Gemini : I have conducted a rigorous, line-by-line audit of <file> to ensure absolute completion and accuracy. Me: *looks, sighs, proceeds to copy and paste about 5000 words from the original that are missing from the Gemini version*

So at the beginning of the pandemic I said it would take about 5-7 years for people to figure stuff out using heuristic learning methods. I am a crystal ball.

It goes further - imagine a by-election contest between a working plumber from Manchester and a professor from Kent? The media lines write themselves, except that the party allegiances are not how our commentariat would like them to be.

One of the fascinating things is that if the Reform candidate was a plumber who had just been on a plastering course, we would not hear the end of it in the media.

Arsenal fans starting to ask themselves - can a football club catch "Keir Starmer syndrome" from a prominent supporter? (Only time will tell.)

In any other part of the public sector, the idea that you might personally be able to receive a gift from a foreign company up to £2,000 and that's *fine* would be comically lax. research.mysociety.org/html/beyond-...

Farage's claims here are straightforward lies (and it's about time the media/press said so) The correct figures are 160K (0.3%) and 900K (1.5%) www.gbnews.com/news/video-n...

Good example of far-right propaganda in action here. Also, the media outlet (Sky News) provides the facts in the next paragraph as a corrective to the lies, but carefully does not point out that lying has occurred.

Something Starmer could have a rethink/reset about. Not holding my breath though.

Doing this for vague "special security reasons" is unprecedented since 2001, and should worry anyone focused on US, Western hemisphere, global security and migration issues www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/u...

Now that the air travel has been shut down around El Paso for 10 days, the next thing worth looking out for is how far federal forces set up checkpoints around the city towards its links to the North and not just directly at the Mexican border

What is the reset I would want from Starmer (apart from, obviously, just him falling in line with me on everything) - junking some of the policies designed to pander to the delusions of the far right. If the country is to succeed in the 21st Century, we have to stop going along with this stuff.

It is slightly irritating that the Guardian uncritically reports his claim that taxpayers are spending "an ever increasing proportion of our national income on out-of-work benefits” without pointing out that it is, in fact, false.

Oddity that when an X-brained columnist drags over "truth bombs" that "You may not like it" (b/c we're sensitive Bluesky butterflies living in a bubble?) is that they are most banal things we've heard 1000x before because we live in the UK, so Times and Telegraph are pushing this stuff every day.

obviously there were extreme, extreme cutbacks in Canadian immigration over the last year, but there were cutbacks in British immigration over the same time period and nobody is trusting Starmer on it.

If PCC is going to screen CoM every time it feels relevant between now and the next election, how are they going to find space to show anything else?

It's a university society and they're entitled to ask who they like. This is deliberate, planned provocation to grab news headlines.

Narrator: Starmer did not want a reset

I see the party of retired people once again has Strong Views On Work Life Balance

Some interesting things to look at for the UK context @paulhebden.bsky.social

The cultural flipside of hemispherisation - in this TED talk I will...

I like the govt's plan to ban smartphones and social media in schools but nobody's mentioned the glaring hole in it

When a prominent figure falls, you can get a good sense reading the coverage which journalists were spending enough time with that figure to distort their perspective.

I come back, once again, to the repeatable finding in numerous polls that statistically zero Reform voters in 2024 have moved to Labour

PS. Not too late to tell the government what you think about their proposed changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain - the public consultation is open until 12th Feb. www.gov.uk/government/c...

My pitch for Labour’s new strategy: "Full speed ahead to uber-woke, net-zeroist rejoinerism"

Steve Hilton: ‘Cameron’s pint-sized Rasputin’. Nick Timothy: “the Brummie Rasputin”. Dominic Cummings: “the new Rasputin”. Peter Mandelson: “New Labour’s Rasputin”. Morgan McSweeney: “Keir Starmer has his own Rasputin”. (These are all real quotes from media reports/ comment pieces.) 1/2

briefing anonymously about yourself as you go out the door, incredible commitment there

Politics figures who do seem all a bit the same actually: Nick Timothy Dominic Cummings Morgan McSweeney

Now we get to find out who the Number Two Blue Labour advisor is when they get picked to replace him.

Who says nothing good ever happens on a Sunday?

The most frustrating aspect of this is the "prison of accounting conventions" (government edition) h/t @dsquareddigest.bsky.social . The need for these operations doesn't go away, they don't get cheaper to do by pushing them out into the future.

If anyone who follows me knows of any decent support groups near Manchester for + people with early onset Alzheimers + *and* the youngish adult children that care for them then LMK

Anyone have any particularly strong feelings about Ghost vs beehiiv?

Random skeets that make me think I should check in on @willsh.bsky.social

You can actually see that Trump is not the guy he used to be. Faced with a similar situation/question in 2018 he would have said "sometime I boo him too"

Not sure it's high quality systems analysis to say things like "6 bad PMs in a row, that's beyond individual explanations" when we've effectively had 2 bad governments in a row. *Note - I do think there are many important systemic factors but... 1/2

My 1 point plan for Ed M in his Labour leadership campaign. Press conference at a Greggs where he vows to eat bacon sandwiches until all the photographers get bored and go away.

Have to feel like losing the Facebook crowd is a pretty significant sign.

The average Labour voter is not on an arguing platform. (eg BSky, X) They don't think hard about tactical voting or anything else. If you spend years being nasty to them, they probably won't go Green, they just won't prioritise going out to vote at all. So many people don't seem to understand this.

Not sure work will even start before the remigration camps open. See you in Cell Block P.

Quite a lot going on here. Congestion busting Cross-Leicester services still stalled even though it's the proverbial no-brainer with 98% line already physically there because we are waiting for a majority Labour govt

Seeing a lot of knowing commentary "we all knew making Mandelson was a cynical bid to get in with Trump" and I'm reminded of Partygate where the commentariat all knew it was going on and therefore it wasn't a big deal. Only it turns out the average voter isn't tracking the lobby gossip religiously.

This quote from a Reform UK councillor sums it up beautifully. Cross-boundary moral outrages, exported online and sold (especially, but not exclusively) to generations that grew up before the internet, are such a central feature of radicalisation today. www.kentonline.co.uk/maidstone/ne...

One for appreciator of big control panels, @dangerouscorner.bsky.social

it's not great when the consultation landing page continues the labour habit of just making things up where immigration rules are concerned. SETTLEMENT IS NOT GRANTED AUTOMATICALLY. absolute joke of a government

As @celestialweasel.bsky.social points out, the sympathetic pov is an accident that comes out of it being an article about coastal towns, rather than an article about higher education.

Interesting to finally see reporting on a uni closure using the same emotional tenor usually reserved for heavy industry. cc @gsoh31.bsky.social