What a Chicago immigration raid says about Trumpism economist.com/united-state... “They threw flashbang grenades into the corridors, smashed in doors and then marched everyone, including children, into the street in their pyjamas.”

Been watching ‘house of dynamite’ and pondering my ‘strategic exchange happens / leg it to Whitehall to be vaporised’ plan. I think a plan that relies on the East Putney signal at such a crucial point may have issues;) (plus I remain mildly dubious anyone would aim at us in a first strike)

Good morning! This week's theme is the River Thames. ------ 'Bridge in London' (1908) by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (Private collection)

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

@radiofreetom.bsky.social have you seen / will you see ‘house of dynamite’ and if so might there be a article/ thread with comments coming? Please?:) (Hopefully I did not miss one)

ok ‘house of dynamite’. the fifty person of the american population who were just dandy with electing an unstable cretin should be frog marched to watch it. (also limited release then streaming wtf why why)

on.ft.com/42n2Oxm “They hope to use the technology to accelerate the speed at which they can provide advice and audits to clients” I mean providing ‘advice’ that may or may not be full of blithering nonsense and you don’t care, is certainly going to be faster

My story is now up: www.economist.com/united-state...

Ukraine’s hellfire is intensifying the Kremlin’s fuel crisis economist.com/europe/2025/... from The Economist

Oh dear my 5am Le Monde newsletter has already been overtaken by events

this ‘limited release then to streaming’ stuff is batshit crazy. Why is ‘house of dynamite’, a film by a well known director and well reviewed, on so few screens, I wondered? Ah. Bc frigging Netflix. My usual indie cinema have it, so I’ve booked my ticket. But I’d not have rejoined Netflix to watch!

The Entrance to Giverny in winter - 1885 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/3110096

Perusing Lego sets. Somebody with great optimism has licensed an ASL model, which surely is likelier to achieve orbit itself than the real thing ;)

www.lemonde.fr/en/lifestyle... I think the jist is that a normal reusable water bottle that isn’t like a ridiculous giant mug or tankard is acceptable :)

No. 9 https://botfrens.com/collections/25/contents/4820

Am reading a new fantasy series where the author has habit of saying things like ‘we ate breakfast as if we might all be about to die, which some of us were’. Can’t decide if this is refreshing or um, likely to reduce dramatic tension.

ICE admits that up to 50% of arrests in its Chicago raids are "collateral.” These aren't statistics. They are parents taken from their children, neighbors taken from our communities. When does a "collateral" U.S. citizen child's trauma matter? This isn't law enforcement; it's a campaign of terror.

wimbledon village, which is admirably village-y despite being miles and miles inside the M25:) (albeit not exactly your average village in various regards ;)

on.ft.com/3KydwLm Argentina’s wily currency traders drain Javier Milei’s dollars Dear me, mr libertarian hero seems awfully keen on restricting trading and whining about traders being in a conspiracy (I never understood how the people who lionised the guy failed to notice he was batshit crazy)

on.ft.com/42p7frk Impact of Trump tariffs is beginning to show in US consumer prices I still think a reality show consisting of nothing but cretins who voted for the orange moron because eggs/somethingSomething learning what a tariff is at the checkout line, would do q well

on.ft.com/3VQdDnN What if working from home was a legal right? One answer is, the % of people who do fk all work and so rely on making a lot of noise i.e the same people who are into office mandates, would pitch a fit

Argenteuil Seen from the Small Arm of the Seine - 1872 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/7760

on.ft.com/4o42lZ1 How romance readers rescued British ice hockey I was about to try and sleep and then I saw this. Wot wot wot wot.

I don’t have much of any time for communists but as ideologies running countries go it was less dumb than ‘cult of an cretin a lot of other cretins saw on the teeeee veeee’

Also worth noting that dark chocolate has more caffeine. So you are not in fact being more sensible, having a small piece of that, over dairy milk, at midnight

I visited the apartment building ICE raided on Tuesday today. Story to come, but you can walk right in. Half of the apartments have no doors on them. Children's stuff abandoned in some flats. *Citizen* residents told me they were arrested and held for hours in zipties. This is America

Re-reading Terry Pratchett’s ‘the fifth elephant’ and unless I’m mistaken there’s an entire page spoofing Chekhov’s ‘three sisters’:)

www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/a... Um I get over to Paris regularly and I always find everyone v nice and pleasant indeed whether in coffee shops or wherever. Possibly bc I don’t act like an entitled jackass tourist it’s a mystery

If you love nature writing, you have Gilbert White to thank economist.com/culture/2025... Sounds like an admirable and nice man

The eccentric investment strategy that beats the rest economist.com/finance-and-... from The Economist

I’m going to go with ‘nothing because without a Time Machine none of them can appear on the teee veee’ (Also sigh… it’s the 21C. the French - some of them at least - might revere Bonaparte but they don’t spend day after day obsessing about what he might have thought re current times)

OMFG will people please stop writing ‘hallucinate’ about frigging LLMs. ‘Ingest text choose most probable answer’ code cannot ‘hallucinate’. You’re just falling for the shtick of a lot of tech bros who get richer if people think they’ve got skynet round the corner.

(Gift article) The flashing red threat from Russia’s dark fleet economist.com/internationa...

The Allee du Champ de Foire at Argenteuil - 1874 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/8605

In honor of National Poetry Day, the greatest parody rewrite of all time:

I am convinced one sign of a country with Normal Adult Humans in the majority, is when a burning flag gets nothing more than a shrug and maybe a ‘grow the fk up’ mutter.

Not v well so it may have been a hallucination, but having taken myself and my cough to the shops for stuff, stopped in Peter jones and … there’s Xmas trees everywhere. Am now worried re how bad this virus is, if am hallucinating trees in October

A lot of tech bros who were upset about pronouns want to confer them on their computers now that they’re dating

The weekly cartoon economist.com/the-world-th... from The Economist

The Sora AI thing is proof of something very important: The technology itself is useless without the ability to use the likenesses of real, living, unpredictable people, and the art they create. And the only way to get those likenesses or that art is to summarily steal it.

'Borough Market Fruit Stall' by Olga Cannon-Brookes buyart.mallgalleries.org.uk/ri-2025/084-borough-market-fruit-stall/

House prices will be our last bulwark against fascism.

You can’t solve the political mania of nationalist xenophobia with marginal policy changes. Or major policy changes. Or anything. Most xenophobia is based on lies or hallucinations. But even where immigration critics have a point, addressing their point doesn’t seem to reduce xenophobia. 1/9

The Times finds it "unacceptable" that people who came here legally in 2021 and have been living and working here since should allowed to stay. The sad decline of a once great newspaper into ignorant xenophobia and casual racism archive.ph/TFZY9

I think there must be more trees now, bc I can’t quite match the scene. Must be the palace on the right there

so it turns out unsurprisingly that some 'whatever it takes' statements are more credible than others www.ft.com/content/6333...

See if the people I just saw in st James park had been letting this pigeon crawl all over them and their kids (as opposed to the thoroughly ordinary and um, unsanitary varieties present) I’d have understood :)

I do like that thing some guys do where it’s like a- firm hand clasp simultaneous slap on back. Not sure I could pull it off :) (two younger guys just did it in front of me )

the real innovation here seems to be in moving ai slop from a banal, low quality, and mostly stupid digital pollutant to something that's potentially very dangerous