Happy Advent to you and your kin! And everyone else's kin too, come to that. As every December so far this decade, I'm going to do an Advent Calendar of beautiful and brilliant carols, with each day's added to a YouTube playlist and also to the ongoing Spotify one, now in its sixth(!) year. 👇👇👇👇👇👇👇

Today’s violence at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc is horrific and heartbreaking. My heart aches for the victims, their families, and the community impacted by this tragedy. I’m grateful to the first responders for their quick action to prevent even greater loss.

Thank you, Mehdi - a lone, rational voice among millions of hypocrites and haters!

My feed is almost entirely people condemning violence and telling others not to celebrate this.

I'm getting predictably wound up by stupid attacks on the UK as failing. People who can't remember endless strikes, over 3 million unemployed, rampant football hooliganism, crime rates a multiple of current levels, desolate inner cities, pensioner poverty, actual race riots need some perspective 1/

Labour homelessness minister Rushanara Ali threw four tenants out of her east London townhouse before relisting the property for £700 a month more in rent, The i Paper can reveal trib.al/E59gUNW

Dramatic changes to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program could drive drugmakers from the market, threatening access to shots, experts say. “If (Kennedy’s) unstated goal is to basically destroy the vaccine industry, that could do it.” By @sheinvestigates.bsky.social

Did you know? In 2017, Virgo was “clothed with the sun,” moon at her feet, 12 stars above, and Jupiter exited her “womb” after 9 months, mirroring Revelation 12. Not the first time. Not a miracle. But it happened. Patterns… In the sky. In time. In us. Are we still reading the skies?

Want to win a writing contest? It takes more than good prose. You need voice. You need craft. You need intentionality. Here’s what contest screeners and judges actually look for—straight from behind the curtain. A thread 🧵🪓 #writingcommunity

BBC News - Thames Water fined £122.7m in biggest ever penalty - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 17: If you're unpublished, try not to tell everyone you know you're writing a book. Everything takes longer than you think. Writing, rewriting, editing, copy-editing, submitting, waiting. Unless you want to answer questions every step of the way, keep it to yourself.

Our statement on the passing of Pope Francis:

Sometimes, the Moon passes directly in front of the beautiful Pleiades star cluster in a celestial event called an occultation! This composite image from Spain captures the Moon's visit. These monthly occultations last until 2029, then not again until 2042! Credit: Cayetana Saiz

If your great novel idea feels… a little thin, you might be missing the other thing. As Tony Earley said, “Every story is about the thing and the other thing.” Enter: the subplot. A thread 🧵🪓 #writingcommunity

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 116: a short thread. 1. Don't rely on publicists to promote your work. It's great if your publisher has provided you with one, but publishers' publicists are overworked and underpaid, and have no time to think up miracles.

I had heard tell of the Harold Hill deer, a herd of fallow deer who graze an outer London housing estate. I was not prepared for the scale of it.

Scientists have developed a solar-powered device that can pull pollution from the air and convert it directly into fuel for cars and planes.

Nice to have given the headline in The Times' preview of this evening's "The Michelle Mone Scandal: Where Did Our Money Go?" 9pm on Channel 5.

Start your own website. Run your own blog. Use decentralized and open-sourced platforms @ghost.org is a great open-sourced blogging platform and website builder Pixelfed is doing great work for images and runs on the social web Support open social projects so your homes on the web don't fall apart

Why can't we understand one another?

I’m not sure how many of my employees in total became millionaires , but I know it’s more than 300. And I don’t know how many millionaires my investments in start ups created. But I’m pretty sure it’s well over 1k. Which government official could do the same with that time and money ?

Why are Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Pichai and Tim Cook visiting and giving money to Trump ? Because they are in “The Race “ to become the dominant platform in the world. Amazon/Anthropic vs FB/LLama vs Google/Gemini vs Twitter/Grok, vs IPhones/ChatGpt is the penultimate global power war ever.