“Peak F*cked Up”

The Halton District School Board isn’t answering any more questions about the Toronto-area high school teacher who went viral around the world for wearing what appears to be jumbo-sized prosthetic breasts to class.

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Our Problems Aren’t Procedural

… Like many centrist arguments of our age, Haidt’s essay emphasizes the procedural over the substantive. Missing from the 8,000-word argument, though, is an acknowledgement that meaningful national problems might also account for the fracture of American democracy. Credentialed experts, smart centrists, and small-l liberals of all stripes held the reins of power right up to 2016. They presided over a catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, two decades of defeat in Afghanistan, a hollowed industrial base, an earth-spanning recession, a secret surveillance regime, an opioid epidemic, and stagnating livelihoods in both the black communities of America’s inner-cities and the white communities of America’s rural hinterlands. With events like these, retweets are hardly needed to explain faltering faith in the American creed.

Is America’s food industry being sabotaged? Consumers got a sense that our food-supply chains might be fragile when Covid-19 outbreaks shut down several meatpacking plants in the spring of 2020. Supermarket meat coolers were thinly stocked for weeks. In 2021, some observers began noticing a seeming uptick in fires and other disruptions at food-production facilities around the country. Soon lists of “suspicious” fires at food plants began circulating on Facebook and Twitter. Our “food supply is under attack,” a typical tweet proclaimed.

By the spring of 2022, the lists of fires and other incidents had grown to include more than 90 events…

Curses! Foiled Again!

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have accidentally broadcast their sins to the entire world.

Like many fans of other football clubs (Liverpool here), I’ve long had a soft spot for Newcastle. David Ginola, young Gazza, Keegan’s ‘I will love it’ meltdown, the iconic striped shirt, Viz magazine, big Les Ferdinand, that wonderful lilting accent, Newkie Brown, Shearer’s amusingly utilitarian ‘one hand in the air’ goal celebration, Jimmy Nail… what’s not to love about the Toon, like?

So when Newcastle United was bought by the Public Investment Fund – essentially, the nation state of Saudi Arabia – I was, like most, disappointed to say the least.