Not only WEIRD, but DEAD

New psychological science acronym just dropped.

As developed the Crockett lab’s recent paper “AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science”.

You might already be aware of the WEIRD sample critique - that psych science has tended to experiment on “convience samples” of people that are unrepresentative of the world’s population. That is to say folk that are:

• Western
• Educated
• Industrialized,
• Rich
• Democratic

Doing so limits generalisability. How could you possibly say that your finding applies to humans in general if you’ve only tested it on Harvard undergrads? But yet, few papers present their findings as “we found X in Harvard undergrads”, preferring to make sweeping statements about humanity.

Crockett and Messeri have come up with another you-can’t-generalise based acronym. DEAD:

• Decontextualized: interpreted without taking into account any cultural, relational, institutional, historical or situational factors participants are affected by.
• Engineered: measured using tasks that are designed to suit the limitations of what the researchers can easily measure rather than the real experience of someone in the outside world.
• Anonymized: taking no account of who is being measured; their identities, life experience, social positions or other relationships.
• Disembodied: without reference to any effect that people’s bodies, physical surroundings and so on might play on cognitition.

This is again a generalisation based critique, but instead of WEIRD’s focus on who gets studied, it relates to exactly how things get studied.

Work in the cognitive psychology field is full of proxies designed to measure some more general - and more interesting - psychological construct. The authors' critique here is that with DEAD data you cannot be at all sure that the actual thing you measured properly reflects the in-context human experience of the construct you want to write about.

In their words:

DEAD cognition is unlikely to be representative of the diverse ways in which cognition lives out in the real world: contextualized in culture and relationships, sprawling and unconstrained, tethered to our identities, and enacted through our bodies.

An example is instructive. There are a lot of papers that claim to measure (or alter) how generous humans are. But “generous”, in the layman’s sense of the word and its complete meaning, is obviously a rather difficult thing to measure quickly and simply in a lab or online. So instead, proxies such as the Dictator Game are used.

In this:

… participants are invited to share money with a recipient (typically a stranger or charity). Giving money is taken as a measure of generosity…

But:

…this task is hardly representative of all the ways in which humans show generosity. The standard version of this task measures generosity outside of specific relationships (decontextualized); it allows only one way to express generosity (engineered); articipants are typically not identified to experimenters or recipients (anonymized); and it excludes embodied cues and expressions (disembodied).

However, the resuilting papers tend to want to claim that “our intervention makes people more generous”, not “our intervention makes people behave a bit differently in a simple game involving a low sum of money”.

This is thus a potentially huge generalisation issue:

When we write papers about abstracted processes, such as ‘generosity’ (rather than, say, ‘donating US$1 to the Red Cross over the internet’), we perpetuate another illusion of generalizability, portraying DEAD cognition as more representative of cognition than it actually is.

A useful discussion in this episode of Two Psychologists Four Beers elaborates further. To provide an exaggerated-by-me version of one of their examples: Some unknown Mechanical Turker who decides to keep the $1 rather than donate it could be reflecting real selfishness of a millionare who craves every last bit of money, but on the other hand they might be living out of their car, desperately saving money for their mother’s life saving operations. Laypeople would likely interpret those two cases as rather different representations of generoisty, but the typical psychological study does not even attempt to differentiate between the two.

This is a shame (in my view):

Iceland rejects EU accession talks after divisive referendum campaign.

Lord knows we don’t need less European solidarity at this point in time. You can see that it’s an unfortunate result simply by looking at who is celebrating it (Farage, Le Pen, and, I would assume, Putin).

It was a close result: 52.8% against, 47.2% for. Upsettingly close to the cursed Brexit ratio.

Staying in bed extra at the weekend turns out to be a healthy habit

Good news for fans of a weekend lie-in!

‘People should not feel guilty’: weekend lie-in may be good for you, experts say.

Contrary to previous advice about keeping a regular bed-and-getting-up time even thruogh the weekend - especially so for those of us who suffer in general from a lack of sleep - it seems like there’s at least a correlation between having a weekend lie-in and not having unduly high blood pressure. High blood pressure is of course associated with all sorts of serious bad health issues.

For years, experts have stressed the risks of lie-ins, warning that catching up on missed sleep at the weekend can disrupt the body’s internal clock and trigger adverse health effects.

Now analysis has produced a heartening caveat to that advice: if you do not overdo it, weekend lie-ins may be good for you, with an ideal benchmark of 1hr 27min extra in bed to protect against high blood pressure.

Perhaps the reason this finding exists is more to do with the fact that basically everyone is sleep deprived in general these days:

Not getting enough sleep puts extra stress on the body. It keeps the heart and blood vessels working harder and can increase blood pressure.

“Getting some extra sleep on the weekend may give the body a chance to recover and reduce some of that stress.

But don’t stay in bed too long! Massive lie-ins are actually associated with higher blood pressure. Apparently 1 hour and 27 minutes is the perfect time, if you’re someone with that amount of control over the fact.

Overall, weekend catch-up sleep was associated with a 6% reduction in the odds of hypertension.

A slightly greater benefit was seen in people who were considered to be physically inactive. They were 6.9% less likely to have hypertension if they had a weekend lie-in.

Analysis identified the 1hr 27min benchmark as the ideal amount of catch-up sleep, Lee said. Someone getting this amount of extra sleep would be 9% less likely to have high blood pressure.

Not getting enough sleep is known to prevent blood pressure from falling at night, which raises the risk of developing high blood pressure.

Experts have previously stressed the importance of having a regular bedtime and wake-up time and dismissed the idea that you can catch up on missed sleep at the weekend.

However, while the new research showed that getting some catch-up sleep could boost heart health, getting too much could be harmful, Lee cautioned. For instance, people sneaking in more than four hours extra sleep at the weekend were at greater risk of hypertension.

Given the sample size and language used I suspect we’re talking about associations rather than definitive causations, but hey, as the article notes, no need to feel guilty about having a lie in if this turns out to be true! And it sounds like it makes sense from what is already known about sleep and blood pressure.

Developing the UK's North Sea oil fields further would likely end up being a pointless disaster

One of the more upsetting things that Andy Burnham’s government seems oddly enthusiastic to do is to enable the expansion the North Sea oil fields. This is mostly in the name of helping with improving the UK’s economy, cutting our cost of living and improving energy security.

However, all these motivations seem set to be utterly unrealisable given that we are not talking about a situation where the UK state owns the oil. What’s being talked about is not a nationalisation. Instead, it’s simply that private companies would be granted licenses to exploit further the oil fields and sell it onto the oil markets to whoever wants to buy it.

“Drilling for Oil and Gas Will not Reduce Bills or Deliver Energy Security” says the UK Energy Research Centre.

Spiking prices appear to favour home production. But the prices UK consumers pay for oil and gas are driven by international markets, regardless of whether it is extracted from the UK Continental Shelf or somewhere else. While oil and gas markets are different in significant ways, their available supply from the UK is small relative to overall market demand. Squeezing additional oil and gas production from the UK may be technically possible, but it will have negligible impact on the UK cost of living.

Another odd argument I’ve heard is that it’s somehow better for the environment than shipping in oil extracted by foreign competitiors. I suppose people are thinking of transportation needs? Buy local, and all.

Of course, this is not what drives the damage and not going to be helped by extracting new oil out of the sea no matter who does it. Besides in this case it seems like to actually make things, if anything, even worse:

Although the carbon-intensity of UK gas is lower than imported LNG, carbon emissions from UK oil and gas production are almost three times as large (per unit extracted) as Norway, the primary source of UK gas imports.

So:

Assertions that drilling the North Sea will provide energy resilience and affordability in the face of current fuel price shocks are a delusion.

A newer article in the Guardian shows that the further exploitation of these damaging and declining oil fields also does nothing for the economy, at least in the longer term. Further fossil fuels = further environmental destruction; something we’ll need to deal with if we want to survive.

The climate damage caused by developing the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields under consideration by the UK government would destroy their economic benefits many times over, according to an analysis.

It estimates the economic damage caused by the carbon pollution from the oil and gas produced would be between £119bn and £336bn in the coming decades, compared with the £28.7bn in value to the UK estimated by Adura, the fossil fuel company promoting the new fields.

These incredible costs are, if anything, likely to be an undercount:

The assessment applies peer-reviewed research on how rising temperatures harm economies to the production estimates for the fields from the company. The figures are likely to be underestimates, as they do not include losses from amplified extreme weather, sea level rise or climate deaths.

Such that:

“Expanding oil and gas production in the North Sea is not just an environmental crime but also economically illiterate”

Every pro increasing North Sea oilfield extraction argument fails to stand up according to experts. The UK is certainly facing all sorts of economic crises and difficulties at present, but it would be short-sighted, immoral and seemingly largely pointless to go down this route.

The real beneficiares of this change are, as ever, going to be the shareholders of huge oil companies, who have already been accused of “cashing in on human misery”.

Between 8 of them they’ve raked in an incredible $93 billion profits in the last three months.

The companies have used the biggest disruption of fossil fuel supplies in the market’s history to almost double their combined profits from just under $50bn in the same period last year, with campaigners warning that millions of households are left paying the price in higher bills and climate chaos.

The data suggests the eight oil companies – Aramco, BP, Shell, Equinor, TotalEnergies, Eni, Chevron and ExxonMobil – made more than $700,000 of profit every minute over the spring quarter.

All this whilst British citizens have been dying due to the recent heatwaves, in addition to the horrific life and health destroying climate driven disasters in other parts of the world.

Things are…not going well on the heat front:

The obvious solution to part of our economic woes? Yes, it concerns oil companies - but it’s not via letting them print further masses of money at our expense.

Patrick Galey, the lead on fossil fuels at Global Witness, said: “BP’s sky-high profits are a scandalous reminder of who’s been cashing in on human misery this year. While wildfires threaten communities across the world, drought bites and energy costs spiral, ordinary families are paying the price for big oil’s prioritisation of shareholder wealth over a livable planet.”

He added: “It’s time to make oil giants pay up to repair the climate breakdown they’re driving. Think how many fire and flood defences we could build, or how many solar panels we could install, if big oil paid their fair share in taxes.”

Albums worth listening to: 2026 releases (so far, non-exhaustive)

Here are some albums released this year that I’ve quite liked, last updated 2026-08-29. The occasional EP might also slip in.

RADICALGavin Prophet · 2026

HELP(2)Fontaines D.C. & War Child Records · 2026

Be Someone BetterRed Arrow Highway · 2026

Romanticize The DiveMetric · 2026

Nine Inch NoizeNine Inch Nails & Boys Noize · 2026

Oversharing on the InternetEarth to Eve · 2026

LAURENLauren Sanderson · 2026

you seem pretty sad for a girl so in loveOlivia Rodrigo · 2026

TRAUMACORE (RAW AND UNCUT) [DELUXE]SkyDxddy · 2026

The Wow! SignalMuse · 2026

Daughter from HellGracie Abrams · 2026

Cruel WorldHolly Humberstone · 2026

Music, Fashion, FilmCharli xcx · 2026

Miss Misfortunatelygracie · 2026

OZebrahead · 2026

GOTTA GET OUTThe Linda Lindas · 2026

Geeqie is a handy little open-source app for Linux systems that helps you view, sort and organise all your images. I’m sure it has far more capabilities than I will ever need, but as a way to flick through hundreds of photos, mark ones to keep vs delete and then do exactly that it works a treat.

I especially like the way you can split the screen into 2 or 4 so as to compare several images against each other. Here’s a screenshot from the official project page.

Beyond that it supports bookmarks, tags, collections, what have you, as well as full access to your Exif, IPTC and XMP metadata.

I believe it also has a duplicate image dector but I haven’t tried that.

Results of the 2024 UK General Election under different voting systems

Today’s Guardian has an interesting graphic simulating what the results of the 2024 UK general election might have been under various different proportional-representation influenced voting systems.

Of course if a new voting system was brought in, then people’s voting behaviour might change - but it’s an interesting look nonetheless. The results do basically seem a much better reflection of what I believe the current vibes of the country are than the result that our existing FPTP one produced.

Sure, I really might not like the parts of the potential results in some cases (and really like them in others). But voting systems must not be designed based on what outcome you want, so I’m glad to see that the majority of MPs - including the majority of Labour MPs,which is the group who most benefitted from the limitations of our system last time - apparently do support this kind of change.

Slow Gods is a space opera dealing with the question of how various societies react to certain destruction

📚 Finished reading Slow Gods by Claire North.

I first heard of this from the New Scientist book club, although I don’t seem to be able to make enough time to read to a deadline, so unfortunately I missed the club part of the club.

Nonetheless, this was a great read, even in solitary form. Set in the presumably reasonably distant multi-planetary future, a big strange object is traversing the galaxy extremely slowly warning each civilisation that in around a century a particular binary star system is going to go supernova and destroy the large number of planets in its blast radius.

I always like books that explore how societies may react - or don’t - to huge, devastating disasters that will come to peak fruition only in the long term, way beyond any one (human) political cycle. See also: the actual climate change we face on this planet today.

The book focuses on Maw, who comes from a plenty ruled by the “Shine” regime. It is not a good society. Think an authoritarian dystopian society of the cruel kind that Liz Truss fantasises about. Inequality is rife. The market is everything. The life you face is all predicated on how much “Shine” you have, which is basically a publicly scored matter of your worth and status. The famous “Nosedive” Black Mirror episode. What is on the route to being created in real life China. That kind of thing.

Basically everyone outside of the financial elite ends up riddled with debt, forced into servitude, and shamed for it. But hey, they should have just worked harder, right?

For being perceived as an unworthy political dissenter, Maw is forced to become a starship pilot. Why forced? Because in order to travel faster than light a ship needs an “organic” pilot who has to plug their brain into a computerised system and access “the dark” in order to navigate between distant systems. It’s a traumatic experience. Which has the unfortunate effect of wrecking the pilot’s mind after a few trips, driving them insane, or eventually killing them. Hence some societies, including the Shine, use forced labour for this.

Maw however turns out to be a very unusual pilot, whose special properties make them potentially a critical part of any evacuation effort, to the extent that there is to be one. Just like real life UK, there’s a large number of cruel residents of most planets that are not excited about the prospect of a large number of immigrants. Nonetheless, the alternative is a fiery death for everyone on any affected planets.

What happens when political systems fail when mortal danger is closest? How does one deal with authoritarian systems that can monitor everything in a population very addicted to their phones? And, for Maw, fundamentally what does it mean to be human, if indeed that is what they are. All these are of course questions that we desperately need to ask ourselves today.

Our critical infrastructure seems increasingly subject to effective cyber attacks.

What were once science-fiction style state cyber attacks on important national infrastructure seem now to be increasingly common.

Iran-linked hackers blamed for cyber-attack that shut down UK power plant.

The power station was down for 4 days.

Of course this isn’t a brand new venture, nor one confined to the UK. Elsewhere there have been similar acts of proxy warfare with more immediate consequences.

Iran has been accused for years of carrying out cyber-attacks on various countries, including in relation to a massive power outage in Turkey in 2015 and several possible breaches of Israeli government websites in 2022.

Iranian hackers are also suspected of recent attacks on US energy and water facilities:

…a group of hackers affiliated with the Iranian government has targeted industrial control devices used in a series of critical infrastructure targets including in the energy sector, water and wastewater utilities, and unspecified “government facilities.” According to the agencies, the hackers have targeted programmable logic controllers (PLCs)–a type of device designed to allow digital control of physical machinery–in those facilities, including those sold by industrial tech firm Rockwell Automation, with the apparent intention of sabotaging their systems.

By compromising those PLCs, the advisory warns, the hackers sought to change information on the displays of industrial control systems, which can in some scenarios cause system downtime, damage, or even dangerous conditions.

Similar to an earlier attack in 2023 wherein:

CyberAv3ngers set the names of the Unitronics devices to read “Gaza”–in a reference to Israel’s invasion of the territory in retaliation for Hamas’s October 7 attacks–and changed the devices' displays to show an image of the CyberAv3ngers logo. Despite the initial appearance of mere vandalism, industrial cybersecurity firms that tracked the attacks, including Dragos and Claroty, told WIRED that the hackers corrupted the Unitronics' devices' code deeply enough to disrupt services in water utility networks from Israel to Ireland to a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, facility in the US.

Iran of course isn’t the only state accused of such actions:

Foreign-backed cyber-attacks have repeatedly targeted water infrastructure in recent years. In 2024, several rural Texas towns were hit with Russian-linked cyber-attacks that briefly caused the tiny town of Muleshoe’s water system to overflow

And it’s not all in the same direction of course. Remember 2009’s Stuxnet worm that appeared to target Iranian nuclear facilities, which is thought most likely to have been created as a jointt operation by the US and Israel. Once again it targeted programmable logic controllers.

Stuxnet specifically targets programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which allow the automation of electromechanical processes such as those used to control machinery and industrial processes including gas centrifugesfor separating nuclear material. Exploiting four zero-day flaws in the systems, Stuxnet functions by targeting machines using the Microsoft Windows operating system and networks, then seeking out Siemens Step7 software. Stuxnet reportedly compromised Iranian PLCs, collecting information on industrial systems and causing the fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart. Stuxnet’s design and architecture are not domain-specific and it could be tailored as a platform for attacking modern SCADA and PLC systems (e.g., in factory assembly lines or power plants), most of which are in Europe, Japan and the United States. Stuxnet reportedly destroyed almost one-fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. Targeting industrial control systems, the worm infected over 200,000 computers and caused 1,000 machines to physically degrade

Albums worth listening to: 2026 releases (so far, non-exhaustive)

Here are some albums released this year that I’ve quite liked, last updated 2026-08-23.

(as well as a test of whether my blog plugin to display albums in a grid works)

RADICALGavin Prophet · 2026

HELP(2)Fontaines D.C. & War Child Records · 2026

Be Someone BetterRed Arrow Highway · 2026

Romanticize The DiveMetric · 2026

Nine Inch NoizeNine Inch Nails & Boys Noize · 2026

Oversharing on the InternetEarth to Eve · 2026

LAURENLauren Sanderson · 2026

you seem pretty sad for a girl so in loveOlivia Rodrigo · 2026

TRAUMACORE (RAW AND UNCUT) [DELUXE]SkyDxddy · 2026

The Wow! SignalMuse · 2026

Daughter from HellGracie Abrams · 2026

Cruel WorldHolly Humberstone · 2026

Music, Fashion, FilmCharli xcx · 2026

Miss Misfortunatelygracie · 2026

Nigel Farage, the anti-patriot, strikes again

The unpatriotic Reform leader is once again showing his true colours. For all his flag waving it’s clear he has no love whatsoever for Britain or its struggling population.

Nigel Farage Has Spoken at 15 Trump-Linked Events Since 2024 Election.

The avenues our wannabe grifter-in-chief has been happily taking gold from by selling out our people include the usual suspects for Trump affiliated American hate-mongers:

• The Heartland Institue
• CPAC
• Alliance for Responsible Citizenship
• Club for Growth
• New York Young Republicans club

At the same time he managed to mention his own constituency, Clacton, only two times in the past year, whilst skipping at least 77 consecutive votes in Parliament, despite some of them being on subjects he claims to be particularly interested in.

Rishi Sunak used to get a little chastised for his apparent leaning towards America over Britain now and the . Nigel Farage rampant up it up to a new level.

It’s all part of the weird anti-patriotic tendency for some of the British right to be absolutely fine with our country being explicitly taken over by malign foreign actors - as long as those actors are Trump or Trump affiliates, despite the huge damage DT has inflicted upon us already.

For pity’s sake, if you want to be the UK prime minister then please stand up for the UK.

These people have a rare ability to bring out my otherwise fairly dormant patriotism.

One of the exceedingly rare upsides of being in the midst of the UK’s fifth (!!) heatwave of the year is that it seems to have made me a relatively bumper tomato harvest.

And yes it was, again, the UK’s hottest day of the year again a couple of days ago, ugh.

Bad Blood tells the story of Theranos, one of the biggest Silicon Valley scams of all time

📚 Finished listening to Bad Blood by John Carreyrou.

This is a deep dive into the life and times of the infamous med-tech company Theranos. Or one of the biggest provable scams of the many that seem to originate from the world of Silicon Valley.

Theranos was Elizabeth Holmes' company that promised some incredible medical devices that could truly change the trajectory of a certain type of healthcare. She was offering tiny finger-pick blood tests that could run hundreds of lab tests quickly and cheaply. Much smaller, cheaper and quick than anything that came before. Eventually the company was valued as high as $9 billion.

Her vision seems to be that they’d eventually become an essential device in everyone’s home, allowing people to painlessly pick up on early signs of any number of problematic diseases and hence get early treatment .

It would, undoubtedly, save lives.

Only one problem. They couldn’t make it work. The devices were much more limited than claimed and extraordinarily unreliable. A real shame. But not something Holmes et al would ever accept. What started out as what felt to me as a genuine desire to build and sell this revolutionary technology turned into nothing more than a huge scam as Theranos constantly lied about its capabilities, secretly using big machines from its competitors to run the tests, in the end manipulating investors, misrepresenting science, conning investors out of huge sums of money and very likely putting the patients that used their test at tremendous risk.

Whistleblowers were rarely seen, and the handful that did talk to author talked about being threatened, sidelined or otherwise suppressed. This probably had something to do with Holmes and her COO, Sunny Balwani running an extremely secretive operation within which they ruled by fear. Constant NDAs everywhere, constant threats and actual litigation abounded to its own employees and other curious parties.

Including journalists. This book is written by John Carreyrou, a journalist who, despite the legal threats, published a pivotal series of exposures in the Wall Street Journal after he did manage to get the inside track via a number of often confidential sources. The rest is history - regulatory investigations ensued, Theranos was closed down, and criminal cases were commenced against Holmes and Balwani.

The book finishes before the court action commenced, but we now know that Holmes was found guilty of 4 counts of criminal fraud and sentenced to 135 months in prison. Balwani got 12 years and 11 months. And they were ordered to pay $452 million to the victims of their fraud between them.

The book in parts reads like a thriller. The audacity of what went down is almost unbelievable, and yet, at this point it’s clear to everyone that this was a real life conspiracy theory that turns out to be appallingly true.

Setting up Yubikeys in Linux

As my digital paranoia contiues to increase, I’ve gone the way of the physical secuity key for some critical online accounts. Setting it up in Linux wasn’t hard at all, but it also wasn’t just plug and play.

Yubikey’s recommendation is do install its authenticator app but I didn’t really want that overhead. This is what worked for me in Linux Mint’s terminal:

1. Install the software:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install yubikey-manager

# I'm not certain next 2 are required, especially if you either have the "security" version of the key or have this software already installed and running...but if the rest doesn't work!
sudo apt install pcscd
sudo systemctl enable --now pcscd

2. Set up your keys:

Plug the key in then:

ykman info ## will show you if the key is recognised and working, its serial number etc.

ykman fido info # gives you info regarding the key's FIDO capability which is what I was most interested in using. Including whether a PIN is set (default = no)

ykman fido access change-pin # To add / change the PIN if you want one

ykman fido access verify-pin # Best to double check the PIN works before proceeding and risking locking yourself out of everything

Step 3 is then going to be to set up your now-working keys with whatever sites and apps you want to use them with.

Remember, always buy at least two if you’re going full-key-security! Otherwise if one breaks you might find yourself a bit stuck.

So today is Bin Day for our friends in Clacton.

Whilst we await the pointless and expensive nonsense from the throughly unpatriotic and corrupt millionaire with an unimaginably snowflake-fragile ego who believes competing against a fictional space alien to do a job he clearly has no interest in doing somehow constitutes “railing against the establishment” to run its course, I did hear one new record-breaking fact.

The physical length of the ballot paper is 90cm. Never before have we seen this in Britain.

Why? I assume because there’s also a record number of candidates competing - 34 - although, famously, very few from parties you’ve probably ever heard of.

Obviously, the violent and racist mob plaguing Thetford must be condemned in the strongest terms.

Some extremely dark stuff, events of a nature that should have stopped forever back in the 1930s, continues to happen in the UK.

From James Ball in The New World:

For the second time in less than three months, there are pogroms in the United Kingdom. Throughout the week, violent rioters in the town of Thetford, in Norfolk, have attacked properties they believed were housing asylum seekers.

On Tuesday night, police had to intervene to protect five men after a mob of 30 to 50 people tried to break into a home. Violence continued through the week, with one police officer being struck by a rock and another bitten by a rioter. As the men were escorted to safety by police, they were exposed to shouts and jeers by the angry mob – “get out”, “bye”, “refugees not welcome”.

There are at least two abhorrent sides to thinking about what’s going on here.

First, and most importantly, the event itself. I cannot imagine the horrors that the residents of the houses being attacked felt as the rabid mob, screaming hate-filled slogans including tenets of entirely unfounded racist conspiracy theories, attempted to break into their houses - presumably with the intent of subjecting them to violence at least as viciously as they attacked some of the police bravely doing their job with spit, rocks and teeth.

Two officers were taken to hospital after responding to the scene at Clover Way that evening, which police described as “fast-moving and volatile”.

Some of those under siege had to flee from their houses for several nights.

Secondly, until I saw Ball’s article, I hadn’t heard much about this. As he notes:

This comes just weeks after families were burned out of their homes in Belfast by violent mobs, but this might well be the first you are hearing of it: the Thetford riots barely made national headlines.

He did note that the Daily Express was one of the few newspaper that covered it prominently. But not in the way that any reasonable journalist conceivably should have.

One exception came from the Daily Express, which sent a reporter to a scene of violence fuelled by online anti-refugee rhetoric.

Having seen this first-hand, that reporter decided the most important thing he had seen was a discarded box of supplies near a bin. “The jaw-dropping list of everything asylum seekers in Thetford were ‘given for free’”.

What’s happening here? Is the government really handing out free laptops, vacations, gold watches or something? I mean, show some common sense.

That “jaw-dropping” list included a single plate, knife, fork and spoon; one mug and one glass; two small pans; basic bedding and towels. The supplier was a company which provides institutional “economy” products to hospitals and prisons – the bare essentials to live and to cook.

Just imagine if the dynamics of the situation were the other way around. We’ve seen what happens when violent crimes take place where the suspect is - even incorrectly - thought to be an asylum seeker. Murders were thankfully not committed in this case, although I tend to think not for want of trying. If nothing else there would have been endless headlines, endless condemnations.

However, the actual response of the government in charge has been fairly despicable:

The Labour government, in trying to appease the mob, inflamed it instead.

…

Even with violent mobs in the street, the government – technically a brand-new government – feels the need to triangulate on immigration in a way it doesn’t on any other issue. The violence this week was conducted by a small mob that rarely, if ever, numbered over 100 people.

When minority elements of a large, peaceful protest clash with police, politicians do not spend time stressing how legitimate the concerns of the wider protest are. They condemn the violence, and the public applauds them for it. But when a violent mob is motivated to attack asylum seekers, clear and emphatic denunciations are nowhere to be found.

It goes without saying but it is, in fact, not only OK but absolutely essential to condemn violent and racist crimes in the strongest possible way.

📚 Finished reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.

This book is set in a (slightly?) future America where everyone has become entirely obsessed with their phones, whilst around them the country has descended into dystopian economic collapse, authoritarian politics enacted via constant surveillance and militarised police patrolling the streets, political unrest and an increasingly warm climate. It’s short-form video all the way. No-one reads books. For most people, the only real hope of sustaining a decent lifestyle is to be popular on social media. In other words, it is an uncanny version, OK, perhaps a slight exaggeration of, today’s world.

Our protagonist Lenny is a well-off middle-aged guy who happens to work for a company that works with weird billionaires who want to live forever to artificially improve their health and lifespan with the goal of achieving immortality. Again, not very different to reality.

We read a mix of entries from Lenny’s diary alongside social media posts & DM from Eunice, a rather younger woman he falls in love with.

A very compelling, albeit mostly horrifying tale of pursuing love in a world only a bit worse than our own. Let’s call it a warning from the future, or perhaps tomorrow’s present.

Temporarily housed Britons refused usage of air conditioning by landlords; children suffer

Sometimes news comes that really confirms my worst prejudices against certain communities. In this case I’m talking about the moral vacuums that are companies that profiteer via offering accommodation to those who most desperately need it, aka a certain category of landlord.

The first paragraph says it all:

Homeless families placed in temporary accommodation in London were told they could not use the in-built air conditioning as it had “not been offered as an amenity” for them, leading to two children being hospitalised during recent heatwaves.

This despite the fact that it seems like the building design itself exacerbates the very issues the residents are trying to mitigate.

Residents say the all-glass construction of the block and the fact that windows open only slightly mean that, without air conditioning, their flats have become unbearably hot.

“It is very difficult to cool the flats down,” one person said. “I find that as soon as I enter the building, I become much hotter, start feeling sick and sweat profusely.”

Remembering that the vulnerable homeless families that are forced into temporary accommodation due to a lack of state willingness or ability to actually solve the scourge of homelessness once and for all do, of course, not get to choose where to live .

After the scandal broke it seems like the restrictions have been lifted. Well, in a theoretical “the on button now works” sense anyway.

However, some residents said they were informed that if they used the system they would be billed via a standing charge rather than for how long the air conditioning ran, which could result in bills of up to £500 for the summer.

I have to imagine that a homeless family in temporary accommodation is unlikely to have a spare £500 - so now they are forced to make the cooling counterpart to the standard “heating or eating” choice an unacceptable high number of Britons have to regularly make. This is not a triviality. Heat kills. Nearly 3000 people in the May and June heatwaves we’ve just suffered.

The building in question has form in extremely dubious ethical practices:

The 19-storey glass-fronted block is owned by Criterion Capital, set up by the billionaire property magnate Asif Aziz. The company was accused this year of trying to mass-evict tenants shortly before no-fault evictions were banned, something it has denied.

The greatest mystery of all.

(Original source unknown to me)

Uh oh, it’s back :(

Britain braces for fourth heatwave of year as fire chiefs issue public appeal

Temperatures are forecast to reach as high as 35C…

July has been 3C above average across the UK, according to provisional Met Office data, and with more than a month of summer left, the UK has already faced more days above 30Cthan ever before.

Hot and dry of course:

Southern England has had just 1% of its average July rainfall, while England as a whole has had 5% and the UK 20%, according to the Met Office.

You cannot possibly worship Thatcher and MAGA at the same time

It’s not the main focus of the article, but Rafael Behr raises a good point in that it’s very inconsistent for someone to venerate both Thatcher and Trump at the same time - which is exactly what the more radical (increasingly mainstream) UK Conservative MPs and their dwindling supporters claim to do to various extents:

What British conservatives either fail to observe or refuse to acknowledge in their mindless orbit around Planet Trump is that Maga politics contains more heresies against the sacred Thatcherite creed than anything Burnham proposes. The US president hates free trade. He admires single-party regimes where a supreme ruler directs economic activity. He imposes arbitrary tariffs. He uses his office to extort money from private companies or coerce them into giving equity stakes to his government. And he acquired the power to do all of this by skilfully manipulating economic and social grievances caused by deindustrialisation - the alienation and dislocation felt by working-class communities that felt their security and dignity washed away by cold global market tides.

Worship Thatcher if you really must, despite the destruction her path ended up wreaking upon our nation. Kneel in anti-British, anti-patriotic sycophancy to Trump if you really must. You just can’t do both.

Most Internet traffic is now 'non-human'

On their blog, Cloudflare report that a new online milestone has recently been passed:

This year, agent traffic crossed a historic threshold for the first time: more than 50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human.

As they say:

This shift has staggering implications for publishers, content owners, and the future of the open web.

Predictably, much of the bot crawling is for the purposes of training AI rather than the “traditional reasons” of creating search engines and other content disovery products. As such, the “return” of visitors per page to crawls ratio has plummeted from around 1:6 to 1:10.

This chart of where humans spend their time when online is also rather stark. And upsetting for those of us who value a free, open, diverse and unsiloed web.

I’d have liked them to split up social and AI for the 2024 entry, but either way, they’re a combination of technologies from massive companies that are silos desperate to trap people within their own profit-seeking limits.

🎶 Listened to Blood on the Silver Screen by SASAMI.

This is the third album from SASAMI, an artist who appears to massively re-invent her genre of interest on every album. This one is more an indie-pop style entry, after she took the time to use her classical music training to study the art-form.

Out of interest, her key takeaway:

“For me, the unifying thing about pop — whether it’s Pulp or David Bowie or Beyoncé or Rihanna — the thing that makes it pop, I think, is that it makes the listener feel like a main character.”

🎶 Listened to All That Is Over by Sprints.

The second album from this Irish band, frequently featuring the punky frustration and anger of dealing with the inner and outer chaos and turmoil of modern-day life.

Let’s go with Rage, featuring the “guess who it’s referring to” lyric:

There’s a false prophet in the room Using fear as a weaponised tool

(Not that there’s a shortage of potential folk in that category.)

Albums worth listening to: 2026 releases (so far, non-exhaustive)

Here are some albums released this year that I’ve quite liked.

(as well as a test of whether my blog plugin to display albums in a grid works)

RADICALGavin Prophet · 2026

HELP(2)Fontaines D.C. & War Child Records · 2026

Be Someone BetterRed Arrow Highway · 2026

Romanticize The DiveMetric · 2026

Nine Inch NoizeNine Inch Nails & Boys Noize · 2026

Oversharing on the InternetEarth to Eve · 2026

LAURENLauren Sanderson · 2026

you seem pretty sad for a girl so in loveOlivia Rodrigo · 2026

TRAUMACORE (RAW AND UNCUT) [DELUXE]SkyDxddy · 2026

The Wow! SignalMuse · 2026

Daughter from HellGracie Abrams · 2026

Cruel WorldHolly Humberstone · 2026

Music, Fashion, FilmCharli xcx · 2026