Sean Boscott's Prime-Minister-endorsed "Support The Met" Facebook page, along with all his other known social-media accounts (Twitter, YouTube), appear to have vanished from the face of the internet.

There are no explanatory messages, they're just not there any more. Was it a result of WoSland's widely-disseminated (50,000 visitors and counting) revelation of Boscott's ugly racism? Did he have a sudden epiphany and decide to become a better person? Did an embarrassed David Cameron have him quietly "disappeared"? Most importantly, do we now have to start up our own, non-racist, support-the-Met group, lest they go unsupported?

At this stage, we just don't know. Investigations continue. Stay tuned.

You may have seen David Cameron on the news today, anointing himself head of the "New Moral Army", promising a "fightback" against rioters, and praising (at 0.53) "the million people on Facebook who've signed up to support the police". The group in question was created, and is run, by this lovely chap:

That doesn't seem quite the sort of "morality" the Prime Minister should be getting behind, does it? But there are more rib-ticklers where that came from.

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Quickly rounding up some of the more interesting reflections on (and in some cases, prescient predictions of) recent events. By all means send any you've spotted that I've missed and I'll add them.

Riots: the underclass lash out (Daily Telegraph)

"Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution."

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Let's make something clear from the off. I have absolutely no idea whether Mark Duggan deserved to be shot dead or not. If the widespread but as-yet-unconfirmed reports that he fired a gun at police are true, he's certainly got nobody but himself to blame. 

We live in a time when the police – and especially the Metropolitan Police – will kill you for getting on a tube train or for just going about your normal everyday business somewhere in the loose vicinity of a protest march, so pointing a gun (or even something that might look a bit like one) at them would be pretty much the textbook definition of asking for it.

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Readers of a spiritual or elderly bent may be aware of the parable of the Deck Of Cards. (You can listen to a splendidly reverby take of Wink Martindale's definitive version by clicking this convenient link here.)

But you don't have to go back to the 1950s for a similarly instructive metaphor for the contemporary age. Because the iOS game Coin Dozer serves, if you don't want to carry around a bulky copy of Das Kapital, as a bible of the modern capitalist world. Shut up, it's not bollocks.

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I like to watch the news for a few hours in the morning. I let it burble away in the background while I check out the day's free iOS apps, generally repeating the same 15 minutes of stories over and over again but occasionally breaking something new or cutting away to interview some reality-show "celebrity", the latter of which provides the ideal opportunity to go to the bathroom.

But to an extent not seen since 9/11 or the death of Princess Diana, watching the news has become increasingly pointless over the last two weeks or so. Because there's only one story, and it's a story about nothing, whose primary function is to distract the public with a soap opera (occasionally punctuated with slapstick) while the whole of Western democracy quietly implodes.

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I originally wrote this piece for a website recently set up by some Labour MPs and MSPs from Scotland, which had solicited contributions from supporters of other parties. The site had attracted a large amount of comments (almost all of them genuine attempts at discussion, rather than jibes) from non-Labour voters, but some readers got very huffy about this "cybernat invasion".

Sadly, despite asking me to write the piece after I suggested it to them, they've declined to publish it, and the site has now taken to deleting comments from non-supporters wholesale. (I had a minor Twitter scuffle with the Labour MP behind the site last night, and he's turned out to have a very thin skin. One of his posts on the blog was also so mercilessly shredded for inaccurate facts that its entire comments thread has now been deleted.)

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A more cynical man than I has already suggested that in the event of the SNP winning independence for Scotland, the remnant UK's likeliest flag would be a thoughtful blend of those of its three surviving nations: from England the red cross of St George, and from Wales and Northern Ireland the white backdrops. LOL ETC. I think this, though, would be the obvious real solution:

But is it an issue we're actually going to have to address? Is this really the end of the Union? And what do you call the United Kingdom when it's not united any more? Let's gaze into a crystal ball, then realise we don't believe in fortune-telling and just take a rational look at the facts.

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Start from this premise: all things are possible.

You have an advantage over me, viewers. The chances are that most of you pay very little attention to Scottish politics, so your heads probably aren't spinning like mine still is at the staggering, incomprehensible magnitude of what's just been achieved. But I'll do my best to paint you a picture.

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"…put out the streamers/It's gonna be a good day for the dreamers."

It won't.

Okay, I should probably expand a little on that.

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I don't know, because I'm not going to count them. But if the latest opinion poll is correct (and it's a big "if"), the electoral map of the Scottish Parliament is going to look rather different in two weeks' time:

65 seats are needed for a majority in the Parliament, and the Greens support an independence referendum, so if these figures are accurate the possibility of Scotland seceding from the UK will suddenly get an awful lot more real. And a Tory-led government in Westminster has already seen support for independence surge by almost 50%, to level pegging with those opposed to it.

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Many, many caveats, of course. And a long spoon is clearly required.

But it's hard to class this as anything other than a significant victory. The Sun is the biggest-selling newspaper in Scotland, and while it's unlikely to have much direct influence on how people vote, it changes the atmosphere of the election considerably. Game on.

It's been called the "me-too" election. The Scottish media is full of the widely-repeated wisdom that three of the four main parties contesting the imminent Holyrood general election (the other one being the Tories, who nobody votes for in Scotland anyway) have triangulated/stolen each other's policies to such an extent that there's almost nothing left to choose between them on ideology, and the election is now basically a personality contest.

(Which is tough on at least two of the parties, since their leaders in Scotland have no detectable personalities.)

But is it true?

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Not least because I essentially don't give a shit about the environment.  (The result below is from Scottish Vote Compass, and my non-Scotch chums might find it interesting to take the test too.)

I do believe human activities are causing global warming, and that we're rendering the planet incapable of sustaining human life at a terrifying rate – via greenhouse gases, pollution and overpopulation – to the point where mankind could in my view have under 100 years left of anything recognisable as our current lifestyle. It's just that I think that's a good thing.

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