Reform UK former leader in Wales admits taking bribes to make statements in favour of Russia while being a Member of the European Parliament. We go live to Russia Today’s Nigel Farage to get his reaction.

Anacã - 🎵 Christian Andretti

The wonderfully extravagant Centaurea nervosa from a meadow by Cavaglia station, Poschiavo, Switzerland, in July.

A story that’s attracted surprisingly little attention in our media: Ex-Reform politician admits Russia-linked bribery charges www.bbc.com/news/article...

this is an extraordinary canary in the coal mine

War is peace, freedom is slavery, regulation is the antichrist.

This has been pushed to the background, but pay attention: Right now, a stack of bills aimed at reining in AI companies and big tech sits on Gavin Newsom's desk in California. These are the bills Silicon Valley and the GOP tried to ban outright. Now they await Newsom's signature—or veto.

Mushenge

Happy Birthday Tracey Thorn! Explore the Everything But The Girl co-founder's musical legacy (including audio & video highlights) here: album.ink/TThornHBD

call it magna id carta

The idea that the government is accountable to the public, particularly on the topic of “handing vast amounts of data about the population to their horrific Silicon Valley friends” - the thing they keep saying they want to do / is bordering on comical. There is barely a line separating the two.

The UK doesn’t have “uncontrolled legal migration” otherwise anyone from any other country can come in here at any time without going through some form of lawful application process. When did this ever happen in modern history? The govt is using this term without telling us what they mean by it.

Boats!

Tony Blair, the war criminal who oversaw the destruction of Iraq two decades ago, is in talks with the Americans to be the "governor" of Gaza's ruins after the Israeli genocide is complete.

All part of the plan to steer the UK to corporatism/fascism. One continuous economic and foreign policy from Tories to Labour to Reform. Entrap, impoverish and enslave in a fully privatised corporatist hellscape of SEZs and freeports.

It is incredible how this government is so intent on dismantling one of our only working industries in service of a con.

This is all about Palantir surveillance. Its the behaviour of a fascist police state to track and monitor everything you do. They are using fear of immigrants to manufacture consent.

“But when its executives prepare their quarterly financial reports, they insist on conveying one clear message: "We are proud to stand alongside Israel." "There is no multinational company that has expressed such strong and clear support for Israel," says Ayelet Gilan” Uhyggeligt firma. Uhyggeligt!

Protecting women and girls latest. A woman recounts the abuse she's received from people protesting outside a hotel housing asylum seekers.

Here's a link to Labour's 2024 manifesto. It doesn't appear to mention rolling out a national ID scheme (which I think we can agree is a MASSIVE project). Yet Starmer's doing it anyway. If that's acceptable, why aren't introducing PR, or rejoining the SM, CU or EU? labour.org.uk/wp-content/u...

Labour are introducing compulsory Digital ID Cards for two reasons. 1. So they can sell your data to the big tech corps they signed a deal with last week. 2. So they can arrest anyone who tweets/posts anything that hurts their feelings.

Along with Musk inciting insurrection, the Tony Blair Institute and Larry Ellison pushing for ID cards, the Palantir prong puts the UK in the cross hairs of Big Tech 'Blue Labour' and the Thiel Effect: How MAGA Is Making In-Roads bylinetimes.com/2025/09/25/b... bylinetimes.com/2025/09/25/b...

I realise the audience for this would just be "me, and also maybe other foreigners" but I would love to read something on why Brits, who are happy to live in a country where their every movement outside is filmed by CCTV, hate the idea of having ID cards, something plenty of countries happily have

Labour’s plan for compulsory digital ID risks creating a more authoritarian state. Under constant surveillance, we would have to pass through digital checkpoints just to live our daily lives — with even more barriers for minorities, migrants and the digitally excluded.

Sounds like a criminal racketeering enterprise.

Starmer sold out the British people. Genocidal treasonous fraud.

Do not try with a desktop computer.

Led By Donkeys have got Fartrage's number.

Read it and weep. This current UK and Scottish Governments are charging ahead with these plans, some will be locked in for 25 years, so even new governance ain't changing it. open.substack.com/pub/european...

I remember first reading about the extent to which these are ungoverned in Keller Easterling's excellent 'Extrastatecraft' - 2014 but still worth reading (possibly time for a 2nd ed?) www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

Italy has moved me to tears for 3 days straight. Bravo ❤️

Harry Enfield and Ronnie Corbett's "My Blackberry is not working" sketch. God, it's *exquisite*. Not a line out of place, everything works beautifully and there's some free Harry *almost* corpsing thrown in as well. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG3...

networkcultures.org/blog/2015/01... Thanks for that - I searched and found this! Amazing! I was shot in the head with a Colt .45 at a distance of six feet when I was 14 years old — and have suffered from mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) ever since. MILD - not really!

ignoring iv had posts deleted bsky.app/profile/reco...

15/ Part of the reason we are in this mess today is because tech "critics" can get very rich and successful by conveniently ignoring the ugliest realities of Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, writers like Paulina—who challenge power rather than serve it—end up out in the cold.

14/ She recently helped launch a new magazine, In|Formation, and wrote some pieces. informationmagazine.com

11/ There are still some copies available, but this book deserves a reissue with a introduction by somebody famous.

10/ Instead of centering men who missed the boat (and still don't seem to get it), let's lift up the work of Paulina Borsook, who saw it all very clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago. Someone should do a profile of her very interesting life. And hey, let's drop some cash into her GoFundme!

9/ I had launch with Paulina Borsook last month in Oakland. Her life is hard, but she still has a lot to say! She's trying to raise funds to get a new version of the book reissued on the Internet Archive. Some of her friends have a running GoFundMe to support her: www.gofundme.com/f/support-fo...

8/ Unfortunately, “Cyberselfish“ predicted the future but did not sell well. Borsook's writing career hit the rocks as tech fortunes skyrocketed astronomically in the 2000s. She is now elderly, disabled and struggling to survive as the rest of the world finds out what she knew a long time ago.

7/ During a decade in which the USA's favorite “tech critics” were busy shining the shoes of people like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, Borsook saw very clearly where things were headed. Because these things were obvious by the late 90s, at least to journalists like Borsook.

6/ Borsook described “paranoid” anti-government rantings and a tech libertarian culture in which the “gestalt is of testosterone-poisoned guys with chips on their shoulders and too much time on their hands.” And soon, these guys would morph into multi-billionaires...

👀 bsky.app/profile/part...

5/ Borsook warned that “cypherpunk” paranoia about government intrusion was leading them to create “a society where there is ever more surveillance and computer-retrievable information about people's private lives.” Sound familiar?

4/ Borsook divided the tech ”libertarians” into two main types: the Ravers and the Gilders. The Ravers are the ones who go to Burning Man and project countercultural ideas. The Gilders are the Peter Thiel types, more overtly focused on money and power. But they are birds of a feather.

3/ Tech fascism in a nutshell: “Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these technolibertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.“ She wrote this in 2000!

2/ In 2001, Borsook said tech "libertarianism" reflected an adolescent mindset, with a craving for unchecked independence & resistance to constraint. She warned that tech libertarians wanted an anti-human world that worked more like a computer. From "Cyberselfish," a book based on her 90s writing:

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

“..& what we are seeing is only a glimpse because never in our modern history have the lenses of intl media been obstructed like this from capturing the reality on the ground. Almost two years & the cruelty of this military campaign remains unabated..” youtube.com/watch?v=g2L7...