R

  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...

  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 ...

  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...

  “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...