I am reliably informed that there are some districts in the USA where mentioning the term “the new normal” will get you hauled out of your car and beaten unconscious by some “mostly peaceful” kid with a skateboard.  It wasn’t always this way.  Back in the early days of the …

How do you hide mass unemployment at little cost to the state?  One way is to create a giant higher education system to keep millions of young people out of the jobs market; and fund it using student debt. While this may not have been the intention of the architects …

One of the less mentioned by-products of the printing press was the spread of what today would be called fake news.  In particular, a previously uninformed population began learning about the supposed satanic misdeeds of the elites; and that witches dwelt among us.  This was especially true in the areas …

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”  Something similar could be said of the Citizen’s Assemblies that Extinction Rebellion propose as the ideal form of government to shepherd us to the bright green promised land. Although …

In the next six weeks we will find out if we are at the start of a Covid-19 second wave.  What we know today is that the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the UK has been growing dramatically from the beginning of July; with the seven day average …

The BBC has not had a good pandemic.  For all that it prides itself on its supposed quality journalism, when it comes to following the science it has done a worse job than the government itself.  On several occasions the corporation has been caught uncritically repeating press releases from pharmaceutical …

This year’s Extinction Rebellion protests have been met with a very different response to that in years gone by.  Instead of the carnival atmosphere, with police officers dressed in shirtsleeves and soft caps, this year’s protestors were met by a more traditional form of policing which quickly kettled them before …

The UK government has lost its lead in the polls for the first time since the general election last year.  Despite the many mistakes made in handling the Covid-19 emergency, the government had maintained a lead of some 6 to 9 points over the Labour opposition.  But an Opinium poll …

With the US presidential election campaigning in full flow, news and social media has descended into the depressing blue team versus red team idiocy that experience tells us leads nowhere.  The supporters of both teams blindly claim that voting for their side is the only way of bringing about positive …

The NASA image of clear skies over China during their lockdown set the scene for the media to link the Covid-19 pandemic to our (lack of) response to climate change.  Perhaps, they told us, the most crucial “lesson” learned as spring gave way to summer was that the economic concerns …