What do polar atmospheric conditions, a Christian religious festival and the internet have in common?  Answer: they’re all excuses made by the mainstream media to pretend that the British economy is prospering.  The Beast from the East – the result of a collapsing polar vortex that pushed freezing air south …

For all practical purposes, solar energy (along with the wind, waves and tides that it drives) is unending.  Or, to put it more starkly, the odds of human beings being around to witness the day when solar energy no longer exists are staggeringly low.  The same, of course, cannot be …

Britain will be leaving the European Union in just ten months’ time.  In the event that the UK government cannot reach a deal with the remaining EU members, Britain’s exit could be abrupt, since “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”  That means no transitional period, no customs union, no …

Anthropologist David Graeber is hardly the first person to notice that a lot of the jobs that have been created in the past couple of decades are largely meaningless: “Everyone is familiar with the sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, really to do much of anything: HR …

The late Douglas Adams told a story about (among other things) the origins of life on our planet.  In the tale, life was kick-started when an alien spaceship that had stopped for repairs exploded on take-off.  The reason the ship exploded was all too human.  The Captain sent a drone …

Viewed through a traditional left-right prism of the kind reflexively used by the mainstream media, the outcome of yesterday’s local election is troubling only because it lacks clarity.  The supposed swing to the left that almost defeated Theresa May at the 2017 election appears to have been halted.  On the …

When the first stuffed platypus was presented to European scientists, they dismissed it.  “What we have here,” they opined, “is some unfortunate lutrinae onto which some scoundrel has attached various anatidae parts.”  And so the innocent little platypus, which had been minding its own business until the European explorers arrived, …

In Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment, the famous cat can exist in an unresolved state – both dead and alive – until an observer finally opens the box; at which point the situation resolves and renders the cat either dead or alive but somewhat peeved.  Just like Schrödinger’s cat, Brexit, it …

Only an economist could think that the problem facing the passengers on the Titanic was that too few of them had learned marine engineering – if only a few of them had learned to fix the hull plates that had been torn apart by a passing iceberg, they might have gone …

Every now and again someone poses a question so obvious that you wonder why nobody asked it before.  When that happens, it is usually because it reveals an unconscious narrative that you have been following.  It is precisely because it jars with what you thought you knew that it is …