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• Undecided about its place in the modern world, the UK breathes out a barely-audible “meh” and commits a very public act of seppuku;
• Hours after the vote has been declared the following day, the Prime Minister resigns, displaying his Eton stick-to-itiveness with the rhetorical question “Why should I do the hard shit?” and disappears for three days;
• Farage walks back Leave campaign promises literally within minutes;
• Duncan-Smith walks back promises that he literally stood in front of during the campaign;
• Gove goes into hiding;
• Johnson goes into hiding, writes an incoherent article for the Telegraph, and then reappears, betraying the whole group he just led;
• The Leave campaign declares they don’t have a plan for Brexit and tells a reporter to talk to government;
• The Chancellor hides for three days, peeps out for a moment, declares government don’t have a plan, and then goes back into his room to sulk as $3 trillion is wiped off of international markets;
• The opposition leader, who went on holiday in the midst of the campaign over the most important decision of a generation, and whose support for Remain may be fairly described as ‘sabotage’, has lost the backing of his parliamentary party, leaving opposition rudderless in a period when the country is—literally—ungoverned;
• A minority opposition party adopts the winning slogan “We are the 48%”, which they evidently view as aspirational, since that is a higher percentage of the vote than they’ve ever received;
• It’s discovered that government don’t even have enough experts to negotiate the trade treaties necessary to effect a Brexit;
• The Prime Minister then goes to Brussels and demands—demands!—that the EU give the UK more control over immigration; is sent home on his bike;
• The only prominent politican who displays anything like leadership heads a party whose aim is to split off from the UK;
• Racist hate crimes increase nearly 60% across the country;
• The term “Bregret” is born as an unknown but seemingly sizeable number of Brexit voters realise that they may have made the worst decision of their lives and want some sort of do-over;
• Johnson, one of those who got us into this mess, is metaphorically knifed by Gove, another one of those who got us into this mess;
• Johnson, no longer finding any of this jolly fun, decides to walk off into the sunset;
• And still no one knows what is going on, or who is running the ship. The only thing we know is that the ship, having already hit an iceberg, is now bound for the rocks.

So, how was your week?

There’s an interesting phenomenon on t’Internet of taking songs & rendering them in 8-bit games console styles. It’s an interesting mix of nostalgia of taking the entertainment d’un certain âge & combining them in an unexpected way. Below we have a version of the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place”:

Another example is this version of the Smiths’ “This Charming Man”, which they charmingly call “Super Morrissey Brothers”

Professional arsehole (and historian) David Starkey states that the true set of British values includes “queueing, drunkenness, nostalgia, loving pets, self-loathing, wit and eccentricity”.

How does terrorism work? Yuval Noah Harari writes the best analysis I have ever read on the subject. It’s all about exploiting a flaw in modern governance: “The legitimacy of the modern state is based upon its promise to keep the public sphere free of political violence… After centuries of bloody struggles, we have crawled out of the black hole of violence, but we feel that the black hole is still there, patiently waiting to swallow us again.”

Are HDR images the new velvet paintings?