The death-toll on London's Grenfell Tower fire continues to mount, it's worth remembering that there are no "natural disasters," only human disasters, created by people who weigh different interests in the balance and create policies based on the way the scales come up.

The UK election didn't deliver the increased majority that PM Theresa May was seeking, but it wasn't for lack of trying: the UK Conservative party spent £1.2m on social media smear ads that painted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser, a useful idiot for Scottish separatism, and an incompetent.

The Conservative Party had a startling collapse at the polls in the United Kingdom's general election, falling short of control of the House of Commons and forcing its leader, Prime Minister Theresa May, to cut a deal with the fringe Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland to muster enough MPs to govern and cling to her job. — Read the rest

Lord Buckethead, standing against British Prime Minister Theresa May in the country's Wednesday general election, won a staggering 249 votes. The "intergalactic space lord" who "enjoys planet-conquering" and "dominating inferior species" (and UK TV light entertainment classic Lovejoy) fought for office in the Maidenhead, Kent constituency hitherto and henceforth considered a safe seat for May's Conservative party. — Read the rest

…and they're likely to vote for the "unelectable" Jeremy Corbyn, a guy significantly to the left of, say, Bernie Sanders, who has survived multiple attempts by the finance-capital wing of his own party to unseat him, and who is riding on a national wave of disillusionment with Thatherism, Neo-Thatcherism, and May-Thatcherism.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May, who surprised the world yesterday when she broke her own promise and called snap elections for June 8, has said that she will not debate the other party leaders before election day.

A Parliamentary petition to rescind the invitation for Donald Trump to make an official state visit has received nearly 1.3 million signatures in a matter of days, making it the fastest-growing such petition in Parliamentary history.

Doubtless you've laughed at the ideological war between the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea. I laughed along with you: having grown up in politics, I know firsthand about the enmities that fester between groups that should be allies -- groups whose differences can only be parsed after months of study, but who are seemingly more at odds with one another than their obvious political opponents on the "other side" of the debate.

Glenn Greenwald frames what I've been trying to articulate: as neoliberalism and its handmaiden, corruption, have swept the globe, making the rich richer, the poor poorer, and everyone in the middle more precarious; as elites demonized and dismissed the left-behinds who said something was wrong; as the social instability of inequality has been countered with increasingly invasive domestic "war on terror" policing, millions of people are ready to revolt, and will support anyone who promises no more business as usual.

In "A Letter to My Allies on the Left," Rebecca Solnit — one of my literary and political heroes — asks the left to give up the practice of reflexively dismissing the good that politicians do, because those politicians also do terrible things.

London's Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the world's great museums devoted to material culture and design, has joined a long line of museums who've allowed the owners of loaned items for temporary exhibitions to require them to ban photography and sketching of these items.

On Tuesday, Labour Party power-brokers waited until Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters had left a National Election Committee meeting to introduce a not-on-the-agenda motion that disenfranchised more than 200,000 new party members from voting in the upcoming leadership ballot.

At a meeting of the UK National Election Committee on the upcoming Labour Party leadership race, Labour grandees waited for Corbyn and his supporters to leave the room, then put forward a motion — not on the agenda — to exclude recent Labour Party members from participating in the upcoming leadership vote, disenfranchising 130,000 new Party members, mainly Corbyn supporters.

UK politics are in disarray: the leaders of the Conservative and UK Independence Parties have both quit; the Tory leadership race is a neverending night of the long knives and the Blairite wing of the Labour Party can't figure out which dice-lawyers to trust on their roll for initiative.

In the confusing but exciting battle over who will become Lord Protector of Albion during its difficult negotiations to leave the Continental Breakfast, all but one of the challengers has dropped out.

Minister of Hot Messes Andrea Leadsom bungled a Smarm Charm over the weekend so badly that her credibility as a candidate collapsed. — Read the rest

It's true that the vote for Brexit was carried by working-class people in some of the poorest and most excluded regions in the UK; but the actual referendum question was put before the British public thanks to a small faction of some of the richest, most powerful people in the country — people who rely on the finance sector (which overwhelmingly supported Remain) for their privilege. — Read the rest

The Guardian's Frankie Boyle is on fire in his new column on the post-Brexit machinations in the UK Conservative Party, where the hardline, ultra-authoritarian elements of the party are splitting their time between knifing each other in the back and planning to eliminate the few remaining environmental, safety and finance regulations that have not been shredded since the first David Cameron government in 2010.

The Chilcot Report on the UK invasion of Iraq has finally been released, seven years after it was announced, and many years after its completion (it was delayed for years over the release of government documents and memos that were contained in its pages).

In a powerful op-ed in the NYT, Bernie Sanders warns the Democratic Party that Brexit shows that many of the left's traditional supporters justifiably feel abandoned by the neoliberal establishments of the "progressive" parties, and will use any opportunity to show their displeasure.

John Quiggin (previously) delivers some of the most salient commentary on the Brexit vote and how it fits in with Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders (etc) as well as Trump, French neo-fascists, and other hypernationalist movements.