The latest XKCD strip, "Sharing Options/#2016" is a brilliant and trenchant surfacing of the hidden rhetoric of social media, where your options are "permanently share with billions of people, including internet scammers, random predatory companies, and hostile foreign governments" or "a small set of 300 or so approved friends," and when this is questioned, the social media companies profess an inability to understand what other options could exist. Read the rest

Britain is one of the most unequal countries in the world, thanks to the Tory-in-sheep's-clothing policies of Tony Blair, and the naked banker-coddling and brutal austerity of the real Tories who followed on from Blair. Read the rest

The UK has been rocked by a series of "historic sex scandals" in which beloved cultural and political figures -- Clement Freud, Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris and many others -- have been revealed to have been sexual predators since the earliest days, using their money and respectability to rape children for decades with impunity. When each new horror surfaces, one of the first questions the public asks is, "Who knew about this and helped to cover it up?" Read the rest