John Barrett
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johnwbarrett.bsky.social
John Barrett
@johnwbarrett.bsky.social
210 followers 200 following 100 posts
Emeritus Prof of Mathematical Physics, U of Nottingham. Expert on quantum gravity, experienced in political campaigning, novice on public health, #OliviaDean fan. This account for social posts, scientific stuff on Mastodon https://scicomm.xyz/@JohnBarrett
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Reposted by John Barrett
explaintrade.com
"Seizing Brexit opportunities to deregulate" was mostly unspecified magic fairy pixie bullshit then, and it's not going to get any more realistic in the hands of a bunch of Reform clowns who don't know how anything works, don't care to learn and disdain anyone that might.
November 8, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
ottoenglish.bsky.social
X is designed to radicalise people.

The algorithm promotes Elon Musk's agenda to promote racists and people who want violence bought - specifically - to the streets of Britain.

Members of Parliament, major institutions and the media should not be there.
news.sky.com/story/the-x-...
Elon Musk is boosting the British right - and this shows how
Elon Musk is boosting the British right - and this shows how
news.sky.com
November 6, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
chrisgrey.bsky.social
Immigration, indecency, and incompetence. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog. The ever-more indecent terms of the immigration 'debate' are another failure of Brexit, which links to the ever-more obvious incompetence of Reform in local government: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2025/10/immi...
October 31, 2025 at 7:39 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
ottoenglish.bsky.social
It's that moment again for National Trust members to vote to keep the entryists out.

Quick and easy to vote and please do so by 31st of October

Quick Vote link keeps the AstroTurfers out.

Then share. Thank you.

secure.cesvotes.com/V3-3-0/nt25/...
Log In
Welcome to the National Trust 2025 voting website, hosted by independent voting service provider Civica Election Services.
secure.cesvotes.com
October 25, 2025 at 10:11 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
mikehoney.bsky.social
I’ve used WA Health’s COVID-19 wastewater surveillance page to estimate the number of infections of BA.3.2.

I estimate ~400 BA.3.2.* infections in Perth for the latest week, and ~4,600 over the 9 weeks since BA.3.2.* was first detected.

#COVID19 #SARSCoV2 #BA_3_2 #Australia #WA #Perth
🧵
October 26, 2025 at 5:37 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
sheencr.bsky.social
We are now in a significant COVID wave after a period of relative calm- excellent summary from @chrischirp.bsky.social
England is now experiencing a significant Covid wave, after 10 months of relative quiet
The latest Covid situation in England and a look at where NHS services are as we head into winter
open.substack.com
October 10, 2025 at 1:36 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
juliadoubleday.bsky.social
Nobody has Long COVID, but everybody has brain fog, cognitive decline and memory loss. I talk about the overwhelming scientific evidence that COVID damages the brain, and the overwhelming social unwillingness to acknowledge it in my latest:

www.thegauntlet.news/p/when-will-...
When Will the Lion Concern Himself
Joking memes make light of the uncomfortable reality: everyone's got a little of that post-COVID brain damage these days
www.thegauntlet.news
October 5, 2025 at 10:46 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
stollmeyer.bsky.social
🔥 Finally an EU leader says it out loud:

“We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies.”
defenddemocracy.bsky.social Defend Democracy @defenddemocracy.bsky.social · Oct 4
President Macron: “Europeans, let's wake up!

We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks.”

defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...
October 4, 2025 at 11:37 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
binitakane.bsky.social
Brilliant article by a teacher highlighting the current dire situation for teachers and kids every winter when it comes to infection risk and spread. We continue to fight for our kids to have the right to breathe clean air.

stevebheadteacher.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/d...
Dear Bridget Phillipson, Please Can We Talk About Health?
Dear Bridget Phillipson, Please can we talk about health? It’s autumn 2025. We’re one month into the school year, in England. Two of my children are ill, again.With Covid, again.It&#821…
stevebheadteacher.wordpress.com
October 3, 2025 at 6:28 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
colinyeo.bsky.social
1/ There’s quite a lot of misunderstanding by good journalists about how right to work checks operate. It’s not illegal to work without having provided proof of your right, as James goes on to say later in the thread. And employers are not under a legal duty to conduct checks: ID is not mandatory.
jamesrball.com James Ball @jamesrball.com · Sep 27
Not sure day one of the latest ID card rollout went very well at all, not least because the government couldn’t answer the absolute core question about why they’re being introduced.

The case is that digital ID will be required for anyone to get work. The problem is ID is already mandatory. 🧵
September 27, 2025 at 2:03 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
sundersays.bsky.social
Trial of X in Belgium for refusing to remove unlawful content. In the UK, X appears to be treated as above the law, as it actively defends so much extreme & unlawful content of many kinds, with so little challenge since those responsible for the rule of law seem to be indifferent or asleep
September 12, 2025 at 6:49 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
newsagents.bsky.social
"Having their first big conference about vaccines and Lucy Connolly – it was a stupid mistake... This was actually disastrous for Reform."

Did the Reform UK conference expose the party for what it really stands for?

www.thenewsagents.co.uk/article/the-...
‘The conference was disastrous for Reform. It's easily their biggest misstep’ | The News Agents
Reform UK’s 2025 conference was a horror show of misinformation, with a celebration of admitted racist Lucy Connolly and lies about vaccines spread by a conspiracy theorist – both greeted with rounds…
www.thenewsagents.co.uk
September 8, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
sundersays.bsky.social
My analysis of Reform’s appeal to a mix of a toxic/radicalised core and more normal mainstream target voters
September 5, 2025 at 9:33 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
robinsonmeyer.bsky.social
Why can you breathe Earth’s atmosphere?

The answer isn’t that the Amazon rainforest is producing excess oxygen on the surface. (It’s not.) It’s that fossil fuels exist. I didn’t understand this at all before reading @peterbrannen.bsky.social’s new book. heatmap.news/podcast/shif...
Robinson Meyer: Why do we have a surplus of oxygen in the air in the first place? It was, for me, also something I did not understand at all before I read the book. Peter Brannen: So there’s this common trope that two out of the next three breaths you have is from phytoplankton the ocean, or a quarter of it is from the Amazon alive today. And there’s a sense in which that’s true because oxygen and CO2 are being exchanged very quickly in the biosphere. But there is something like 800 times more oxygen in the air than can be produced by the entire biosphere. And all of the oxygen that’s produced by the rainforest, say — the rainforest is a living system where everything else is consuming that organic matter and feeding off of it. And it’s kind of a wash — just as much oxygen is created by the trees as is consumed by the bugs and fungi and jaguars and all the things that are living in the rainforest that are feeding off those plants and respiring that plant matter back to things like CO2 and water. So on a net scale it’s a wash. So that gets you a planet with close to zero oxygen, and instead we have this absurd abundance of this thing that wants to react with everything. And the only way you can do that is if, say, you imagine a tree and when it dies, rather than being decomposed by fungi and beetles and on and on, that tree suddenly gets buried in sediment and falls into the crust and becomes part of the rock record, and the oxygen it made in life is not used in its own destruction. And by shielding that tree in the earth, you leave this surplus of oxygen in the air. And over all of Earth history, as a vanishingly small amount of this organic matter, things like plants and algae, do make it into the rock record, they leave an equivalent gift of oxygen in the air as a surplus. We are more familiar with plant matter in the crust where it’s economically exploitable — we call those fossil fuels. So in a weird way, the fact that me and you can breathe — I don’t think a lot of people attribute that to the fact that there’s fossil fuels in the ground. Luckily most, you know, quote-unquote fossil fuels are very diffuse in mudstones, and they’re not economically exploitable. And we’re never going to run out of oxygen by burning fossil fuels because, you know, we worry about CO2 going up in parts per million and oxygens in whole percent. So, you know, it is true that for every molecule of CO2 we burn we’re bringing down oxygen by an equivalent amount, it’s just not that concerning. But yeah, there is this astounding way of reframing, of looking at the world where the plant surface is breathable only because of what’s happened in the rocks beneath it.
September 3, 2025 at 4:24 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
josiah.writes.news
PM Starmer agrees with the SNP that "we had an [asylum] returns agreement with the whole of Europe. It was ripped up when we left the EU by people making promises" that were a fantasy
September 3, 2025 at 11:29 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
jeremymberg.bsky.social
Yes, it was carefully hidden in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... )

1/2
A graph comparing COVID incidence after the Pfizer vaccine compared to placebo
September 1, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
vicderbyshire.bsky.social
The final phase of largest-ever expansion of publicly funded childcare support has begun in England, as thousands of working parents receive more help with their nursery costs.
Those eligible are now able to get 30 hours of free childcare per week during term-time for their children aged 9 mths-4yrs
September 1, 2025 at 7:41 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
bellingcat.com
Finding key information shared at council meetings takes time and effort. Today, we've launched a tool that allows you to search verbatim quotes from council meetings in the UK and Ireland, without the need to watch long recordings or sift through extensive notes. council-search.bellingcat.com
Bellingcat Council Meeting Transcript Search
Find verbatim quotes from council meetings in the UK and Ireland using this free open source research tool by Bellingcat.
council-search.bellingcat.com
August 28, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
josiah.writes.news
🔴 Reform UK Councillors ‘Exploited Legal Loophole’ to Dodge Spending Limits on Farage Election Leaflets

Exclusive: At least 12 newly-elected Reform councillors in Durham did not declare costs for mass mailings from party leader that attacked local council’s spending
bylinetimes.com/2025/08/28/r...
Reform UK Councillors 'Exploited Legal Loophole' to Dodge Spending Limits on Farage Election Leaflets
Exclusive: At least 12 newly elected Reform UK councillors in Durham did not declare costs for mass mailings from party leader that attacked local council's spending
bylinetimes.com
August 28, 2025 at 8:44 AM
johnwbarrett.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Politicians risk ignoring many voters by not being on TikTok, Tory MP warns
‘You’ve got to be where the electorate are,’ says Luke Evans, the sixth-most followed UK politician on the platform
www.theguardian.com
August 25, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
safedavid3.bsky.social
🚨😷🚨😷🚨😷🚨😷

BREAKING NEWS

At last, in the UK, we now have official guidance on the use of respirators (FFP3) vs Fluid Resistant Surgical Masks (FRSM) which has been prepared SPECIFICALLY FOR THE HEALTHCARE SECTOR.

🚨😷🚨😷🚨😷🚨😷
August 22, 2025 at 11:51 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
solidevidence.bsky.social
It’s been 2 days, lots of comments, and I’ve been called lots of bad names (mostly on the other site).
Here’s what I learned about protein based Novavax (NV) vs mRNA COVID vaccines.
1/
solidevidence.bsky.social Solid Evidence @solidevidence.bsky.social · Aug 20
Can someone explain to me why some feel so strongly that the Novavax vaccine is superior to mRNA? From the data I've seen they are about equivalent, and both are very safe.

a priori I would think that mRNA is better because it elicits both arms of the immune system, but is there data either way?
August 22, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by John Barrett
mikehoney.bsky.social
Here's the latest variant picture for the United Kingdom, to late July.

The XFG.* "Stratus" variant remained dominant, growing strongly to 68%.

NB.1.8.1 "Nimbus" fell away sharply to 6%.

#COVID19 #UK #XFG #Stratus #NB_1_8_1 #Nimbus
🧵
August 16, 2025 at 3:16 AM
Reposted by John Barrett
noupside.bsky.social
“The only way a populist can be fought is by telling a true story better.”

I’m at the Liberalism in the 21st Century conference listening to Suketu Mehta extol the critical virtues of storytelling.

“God speaks to us in stories, not in studies.”
August 14, 2025 at 8:43 PM