As my Gran used to say: When the cat sits out in the February sun, Half the winter’s yet to come!

Great piece about the Brent River Park by @londonopia.bsky.social. “Brent River Park is not flashy. It does not need to be. It is London’s green pulse, steady and unshowy, reminding us that even here — especially here — the quiet work of nature continues.” londonopia.co.uk/brent-river-...

Lovely piece on the Brent River Park by @londonopia.bsky.social.

🔴 Nigel Farage Paid by Trump Crypto Adviser Who Worked With Russia Operative Paul Manafort The Reform UK leader received payment from David Bailey, who collaborated with the convicted fraudster behind the Trump-Russia influence scandal bylinetimes.com/2026/01/15/n...

‘We have achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before’…Trump spends two hours wandering around his own alternative universe. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Farage has learned from Trump. Just keep lying. People hear the lie, not the correction.

Brain-rotted past redemption.

And sure, it is personal to me. Farage's predecessors stripped rights from my ancestors then killed them all, he is now proposing the first part of that for my modern family. Wake up and smell the coffee folks. This is of a different order to the current government.

How did your infrastructure collapse? Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.

This will serve to magnify, manyfold, the impact of extreme climate moments, when they do hit. We are honestly really not prepared for what this could look like.

When the UK public and political class finally accept that climate change is real and impacting us, it will be everywhere, all at once. It will have been inside the walls for years, ruining infrastructure, collapsing market pricing mechanisms, cutting off communities for months.

Analysing different and disparate datasets on weather related events in the UK and the effects of climate change are becoming increasingly hard not to notice. But the thing about the impact is that it's not sudden and spectacular, like a hurricane or Valencia style flood. It's chronic.

The grab-bag policies of the modern fascists - that includes the Reform Party - a mix of state intervention, removal of workers right, burning the planet, and investment in local companies - to go alongside the deportations and pro-aggressor foreign policy. www.ft.com/content/4541...

Technologists find technology hard too, to be fair. Or they would know that the *availability* of a technology doesn't equal its instantaneous universal *adoption*.

It looks to me like this election will be won by the party with the best ground operation, and will end up revealing something important about the country, but not the thing people will think it revealed

Because most planning control departments have been cut to the bone & only use enforcement when it's an absolutely nailed in certainty they'd win, but these cowboys think that "very rarely" is the same as "never".

This would, presumably, imply massive layoffs between now and August 2027. The tax implications alone would be mind boggling. www.ft.com/content/f1ec...

The meeting of the Coalition of the Willing has ended. Little hope for peace, for now... Keir Starmer: “We must defeat the lie that Russia is winning”

A great result for London Centric (to which you should subscribe if you don't already.) Their work gives me hope, but also makes me think of all the council meetings and court sittings that happen every week across the UK with no reporters present because local journalism has been hollowed out.

UK trade policy remains absurdly vulnerable to threats given successive governments disdain for using Parliament or telling anyone very much. We don't even know what phase 1 of the US-pharma deal says, and now there may be a phase 2. www.politico.eu/article/dona...

‘Crisis of his own making’: Trump weighs another war with Iran ft.trib.al/bDc64EB

Update: Public Meeting to discuss the Trumpers Towers proposals, organised by Hanwell Broadway ward councillors. 7pm, Friday 27 February, South Hanwell Baptist Church, Boston Road W7 2HJ. hanwellblogs.wordpress.com/2026/02/15/g...

I’m sceptical about the absence of human intervention here but an astonishing story of an AI-enabled vendetta carried out at lightning speed.

Here’s why we need @londoncentric.media. Interesting how many of their and @millmedia.bsky.social investigations feature property. English property law facilitates some egregious abuses.

The US built a whole tech industry off taxpayer dollars on defense and war. In the UK, ou health budget dwarfs defence, yet rather than use that to build our a socially useful tech industry, we outsourced that industry to military industrial tech giants from the US, like Palantir. It's mental.

We long since outsourced our ability to produce basic electronics boards and components to China and other places, but why we ended up outsourcing software and data skill sets to America, is just beyond me.

Much of Palantir's "genius" is not genius at all, it's just smart data science. When did UK politicians decide the UK state didn't have the intelligence and capability to build it's own systems? Why does the NHS need a Palantir? It's just data guys, not Elvish spells.

For so many things. As I've been looking for non-US alternatives for software and services it has really hit home how we've just given up, despite the heritage of computing.

When Farage avoids a by-election it’s usually a sign that he thinks Reform are going to lose.

Tenders and procurement procedures are for little people.

I have no particular knowledge nor interest in Palantir, but as a public procurement lawyer looking closely at the public domain documents about the MoD-Palantir contracts, there is something concerning going on. Two successive high value tenders without advertisements or competition? Really?

The detailed and informative replies to the quoted post show how this site can be very good for discussing news events. No site is perfect, but Bluesky has many merits. And this sort of engagement is better than I had with 1/4 million followers on Twitter.

In a word, uncertainty! It’s bad for business.

“Shadow CDC”: the former group Fired But Fighting has rebranded as the National Public Health Coalition, with about 100 regular volunteers. But will they be able to reach people, & will the public be able to access their expertise? Jerome Adams, Trump's... 1/3 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Great stuff.

This too…

Libya’s prime minister and the Haftar clan are the beneficiaries of the country’s disorder. For nearly a decade they have obstructed elections and muzzled civil society

It’s amazing to think that American conservatism, which claimed to have an intellectual heritage going back to Burke, Hamilton, Hayek and Buckley, would now be a movement whose sole ideology is whatever crazy policy Trump pulls out of his ass.

A long read, but worth it. Sharp analysis by an economics professor of the threat that cryptocurrencies play, especially with Trump stumping for them. www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

The Empty Cell . Cartoon by Pat Bagley

The thing these Reform UK supporters aren’t telling you is that the same ‘fake’ accounts were supporting their own party months ago. And many still are.

"Nasty and violent" ex-Reform Kent county councillor sent to prison www.bbc.com/news/article...

At what point should the Foreign Office be issuing travel warnings?

Just don’t go to the US. There’s a maniac in charge there and anything could happen. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

This is almost certainly going to get lost amid everything else happening at the moment. But it’s a big story.

The inmates have seized the asylum.

Absolutely insane story about a middle-aged woman from Hertfordshire who got arrested, shackled, and detained by ICE and held in a prison for eight weeks.... while on holiday... with a valid tourist visa... as she tried to leave the country.

Now this is interesting. @jburnmurdoch.ft.com trashes the ‘graduate earnings are low because we are sending too many people to university’ line. www.ft.com/content/649d...

Gotta love @chrisdillow.bsky.social