The Braindump Blog

📚 Finished reading Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin.

This was a book with an absolutely fascinating premise that kept me thinking long after I finished it.

The general idea is that, presumably sometime in the near future, a company called Nepenthe offers a controversial medical procedure to the public that allows people to fully erase any particular memory that they have. It is usually only able to erase periods of your life that occurred over a short and defined timespan. The typical use-case is people erasing moments of trauma in order to eliminate their PTSD or whatever else is causing them to struggle with life.

There are two approaches on offer. In the standard method you sign up for the erasure, sign the legal docs, get the procedure done and go about your life unencumbered by the legacy of your previous memory whilst knowing that you erased a memory. You might even know what type of memory it was, but you won’t any more have the direct recall of it. You won’t viscerally remember the whatever presumably terrible thing happened to you. It will no longer affect your mental health.

Then there’s the more dramatic option where you decide you don’t want to even remember that you have ever erased a memory. In this case, assuming you can set up the rest of your life such that you won’t find out, you won’t know you’ve had a memory erasure and let alone what it was that happened to you that you desperately wanted to forget.

Everyone thought the procedure was a one-way operation at first - that when you lost the memory it was gone for good. However new developments in science showed that it could be brought back with another procedure.

People who knew they’d had a memory erased were then allowed apply for it to be un-erased. Those who didn’t know they had a memory erased obviously wouldn’t know about it so wouldn’t think to apply. That’s until such time as the courts mandated that Nepenthe contact all these non-knowing people to alert them to the fact that they did have an erased memory and had a right to have it un-erased if they so wished.

This was obviously a shock to the people concerned. Imagine waking up to an email hat told you you had some of your past erased - and that your previous self had decided to keep that knowledge from your current self!

Although it may not have been a total surprise to 100% of the self-secreting patients: part of the court’s decision may have been driven by a few reports of people getting unexpected flashes, or “traces”, of their supposedly gone memories or other unwanted side effects that the person themselves could have no idea whatsoever of the source. Nepenthe minimised or denied these reports - let us question whether it was really a good idea to allow the sole power to do this procedure to rest in the hands of a private biotech company with their; IRL lessons for us all to learn here - but nonetheless the idea entered the public consciousness.

What would you do if you were one of these people? Would you want to unerase the memory that your past self deemed was unbearable? Would it make your life better or worse? What would the implications be for the people around you - your family, your friends and so on?

This was probably an especially challenging decision for the people who did not go on to lead a good and happy life after the procedure. Could it be that their erasure led to their subsequent downfall? After all, what are we without our memories?

There are of course many deep philosophical questions at play here, not least around what actually constitutes the self, what forms your identity - and I loved watching the characters play through them

Had another wonderful day out with a friend at 2025’s New Scientist Live

The talks I attended:

Why AI isn’t taking over the world in 2026 (and when it might happen)

Flint Dibble exposes how pseudo-archaeology distorts history and offers tools to challenge misinformation about our human past.

Can we eat our way to happiness? The gut-brain connection explained

Emily Prpa explores the fascinating science of the gut-brain axis and how your microbiome may hold the key to a happier, healthier life.

What on earth can we do about climate change?

Matt Winning hilariously tackles climate change, revealing causes, needed changes, and what we can (and can’t) do.

How gaming changed the world

Andy Miah reveals gaming’s transformative impact on technology, AI, and education, highlighting the importance of smart gaming for a better future.

Space oddities: The mysterious anomalies challenging our understanding of the universe

Physicist Harry Cliff discusses cosmic anomalies, from Antarctic particles to mysterious forces, revealing hidden realms of the universe.

Self defence: A myth-busting guide to immune health

World-leading immunologist Daniel Davis debunks immunity myths, revealing unique immune systems and practical tips for enhancing immune health.

Quantum computing: From testing the multiverse to a tech revolution

Maria Violaris demystifies how quantum computers actually work; the global race towards building them; and how they could radically change our everyday lives.

How to insure a hobbit: And other questions from the frontiers of fantasy mathematics

Uncover how mathematics shapes fantasy worlds, from Harry Potter spells to Star Wars tech, as Tom Crawford reveals the secrets behind beloved franchises.

Is our fixation with diagnosis making us feel worse?

Join neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan in conversation with an expert host as she discusses the impact of modern medicine on health and diagnoses.

Are smartphones and social media really causing brain rot?

Peter Etchells investigates if our brains are truly being rewired by endless scrolling and notifications, or if the panic over screen time is overblown.

Previously:

• 2024
• 2022

📺 Watched Wednesday seasons 1 and 2.

This is Wednesday as in Wednesday Addams. The creepy goth girl you’ll be familiar with if you have followed the Addams media at all, which has, astoundingly, existed since 1938 when The New Yorker published their adventures in single-panel comic form. They later debuted on the small screen in the 1960s.

Anyway, here we focus on the daughter, Wednesday, as she attends Nevermore Academy as she goes about the stresses and strains of daily life as a loner-inclined student - occasionally using her psychic visions and impressive intelligence to help solve the odd violent crime here and there.

It’s really well done. The deadpan dialogue is hilarious in places, especially between her and her roommate who has rather different emotional inclinations.

Some of the sound track is excellent too. Lady Gaga pops up in season two. And the piano rendition of The Cranberries' justly famous song “Zombie” is so good I had to rush out and procure a copy.

It’s also on the Wednesday season 2 sound track release which is available in all the usual places including Apple and Youtube - alongside a version by Bella Poarch.

I then found out I’m not very good at playing the piano. But hey, practice makes perfect, maybe.

📺Watched Doctor Who season 2.

That’s the season 2 released in 2025. Confusingly, there have been at least three season 2s now for various whims and licensing decisions. This is the one where Doctor is now played by Ncuti Gatwa.

And I’m pleased to say I found it generally more enjoyable than some of the seasons over the past few years were. Good stuff for Who fans.

At the same time I’m slowly continuing my epic quest to watch all Doctor Who eps from the 1960s onwards. Well, all the ones that haven’t tragically been lost to the mists of time, which, shockingly, it seems quite a few of the early ones were. On that front I have recently entered the colour TV era.

📺 Watched The Inheritance season 1.

This one is a reality show where 13 people are summoned by a deceased version of Elizabeth Hurley and a very English-posh butler to compete for her inheritance. For some reason she wants her wannabe-inheritors to do tasks together, each of which releases a part of the inheritance cash.

The participants then have to decide amongst themselves which person they want to inherit that day’s inheritance money. That person is free to secretly gift segments of their winnings to other folk, or not. And occasionally who to, going forward, disinherit entirely.

A pretty contrived premise that is not quite as compelling, or probably as psychologically damaging as the The Traitors imo - but it’s the same sort of thing and inevitably I was pretty invested by the end. I know I’ll be watching season 2 if there is one.

📺 Watched Black Mirror season 7.

This unsettling show (mostly) about the dark side of of our increasing fascination with technology is back - “what if phones, but too much?”, and, on occasion, extremely on the nose. The home of many a torment nexus.

Previously.

🎥 Watched Infinity Pool.

We join a struggling author and his wealthy wife taking a break at a secluded luxury resort to answer the question: what if the punishment for committing crimes was harsh but it isn’t (exactly) you that has to pay the price for it - at least if you’re rich enough?

The “how” is extremely weird. And creepy. But a pretty gripping - and disturbing - exploration of privilege and morality.

It is of course not like the richer folk amongst us in the real world can’t or don’t buy their way out of the legal consequences of immorality that the rest of us might face. Maybe this film is the logical conclusion of that. I hope not.

Shades of the White Lotus, but messed up. Which is saying something.

📚 Finished reading The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

I’d heard grim and dark things about this book which made me regularly put off reading it until now. It is certainly disturbing, depicting the life, thought processes and cruel and violent acts of Frank, an teenager isolated by his detached and confused mental state and his physical location.

I can see it being rather controversial, especially the somewhat implausible (to me) ending. But it’s a compulsive read for any fans of darkly gothic genres.

I like this quote from Elizabeth Spiers' article “Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning”

There is no inherent virtue in caring about your own children; that is the bare minimum requirement for effective parenting. Virtue lies in caring about the safety and well-being of children you don’t know.

To be clear, the article is not one of the as far as I can tell mostly but not entirely mythical articles from “liberals” celebrating the death of a free speech advocate.

Rather, she writes:

I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views, but that is because I don’t believe people should be murdered generally, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done.

Yesterday saw the largest ever far right rally taking place in Britain.

(Photo from UPI.com)

This is not to suggest that every participant identifies as far right politically, and some may not even hold most of the views associated with that extremist movement (although this is something I’d like to have a way of establishing). But it was certainly organised by, promoted by, and paid for by some of the overtly far right elite who wish to replace British democracy and tradition with authoritarism, stifle our free speech, turn our national flag into a symbol of hate and rob us of our rights.

Whilst the organisers' claim of attracting the 3 million participants is laughably high, it seems perhaps 110,000 people or so did turn up to show their support for the convicted violent criminal, unashamed Islamophobe and probable millionaire Tommy Robinson, amongst other things.

There was a counter-protest, I think largely organised by valiant groups as Stand Up To Racism, which numbered around 5,000. I am ashamed to have only stood with them in a metaphorical sense.

(Photo from Reuters)

If you feel inclined to support organisations that are standing against the Robinson crowd in a material way then I know organisations such as the afore-mentioned SUTR are taking donations, as are Hope Not Hate and Amnesty International, which are another couple of worth orgs that I believe had a presence.

There is too much to say to comprehensively summarise what happened and what it means, very little of it good. However, a couple of points stood out to me.

Firstly, for all that the controlling elite of the movement claims to be obsessed with the superiority of everything English and the need for national sovereignty, they sure invited a lot of foreigners to lecture us we should do as a country in terms of the main-attraction speakers.

Éric Zemmour a French politician of the far-right, delivered a soliloquy on the racist and inflammatory conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement Theory, saying:

We are both subject to the same process of the Great Replacement of our European peoples by peoples coming from the south and of Muslim culture. You and we are being colonised by our former colonies

This is a protest that claimed to be - albeit there was no chance it ever was going to be - an effort to “Unite the Kingdom”.

A Belgian politician, Philip Dewinter claimed that:

It has to be clear that Islam is our real enemy, we have to get rid of Islam. Islam does not belong in Europe and Islam does not belong in the UK.

A Dutch commentator, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, put out this absolute inflammatory nonsense:

They are demanding the sacrifice of our children on the altar of mass migration. Let’s not beat about the bush — this is the rape, replacement, and murder of our people… Remigration is possible, and it’s up to us to make it happen. We are Generation Remigration.

Ada Lluch, a Spanish influencer, claimed:

The government are taking our money and financing the great demographic replacement of our nation.”

And of course the biggest celebrity who spoke, via video link, was Elon Musk. With comments that are as deranged, anti-democratic , anti-patriotic as those that we have increasingly have come to expect from him.

A few choice snippets, courtesy of the Independent:

Elon Musk called for a change of government in the UK and railed against the “woke mind virus” as he spoke at Tommy Robinson’s rally in London.

The X owner claimed a “dissolution of Parliament” is needed and said “massive uncontrolled migration” was contributing to the “destruction of Britain” in comments via video link.

And Indy100:

He went on to address what he called “the reasonable centre” – people who “ordinarily wouldn’t get involved in politics, who just want to live their lives. They don’t want that, they’re quiet, they just go about their business.”

“My message is to them: if this continues, that violence is going to come to you, you will have no choice,” he said.

“You’re in a fundamental situation here. Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you.

“You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.”

Given the UK is supposedly internationally renowned (and hated by the people running this particular event) for its policing of speech, arresting people for tweets and so on - and yes we do in fact have a ban on inciting people to racial hatred so if you plead guilty to that offense then you do face legal consequences - it is quite incredible to me that these foreign entities were allowed to spew such obvious vitriol, hatred and calls to violence to a crowd of 100,000+ people hyped up on Tommy’s lies.

“Two tier policing”, some might say. Especially in an era where we are arresting hundreds of peaceful protestors for holding up signs saying ““I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” or cartoons from a mainstream magazine.

Again, let’s remember, that the claimed aim of this event - its literal name - was to Unite The Kingdom. I suppose they didn’t specify which kingdom. The fake “patriots” organising it clearly had a kingdom other than the United Kingdom in mind.

It’s always easiest to see the hypocrisy in people you disagree with I admit. But this time it’s surely unmissable.

Imagine if instead of a foreigner who looks like Elon Musk - and also happens to use his status as the world’s richest man to support and fund the type of groups that organised this misinformed disarray - we had a foreigner that looks like anything that fits people’s stereotype of “a Muslim” who was avidly and explicitly agitating for the UK government to be overthrown immediately and that it is perfectly reasonable - and indeed necessary - to use violence in order to combat your ideological enemies

Again, this is exactly what the organisers of these events claim to fear - the whole “the UK is under Sharia law and that’s why no-one dares leave their house in London in case they get blown up by an Islamic terrorist” nonsense.

Sharia law is not the law of the land, nor is there any sign that it will be at any point in the future. Friends that live in London report that people do still leave their houses, believe it or not.

Replace the word “Sharia” with the phrase “far right and foreign billionaire friendly” and you get a threat that qualitatively parallels original paranoid conspiracy claim but appears to be rather more likely to happen.

Even in the short term - despite supposedly being a group who often claim to be substantially more infused with a respect of British law and order than others - the calls to violence were unfortunately directly acted upon by (a minority of) the protestors.

The Met police report that 26 officers were injured, some seriously so:

The injuries include broken teeth, a possible broken nose, a concussion, a prolapsed disc and a head injury.

The Tommy Robinson protestors deviated from the organised route in order to encircle the smaller group of counter-protestors:

“When officers moved in to stop them they faced unacceptable violence,” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

“They were assaulted with kicks and punches.

“Bottles, flares and other projectiles were thrown.”

The last thing that I want to document for now is once again the difference between the claim of what the organisers and their followers are against, are “terrified” of - and their actual behaviour as exhibited at this event.

The original advertising I saw for this protest referred to it as a celebration of free speech - a “free speech festival”. Sounds fun and wholesome, right? Well, in a different world, perhaps.

What did we actually see? A set of speakers that were largely constrained to basically one relatively marginal set of extremist political beliefs, attacks on the folk who were, as far as I can tell, peacefully counter-protesting, and perhaps most incredible of all, the star speakers literally calling for a crackdown on people’s free speech right:

“This is a religious war,” said Brian Tamaki, leader of New Zealand’s Destiny Church. “Islam, Hinduism, Baháʼí, Buddhism — whatever else you’re into — they’re all false. We’ve got to clean our countries up. Get rid of everything that doesn’t receive Jesus Christ. Ban any public expression of other religions in our Christian nations. Ban halal. Ban burqas. Ban mosques, temples, shrines — we don’t want those in our countries.”

Was it a rogue speaker? Certainly not, if the reaction of the supposedly freedom-loving crowd was to be taken seriously:

…a big crowd cheering speeches that called for banning all public expression of non-Christian religions,

No freedom of speech. No freedom religion. No freedom of expression. No freedom of assembly. People associated with the organisers of the event seem desperate to deprive us citizens of our actual rights, visible not least in Reform’s campaign to remove some of the very laws that protect them.

Sky reporter Tom Cheshire notes that an appeal to Christianity was something relatively novel to this rally of the right compared to others he has covered.

That’s been a difference with this rally compared to past ones I’ve covered - an overt Christian nationalism.

People carried wooden crosses. One person had a light-up crucifix.

When the crowd arrived at Whitehall, they were led from the stage in a chant of ‘Christ is king’. And then a public recital of the Lord’s Prayer shortly after that. It’s an important difference. Not just a flag to rally around, but a religion too.

🎥 Watched The Mauritanian.

In an era where people that should know better are expanding the remit of the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention camp, I finally got around to watching this film. It’s the true story of one person’s experience of Guantanamo’s original setup.

It’s absolutely horrific. The person in question is Mohamedou Ould Slahi who was alleged by the authorities to have been involved in planning the appalling 9/11 terrorist attack on the US. He certainly had some prior contact with al-Qaeda, having trained in one of their camps back in 1990, but claimed that he had severed all connections with the organisation in 1992.

The authorities claimed otherwise, although according to the film they really had very little evidence for it. He certainly wasn’t actually charged with any offence or permitted a court trial before being incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. Whereupon all the horror stories you may have read about that went on there were visited upon him. Per Wikipedia:

Slahi was subjected to sleep deprivation, isolation, temperature extremes, beatings and sexual humiliation at Guantánamo. In one documented incident, he was blindfolded and taken out to sea in a boat for a mock execution.

Basically he was tortured. They even threatened his family. This would have course all been illegal on American soil, but was seemingly par for the course there.

Eventually he was released - but not before having to undergo 14 years of this appalling treatment.

When he came out he wrote a memoir which was published as “Guantánamo Diary”. The Mauritanian is the film adaption of that. Which makes it extremely disturbing of course.

A lot of the focus of the film is on the lawyers who finally defended him - Nancy Hollander and Theresa Duncan - and the difficulties of doing so when your suspect is locked up in Guantanamo, sections of the public are very against the idea of defending anyone who might remotely be involved in terrorism, evidence be damned, and, at times, you’re not quite certain that your client isn’t guilty of a horrific offence.

Nonetheless no-one should face punishment without a fair trial - essentially on the whims of the authorities - and certainly no-one should be tortured.

Also from this month’s Byline Times - concerns for the ongoing ‘insect apocalypse’ based on studies done in the past few years.

The first was based on research conducted by a team at Radboud University in the Netherlands and published in 2017. It revealed that the overall biomass of insects caught in its traps in German nature reserves had fallen by three quarters from 1989 to 2014.

The second was published in 2019 and reviewed 73 reports of insect decline from around the world. The summary was equally bleak. Looked at globally, 41% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds, and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, suggesting that they could vanish altogether within a century.

This is important for all sorts of reasons - not least that almost all ‘terrestrial’ food chains require insects in order to function.

Some terrifying sounding statistics on political violence in the US in this month’s Byline Times.

The technical definition of a civil war is a thousand combatant deaths within a year, according to the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. The definition of civil strife starts at 25 deaths within a single year.

During the five past years, rightwing extremists have killed, on average, more than 60 people a year in the United States. Therefore, by definition, America is already in civil strife, and some argue that it is now on the threshold of civil war.

And later:

Today’s political violence is almost exclusively right-wing, as documented in a study conducted by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies which found that, of the 893 terrorism incidents that took place on US soil between January 1994 and May 2020, left-wing groups and individuals were responsible for 22 of the 3,086 deaths. These numbers do not include the dozens, if not hundreds, of planned right-wing attacks that will have been foiled by law enforcement authorities.

Marche says that the mainstream media is yet to understand and articulate the size and scope of this growing domestic terror threat, arguing that even fringe groups within the anti-government patriot movement are “sizeable”, with one - Sovereign Citizens, which rejects government authority and existing legal systems attracting more than 300,000 active members alone.

Finally, some good news:

…calling your boss a dickhead is not a sackable offence, a tribunal has ruled.

Regarding the upsettingly wide-spread and often violent anti-immigrant protests last year that occurred after the appalling Southport murder:

Two out of every five people arrested after participating in last summer’s riots had been previously reported to the police for domestic abuse

…

Previous offences include actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, stalking, breach of restraint and non-molestation orders, controlling coercive behaviour and criminal damage.

These protests aren’t really anything to do with ‘protecting our women and girls’ (whatever the ‘our’ in that common claim is supposed to mean).

We know many of the protests were instigated or attended by some extremely racist far right extremists. And now it seems like a high proportion of those arrested for their criminal actions at these protests are themselves have a history of violence, often against women.

This is an idea I’ve not seen before on the kind of site that suggests you write a letter about the cause they’re interested in to your MP.

If you want to write a letter to your MP on the issues raised in this blog post, there is a ChatGPT prompt to assist you in doing so, with full instructions, here.

One word of warning, though: please ensure you have the correct MP. ChatGPT can get it wrong.

It’s good that they add that warning to check it got your MP right! You should probably read it very carefully to check it got everything else correct if you go this route.

I’m not sure that I feel this is in general a good idea, but if it helps people get more politically engaged and is effective then perhaps there is a place for it? But you have to be very sure that you’re campaigning for your MP to actually address the issue you care about in the way that you want them to.

In things that seem truly unbelievable until they turn out to be true, it turns out that at least one of the swathe of ridiculous, cruel & dangerous anti-immigrant protests currently happening in the UK was led by someone who has been convicted for illegally bringing immigrants into the UK.

Yes, a people smuggler. Presumably protesting against…himself.

Lee Twamley, photographed at the front of Britain First’s “March for Remigration” in Manchester this month, has served prison time for trying to smuggle Vietnamese migrants into the UK.

That aside, in general, whilst I’m certain not every participant in the protests is a far right extremist, I think everyone needs to be aware that much of this action is being organised by and/or participated in by some very unsavoury extremists, many with a criminal background.

If you decide to attend one of them, please know who you’re aligning yourselves with, whose agenda you’re supporting - inadvertently or otherwise. Know that some of the people who may have influenced you to turn up to the protest are far more of a danger to women and children than the average asylum seeker could ever be.

The march Tawmley attended was put in place by Britain First, which has instigated:

…a series of events that have brought an assortment of neo-Nazis, misogynists, crackpots and convicts onto the streets of Nuneaton, Birmingham and, on 2 August, Manchester

Such as? Hope Not Hate runs down some lowlights of these hypocritical criminals:

Current and former Britain First activists have been convicted for theft, burglary, drugs offences, numerous kinds of violence (including domestic abuse), terror charges, child abuse and more.

For example, while Golding rails against the supposed lawlessness of London under Mayor Sadiq Khan, his own brother Jamie — himself now a Britain First activist — unleashed an astonishing crime wave across London and Kent in the mid-2000s, culminating in his confession to 171 burglaries across the region.

Despite endlessly decrying “imported rape gangs”, we have previously revealed that former Britain First activist Warren Gilchrest has been convicted of multiple sexual offences against children under the age of 13. Gilchrest is currently serving three years for his role in the racist violence in Manchester last summer.

We have elsewhere detailed Paul Golding’s own long list of convictions. The Britain First leader has also been caught on tape admitting to having violently assaulted his then-partner Jayda Fransen and another woman.

Regarding the recent “put England flags everywhere” initiative, also known as “Operation Raise the Colors”, Hope Not Hate reveals:

…that the co-founder and organiser of the group is longtime Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) ally Andrew Currien (AKA Andy Saxon). Formerly a key member of the English Defence League’s leadership bodyguard team, and now running security for the far-right party Britain First, Currien has previously been jailed for his part in a racist death. He was one of six men convicted in 2009 after a 59-year-old man was crushed to death by a car following a violent brawl.

And the infamous ongoing protests at the Bell Hotel in Epping Forest?

…the Bell Hotel has been targeted by dedicated far-right activists since 2020, several of whom were involved in last night’s protest. This includes Eddy Butler, a former British National Party (BNP) organiser previously linked to a violent neo-Nazi group; Callum Barker, an activist for the fascist Homeland Party; Toni Collins (AKA Ginger Toni), a key figure in the circle surrounding Tommy Robinson; Lance Wright, involved in the neo-Nazi music network Blood & Honour; former Combat 18 activist Phil Curson; and activists associated with the anti-Muslim group Britain First.

📚 Finished reading Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West by Catherine Belton.

This is an highly detailed, lengthy, prize-winning book on the rise of the current President of Russia, Vladimir Putin and the people around him. Given world events, we probably all have some sense of who Putin is and what he is like. But if you want some insight into how his background and how he got to such a position of (catastrophic) power, then this tome will surely fill your needs.

Right from the start, while the Communist Party was still in power, he and his KGB allies were consolidating wealth and power for the future by forming a kind of corrupt kleptocracy, leveraging a combination of the state, the intelligence services, corruptible big businesses and organised crime, to further their own interests.

That group eventually managed to seize power, install Putin as president (twice, so far), and replace the former ministers of state and other high-ups with their own loyal set of wealthy oligarchs who either did as they were told, or suffered greatly for not doing so .

Politics, business, crime and self-interest were intermixed. Political opposition, in practical terms, was outlawed. It seems likely that they went so far as to permit or even overtly stage deadly terrorist attacks - lives that were lost in order to consolidate yet more power for Putin & co.

As well as amassing their own personal fortunes, this gave Putin et al. the ability to control massive amounts of often corruptly sourced money that, between building various gold palaces for themselves and their friends, they went on to use to undermine, amongst other things, Western institutions and democracy. Cue the election meddling and foreign funding of extremist politics of today.

This included the exploitation of all-too-willing and greedy Western corporations who were happy to turn a blind eye to all sorts of criminal and unethical practices if they thought they could make a bit of money by doing so.

The last chapter ends with the curious overlap between a “network of Russian intelligence operatives, tycoons and organized-crime associates” and Donald Trump that’s been seen over the past few decades.

This will of course be fuel for anyone concerned about any links between the Russian authorities and the current US President - although the book does not set out to make a case for that within the political realm. But it does demonstrate that, at the very least, Trump owes the Russian oligarchs an awful lot of favours in terms of them constantly bailing him out of his failed businesses and their unmanageable debt, and was, in the very best case, unknowingly used as a means to launder their dirty money.

The book was written in 2020, and so doesn’t have anything on Putin’s latest war crimes and attempts to destabilise the planet. But we all know, and are living with, what happened next.

It is, especially in retrospect, hard not to agree with a reviewer of this book from the NYT who was wondering with concern five years ago whether:

…a cynicism has embedded itself so deeply into the Anglo-American political classes that even the incriminating information it documents won’t make an actionable difference

📚 Finished reading Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough.

Oliver Bullough examines what Britain did next in order to try and maintain its status after the decline of its previously mighty empire (thankfully).

Fresh out of opportunities for quite so explicit an exploitation of other people and places for its own economic ends, the country apparently decided to proactively take on a role akin to that of a “butler to the rich” - a metaphorical Jeeves, to any Bertie Wooster who had enough money to pay for the ever-so-professional, ever-so-discreet financial services on offer. After all, who wouldn’t trust you if you were associated with one of the famed and “respectable” centuries-old British institutions?

The clients of these services were by definition all very wealthy. Unsurprisingly, the mix of that base requirement and a reputation for professional discretion meant that the corrupt, the criminal and the kleptocratic oligarchs and other miscellaneous billionaire types - and on occasions autocratic regimes - were amongst the most desired clients for the “global faciliator” that the UK became.

The book casts light on some of the ways in which Britain and its associated territories explicitly, and often knowingly, enabled all sorts of financial crime, money laundering and other unethical practices. Witness the development of the British tax havens and “offshore financial centres”, which are still to be found in places like Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands.

These are places where the wealthy can hide their illicitly gained wealth from the rest of us, conducting transactions that would never be permitted if known about.

The assertion here is that “respectable” British institutions - think of our elite legal, financial and PR firms, as well as, on occasion, the government - are actively helping wealthy, often foreign, clients conceal their money and protect their reputations by escaping any form of accountability.

In short, Britain is enabling global corruption; helping not only to further enrich the already-incredibly wealth, but to extra-reward those whose massive fortunes come via some form of criminality.

All of this comes, of course, at the expense of the everyday British citizen, amongst others. Every penny (well, billions of pounds) of tax avoided, of criminal costs incurred, of state services provided, of money illegitimately siphoned to foreign lands is a penny less that could be put to good public (or private) usage over here.

All is not lost though. Or at least it does not have to be. As is typical in this sort of book the author does have some suggestions as to how to reform the system in order to cajole the country into being less amenable to being little more than a bag-carrier for the wealthy criminal. Basically we they all boil down to “we need to increase transparency and accountability”.

For example, the state needs to put substantial resources into the agencies that tackle financial crime, including tax avoidance. We need to close any of the extensive remaining loopholes that mean some financial “moral crime” and tax dodge is in fact legal. Any trick that enables the wealthy to launder their ill-gotten wealth or evade the tax due on it needs to be cracked down upon.

However, how we get the state to do that is another question. I’m sure he would agree that it’s unlikely to happen if the issue is left entirely in the hands of the politicians of the day. Can we find a solution, or are we destined, as a country, to pride ourselves only on how discrete a servant we can be to the criminal and corrupt who can afford what we ask? Is there a higher vision to our national culture than simply an ability to paste on a layer of veneer to finances the oligarchs of the day?

The issue isn’t only a local one. By helping corrupt kleptocrats and their organisations move money and hide wealth, worldwide corruption is encouraged and concealed, with global costs both financial and democratic.

The general idea of the book wasn’t a all new to me, but the wealth of detailed case studies meant I came away feeling that the self-evident facilitation of financial corruption was embraced even more widely and even more knowingly by our institutions than I’d have expected. Leading, of course, to the construction of yet another set of urgent reforms we need to add to the ever-growing list of “how do we solve the permacrisis” ideas.

And this is from a book written in 2022. Something I think we can say without too much doubt is that the subservience of companies and states to corrupt billionaires has most certainly got not one iota better since then.

Nigel Farage’s interview in last Saturday’s Times is somewhat revealing and very disturbing.

We seem to have reached the stage where he feels able to say the quiet part out loud, where he confirms the suspicions that many of the decent folk of the UK have had for some time: that there are few limits to the moral depravity he is prepared to sink to in order to rile up hatred in the UK to his advantage.

Firstly, if he became Prime Minister, he plans to pull the UK out of many international agreements.

These include:

• The European Convention on Human Rights
• The Refugee Convention
• The Council of Europe’s anti-trafficking Convention
• The UN Convention Against Torture

Yes, it seems he does not want to align the UK with being against human trafficking or torture. The first you would think should be of paramount concern to this person so concerned with “small boats”. The second you would think should be of paramount concern to anyone who hasn’t truly lost all vestige of humanity.

More locally, he also intends to disband the UK’s Human Rights Act. And, to the extent that he intends to replace it with anything, it won’t be anything that guarantees your human rights - the idea of which he seems to think is somehow a negative because human rights in his view are “state-given”. Apparently he sees the role of the state as solely to limit your freedoms and punish you . Not to help protect you, your dignity, your freedoms and indeed your life.

For be in no doubt: whilst he will use examples of various types of immigrants in the rare cases where he bothers trying to justify his lunatic ideas, these laws are not in place to protect only immigrants. If you are whatever Farage would accept as a being a 100% native British citizen then the exact same laws are what protects your rights too.

If Farage disbands these laws, you will lose rights and freedoms.

• Your right to not be tortured? It’s guaranteed by article 3 of the UK Human Rights Act
• Rights to a fair trial, of not being punished unlawfully? Article 6 and 7 of the act.
• Right to freedom? Of thoughts, belief, religion, expression, assembly, to marry - the UK HRA, article 9, 10, 11 & 12.
• Right to privacy? The UK HRA article 8. and so on.

Farage is proposing to strip the very legislation that enables your freedoms, quality of life and privacy, and that of your loved ones.

In withdrawing us from the world stage he will continue in his perverse ambition to make Britain weaker, poorer, less powerful; all in the name of making it crueller.

This is nothing new. This unpatriotic chancer was one of the “masterminds” behind Brexit which the majority of the UK agrees made our country, and us, its people, weaker, poorer and less influential on the world stage. We have become rule takers, not rule makers. Immigration has sored. As has poverty. The NHS seems to be in a chronic decline. Essentially, the exact reverse of what Farage promised would come as “Brexit bonus” has come to the fore, and the vast majority of us are substantially worse off as a result.

Even if you support the ethos behind some of his policies, you would almost certainly not want this dangerous and incompetent fool to get his hands anywhere near the levers of power. He has shown he cannot deliver what he promises - probably because he has no real intention of doing so. He just wants to maintain his vast wealth, increasing power, fame and ability to appear on whichever TV show he likes.

Immigration is of course the area in which his avaricious cruelty is brought most to the fore.

His “plans” include:

…the arrest of asylum seekers on arrival, automatic detention and forced deportation, with no right of appeal, to countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea.

There are plans for deals with third countries such as Rwanda, a “fallback” option of sending people to British overseas territories such as Ascension Island…

He will require the wide sharing of our personal data in order to help them do this.

The NHS, HM Revenue & Customs and the DVLA will be required to share data automatically so illegal immigrants can be tracked down and arrested.

At best this will lead to a rise in anyone who could be perceived as an “illegal immigrant” to avoid seeking healthcare, paying their taxes or getting a driving license, with all the consequent problems off pushing people into the illegal economy and induce extra cost for the tax-payer.

But it also feels very likely to end up with the data of all of us, immigrants or otherwise, being used for purposes we dislike or subject to leaks and hacks. The British public does not in general appear to like their health data being shared, even when it’s for well-meaning reasons that do not involve trying to deport you.

In Farage’s words:

The aim of this legislation is mass deportations

People entering the UK in order to claim asylum “illegally” (and note: there is currently no real legal way for someone to claim asylum - so he is basically referring to all asylum seekers) would be immediately arrested, temporarily detained on some hastily constructed ex-RAF-base holding pen and then shipped off.

“They have no right to claim asylum,” he says. “They would be arrested and detained.”

A total abrogation of responsibility, with cruel and unusual consequences.

Why is this needed? Well, his excuse is that asylum seekers are in general the scum of the earth, rather than the reality of being often desperate people fleeing from a tortuous trauma of course.

You have these young men from different cultures, Afghans being perhaps the worst example, who are literally free at licence to go out, work in the criminal economy and commit crimes…

This is of course an absolute lie. No-one is free to work in the criminal economy and commit crimes. He and his corrupt buddies may not have noticed - but our country has laws. And if you are caught committing crimes then you are subject to them, no matter your status.

You do not get a “commit murder without penalty” card just because you weren’t born in Britain. In fact the only real difference is that a wider array of punishments are available to you if you are a foreign national such as an asylum seeker - mostly involving being removed from the country,.

In fact one of the responsibilities explicitly mandated by the Refugee Convention that Farage wants to remove us from is that refugees must “abide by the national laws of the contracting states”.

After all, a much-overlooked fact is that the only reason you know about the tiny number of cases where it has been alleged in recent times that an asylum seeker committed a crime is because they are being investigated and making their way through the British legal system under the full force of the existing British law.

We don’t need special magical laws against migrants committing crimes because we already have laws against anyone committing crimes.

After a stint in the pre-fab camps, Farage envisions the survivors being deported to third-party countries. Such as?

He wants to sign deals with countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea, despotic regimes with dire human rights records.

Yes, Afghanistan. As in, the place ruled by the Taliban. The group famed for their “public executions and torture”.

But what of the risk of people being killed or tortured if they are sent back to their country of origin? The Taliban are unlikely to look kindly on people who have fled.

asks the interviewer, quite reasonably.

And now perhaps we see one of the reasons why he wants to extract the UK away from the laws on torture.

“I’m really sorry, but we can’t be responsible for everything that happens in the whole of the world”

Farage responds, far less reasonably.

No-one is particularly asking him to be responsible for what happens in the rest of the world, although people may well have views on the morality of that position. But, if he wants to become PM, we should be asking him to take responsibility for what wants to make his own country do; for what will be done in our name.

Britain sending asylum seekers to places where we know they may be tortured is Britain taking an action. Why on Earth does he want us to abandon the convention against torture if Britain isn’t implicated in his plans?

If there’s a few immigrants he can’t immediately send to these kind of places then, well, he wants to resurrect the totally failed, probably illegal and much ridiculed Rwanda deportation plan that the last Conservative administration had.

He is open to reviving the Conservative Party’s Rwanda plan

As a reminder, the Rwanda scheme cost the tax-payer £700 million and managed in the end to have gotten 4 - yes, four - people to leave the country. This does not seem very DOGE-aligned, even if it was moral, legal and he actually had the ability to make it work; which based on his past history he clearly does not.

Or failing even that, he might accept sending asylum seekers to the British Overseas Territories, such as Ascension Island, as a last resort

But wouldn’t some of this require the other countries to agree to take Britain’s small share of the asylum seeking population? Well, yes, obviously, but apparently he thinks we’ll be able to bully them into it.

Here he is, back channelling his hero, Donald Trump.

“We have enormous muscle on these things,” he says. “We can be nice to people, we can be nice to other countries, or we can be very tough to other countries.

But all the diplomatic levers that we have, if we have to use them, on visas, on trade, sanctions … I mean, Trump has proved this point quite comprehensively.”

Apparently forgetting the fact that part of the US’s considerable ability to seemingly bend some countries to its will (at incredible expense to the weakening US itself) comes from the fact it is such a big player on the world stage.

Farage’s own Brexit has lessened the wealth, trade, power and influence of the UK. Many countries have rather less to fear from the UK implementing whatever self-harm policies he has in mind that being shut out of the US economy, services, and so on.

It’s part of the empty-headed Reform technique of stealing US policies verbatim, without realising that they do not themselves in fact live or campaign to govern in the US. It may have escaped the attention of someone who spends far more time gladhanding his rich US pals and contributing to the American economy than helping members of his own UK constituency, but the UK is a different country to the US, with different needs and different abilities.

This is why they ran some council election campaigns on a plan of sacking all council DEI officers when in fact there were none to sack. Why they ran on closing down low traffic neighbourhoods in areas where there were none to close.

Anyway, to conclude:

“…look, I can’t be responsible for despotic regimes all over the world”

he says.

But we can and must hold him responsible for the despotic regime him and his big-business cronies seem to want to create in my home country, the United Kingdom.

(This article was cross-posted from wrongreform.uk)

The Wayback Machine is a superbly useful tool in finding out what various websites in the past looked like. You can use it to dig up the tragically high number of websites that have suffered from the ravages of link-rot, or to see what still-here websites used to look like in the past.

The latter use is particularly important for journalists and us everyday citizens in this modern era when, for instance, the current US administration, being the most-censorious, anti-free-speech, scared-of-words governments over there in recent times is forcing its agencies to quietly remove or edit sections of their websites - including removing, potentially forever, many important datasets on subjects like health and climate change.

It’s one of the few sites that, like Wikipedia, I think is a wonderful example of the internet used for unalloyed good, and like Wikipedia, worth donating to now and then if you have spare money.

But how do the website snapshots get to the Machine in the first place? They do operate their own crawler, but that’s not the only way. They enlist the help of several third party organisations to get at content they otherwise might not have found and catalogued in time

One of these external organisations is the Archive Team.

The Archive Team focuses on grabbing content that’s hosted by services that are or were at risk of closure or some other kind of deletion. In the past this has included GeoCities, Yahoo Video, Friendster and others.

In their official words:

Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions - and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever.

Per co-founder Jason Scott:

Archive Team was started out of anger and a feeling of powerlessness, this feeling that we were letting companies decide for us what was going to survive and what was going to die

And recently I discovered it was extremely easy to join in with the “rogue archivists” in this important project. You should consider it too.

The easiest way is to download their “warrior”. This is a program that runs inside a virtual machine you first install on your computer (e.g. VirtualBox). Once that’s up and running and you’ve chosen the project you want to work on, it simply automatically downloads the at-risk items that need archiving and then uploads them to Archive Team in the format they need to eventually end up on the Wayback Machine.

All the software is free. And don’t let the need for a Virtual Machine put you off. It was a very simple process for me - something you could complete in a handful of minutes, and fully documented here.

The main caveat is that you need to have a “clean” internet connection. What that means is detailed in the “Can I use whatever internet access for the Warrior?” section on this page. It basically means no VPNs, DNS accelerators, ISP connections that inject adverts, proxies, content filtering firewalls, being in a country that heavily censors the internet, and so on. Your computer basically needs to be able to access the webpage its archiving in its pure, unadulterated form.

But if you’re good with that, why not join the effort to preserve that wealth of content out there that’s at risk of forever vanishing?

A few of their current projects:

Meta Ad Library: Database for advertisements for Facebook and other products by Meta. IRC Channel US Government: Archiving the US government. IRC Channel #UncleSamsArchiv Radio Free Asia: Non-profit media organization owned by USAGM. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Non-profit media organization owned by USAGM. Voice of America: An internationally-broadcasting state media network at risk of closure.

Telegram: Archiving public messages in various newsworthy and/or otherwise notable Telegram channels

There’s a lot of other ways you can get involved if you have technical ability or computational resources. But this is something you can run very easily on your average everyday computer whilst you’re using it for whatever you turned it on to do.

AI to help police catch criminals before they strike

says a press release from the UK Government last week.

This does not fill me with confidence. We’re heading towards the era of actual Minority Report it would seem - possibly another example of the torment nexus humanity constantly fails to avoid creating.

Firstly, to make an obvious technical point, someone isn’t a criminal before they commit a crime. They are in fact an innocent person. Nonetheless, crime prevention is obviously better than letting it happen. Which is one reason why we already have plenty of laws around “conspiracy to commit” crime, which if you break, make you a criminal, with a potentially length prison sentence. These are examples of “incohate” offences:

An inchoate offence is one that is incomplete.

Anyway, what is the actual government plan? Basically it’s to have someone make a crime hotspot map that has to somehow involve using the black box magic of feeding sensitive personal data into “advanced AI”.

Innovators have been tasked with developing a detailed real time and interactive crime map that spans England and Wales and can detect, track and predict where devastating knife crime is likely to occur or spot early warning signs of anti-social behaviour before it spirals out of control

which:

…will be rooted in advanced AI that will examine how to bring together data shared between police, councils and social services, including criminal records, previous incident locations and behavioural patterns of known offenders.

Why do I feel like it’ll involve dumping a load of person data into some privately-controlled-by-a-weird-billionaire version of ChatGPT and asking it to make a map?

Outside of the potential use of ChatGPT (which to be fair is something I just assumed, it might well having nothing to do with it) - it’s not like this type of thing hasn’t been done before. Witness the rise of “predictive policing” using now-less-fashionable forms of AI.

The typical implementation did not go well.

To quote a headline from the MIT Technology Review:

Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.

Why? At least partially from the nature of the data they tend to be fed:

Yet increasing evidence suggests that human prejudices have been baked into these tools because the machine-learning models are trained on biased police data. Far from avoiding racism, they may simply be better at hiding it.

The UK Government’s own “Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation” wrote in 2019 that:

The evidence suggests that there is an absence of consistent guidelines for the use of automation and algorithms, which may be leading to discrimination in police work. … Multiple types of potential bias can occur. These include discrimination on the grounds of protected characteristics; real or apparent skewing of the decision-making process; and outcomes and processes which are systematically less fair to individuals within a particular group.

Now, some of these efforts were from a few years ago. Unquestionably, the nature and abilities of AI tools has radically changed since then. It does make sense to me that there is a potential good use of these type of tools in the field of crime prevention - even if we don’t know what it is yet. Plus more people have spent more time thinking about the potential perils embedded in these systems that we should aim to avoid.

So maybe it’s just a bad headline and this effort will prove to be something that will materially help society. But I feel it’s far more likely to be the government getting on the generative AI hype train with some underspecified request that will end up offloading the responsibilities of the state, as well as a big bucketload of public money, to some blackbox software under the exclusive control of an agenda-ridden US tech billionaire which ends up doing nothing more than further embed inequality and prejudice into the criminal justice system.

I hope I’m wrong.

Also, in extreme irony:

This announcement is the second challenge to be announced as part of the Programme, building on our Clean Energy challenge aiming to deliver cheaper bills for households across the UK by shifting electricity demand during evenings and weekends by two gigawatts by 2030 – the equivalent of 1.5 million homes.

Feeding tons of data into some unspecified “advanced AI” is unlikely to help any clean energy challenge.

📚 Finished reading America, América by Greg Grandin.

This book, by a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, was a lengthy, yet extremely readable, 500-year history of the modern Americas that really quite shifted my views of the birth of the modern-day United States, whilst providing insights into the history and influence of the nations of South America that I had essentially no knowledge of.

Sure, it covers the horrors inflicted on the indigenous population coming from the violent greed of various European colonisers - a ghastly, but at least somewhat well-known history - but it was much of the the interplay between the ever-changing north and south of the American continent that was fresh to me. I learned a lot more detail about the rulers and other key figures from North, and especially South American history.

The general premise is that the identity of the United States was formed not only in relation to the commonly-held idea of “looking east” to Europe, but rather in relation to its southern neighbours, South America. And likewise Latin America’s various identities were shaped by their constant political and/or actual battles against its expansionist-inclined northern neighbour.

A key issue throughout the book is the author’s contrasting of the northern Anglo-American approach to expanding their territory - violently conquering so-called “terra nullis” - vs the countries of Latin America which were often more included to think of indigenous people as being part of the existing communities rather than as something between the non-existent and rival nations.

Grandin asserts that it was really Latin America that was the key driving force behind liberal internationalism. After their own wars of independence, the republics of southern America pioneered “American International Law” - which (in theory) promoted the equality of nations great and small, respect for the sovereignty of other nations, and, in general, the idea that you usually shouldn’t intervene in the business of other countries. These are ideas that ended up influencing the founding of transnational organisations such as the League of Nations and the UN.

This is a contrast to a more “might is right” expansionist doctrine, whereby if your country happens to be big and powerful then you have every right to - and maybe even a duty to - control or conquer other nations which cannot physically defend themselves.

These were ideas more associated with the early years of the United States (some might say they are unfortunately making a comeback). The US used its “Monroe Declaration” - originally celebrated as an expression of solidarity by Latin American nations - as an excuse to manipulate and assault the countries to its south and elsewhere; undermining foreign governments, enacting regime changes and so on.

Although there were exceptions on both sides. The author seems to be quite a fan of the US President Franklin Roosevelt. His “Good Neighbour Policy” led to the recognition of the sovereignty of other nations and their right to govern themselves. This, in the view of the author, gave him the moral authority to fight against the rise of global fascism.

The inhabitants (and colonisers of) southern America were of course not morally pure. Far from it. This book details enough for us to realise that the author certainly does not intend to portray ever resident of the south as morally heroic. But rather that there was a real difference between the typical Latin American vision of democracy (“vibrant and egalitarian”) and that of it northern neighbour (“tepid and unequal”); the presence of social and economic rights, vs the critical focus being solely on political rights (for some).

It’s also an exceptionally readable book. I believe it is over 700 pages long which would normally put me off. But I’m glad in this case it did not. It is, at least to me, an absolutely fascinating and quite radical rethinking of, in particular, the history of the US as I knew it, as well as the history, intellectual and otherwise, of South America -including the latter’s philosophical influence on several of the concepts that drive the ideas of international law, democracy and human rights as we know them today.

Or knew them.

The book has tremendous contemporary relevance. Some of the sentences above might resonate as topics we urgently need to be concerned with today, even whilst they are told from the perspective of events of up to several centuries ago. It would appear that this history of politics and justice is not always a one-way journey. And, as always, as trite and predictable as it is to say it: those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.

I’ll end with a quote from the book’s own blurb, which, as naturally biased as it will be, reflects how I felt about this exceptional book. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in history, the Americas, geopolitics and related subjects - or simply in how the world we know today came about.

At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world.

A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.

Some facts and figures that are useful to know as the battle around inheritance tax in the UK will most likely come to the fore again following reports that the government is considering changing it.

The vast majority of deaths do not involve any inheritance tax charge at all:

in the tax year 2022 to 2023, 4.62% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, increasing by 0.23 percentage points since the tax year 2021 to 2022. This means that IHT is payable on fewer than 1 in 20 estates, as it has been since 2007 to 2008, and broadly since statistics were first produced

And the rate paid by those who do is far lower than the headline 40% rate.

t…he average effective tax rate paid by taxpaying estates was 13% (compared to the headline marginal rate of 40%), reflecting the impact of exemptions, reliefs, and tax-free allowances.

These charts based on a report commissioned by the Bible Society, leveraging a poll run by Yougov, tell a story that surprised me.

Over the past few years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of young people - aged 18-34 - that report believing in God.

And some of them seem to be actively engaging with their beliefs, with a massive increase in the % who report going to a Christian church at least monthly.

It’s still a minority pursuit to be sure. But, nonetheless, the upswing reflects a 400% increase in the 18-24 group.

The increase is dominated by young men, with not so far off twice the proportion of young men reporting that they regular attending church than women.

I haven’t read the full report, but I do intend to, to see if it it includes any theories of why this is.