathy. When he talks it up, they all go up a bit.

So after the last crash, I bought some Bitcoin and some Ethereum. I invested a very small amount of money (a few tens of pounds) using limit orders to catch them on the dips (they vary up and down a few percent over the course of a day apparently) and to sell on the ups. After fees (the bank charges a transaction fee, and by inspection it seems to be about 1%) I have a profit, in cleared funds, of £3.75. That's not bad for five minutes spent prodding at a mobile phone.

Every day it seems that some new cryptocurrencies become available. Occasionally, one rises in value exponentially for no apparent reason. Then there's a crash.

Last weekend I spent a couple of hours doing a spreadsheet of about 30 cryptocurrencies available looking at the low and high for the year, current value and relative percentages, and a brief qualitative description of what their value did over the year.

It seems that since Musk's last pronouncement (I think he said that crypto wasn't too bad for the environment after all) they went up a bit and now they are gradually declining but with daily variation of a few percent. So if you buy at the trough, and sell before the peak, you should do OK if you don't get too greedy. I reckon I could make about £3 a week profit if I'm careful.

Then, when I have earned enough to re-invest, I can withdraw my initial stake and just invest my profit. That way, if it all goes horribly wrong, I've lost nothing.

"This time next year, Rodney, we'll be millionaires!" -- Derek Trotter.

Last year, I was doing a bit of soul-searching regarding where I'd got to in my career (careering from disaster to disaster) and I found myself frustrated (particularly by PHBs and corporate inertia), perhaps part of an on-going midlife crisis. So I looked for a new job and miraculously got one.

Now I am the PHB, at a different company with a completely different culture and absolutely no C++ (hooray). I am learning new things too, which is always good.

I have already found that my ability to obfuscate with grand yet vacuous prose has come in useful. I'm also spending a lot of time doing analysis and planning, and "communicating" with project managers and senior people in the company. Some days have been entirely filled with meetings. I feel a bit guilty. It doesn't feel like "proper work."

Of course, being a PHB means being ignorant, smug and vindictive, so these are traits that I am keen to hone and apply to my team going forward. I will sit back and stare at Microsoft(TM) Excel(R) spreadsheets while the enthusiastic and intellingent young engineers in my control are ruthlessly exploited, having their natural enthusiasm beaten out of them until they are no longer of use and can be discarded.

That's the plan.

However, as it says in the Tao of Programming

Thus spake the Master Programmer:
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless."

I like to write code at home. I have various silly projects that I work on from time to time. I do a lot of shell scripting, since that gives the biggest bang for the buck, but I also like to write C. I'm really struggling to get into it at the moment. I find that being a PHB my brain is all "visionary leadership" and "ideas" and I can't quieten down the internal noise long enough to write any code worth it.

This weekend I think I have managed to write about 20 lines of code. Every time I sit down to do it, my brain goes off on a tangent.

The Good Law Project has been doing a good job in recent years of holding our corrupt and mendacious Alt-Wrong (ERG/Faragist) infested Tory government to account, particularly for contracts awarded to friends, acquaintances and others connected with the Conservative Party, to provide public services, including for the procurement of PPE for the Coronavirus epidemic.

It seems that the Alt-Wrong apologist press, this time the Mail on Sunday, is picking on the Good Law Project, accusing it of "abusing" crowd funding.

From the Good Law Project website:

The Courts have repeatedly complimented us for our conduct. In our challenge over the Hanbury contract handed to associates of Dominic Cummings, the Judge said she was satisfied that we are managing our cases and funds in an appropriate way. In another hearing the Judge said: “All citizens are likely to have an interest in whether or not the procurement on the part of the government is done using good governance procedures and integrity. And therefore there is a real wider public interest that has been represented by the claimant group…”

Like all good bullies, the Mail on Sunday is attacking the messenger, not the message, and making things up.

At last I have a sea-going vessel of my own. Someone gave me an old inflatable dinghy, a 2.4m tender. It has oars, but no rowlocks.

A few years ago, I noticed I was losing my sense of balance. I used to be able to stand up on the gunwales of my dad's small yacht when it was heeling over, with my hands in my pockets, looking nonchalantly out to sea. A couple of years ago, some strange things started to happen. I got shaky and weak in places. I find it quite hard to stand up on the boat now.

I'm very proud of never having fallen off a boat in my life, and when I took the dinghy sailing course a couple of years ago, I let them know that I considered it undignified and that I wouldn't be capsizing. I was the only one who finished the Level 1 course without capsizing.

Level 2 was a bit different. I did capsize once while practising on the lake, and doing the Level 2 course, there was plenty of capsizing, some of it deliberate since the instructor wanted to see us recovering.

My own sea-going vessel was given to Mrs Turgid by someone who knew that I had a passing interest in such things. Turgid Sr. was keen to see it, so he, I and cousin Mitch took it down to the harbour one evening to try it out. We pumped it up and then noticed that it didn't have any rowlocks for the two oars. Undaunted, out I went in it, an oar in each had used as a paddle. I got a few metres from the slipway where the water was a couple of metres deep and made it back to the shore.

Unfortunately for the on-lookers, there was no capsizing and I didn't get wet, despite my increasingly decrepit state and lack of physical fitness.

Living in the countryside, and being next to the sea is great. When we moved in, I planted a few rows of potatoes, and then some more a few weeks later, most of which are through now. I've also caught a few fish.

Yesterday Turgid Sr. and I went cycling up into the hills. He is a cheat: his bike has an electric motor. Mine doesn't. It was a 12-mile round trip, the first half being up hill a total of over 640ft (200m) mostly on bumpy gravel tracks. I puffed and wheezed, took copious quantities of Salbutamol, but I made it. The scenery was stunning. My legs were like lead at the end of it.

I need some rowlocks for my boat, possibly a small outboard motor, and a fishing rod. And a crate of beer.

Since I moved house I now have a room for all my computers. This includes my two old Sun Ultra 80s and Sun Blade 100. I also have a K6-2/500 (512MB RAM) which started out in 1999 as a K6-2/400, and an Athlon XP 2000+ (512MB RAM) from 2002.

I decided to try NetBSD on one of the Ultra 80s and the Blade 100. Turgid jr. installed one of them, hist first time installing NetBSD, and it worked very well.

Years ago I installed Gentoo on the K6-2, and I thought I might have a got at installing a new verson on the Athlon XP. It took a while to get it going. The Gentoo 32-bit boot image is broken, so I ended up having to boot from Slackware-current to partition the disks and set up the network. I then got the stage 3 image down over http from one of my Slackware machines and set it going.

Then I had an idea. I went on Ebay to see if I could find a faster CPU for the Athlon XP machine. The XP 2000+ runs at 1.67GHz and was reasonably quick back in the day. When I compiled the Gentoo kernel, it took about 166 minutes. On Ebay, for peanuts (less than £12.50 including postage), I found an Athlon XP 2800+, which runs at 2.08GHz. I ordered it and dropped it in. I tried the kernel compile again. It only took about 114 minutest this time, an improvement of over 30%.

Someone on here kindly suggested I try setting up a compile farm for cross-compiling Gentoo on the faster machines. So I got as far as setting up VirtualBox on some of my Slackware systems and starting a Gentoo install (to be identical to the clients, for consistency and simplicity) on one of them.

One of my 64-bit Slackware machines (the ancient intel Core 2 Quad) died. The motherboard had been on its way out for months. The symptom was that it wouldn't start straight away when you pressed the power switch. Sometimes it wouldn't start at all. but sometimes it would take many tens of seconds to start. I googled that and it was probably a problem with failing capacitors. The machine had 8GB DDR-2 in it and a couple of large SATA disks, so I didn't want to waste it. I went on Ebay and managed to get, again for peanuts, a Gigabyte motherboard which came with a dual-core Pentium.

The motherboard (and CPU) worked, so I put my Core 2 Quad in it. Unfortunately it would only work with half of my RAM. I did a bit of googling and it turns out that this motherboard can't take double-sided DIMMS. So now I had a spare 4GB of DDR-2 RAM.

Then I remembered I still have my old Phenom II X4 940 (3.0GHz) in a box somewhere, and its cooler. All I needed was a case, power supply and motherboard. Back on Ebay, I got a very good deal (with a money off voucher) for a cheap and cheerful new case, a new 750W PSU and an old Asus Socket AM2+ motherboard complete with dual core Phenom II, 3.1GHz.

I put it all together, and took the disks out of the Core 2 Quad, and put a spare disk in that one. I put my old nVidia GeForec 9400GT in it and away it went, after disabling the built-in graphics, which is some kind of Radeon.

Then I was thinking about number crunching. I do some BOINC things and I really will get around to writing some OpenCL code one of these days. Graphics cards are as rare as hen's teeth these days. I have a GTX 1650 in my Ryzen, and I had a GTX 650 in my Phenom II X6 (2.7Ghz). I looked on Ebay at second hand GTX 660s and they were selling for ludicrous amounts of money (£60+) given how old they are. Then I had a brainwave. I've used nVidia Quadro graphics cards at work before, and they're not really what people who play games buy, so I had a look at that wikipedia page to see what models support which features and I figured I might be able to get a bargain on something with "CUDA Compute Capability 5.0" and Maxwell architecture. So I went back on Ebay and found some Quadro K620 cards for sale at very reasonable prices. So I bought two for the price that GTX 660s were selling for. They're up and running.

I had thought about seeing if I could upgrade the Phenom II X6 1045T (2.7GHz) to the fastest the board will take, the 1090T at 3.2GHz. It seems that these CPUs are still selling well. It would be difficult to get one for under £70 and I have run out of pocket money. The parts to get the Phenom II X4 going were less than that.

My adventures with lunatic fringe versions of Slackware (i.e. -current) continue apace and I've just set up the Core 2 Quad with current from about a week ago with kernel 5.10.38. I tried a current from two days ago with kernel 5.10.41 but that hangs on boot and gives a kernel oops apparently in the SMP code.

Living in the sticks the Internet bandwidth is rotten. I'm only getting 11Mbit/s down and about 1.2 up so I finally got around to putting a cron job on my little always-on server to do my downloads over night. I considered satellite Internet, but that's a bit too new at the moment, and I've heard that some people have had bad experiences with it.

My family is relocating to Scotland, to the highlands, to be nearer my parents, to have a better quality of life and to build a new house.

This house is going to be built to some very modern standards. I want it built with a high level of insulation, triple glazed windows and it will be heated by a ground source heat pump, possibly with a borehole for the element. I'm also thinking on putting in a solar panel for hot water. Electrical solar panels may come later.

From what little research I've done, I think we'll be building a timber frame house with concrete blocks and rendering on the outside.

My father is giving me some land in the corner of one of his crofts, so I'm saving a lot of money on the plot. There is an old ruin on the site. It's probably over 100 years old and is a but and ben. Any sign of a roof has long disappeared, but the stone blocks are still there. I don't know what to do with them. Any ideas?

We also have to consider things like sewerage. Apparently there are some newfangled things you can get nowadays that are better than a septic tanks.

I see that waste heat reclamation systems are also available and I would like to know if they're any good. I suspect they might be quite expensive to install.

Finally, the house needs data cabling: Cat-6 or Cat-7?