What will follow is a determined attempt to limit the contagion by isolating a couple of individuals (Andrew and Peter Mandelson) who will become utterly disgraced, but will carry the can for the whole system, which will continue largely untouched.

'Being detained at your brother's pleasure' will never not be funny

Prisoner cell block HRH.

Among other things, it gives the lie to AI evangelists' pious reminders to check the output first. Yeah, you should, but people won't do that. You give people a magic "do my work for me" button and they'll just press it.

"One of the men drank my ink, thinking it was medicine"

I think I’ve been scammed….My Rottweilers haven’t grown in months 😱😱

Great Minute Cryptic today.

just idly remembering when i was assembling my dissertation for final submission in 2017 i was chided by one lovely professor at a conference, who felt my use of the phrase "the return of fascism" to describe the present moment was "alarmist"

the Spectator accidentally recycled a subhed from a previous day’s article about Tehran

Much better than the Thunderbirds theme.

“Stand bye for action!” (Frenzied bongos) “Anything can happen in the next half hour!” The finest lyrics ever written - “Stingray - Stingray!” When I was a very young Bob, this was my favourite. youtu.be/w4QB1JsE1Is?...

I have something I call The Harry Redknapp Rule, which goes thus: if someone is caught, by fluke, doing something wildly, intricately illegal - in Redknapp's case, placing dodgy cash in a Monaco bank account in his dog's name - then it is vanishingly unlikely that this is their first such crime.

It is worth recalling that the position of U.K. Ambassador to the US was not vacant at the time the Prime Minister chose to appoint Peter Mandelson to the role. A highly competent and respected woman was replaced.

One problem with billionaires is that they're so rich they no longer have rational incentives. To someone like Bezos, the financial performance of WaPo is wholly irrelevant, and so the only "incentive" is to satisfy emotional urges, such as breaking something just to show he can.

In all the Odyssey discourse, I think it’s important to remember that it’s a richly subtle work, with myriad strata of meaning and levels of nuance. You might even say it has… . . . . . Menelaus.

See also: Free Bird

Man Who Thought Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ Was Over In For Thrill Of His Fucking Life https://theonion.com/man-who-thought-fleetwood-macs-the-chain-was-over-in-for-thrill-of-his-fucking-life/

Two important points about "historical accuracy" in the Odyssey: 1. Several hundred years separate the composition of the text from the oldest extant written text; 2. They should all be butt-naked for large portions of the story.

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

Yes. Very few students come to my classes with experience reading long poems (or with Middle English, for that matter) but guess what? With scaffolding and support, they figure it out

Please CHRIST look at the UK; Starmer’s Labour didn’t win the last election; the Conservatives lost it. The thing to do is to *BURN AWAY* Schumer, Jeffries et al through direct action, protests, primaries. You and I are in charge (sorry! but also: congrats!) Catch up with us, Dems, or be retired.

Animalgesics. #art #pills #moles

[whispering to Miller] He'll throw you to the wolves. You'll never get a pardon. It's now or never! [slithering over to Trump] He plots against you sire! Throwing him in the dungeon will send a message to the others!

The people of Minneapolis have demonstrated a level of selfless bravery and nobility in the face of state tyranny that I don't think Americans have ever had to show in their lifetimes before.

typical ai use case

I went to visit my friend, and the second I walked through the front door his three year-old marched up to me and said "in OUR house we take our shoes off."

a smart evil person would have thrown that ICE agent under the bus so fast it made us dizzy, just absolutely One Bad Appled him across the country to soothe the anxious white folks. instead they got on TV and pointed to a video of him not getting run over and said "omg look at him getting run over"

If you have read even a single history of fascism, you are already aware that one thing that its rise has in common in every case is an opposition party that refuses to intervene for fear of looking weak or putting the left into power

Mafia goon: Nice house you got here...it'd be a shame if something happened to it Media outlets: Mafia goon rules out use of force. Expresses regret at the mere thought of it

it’s come to my attention that my tumblr post has been crossposted to bluesky, so I’m posting it on my account here #AntiAI #GenAI

a government agent, who murdered a civilian for peacefully protesting, flying a dont-tread-on-me flag is such a perfect distillation of the maga ethos it almost feels fake

I have not seen the video. I do not want to see the video. But there's a massive public interest justification for having the video available.

The reason they won't, even when the hardest of hard lines is being blatantly crossed, is because it's owner has made a point of conflating any regulation of the site with supression of free speech, and they're scared of what America might do in retaliation for that.

The mysticism of tarot cards was just made up by a few guys in the 18th century. Before that, the tarot deck was mostly for card games. The "standard" deck of playing cards has a much longer history of cartomancy.

Plain and simple my politics is that nobody should be wealthy enough to make their insecurities my problem.

Feels like for a lot of people, the president's biggest sin is just being to blunt too put a nice, jingoistic, propagandistic cover on what the what US is and does and always has been. Public figures squawking about democracy and liberation while he goes "BLOOD AND OIL" is darkly, darkly funny.

lovely little logic loop here. the left have accurately described reality, but i still think they're wrong, so what if it was somehow in fact the left's describing of reality that perverted history to make them right. quantum politics. no fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!

Discworld QOTD, from Snuff "But what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?"

So, to clarify, spray-painting a plane is terrorism, holding a sign to support the organisation those that spray-painted the plane were members of is terrorism, but taking a foreign head of state hostage needs to wait for a press conference from the hostage taker for nuance?

It's a neat trick to say "get beyond the argument" when implicitly you mean "by accepting my position"

These make me laugh 100% of the time

I share a name with a member of the Trump administration and occasionally I receive complaints intended for him.

Yeah well my buddy already lost his job to artificial intelligence. He was an art thief.

If you begin Star Trek: Voyager episode Spirit Folk at exactly 11:49:35 on New Year's Eve, Ensign Harry Kim will kiss a cow as the clock strikes midnight. Join in a very dumb annual tradition and start 2026 off on the right hoof.

Whenever I shop for clothes now I find myself saying "shape and drape, shape and drape" under my breath despite not really knowing what that means.