FOLKS! Criminalizing Sharia isn’t a bad idea because it could lead to criminalizing whatever religion or philosophy you think is worthy of protection. It’s a bad idea because criminalizing Islam is a bad idea. This isn’t hard.

This is a bill that would criminalize Muslims following Sharia. Not only is this a gross violation of religious freedom, but every Jewish person should understand where this sort of thing can lead.

The idea of a bill rendering people deportable for following religious law should make every Jew ill

I wrote about what it tells us that Martin Buber, a proud Zionist during his life, would probably be considered an anti-Zionist by the standards of what the word means today. www.jta.org/2026/02/09/i...

That moment when you forget about the whole of Eurovision existing

To reject the US as a fundamentally American country with a deep shared history and commonality with the rest of the Americas, including that Spanish has long been our de facto national second language, is on a deep level anti-American. It's hating actual American culture and history and tradition.

…as well as being supported by the vast majority of Lab/Lib/Gn voters, almost all Labour MPs, a 2-1 majority of voters overall and – even now – a healthy majority of Con voters

Also Net Zero has been Labour's policy the entire time McSweeney has been there and they're spending tens of billions to achieve it...

This is the key point that is lost in so much Westminster bubble talk on net zero. It is popular. It’s hugely popular with Labour’s base and with the progressive voters it needs to vote tactically to defeat Reform. And it’s even popular with Tories who Labour needs not to switch to Reform.

As the old saying goes “Advisers resign, ministers hide”

Just beyond parody at this point

Second time in 3 days I’m posting this Vonnegut quote wrt AI.

Marc Bloch, historien et résistant juif, entrera au Panthéon le 23 juin

Iran sentences Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi to seven more years in prison

This is very, very good. A politically adept Labour PM still has the opportunity to turn things around - at least partially. Understanding Reform-curious voters will never vote Labour would, in and of itself, be a major step forward. Getting to a 30% vote share is still doable.

British values

We never used the term "cake batter" when I was a kid, we said "cake mix." When I first heard cake batter, in my early 20s, I assumed someone took a slice of cake, dipped it in batter and deep fried it. As I'm Scottish I don't think this is completely unreasonable.

Scientists have long opposed the kind of polar geoengineering that could potentially avert the collapse of Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier—but now some think it will be necessary, Christian Elliott reports: theatln.tc/tHSn4HPJ

also okay this is gonna be a Spicy Take but my view on Eugenie and Beatrice being in the files is not “what did they know how dare they we must hold them responsible as 19yr olds who were involved” It’s “man wtf did their parents do to them that we don’t know about”

A scammer just tried exactly this on me via WhatsApp. Glad I saw a post here recently outlining the scam - it would be very easy to fall for. The “hotel” account had an unconvincing name, but they had my name, number & reservation dates. lifehacker.com/money/hotel-...

Metry and her husband of 4 years go to DHS to get their I-130 in motion. "Good news" a DHS employee told them, the form to start her naturalization was approved. DHS employee asks the husband to follow him through a secure door. When it locks behind him, ICE detains his wife to deport her.

The major flaw with the claim that Trump's foreign policy is "realist" is the fact that it is so deeply ideological. There is no "realist" case for driving South Africa into China's embrace, rather than competing for its partnership. The only reason Trump is doing so is based on racist memes.

can't help but think there is probably a corrosive effect of having sex trafficker-elite emails unveiled for months on end as one of the biggest cultural/news stories of the last year— unearthing an inexcusable moral rot in the upper echelons of power—but without any real accountability/justice

Shakespeare's Mum youtube.com/shorts/L4Ndw...

It is actually open to the public! The reason things have been put off for so long, and gotten so bad, is because it’s politically unpopular to spend money for Parliament to have a decent place to work in. Which I get but there is an entire support staff also working there who also deserve that.

This comes up a lot so I do want to let you all know that the option of turning the existing building into a heritage/museum site has been costed out and it is substantially more expensive

So true. Also, many of the Americans doing literally nothing about Epstein’s American ‘associates’ are precisely the ones lying about Europe & particularly the UK being overrun with child-rapists. It’s insane.

If Starmer & McSweeney finally go over the revelations in the Mandelson files Their toxic immigration plans must go with them. NO MORE politicians in the pockets of the seedy rich blaming the outcomes of their greed & corruption on immigrants!

5 years is not "quite short". those 5 years cost us about fourteen grand, three horrendously stressful applications, and (for example) a full half decade where nobody would offer us a mortgage because my wife only had temporary residency, so we had to keep paying a fortune in rent instead

We gotta come up with a better system than “everything rests on whether these twelve billionnaires are nice”

A publisher who lays off a reporter whose pen is freezing because she's covering a frigid war zone while dodging missiles is not an editor you want to work for, in a more perfect world

/16 It took me a long time to fall asleep. I watched the monkey. Its little shoulders were slumped as Swiss snores droned. Occasionally it flinched. But it soldiered on. It was there before I arrived and would be there after I left, no master of its circumstances, but master of how it endured them.

I put together a list of peer-reviewed critiques of The Cass Review, which itself was not peer-reviewed. The media completely ignores these. I’ve been in academia since 1999 & never seen anything as widely criticized as Cass. It is a media/propaganda event, not an academic/scientific one.

We’ve just attended the Responsibility Award Ceremony at the Museum of the Second World War, and today it was damaged by a Russian attack (photos: Ukrainian Culture Ministry)

Another one of my pet bugbears is exasperation over a self-flagellating political discourse in the UK that in its obsession with the impact of deindustrialisation ignores how substantial manufacturing in the Midlands, Yorkshire and Northwest of England still is as a player in European supply chains

"Of course, how was Mandelson to know that Epstein, who seemed so plausible, was a wrong ‘un? Well, one clue was that, at the very moment Mandelson was forwarding this stuff, Epstein WAS IN PRISON. He had pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution."

in general it is very strange for anyone — even gutter racists — to imagine the mediterranean world as somehow looking like northern europe.

I can see why, politically, and perhaps even morally, from their perspective, the HO might not want to willingly grant asylum to a bunch of people they feel don’t “deserve” it. But that’s THE major problem with immigration and asylum policy. Wishful thinking by policy makers.

'measles outbreak at the child prison' seems entirely avoidable, it's really the kind of thing that only happens if you do several unthinkably evil things on purpose all at once

Can I have your attention: esnupi

Wow - yes, here it is. It looks like Putin was the one who reached out to Epstein, at least according to what he told Ehud Barak. Given Barak’s intelligence background, it’s unlikely he’d lie to him Wonder who was the Russian conduit to Epstein - there is one plausible one

Historic joint black flag mass protests in Israel tonight led by Palestinian Arabs and Jews in solidarity against the Netanyahu-Ben Gvir government abandoning of Arab citizens to organize crime, and for Jewish- Arab solidarity.

The funny thing about a certain type of angry conspiracy guy is that they’re literally being confronted with an elite paedophile ring and a tyrannical government at the same time right now, and because it isn't being done by the people they wanted it to be done by they’re all being pussies about it

Microsoft stock tanked -12% after revealing 45% of Azure’s backlog is OpenAI. Meanwhile, Oracle is struggling to secure loans for its $300M AI deal, risking layoffs to pay for it. The theme is clear that bankers don’t trust OpenAI’s solvency, and it’s dragging down every partner attached to it.

every epstein file drop underscores how elite power operates through shared socio-economic networks, regardless of people's ideological differences, populist posturing, or public feuds

William Foege, the physician who saved many millions from smallpox— William Foege, who sadly died this week, is one of the reasons why this map ends in the 1970s.

all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place

SCOOP: 404 Media is publishing a version of the user guide for ELITE, a tool Palantir made for ICE which brings up dossiers on individual people and provides a “confidence score” of their address. The full user guide here:

Pulling together thoughts on the Plan B student loans, the way the system is set up means there will be a 40-50% chunk of people who for some of the most expensive years of their careers will pay a 9% higher tax rate than the other 50-60% and this does basically make it impossible to do tax policy.