The House of Commons slams the door in the face of Black Rod, approaching with a summons from the Queen.
No photo this year of Black Rod knocking on the door with her rod of office three times, because of scaled back pandemic coverage But there's a lovely notch there from past ceremonies.
Because if you're going to have a monarchy, it's important that the Queen remembers her place and that the Commons are in charge.
Also there's a Crown, a Sword of State, Cap of Maintenance and a +5 Cloak of Warding (ok I made up that last one)
A member of the Cabinet is held hostage in Buckingham Palace as security against the Queen's safe return. Like America's designated survivor but in reverse.
And this is the scaled-down ceremony because of Covid. Normally there's a Royal Coach, Heralds, all the fun stuff.
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The Arizona legislature, which commissioned the "audit", will surely accept its conclusions however wild they are. Perhaps they'll do that via a motion rejecting the 2020 result?
That might also mean a criminal investigation against innocent election officials in Maricopa. No convictions will follow but it'll take months.
I wonder if the world is about to face significant inflationary pressure. Supply issues for appliances, low interest rates, stimulus cheques / furlough payments, post-Covid optimisim in the West...
It's been 30 years since inflation was out of control in most Western countries. Millennials haven't experienced high inflation, let alone Zoomers. If it comes it'll be a big shock.
I'm writing indoors at a cafe for the first time since March 2020. Every table is taken and every person has a laptop out. It's completely silent apart from the background music.
Someone just came in, saw there were no tables and went to leave when someone else offered to share a table. The new person has no laptop, but she has ringbinders. Silence continues.
Someone answered her phone. The rest of us are giving her dirty looks.
I think this NYTimes article is too pessimistic. In particular, it doesn't take account of the situation in Israel, where it looks like there *might* be population immunity with just 54% vaccination.
Almost 30% of the population in Israel is under the age of 16. The young population meant that we weren't *expecting* herd immunity here until kids could be vaccinated.
The article suggests that you need 80% vaccination coverage to keep unmitigated R<1. But that doesn't seem to be what we're seeing in real life. Maybe because infected kids alone don't transmit the virus to enough other people to keep the pandemic going?
The "watermark" theory was all over MAGA and QAnon in the week after the election. The theory was that Trump had ordered the US military to secretly watermarked the ballots in order to expose fraud by state officials.
Here's a few examples from 8 November showing what they imagined the "real" ballots might look like under UV light. QAnon adherents also referenced the Q phrase "watch the water", claiming it might refer to watermarks.
The irony is that QAnon dumped the watermarks theory months ago, and have spent recent days explaining how the UV light at the Maricopa "audit" wasn't looking for watermarks because that would be dumb! The UV must really be looking for something else like skin oil