It's hard to be my age, having lived almost my entire life in one state in the US, to watch a small, insanely wealthy group of people busily destroying what made us special. All for money and control, not for the good of anyone, when they cannot spend what they have in their lifetimes. (1)

This makes me sad: Tim Brookes, whom I suppose non-Burlingtonians most likely know from his NPR essays, and one of the wittiest people I ever met (decades ago, now), is giving up on America. Please read this short essay: www.sevendaysvt.com/arts-culture...

Pew Research Institute (2023): • Red State Texas has about 2.1 million undocumented immigrants • Red State Florida has 1.6 M undocumented immigrants • Blue State Minnesota has 130,000. And yet only Minnesota is being occupied by masked thugs over "immigration." It's *not* about immigration.

If the UK had still been a member of the EU, there would have been no way for Trump to try to play us against them and them against us.

Anonymous Tory MP in 2018: "If we try to cancel Brexit, we destroy ourselves. If we go ahead with it, we destroy the country." They did both. And now the culprits are running from the wreckage.

I think the White House badly underestimates the strength of the pan-European folk memory of 1930s appeasement, and how deep it still cuts. I suppose this is what happens when you learn in school that WW2 started in 1941 in Hawaii.

$1.5T for the military budget $170B for ICE and Border Patrol $1B to refurbish Trump's Qatar jet $470M to send National Guard into cities $230M for Trump's DOJ "compensation" $200M for Kristi Noem's jets $100M for Trump's golf outings But no money to lower your healthcare costs.

Still true.

I’m old enough to remember when many of the voices saying very little tonight told us very loudly that Obama and Biden were anti-British.

Former Finnish PM Sanna Marin, "If Russia wins the war against Ukraine then we would only see decades of this kind of behaviour ahead of us" "We should push Russia back to its own territory" "Ukraine should be whole again" "And we together have to make sure that this becomes reality"

And here we are: the entire transatlantic alliance is now talking about Greenland, instead of talking about ending the war in Ukraine.

The good news is that a geologist acquaintance of mine left the oil industry. Realising there is no future in UK fracking, she now works for the offshore wind power industry, surveying the seabed for turbine locations.

NEW: Coal-fired power generation fell in both China and India in 2025, for the first time since 1973. The drop came after record clean energy additions in both countries, and was the first time that clean energy was a major driver of falling coal power use.

Why we won't be using X anymore ⬇️

“Defund the police” to spending $ 85bn on ICE, is quite a shift.

Seven Select Committee Chairs have written jointly to the Prime Minister calling for an explicit ban on cryptocurrency donations in the forthcoming Elections Bill. This is not an argument about digital assets. It is an argument about democratic integrity.

Dorothea Lange - Gas Station, Kansas, 1938.

I’ve just watched the trailer for Wuthering Heights. Costume buffs *LOOK AWAY*

A Black man was killed by ICE (off duty) in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve. And like Renée Good, he was an American citizen. But most people have not heard about Keith Porter. I need y’all to realize this. Black people experience this lack of visibility all the time when it comes to being victims.

From the people who have wanged on about the importance of sovereignty since we left the EU…

The immigration doom loop in full swing. Chasing the xenophobes is a doomed strategy both economically *and* politically. (1/3) archive.ph/pyVLg

New analysis of the economic impact of Brexit is clear cut ➡️ it was bad. The author breaks it down ⤵️

11. Dennis Goris

I thought it might be nice to give away my last 2 signed hardbacks of my novel 1983, with two lovely linocut hares by my mum. All you have to do to enter is repost this (& leave a reply). The book's been called "Stranger Things rewritten by Kurt Vonnegut and Sue Townsend”. Extract in the replies.

The US government is now freely killing people at sea, in other lands, and on its own streets. It is difficult to see what more is needed for Congress and the Supreme Court to exercise their constitutional duty to check and balance what is now a rogue state abroad and a gangster state at home.

If you're in Europe and just waking up, here are the 60+ bodies - around half of them under the UN umbrella - from which the US has withdrawn

So the US taxpayer will spend billions of dollars to make the Venezuelan regime even more repressive so that it can protect American oil companies who won’t actually do anything except themselves receive billions more dollars of taxpayer subsidies. MAGA

A heck of a chart: in every single one of the 10 major US cities that built the most housing between 2017 and 2023, rents for older, existing units fell—often by quite a bit.

I sometimes think that we're in an age where people align politically based on what they want most strongly to reject, rather than what they want to attain with politics. Maybe this is a few generations of negative campaigning, or possibly it's always been this way and I'm open to seeing it now.

You'll be amazed to hear that on the stock market Chevron ⬆️9% Halliburton ⬆️10% Exxon ⬆️4% ConocoPhillips ⬆️8%

America is in the grip of a man-child

@joejameson.bsky.social Joe, currently listening to one of your audiobooks, The Murder at World’s End. I’m enjoying your work immensely. Your vocal range is incredible: 20s to 70s, young women, timid servants, entitled aristocracy. It is engaging and nuanced. Thank you!

My friends in Austria sent this and I can't stop watching...wait for the end. 🤗💜

If Trump gets his way you'd have substandard chicken in the UK food chain but it would also be much cheaper so UK poultry farms - which are built and regulated to those much higher standards - would be royally screwed. It would benefit nobody apart from US farmers.

The conversation on Threads

Just a few more facts needed. Any minute now we’ll have enough facts.

fwiw it’s been about six weeks since Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of trafficking drugs into the US

Brexit has cost each and every one of us £3,700 a year. But instead of solving the problem, Labour are using Brexit as an excuse to raise your taxes. My message ahead of the Budget: Stop blaming Brexit and start fixing it!

Britain is missing out on up to £100m for every week that a landmark deal with the European Union is not in place, according to new research that has prompted calls for Keir Starmer to urgently break the Brexit economic “doom loop” www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

“Elon Musk admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project to get in the way of that actually succeeding.” — @parismarx.com in @gizmodo.com He’s always been this way.

Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan… * Vehicle traffic: -11% * Foot traffic: +3.4% * Storefront vacancy: -0.9% * Pollution: -22% * Revenue for mass transit: $548M So YES this has been a huge success.

We are so close to the 10k signatures we need for the Government to respond to our @climatemajority.bsky.social petition calling for a funded National Climate Resilience Plan. Please sign now. It's a simple and easy thing you can do to make a difference. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/73...

It was the Dunning of tymes. It was the Kruger of tymes.

These [REDACTED] files are getting [REDACTED]

Happy Winter Solstice to all of you. Only six months now before the day start getting shorter again. > (Please see next post before replying.)

this is the greatest feeling, when the cord box proves its utility to a family member

Quite the chart. www.ft.com/content/30a4...

The Mackinderian roots of Trump's National Security Strategy open.substack.com/pub/arthursn...

I like Oxford a lot. Its architecture, and bookshops, and cafes, plus its all-pervading ambience of history and learning, but I think what I most like about it is its commas.