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Why is Boris so Confident?

  The spectre of Partygate looms large over Boris Johnson; coupled with the cost of living crisis that his and Sunak’s disastrous policies have wrought upon the UK, current opinion polling is not looking good for him right now. Currently, opinion polling from major pollsters has Labour on a lead of between 6 and 11 percent (for comparison, Tony Blair won the 1997 election by a margin of 12.5%, so an 11% lead is indicative of a similarly scaled landslide). Even worse for the Prime Minister is polling on individual policy and leadership areas, with most pollsters showing Labour leads on every issue they poll, from the economy to healthcare to crime to integrity in office. If that is the case, then why is Boris so confident? Usually, when a government is in such a tailspin, its chaotic actions are matched by chaotic and often pessimistic media briefing, statements and leaks. However, while we are of course seeing plenty of chaotic actions, the approach of the government in terms of wh...
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Putin's Final Gamble

  A thermobaric weapon uses oxygen from the air, rather than pure oxygen in a cell, as fuel for detonation. Conventional explosives consist of around 25% fuel and 75% oxidiser by weight, but thermobaric weapons are 100% fuel, making them around four times more powerful than conventional explosives by weight. However, what makes thermobaric weapons so dangerous is the way in which they kill their victims. Of course, they have the same effects as normal explosives; victims might burn to death or be crushed by debris, but the pressure wave created by sucking the oxygen from the air can rupture lungs and eardrums and cause blindness - but crucially it is very unlikely to make the victim fall unconscious. This means that many deaths from thermobaric weapons occur by suffocation of a fully conscious victim who has had both lungs ruptured. Thermobaric weapons were used by the USA in Vietnam, and were considered so cruel that they have not ever been subsequently used by any country since o...
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Everyone Less Covid-Cautious Than Me is a Murderer: The Ultimate Guide to Having Opinions Online

  Everyone less Covid-cautious than me is a murderer, and everyone more Covid-cautious than me is a maniac. It seems that nearly everyone, or at least nearly everyone on Twitter (and other social media) believes some version of this statement. Now, do not get me wrong, the murderers and maniacs do walk among us - I think anyone would have a hard time excusing the actions of Prime Minister Boris Johnson during the various national lockdowns that hit the United Kingdom over the past two years. However, the point is that everyone sets the bar of what is acceptable just below what they are actually doing - and the bar of what is and is not acceptable is a very firm, and very binary line for most people when it comes to coronavirus. There is some logic in it - after all if you believe what you are doing is acceptable then why would you limit yourself further for what you see as no reason? But the logic seems to end there, as people find it very difficult to conceive that others might pu...
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What Next for Boris Johnson?

  The Prime Minister has been in apparent mortal danger since the emergence of Partygate stories. However, thanks to a recent favourable intervention by the Metropolitan Police (which my libel lawyer tells me I am not allowed to call a cover-up), it would appear he is safe. But, is all hope of justice being done lost? Well… During the May administration, a series of complex votes in Parliament, the frenetic mood changes of key MPs, and the various possible confidence votes, led to a wide range of possible outcomes, analysed by many pundits in flowcharts. I was something of an expert on this - at peak I would address rooms of 40 people all wondering what had gone on and what might happen next. And by creating and studying these flowcharts, I was able to explain. Now, since Boris faces a slightly simpler, albeit more dire, situation than Theresa May, there is perhaps no need for a flowchart, but the same logic can be applied to look at possible next steps. The Sue Gray report is a go...
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There Will Be Another Pandemic

  There will be another pandemic. Well, in all likelihood there will be. After all, unless some other event happens to cause the extinction of humans soon (such as, I don’t know, a nuclear war with Russia), the probability of another pandemic occurring ever approaches 1. However, that kind of logic is not what this blog post is about. I instead posit that there will be another pandemic SOON. Maybe in the next twenty years, certainly in this century. Why? Because the conditions that led to this pandemic are still set to be in place in the “new normal”. Wet markets in East Asia, where Coronavirus is theorised to have developed, are still common, and the West has an awful lot of practices that are prime ground for the breeding of new superdiseases, such as an over-reliance on antibiotics, a refusal to wear face-masks even in the limited way that had become the norm in the rest of the world before the pandemic, abbatoirs, slaughterhouses, nightclubs, or even the fact that according to ...
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Ali - An Obituary for a Twitter Account

  Ali has died. PoliticsForAlI was a news aggregation service (or a “news aggression service” according to one quick-thinker in the aftermath). The Twitter account, which had hundreds of thousands of followers, had subscriptions to all of the newspapers and would bring the most outrageous of paywalled content to the masses in 280 characters or less, always linking to the story below. Unfortunately, the 280 character summary of the point made in an article became further and further removed from what the article actually said, and by the end of 2021 they had largely stopped linking the articles from which their “news” came from altogether. Why was he called Ali as a nickname? Well, paste their Twitter handle into a case changer and you will see - the last L on “all” is not an L but an uppercase I. I do not need to tell you this. The chances are that if you are here you are familiar with Ali and had your own serious misgivings about it. One incident that sticks out in my mind the mos...
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The American Coup - One Year On

  “How could we possibly have known this was going to happen?” cry an outnumbered police force dealing with tens of thousands of armed rioters all wearing t-shirts saying “JAN 6 CIVIL WAR” that have been available for purchase from Amazon for a quarter of a year by this point. Many of the rioters had taken to social media over the Christmas fortnight to say that they were going to do something big on 6th January too. Alas, you simply cannot tell in advance when something like this is going to happen. But for something that was planned in advance it really was a disaster for those who planned it. I don’t think anyone needs reminding of what happened - people who appeared as though they should have been in a nursing home instead found themselves thrust into a Congress in session, and then the rioters turned up. In all seriousness, armed rioters stormed the Capitol building with a genuine aim to kill members of Congress and ultimately overthrow the government to install Trump as a dic...
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