Happy Squirrel Appreciation Day to all who celebrate.

🇺🇦🇪🇺 Zelensky: Just last year, here in Davos, I ended my speech with the words, “Europe needs to know how to defend itself.” A year has passed, and nothing has changed…

Orban wasn’t happy about this.

Some breaking art historical news for you - a lost portrait of Robert Burns by Sir Henry Raeburn was unveiled today at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. It’s been missing for more than 200 years. 1/3

If you want to know why we need to consign the heinous thinking of neoliberals to history, note this from the FT on Trump's plan to redevelop Gaza, this afternoon. Do Palestinian's feature? Not once...

457 British troops. You evil, senile bastard.

“We’ve invented a magic computer. It uses all of the earth’s resources, we’ve spent trillions on it and it’s the sole growth area of the US economy.” “What does it do?” “We were hoping you could tell us.”

If this happens, it will make literally everything better. All of it. Everything in the world. @nigella.bsky.social in our living rooms every Tuesday throughout Autumn - genuinely life-changing stuff.

“It is too early to judge the assortment of war criminals, dictators and autocrats who have paid a demented racist warmonger a billion pounds to be a member of his exclusive club.”

Shopfront in Lisboa. #WindowsOnWednesday #Photography #Architecture #Doors #Portugal #Lisbon 📷

Magnolias are the oldest flowering plants, dating back to the dinosaurs. Bees didn't exist then, so they're pollinated by beetles. SF's Botanical Garden has one of the best magnolia collections in the world. They have started blooming now, peaking next month. Go visit: gggp.org/magnolias/

#Woodensday St James's Piccadilly's heavenly limewood reredos by Grinling Gibbons. 2005 restoration used special wax + white gouache for light, delicate appearance of 1684, much as Gibbons intended. Pelican in piety, doves of peace, garlands w St James' scallop shells + floral/fruity cascades.

A man from Kazakhstan went to great lengths and made a carousel out of...a huge ice block.

If true, this would be worth a fortune.

Owl carving from the medieval chancel stalls of St. Mary's Church at Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire. 📸 My own. #Woodensday #HighamFerrers #Northamptonshire

Having seen this map, I now feel weirdly proud to have eaten in a Chinese restauraunt in Shetland. (It's probably the country's only Chinese restaurant that is part of a bus station, and was a lot better than the Indian restaurant I tried the next night.)

Trump is up and rambling on at Davos and talking bollocks on a scale that would throw shade on Buster Gonad himself.

WTF? Reeves sat on stage next to a member of the Trump regime at Davos who said America needs to control the whole of the western hemisphere – by force if necessary. And her reaction is: "Okay". ... While Canada and EU leaders talk of a future without America, Brexit Britain clings onto the past. 😡

Compare & contrast. This is Trump’s demand for Greenland. And this is Hitler’s for the Sudetenland. There is no difference. The language. The unstoppable need to dominate. The megalomania. It’s the same. And Keir Starmer’s response is appeasement. We are in that moment. 1/

Whenever I hear the word Davos I immediately conjoin it with Davros. Same evil, just with more people involved.

The former Norwegian Chief of Defence has several other quotes worth mentioning👇 He describes Trump's behaviour as a "mentally retarded bull in a Greenlandic glass shop" The US has become "a normless and hostile superpower" "Norway should not buy American defence equipment."

This is such a cool illustration of how the Mercator map distorts the size of Greenland, which looks as big as the whole continent of Africa on that map but is actually the size of Mexico.

You think you’re watching TV but it’s watching you, and selling your data. Here’s how to get your privacy back

A joke for the history buffs: Germany’s satirical newspaper @der-postillon.com titles: “Vienna Academy of the Arts offers Trump admission as a student — They don’t want to get blamed again“

If allied security services hadn’t started planning for this eventuality (secure back-channels, secondary security classifications etc) in 2016 when a plainly corruptible man became US Commander in Chief, I’m not sure what we’re all paying them for honestly.

We as the UK have been fruitlessly chasing the mythical US-UK Trade Deal for what feels like decades now, and even cut ourselves off from our biggest trading partner, the EU, to do so. Additional tariffs are now going to be imposed on the UK by the US because we oppose the annexation of an ally.

Plaque on the 4th floor of building 34 at MIT. Outside the elevators. Information theory.

Frank Gehry Designed Art Gallery of Ontario

Accurate and devastating. Starmer's wrong-footing by Trump is only matched by his inability to confront the reality of Brexit.

Semaphore at Foxfield. 21 July 2018. #railway #photography

Stop callinge them "data centers" and starte callinge them "slop peripherals"

In 1916, the US was worried that Germany might take control of the Danish West Indies to use as a submarine base. So, Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the USA, with the colony becoming the US Virgin Islands. In exchange, the USA acknowledged Denmark's complete sovereignty over Greenland.

Ingeborg Hochmair was born #OTD in 1953. Dr. Hochmair (w/husband, Erwin) designed/developed the first micro-electronic multi-channel cochlear implant restoring useful hearing to those with severe/profound deafness. #wow 1st woman in Austria to receive a PhD in electrical engineering. #WomenInSTEM

Since Trump-whispering provides, at best, temporary respite from the madness and harm, can we not just tell him to **** off now?

Curtains-up time at Suella Braverman’s theatre of the absurd. In the latest highly-predictable performance, Heinrich Hamster returns to her natural habitat: the badlands of the right's nuttiest margins. Roll up, roll up.

There are going to be limits to what you can make other countries do by threatening to tax your own citizen's purchases of their products. I believe handing over entire territories falls well beyond those limits. 🤷‍♂️

Dresden, Germany

We have a winner! 🤣

OpenAI going for advertising $ is a very clear tell about the ability of them to monetize productivity gains that ChatGPT enables. Now they are trying to detain your eyeballs there to see miracle heated slippers, not convincing you to pay for something that will save you time and $.

Excellent piece by Gabriel Zucman showing claims of the decline of Europe vs the US are highly misleading. Productivity gap is smaller than sometime suggested and Europe has higher quality of life indicators, esp environment and work hours. E Anglia Bylines eastangliabylines.co.uk/business/eco...

London has, once again, topped the rankings as the city people most want to visit, work in, and live in. Please don’t tell Farage and Leila Cunningham. They’ll both be absolutely fucking livid

Trump (and right wingers in Britain & EU) often claim that the USA economy outperforms “sclerotic” Europe. A more comprehensive comparison gives a different perspective about the quality of life in each: