I'm writing this on July 18th and that's Richard Branson's birthday, maybe somebody got him a train set for it, hopefully not the government though because that was very very expensive last time.

What else is in the news? I see that Shamima Begum is also trying to return to the UK, something about losing an appeal. Appeal? I didn't think she appealed to anyone, other than the sorts that probably want a statue of her put on that plinth in Bristol. The guardian can call her stateless for all they want but she looked like she was in a right state the last time folks saw her running about trying to kill people. I also saw an article on Coronavirus and how the acting profession are fearful that some theatres may never open again after lockdown. Why do they have to make a song and dance about everything?. There's also a new disease on on the loose: Bubonic plague! A Chinese city has issued a black death level three warning. Well, 2020 is the year of the rat.

I guess though, the big story this week seems to be the Twitter/Bitcoin hacking scam which in my mind reassured me that the world is still kind of the same and that fools and there money are easily parted. Earlier this week some hackers managed to take control of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Barack Obama's Twitter accounts and posted a tweet saying that as a charitable act, anyone who sent money to a certain anonymous Bitcoin account would get twice the amount paid back. This on the surface looks remarkably suspicious. Designed to appeal to the sort of people as lazy as whoever it was that named the fireplace. But the internet is populated with idiots, the sort of people who think that pharmacists work on farms and boast that they can still fit into the same shoes that they wore 10 years ago. People being stupid on the internet? That expectation is the price of entry.

Nonetheless, this is probably the least dubiously legal thing to happen with bitcoin this year and it's the least dubious business thing to involve Elon Musk this year. I have a bitcoin wallet and it's a nice little hedge against economic collapse that can't be seized or stolen through inflation, but I largely have it through greedy speculation that the price jumps 10-fold. It's not a proper investment and nobody's in it for anything other than the off-chance of getting rich. And anyone that thinks that Elon Musk is going to give them a thousand dollars is either deluded, or they're perhaps just Elon Musk's lawyer charging by the hour for whatever mess he's gotten himself into this time, mostly likely on Twitter ironically. Which was ironically also on Twitter. And as for the rest at least when it was Obama or Joe Biden's twitter account claiming to give away free money folks should know better not to trust it, because they're politicians.