According the Daily Express (UK), British Children’s Secretary Girde Urloins Ed Balls yesterday announced an 800 million dollar plan to “put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.” The families will be monitored to ensure that the at-risk children attend school, go to bed on time, and wipe their asses properly. Okay, I made that last bit up, but not the first two bits: the UK government has announced a plan to install closed circuit video cameras in the homes of its citizens to make sure that they go to bed on time. You couldn’t make this shit up. Unless your name was Eric Blair, obviously. (That’s George Orwell for those of you scoring at home.) Normally I’d finish this up with some snark about how the UK’s become a hamster in a wheel third world socialist shithole, but things here are no better. Sooner rather than later we’re all going to be stooped over in the rice fields meeting the quota for a five year agricultural plan developed by some recent Harvard grad. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then and they can only use me for fertilizer.