SCOOP: China's top 2 gay dating apps, Blued and Finka, became unavailable on app stores over the weekend. Apple confirmed to WIRED that it removed the two apps following "an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China." latest with @lmatsakis.bsky.social

history will ultimately decide this but i think joyce carol oates might have just landed the most devastating burn in human history. like the death star trench run of posting

I’ve written to Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage urging them to condemn Donald Trump’s attack on the BBC. The BBC belongs to Britain, not Trump. We must defend it together.

Sack the editor of the New York Times every time it writes about boiled mutton.

Maybe Keir should demand the heads of major US news networks any time they imply Britain is on the brink of civil war or that we live under sharia law. Or does it not work both ways?

I’d like to share with you an excerpt from the book "Hemingway Knows Nothing" by Ukrainian Defender, poet, writer Artur Dron.

I made a “how do you do, fellow kids?” joke to someone in their mid 20s who, it turns out, was too young to have heard of that meme. So “how do you do, fellow kids?” is now an example of “how do you do, fellow kids?”

‘Our priorities are growth and climate’ Oh rly???

I think there are still obvious cases where the reverse poppy police have a point, but in general this needs to be toned down a bit unless the goal is to gift yet another powerful symbol and what essentially is a national festival to the far right for their exclusive ownership.

People are taking the piss out of this, but I was intrigued by the Polish marking. Turns out it's an acknowledgment by the local community of three Polish squadrons who flew from a local RAF base, 22 of whom died in service and 6 of whom are buried locally. I think the mockery is uncalled for.

Budget time saving pro-tip: anyone whose argument amounts to go “The fiscal mess is largely due to spending money on (people and things I don’t like) and can be solved by raising taxes on (people and things I don’t like)” is not a serious person and their views can be ignored.

"China-critical academics" = literally anyone engaging with modern China in a way that does not completely align with the PRC government. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

The classic rule is that it’s fairly easy to get middling scores/grades/whatever in arts courses compared to STEM, but about equally as hard to get top scores in arts courses as in STEM.

What annoys me particularly on this is the excitement which the online UK left takes from US events will not even slightly be reciprocated by any interest in UK affairs from across the pond. Not even slightly. And the left are hardly the only people doing this. It's pathetic across the board.

I’m sure Matt Goodwin will be along shortly to tell us all whether LNER Customer Service Host Samir Zitouni counts as British or not. news.sky.com/story/train-...

Which party *creates* economic power? Vote for them.

Belgium and Italy are reminders that British people do not drive so badly even amongst W. European states…

Classic airport situation where all the people who paid for earlier boarding end up stood on the same bus as the people who didn’t bother.

Presently @ Heathrow T5 and looking at a a charging station filled with businesspeople in their 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s playing RTS and first-person shooter games on their laptops. Fellow gamers, we really did win, didn’t we?

No, no, no Pasokification is what Corbyn’s Labour avoided in 2019 by…. Oh.

Americans tutting ruefully at the state of crime in Britain, as a means of making smalltalk in the back of the armoured ICE vehicle.

You really have to read this to understand just how insane the response to building anything in the UK actually is. And yes, Facebook groups. My local ones are 1) opposed to the building of a new town locally and 2) opposed to the expansion of a local scrapping site, the biggest local employer.

If you want to understand the emotional end intellectual malaise of British politics, this piece by @mjrobbins.com is a pretty good place to start. It effectively describes a country that has gone mad. open.substack.com/pub/martinro...

The sheer greasy desperation from these bastards that any violent crime is committed by an immigrant so they can continue their grift. Even when they know it isn't true. Foul.

Who could forget other great classics like Jules Verne’s 80000 Kilometres Under The Sea?

In the annals of low-effort Halloween costumes, going as Arthur Dent has to be a win for me, surely?

I know this might be a bit “making up someone to get angry at”, but supports-ID-cards-doesn’t-have-a-driving-license is definitely a kind of guy that I have met on Blue Sky.

If Canadian PM Carney manages a “reset” with China, it will be the fifth reset in 20 years under three Prime Ministers. Two of those resets have required their own reset, by the same PM, after they went south. Heavy lies the hand on the China Reset button www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

More information coming out now on this. Looks like a Cabinet Office scheme led by Georgia Gould… planned savings of £10m-£30m a year (back up lower Premier League full-back price) don’t really seem worth the candle if this the result IMO.

Terrible news: an infestation of brown marmorated stinkbugs is threatening the Turkish hazelnut supply. Protect your Nutella and remove the Ferrero Rocher from the trick or treat pile. as.ft.com/r/a1407bbc-5...

I keep being told spending cuts are easy. Honest proposals such as those recently outlined by Policy Exchange show they are not My column www.ft.com/content/f086...

This is an odd, but accurate, way of describing the Isle of Wight.

I get very, very annoyed at organisations that insist on communicating in PDFs attached to emails. Truly a stupid way of communicating that combines officiousness with poor infosec and usability. Literally the thing you do when you want people to *NOT* read what you are sending them.

The fun thing about having a small team working with you is you can say "hey you're spending this week digging for stolen mobile phones in London flowerbeds, I promise you it's a thing". www.londoncentric.media/p/london-pho...

"Are we the baddies?"

This is like complaining that George Washington hasn't chopped down any cherry trees lately. Larry has taken on higher responsibilities. He is the thin mew line between order and chaos.

By the by, there ARE currently some pretty hard men and women fighting far away from the United Kingdom against a powerful threat... and Elon Musk has turned off their Starlink access when they got too feisty.

The British public implicitly believe if that if you are renting with £1m in the stock market you are wealth and if you take that money and buy your flat for £1m you suddenly have zero wealth. That’s bizarre and funny!!!

This is absolutely right. It’s about creating a permission structure for violence, whether that violence is conducted by the state directly or simply permitted by the state.

"Stay signed in?" Outlook in Browser asks me, seductively. "Yes." I reply. We both know it's a lie, but perhaps one day it will be true. The dream remains.

When HS2 was being debated, I remember someone arguing against it because "terrorists will use it to travel from London to other towns".

No, it isn't. Statements by European leaders about US politics are going to have zero impact. There's no point in making them. What we should be far more strident about is protecting our own political systems against the rot that has set in in the US. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Is the UK addicted to “full independent inquiries”? Does it really take a years-long process costing millions to say it was a mistake to release Hadush Kebatu on Friday? Wouldn’t a faster internal process into what went wrong allow the government to *fix* it faster?

"Fury as MP spends £5 of taxpayer cash on sackcloth and ashes despite looming tax rises"

A left wing organisation collapses into infighting and allegations of sexual abuse, you say?

"The apps are so advanced!" The apps are 13 million migrant workers in a robot suit!

www.facebook.com/share/p/19C1... My friend Mark Mardell was chucked off his Turkish Airlines flight at the weekend because he had Parkinson’s and his son had asked for assistance for him. (He’s written about it as a public post on Facebook but the link is proving hard to share outside,)

At long last, we have created Palladio from Kurt Vonnegut's classic 1997 sci-fi novel "Don't Create Palladio".

NIMBY organisations have this magic power where they can get newspapers to publish their BS analysis any day of the year. “We’ve made is so hard to build housing that people will live anywhere for it” is what this analysis is saying. www.theguardian.com/money/2025/o...