Cornucopia of Conspiracy

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...