full of admiration for my fellow britstacker Keir Starmer. the man has an undeniable talent for clinging to power. utterly ruthless. he’ll say whatever he needs to say, manipulate whoever he needs to manipulate, betray whoever he needs to betray, bully, threaten, connive, a terrier with his little teeth sunk deep into the red flesh of the british state, growling, eyes rolling back into his head, never ever letting go, and for what? so he can flob about in number 10 like a dead jellyfish, achieving basically nothing. you have to wonder why he bothers. it’s not like he has anything he actually wants to achieve in government. hard to imagine he’s even remotely enjoying being prime minister. he does not have the face of a man who is loving his life. even he can’t have deluded himself into thinking that he’s the best man for the job. everyone hates him and every day he stays in the job his legacy gets just a little more tarnished. it would be so easy to let go. but he won’t. and frankly i get it. this dumb animal intransigence is basically just life itself. the fish still thrashing about on the end of the line, the frog still twitching on the dissecting table; every organism still flails against the world with everything it has, even when it’s hopeless. if you can’t admire keir starmer, if you don’t see something of yourself there, then you are hopeless, and we are not the same. anyway the second part of this post is a ranking of countries by the names they gave their first nuclear test. israel and north korea share joint last place for not giving theirs any public names at all. seventh place goes to russia which named its first test “rds-1” for essentially no reason (despite what various folk etymologies would have you believe). in sixth place is pakistan, whose first nuclear detonation was named “chagai-1” after the location of the test. boring. france, in fifth place, named its first test “gerboise bleu.” a gerboise or jerboa is a small desert rodent. only the french could develop the most terrifying weapon in human history, a world-destroying fire powered by the secret irrationality of the universe, and give it the same name as a tacky marseilles nightclub. in fourth place is the uk, whose first test was codenamed “operation hurricane.” unimaginative; obvious. china takes third place with “project 596,” which sounds boring but is actually a spiteful fuck-you to the soviet union, which suspended its nuclear assistance to china in june 1959, and appears to have assumed that the chinese could never build a bomb by themselves. runner up is the united states, whose first test was named “trinity” by opppenheimer, after john donne’s “batter my heart, three-person’d god,” a poem about the essential evil and irrationality of man. “dearly i love you, and would be lov’d fain/ but am betroth'd unto your enemy.” but the runaway winner is obviously india, which detonated a nuclear bomb and called it the “smiling buddha.” terrifying.