Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind With Big naturals

It would be easy to reposition this headline as 'Billionaire author vows to keep interfering with Scottish democracy', which doesn't look too pretty.

I think we’ve got better and more culturally-varied street food than I could have imagined, cool jackets galore, and drugs that make us think we’re really fast and strong before they kill us.

This is legit the "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" paper though. This is standard.

That's not even a joke or exaggeration. That is just describing ICE. They think you're barely sapient goo and they can just lie right to your face.

It's both compelling (and IMO deeply worrying) that back to back, Britain has had a leader of the opposition whose theory is visibly, and in Kemi Badenoch's case audibly 'it would simply be better if I were in the room'.

It's also all a bit...'Franz Ferdinand's assassination an embarrassment for the 'Visit Sarajevo' tourism campaign', it is certainly *true* but it is missing the point.

It’s a bit soon to generalise, but we’re seeing an uptick in young ordinands who haven’t been to university even though they had the qualifications, and for whom their ministerial education will be their only experience of HE. Which is a pretty new phenomenon (as opposed to classic mature students)

Books I've read in 2026. (Yes, this is a bit late.) continued from my former twitter book reviews account which ... as of end of last year I'm no longer using. Last year's thread is here. bsky.app/profile/kieh...

Imagine being so devestates over inventions of yours doing so much in war that you start a series of prizes to bring the world together …. which within a century or so bring down decades’ peace because a warmongering dictator is so angry he didn’t get the peace prize

I'm also old enough to remember all those who told us Trump would make the world more stable. One year in, he's threatening to destroy an eight decade security alliance, the pillar of Western stability, over not getting an award.

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.

The incredibly lukewarm Democratic response on Greenland is being noticed in Europe, incidentally. Chuck Schumer not finding a stronger word than “quixotic” for Trump’s plan to seize Greenland has been name checked to me more than once.

What makes this statement by Emmanuel Macron so unprecedented is, for the first time, a leading European ally is equating Trump with Putin. “No intimidation or threat will influence us - neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland, nor anywhere else in the world.” EVERYTHING has changed.

Oh wow. Trump got a hand-me-down Nobel Peace Prize! Did you know: It would not be the first time a Nobel laureate has given his or her medal away: in 1943 Nobel Literature laureate Knut Hamsun gave his medal to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

So the message of this press conference is that Robert Jenrick thinks the Tory party killed Britain, but he might have stayed in it had Kemi Badenoch not read his secret speech.

Reminder that in the UK an incoming radical, populist government would have immediate access to immense, unchecked executive power. And the current government is doing nothing to protect us from that.

"restricted for most AI systems right now" "right now"

BBC report at a headline level that Grok will now not make sexually exploitative images any more. An actual reporter comes on and explains that it will do no such thing, and will just make the images invisible in the UK. These are two very, very different things.

I'll say it again: watching Robert Jenrick do "cunning politics" is like watching a toddler hide behind a cushion. "Where's Robert gone? THERE HE IS! Oh no! Where is he? THERE HE IS!"

"A man whose pronouncements on race and skin colour would have seen him ejected from the Conservative front bench by any leader from Edward Heath to Rishi Sunak is no longer in it" - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @stephenkb.bsky.social

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

RT if you've never had a tab of ChatGPT open 'just to do quick research'

I mean, "I'm not breaking the law anymore so we're all good right?" is not how I understood the law to work

"Argentina's done it. Russia's done it. Turkey's done it. Venezuela's done it. And Zimbabwe's done it. It's a thing that tin pot dictators do... right before starting a hyperinflation and destroying their own economies."

Someone on the TV has just said that some AIs have a 'moral compass' and WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT COMPUTER

at a certain point someone really needs to point out, when they say this, that "Greenland will be acquired or taken over by China or Russia" is insanely stupid

Here's the adult vaccination recommendations as of Nov 2024. Why did I save these? Because I knew someone was going to try to stomp on this, and not today, Satan. Not today. #CDC #vax #vaccines #getvaxxed

Every mob that has ever run a trans woman off of socials has had a "valid reason" why they deserved it. But it's still systemic and endemic.

A lot of people are saying Father Ted. I don’t get this. Arthur Matthews, who we all know was solely responsible for Father Ted, seems like an ok guy

Those British politicians making money off X’s revenue-sharing programme should be asked whether they should be profiting from a platform distributing CSAM.

It's I think just a sign that some ministers, and Mike Tapp is visibly one, are just too online. Why are you complaining about Twitter wanting clarity when you are doing a media round?

A fascinating thing that has changed is when George Osborne sent Chloe Smith out to get destroyed on his behalf on Newsnight it did him real damage temporarily, loads of Conservative MPs and Labour MPs going 'terrible form. He should have been getting whacked by Paxman'. Now it's normal!

Can't believe this has been sat on YouTube for fifteen years and I'd never heard it until today.

I think the AI angle of this is obscurant. It doesn’t matter that grok is “an AI” whatever you take that to mean. Suppose X hired a team of guys to photoshop the clothes off of women and children whenever anyone asks. That’s functionally identical what happening here. It’s not complicated.

It's 2026 and Schumer is publicly admitting he continues to take Trump at his word

Happy New Year

The richest man on earth, the richest man in human history, personally obliterated the US agency that had been preventing these horrors. He sneered that he had to miss some good parties in order to spend his weekend erasing the agency these people had depended on. Inhuman.

Think @sundersays.bsky.social is accurate here. The UK has not suddenly become much more racist. However the (re)normalisation of open racism by "respectable" right-wing media and politicians has led to both increased visibility for open racists, & radicalisation of some "soft" racists/xenophobes

We have so much good evidence for cash transfers but so many just refuse to accept that those in poverty can make good decisions.

The Policy Exchange History Reclaimed project (which tends to sceptical about this approach) asked this poll question, and found 76% support and 13% opposition to doing more to educate visitors about direct and indirect links to slavery and colonalism. PX did not promote this finding.

Nodded at Keanu across a lobby

Shamima Begum was the beginning of something in so many ways, one of which was 'the last government's inability to just do its job properly (in this case by passing legislation that would have allowed it to prosecute her here at home) and instead going 'no option but to undermine all our rights'.

Remember: When Tylenol was poisoned *by an outsider* and killed people, the company recalled all their products & redesigned them. When Intel’s Pentium had a bug so obscure it affected 1 in _9 billion_ long division calculations, they recalled their chips. ChatGPT was made deadly *by its team*.

Knives out: the upper middle class are squabbling vicious children who do not deserve their inheritance Glass onion: the new elite are the stupidest murderous cunts alive and deserve your scorn Wake up dead man: those preaching anger as salvation are leading you to death, hope and kindness matter

The only thing ChatGPT ever does.

Me logging into this website so that I can “get a sense of what’s going on in the world”

Ste says funny, I say "I occasionally wake up at night and think about this".