Telling Trump he will make the same mistakes as Obama did is one way to get his attention. Obama lives rent free in Donald's head.

OTD in 2022 we saw a genuine appeal for an authoritative statement about the *actual* size, *precise* location of the 100,000 troops alleged (lol) to be poised to invade. He objects in various comical ways that being wrong on a topic in the past is relevant to being wrong now

My kids are totally unstoked about Star Wars films but have loved the Sonic films and look forward to more of them being released. I fear the absence of Jim Carrey may mean a fatal quality-decline for Sonic 4 but we’ll see.

Brexit: ten years later, still a pointless waste of my time, inflicting bureaucratic complexity for no benefit at all. This sentiment once again invoked by having to find the correct stamp in my passport to show I had not over-run 90 days in the EU (it had faded to near illegibility).

What I don’t get about this (and other such move from our supposedly “open-borders” government) is why exactly it is supposed to be for. Is there a particular issue with dual-nationals that has gotten worse recently? No, right?

This disqualifies Farage from any office in the UK whatsoever on national security grounds alone. Tankie nonsense.

TIL that there is a massive area in the centre of Birmingham that has been wasteland for years. www.birmingham.gov.uk/directory_re...

OTD in 2022 George Galloway released one of the absolute, all-time classics. He has yet to delete it, show humility, or confirm/deny if this means he in fact being paid to act like an idiot, or if he just does it free. #JustAskingQuestions

Post an image you can hear

That they don’t have billions in funding just ready to go on-tap at a moment’s notice? The USAID budget in 2024 was $32bn. For contrast the UK’s total foreign aid spend in 2023 was £15.3 (~$20bn) and at the same time was (and the rest of Europe) have to cover the shortfall in Ukraine aid.

Why should Ukrainians or Europeans more generally listen to the leader of a country that presently does not actually donate more than a small amount of military aid to Ukraine and hasn’t in more than a year?

"everyone has to get back to the office because the important thing about business is human interaction" is dying, but "white collar jobs will be replaced by AI agents within 18 months" cannot yet be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear.

This one is the biggest possible tell for someone who knows eff-all about CEE except what they get from Russian propaganda channels: there never was any commitment to not allow Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Baltics, the Czechs/Slovaks etc. to join NATO. None at all.

This is awkward AF for tankies. Mostly cos they have never heard of this treaty or the other one Russia signed about it. But you've seen how much of a shit we don't give about treaties. Anyway, forgetting to mention that promise is hard to explain if you think we got it, given it's importance.

Not even a single one. They’re all great, either as-is, or cooked the right way. One of the things I’ve noticed about the younger generation is a lot of them seem to have just noped completely out of eating anything “difficult” or even eating greens entirely, even at age 18.

So, under the proposed laws, you can’t be an American if you’re born in the United States, and you also can’t be an American if you’re born outside the United States to Americans. This, from a regime whose core figures get absolutely hysterical about population non-growth

I only met Matt once and he was on his way to meet Liz Truss's team in No 10 to advise them....

What on earth...? New feature on Adobe. AI bloat is literally here.

1/ Leaked casualty figures from an elite Russian special forces brigade indicate that it has suffered huge losses in Ukraine, equivalent to more than half of its entire roster of personnel. Scores of men are listed as being 'unaccounted for', in other words having deserted. ⬇️

Such a powerful image in Le Monde. (The writing on the plane says "Neutral athletes") Cartoon by: Letton Gatis Sluka

Closing chunks of vital airspace because paranoid idiots in the military want to show their dominance? The US really is becoming China

My favourite German word is now "Motordrosselklappenhebel". Amazingly, a word that applies to a relatively common thing that you would probably like to be able to say quickly.

Predicting that some universities will soon pledge to provide AI-free instruction, and that this will be an advantage in recruiting and training top students

Quite the chart

It's got to be admitted... Bluesky is a little bit dead at the moment...

Americans for some reason think their food includes Mexican food and Asian food and Japanese food, and isn’t like roast meat and apple pies they got from the UK, while British food is just roast meat and apple pies. Turns out, lots of good food in a modern progressive multi-cultural democracy

You know, every time I hear Labour-supporters complain about treatment by the press, I recall the time the British media spent weeks on an unsourced, blatantly-false, denied-by-all-involved story about the PM of the day having done a completely unprintable thing whilst at university.

Actually interested to know how much money he was making from this. It does feel like social media is shrugging its shoulders going 'we're not the publisher' while at the same time monetising & encouraging the corrosive torrent of shit that is being published on their platforms.

Re-upping this for the Monday crowd... I think my favourite, most revealing detail is that the guy seems to not realise he's in trouble because London Centric's reporting didn't hit anything like his view counts, so therefore it can't really matter.

Morning. A reminder that the names will continue to change with regularity in UK politics until leaders realise that there are no easy solutions and that difficult choices have to be made and justified.

Just remembered the US True Crime fans circa November 2024 giving it large about how we had no rights in the UK over the Letby case because it was possible to put some on trial again for the same crime (in v. limited circumstances when new evidence comes to light). www.fox9.com/news/ice-det...

I hope the abyss in @stephenkb.bsky.social's newsletter becomes a returning character

Just how was Bridgen ever an MP?

Don't want to sound flippant about the nature and severity of the threat, but to quote that anonymous Ukrainian soldier, "we are lucky they are so fucking stupid". Imagine how much more dangerous this would be if they weren't threatening invasion, dissing NATO troops, hitting us with tariffs etc

Both of the media brands seen in this video should not be operating in the UK.

Any Labour leader who doesn't wait until 2029 to hold the election, at which point the full awfulness of the Trump regime will be known and available as a stick to beat Reform with, shouldn't be leader. We don't need an early election, no-one wants an early election, don't hold an early election.

so a month ago I was reading @markpackuk.bsky.social’s speech on Twitter in the lords and there were obviously fake stats the government used to justify Twitter’s UK reach and its continued importance to British audiences Rob has now found the source of the data was… Twitter

Feb 2022: “We will not invade Ukraine” Feb 2023: “You made us invade Ukraine” The Tankie prayer of narcissism. "We won't. You made me".

Here's the ad. The pattern of being fine with endorsing candidates abroad but losing it the moment somebody from outside barges into the American political discourse is quite clear at this point - an intersection of American exceptionalism and belief that the US is ultimately in a league of its own.

Hopefully base station equipment is already on the sanctions list, but if it isn't already, it should be.

We should only ever have dreadful lowest common denominator things that suck. Every penny spent on making Crossrail nicer than the Victoria line was wasted.

Average house price (Halifax): £300,077 Average annual full-time wage (April 2025, ONS): £39,039 Result: the average person cannot buy the average house. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

No-one who spent 2015-2019 boosting the paid apologist of this regime has any business getting too moralistic about the (extremely unwise) appointment of Mandelson as an ambassador.

People who do this kind of thing should see serious jail sentences and if the law does not already allow for that then it should change ASAP. Also, yeah, why can similar dumps in Kent be cleared but not this one? www.theguardian.com/environment/...

It may even arguably be worse - Johnson was openly shy of hard work and was only interested in making speeches and writing columns. No wonder such a mess festered under him. Starmer is his opposite, a 'forensic' lawyer who should be all over the technicalities and details. And he is just bad at it!

I mean, as decisions go, it is in at least the same post-code as deciding to make Chris Pincher a Deputy Party Whip. The allegations are possibly less serious, but the role was quite arguably more important.

This is preying on my mind a bit. Jeffrey Epstein was not primarily a British scandal! So far we've removed a Prince from the Royal family, fired our US ambassador who was one of the most important political figures of the last few decades and banned the CEO of Barclays from the financial industry..

It says a lot about the national psychology of both countries that the primary narrative of the 1982 Falklands war in Argentina is "the soldiers were betrayed by their officers" and that in the UK is seemingly now "we almost lost, actually".

Numbers with no baseline, no context, and no actual meaning other than “I am angry”.