Cornucopia of Conspiracy

The Jeremy Kyle Show has been cancelled after the suicide of a guest , Steve Dymond (below), was linked to his appearance on it, after he "failed" a lie-detector test. For those who aren't connoisseurs of the race to the bottom of TV "entertainment", the Jeremy Kyle Show is a forum for people who feel they have been betrayed by those close to them, mostly in love, and to whom the media Establishment gives no other voice than confrontation-fuelled TV watched by the same sort of people who go to car races or air shows in case there might be a crash. But let's take a closer look at this. Shows don't just turn up on TV, they are commissioned by middle-ranking executives, and their commissioning is OKd by senior executives. The senior executives who have ordered the show shut down and all episodes taken off the ITV hub are either the same ones who were happy to commission it, or their replacements who were happy for ITV to take revenue for advertising

Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral is a symbol not just of Paris, but of France. The tragic fire that has torn through it has drawn the minds of all French people to their national identity and to the words of their President, Emmanuel Macron, with a promise to rebuild, as well as offers from well-heeled individuals and corporations to donate millions of Euros towards reconstruction. Investigators have stated that it is impossible to declare the incident an accident, but this does not mean that it was not accidental. Nevertheless, the image of such a powerful symbol of France in flames ironically parallels images of Parisian landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower, obscured by smoke from Yellow Vest protests mixed with tear-gas. Regardless of the cause of the blaze, the temptation for Macron to present this as an opportunity for the country to draw together must have been too strong to resist. Significantly, given the pro-democracy (and therefore anti-integration) position of the gi

On 22 March, Uri Geller wrote an "open letter" to Teresa May on Facebook saying "I will not allow you to take Britain into Brexit". He explained further, on CBC radio on 25 March, that he would be visualising May revoking Brexit at 11:11 every morning and evening, and called on millions of people over the world to join him. On 26 March, there was a coup d'état in the House of Commons , whereby MPs from both major parties plus The Independent Group, which broke away from Labour, expropriated Government of the tasks involved in the Brexit process. They thus overthrew the democratic process in Britain, whereby the electorate entrusted the Conservative Party to enact their four word instruction in the 2016 referendum, "leave the European Union". The 11:11 "movement" is in reality a diffuse cloud of speculations as to why sometimes people think they see these numerals more often than chance would explain. There are no dominant schools e

In the aftermath of the death of Molly Russell  (below), we are told that social media giants are going to alter the algorithms that introduce users to increasingly addictive content. I'm sure they will, because Big Tech is in the crosshairs of public opinion like never before. But we need to remember that these algorithms did not come about by accident. As I wrote in Planets and Meaning: A Phenomenology of Fate , quoting The Times' Ben Machell, There are hundreds of incredibly clever, incredibly well-resourced people in Silicon Valley armed with a very detailed understanding of how the human mind works, and who have made it their business to make sure we cannot put down their apps or hardware...it’s possible that half of us now suffer from some form of behavioural addiction. And while this is bad news for adults who wish to escape their smartphone screens, it’s even worse news for children…“People are carrying around a portable dopamine pump, and kids have basically

Jerah Begum, son of the "jihadi bride" Shamima Begum, would not be dead in an ideal world. Obviously, we do not live in an ideal world. But in a fairer world, the many Yazidi children who were killed or enslaved by ISIS, and their parents, would have benefited from the same publicity given the Begums by a slick media campaign. Britain did revoke Ms Begum's citizenship, but thus far the UK is signatory to the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which binds contracting nations to refrain from making people stateless. Ms Begum has dual nationality, but the other nation of which she is a citizen, Bangladesh, refused to allow her entry. The reason is telling: Bangladesh has enough problems with jihadis entering the country masquerading as Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. We gain an insight here into why Ms Begum was refused permission to enter the UK. Jerah, that poor innocent child, would have been held up as a jihadi Messiah before, had he lived, he could h

"I hate the white working class." The sentiment runs through the rhetoric of anti-democracy campaigners and seems straight enough - such campaigners hold prejudices on the grounds of skin colour and of class. But things start to break down once one tries to work out: who, exactly, are the "white working class"? I got a clue as to the configuration of this singular group when talking to two black men at a political meeting. They said that when they changed their views from far-left to centre-right they were treated as if their skin-colour had changed overnight. Although students, they were made to feel as if they were two instantiations of the amorphous "masses" that had turned up in the wrong place: the "ordinary people" left-wingers fetishize as an abstraction but hate with every fibre of their being when they turn up in places judged to be above their station. (The men told me being treated as white in any way was bad enough when coming f