thinking about this a lot today

If by "smashed up" you mean spouted a lot of bollocks and then quit government in a huff because everyone was ignoring him, then yes he did.

Can you spot the bits that were written by a human being? I asked Claude to imitate a WSJ editorial on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical and then mashed the results up with the real thing. If Claude read the Pope on AI, by @seatrout open.substack.com/pub/andrewbr...

This looks like what Bezos did to the Washpost newsroom

“THERE is but one living and true God, ever- lasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.” (Source: the not noticeably woke Thirty-Nine Articles)

Battery cattle farms are an abomination.

Interesting that the idea of another EU referendum is regularly discussed on broascast media as something that would cause division and thus a bad idea. But plans to deport literally millions of people are discussed as administrative questions.

Excellent book! Grab it while you can. Think Jane Austen but with dragons. 🐉💕

In sum, skip the Atlantic on this one and read Monstrous Regiment, a great standalone Pratchett and a perfect book for right now, because it takes on propaganda, war, gender, and how religious zealots starve nations and ruin everything. Quote me on that, why don’t you.

Can anyone explain just why Onan would rather spill his seed on the ground than make Tamar pregnant? The only explanation I can think of is that the resulting child would count as Er’s heir. But is this right?

A perfect Alfred Dugan paragraph

Remember

Absolutely. ..and the Lib Dems - in a demonstration of just how little they think through policy - want to see the government take 12p off every litre of climate-damaging fossil fuel. Subsidising an unsustainable transport mode that skews towards the wealthy is no fix for a cost of living crisis.

rereading The Peripheral after some years, discovering how much denser and more closely imagined it is than I remember. One lovely, prescient touch: the Appalachian Jefe who is one of the villains got his start as a swasticar dealer: Corbell Pickett Tesla.

Thought it might be a good time to re-up these paragraphs from a piece on Burnham I wrote in January for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-b...

Honestly if you think either the UK or the US has a good food culture, you need to spend a few months living in eg Italy, Japan, France, India (yes), Turkey, Thailand, Spain… My criteria is not “do rich people eat well?” (they always can) it’s “is there good varied cheap local food?”

Drove past a sign for the outlet village at Gretna Green; I suppose it sells preloved brides.

Thoughtful piece, which is (in part) a response to my "Is Bluesky Dying?" piece from last month.

Your Party went from polling 15% nationwide to winning an average vote share of 5% of the vote in 20 wards out of 3,000

Once upon a time this country used to be able to airlift dogs out of Afghanistan

Regret to announce "Project Unstoppable Fury of Incandescent Steel: Inevitable Death on Wings of Fiery Oblivion" has been paused in light of how scary the enemy is. To our foes I have just one message: "uWu, I am but smol."

James Ball says everything that matters about Polanski: www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-w...

Vodafone takes control of UK mobile operator Three in £4.3bn deal. UK mobile phone network is controlled by EE/BT, VodafoneThree, Virgin Media O2. Vodafone just hiked prices by 7.3% (CPI +3.9%). Concentration of economic power = more customer abuse. People abused, shareholders gain.

Our aid cuts were justified as necessary to fund defence spending – which would've been short-sighted and misguided. But it wasn't even true. The defence boost was allocated as capital spend. Aid cuts from the current spend budget were just pocketed to help meet the fiscal rule. Utterly grim.

Finally, some good news.

It really is bloody good.

The latest issue of pre-Tinder studies

Giving directions in Fife, 1775: "Now, do you want the Windygates by the Bogies, or the Windygates just below Backside?"

Trump Derangement Syndrome is real - and this is what it looks like this

Fifteen years ago I worked at the Telegraph and had this in print pinned to my bedroom walll

My great colleague @robertshrimsley.bsky.social saying all the thing I want to say this week about antisemitism and saying them beautifully and with real power. Comments are not enabled on this column because that’s where we are. www.ft.com/content/f9ee... The shrinking of Jewish life in Britain

"If an archbishop cannot talk intelligently about how evil works in the world, who can? It’s not as if the subject is going to go away," ✍️ @seatrout.bsky.social

21st Century warfare: Sylph-child uses Nintendo-style pad to direct miniature explosive drones into enemy tanks, hundreds of miles away, detonating them, killing the crew.

Just gave a talk about AI, that I have to say was only enhanced by the LLM'd bio they had ready for me that said I was long listed for the Booker Prize in 2024 for my book, the Shadow Network*. *Nope, no such book, no such long listing...

Keeping seeing posts that the "Corbyn playbook" is being used on Polanski. But attacks - whatever the motivation - only work if there is some evidence of a problem. Telegraph et al tried it on Sadiq Khan + it never stuck because there's zero evidence of Khan or those around him being antisemitic.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of an armchair is in want of a cat, especially if he is trying to read something.

I see that the last two posts of mine here that anyone liked were about animal exceptions. Is this a niche I should exploit?

"Many people are saying 'Did Magna Carta die in vain?'"

when we mourn le guin, we mourn one of our greatest writers & thinkers. but we also mourn one of our all-time greatest haters

Came across these important notes from a meeting from several years ago (I only write in cursive when I’m trying to force myself to focus)

How Volodymr Zelenskyy manages to survive in a literal war without a ballroom to keep him safe is just shocking to me.

‘For the first time in my life, I am not covering a war. Like every other civilian in Lebanon, I am just living it.’ Charles Glass reports from Beirut, in the 1970s and now. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Woke tofu-shitting kittylitterati

Any candidate who mentions Gaza in a local election leaflet loses my vote. It’s such bad faith. I loathe what Israel is doing, but anyone who thinks Haringey council can influence Netanyahu is just showboating.

subscriptions >>> shop.viz.co.uk/viz355bs

I genuinely think some people do not want to look this in the eye/think about it because it is so awful. We wrote what I thought was a pretty eye-opening story about all this and I was surprised by the lack of engagement tbh

This is wild: the authors find evidence for giant, macro-predatory octopuses in Late Cretaceous oceans that might max out at *62 feet long,* comfortably large enough to attack, kill and eat mosasaurs

I thought this was a sick Onion joke but it’s not. Deporting foreign lefties to save America roy.house.gov/media/press-...