the magic of the Muppets is that there are two fourth walls. they constantly break the one that reminds the audience they are performers. they NEVER break the one that reminds the audience they are puppets. this dynamic is the key to their entire comedy style

The government’s own economic advisers are giving it perfect political cover to reject Jim O’Callaghan’s increasingly brutal immigration policies but it won’t because our government ministers are amoral spoofers who don’t care about anything beyond the next poll www.thetimes.com/world/irelan...

Irish media, international news: OMG Farage! Musk! 😭 “Populism” everywhere 😤 Irish media domestic news: let’s get Declan Ganley on again to say our democracy is corrupt and country overrun by immigrants. Oh and John Collison to tell us how to run the state as a techbro enterprise.

Gardaí are renewing their appeal to the public for help in the case of missing person Bridget Madigan, 10 years on from her disappearance

I converted to Catholicism a couple weeks ago. Here’s what I think Jesus got wrong.

Great to see Tesco supporting Irish vegetable growers by putting at least 3 grams of Irish broccoli into every 100g pack.

underexamined in the debate about banning youths from social media is that we are effectively talking about regulating social media as a vice industry like alcohol, tobacco and gambling, but with the public health implications of that not at all applying to adult use of social media

bro are you okay? your credits music changed mid season

On the one hand, if we don't do anything to stop climate change, Blackrock will be wiped off the map On the other hand, if we don't do anything to stop climate change, Blackrock will be wiped off the map

as frustrating as it is, there has been something slightly gratifying in experiencing Google's already enshittified search melting into incoherence in real time, even though coherence is the entire point of a search engine

Nick Delehanty started a podcast with buds in the "official" Spoil the Vote campaign: + Declan Ganley, who has millions in contracts with the US security state + Elaine Mullally, who launched RFK Jr's anti-vax group Children Health Defense in Ireland + Paul Treyvaud, who is an unstable restaurateur

This level of apologia (from Megan McArdle in a podcast with Josh Barro and Ross Douthat) is fucking appalling. Idk what else there is to say.

Keogan thinks Glinner got stopped at the airport because of the UK's adherence to tyrannical EU law

Michael Tracey and Richard Hanania are in a life and death struggle to see who can more stridently defend the honour of a dead paedophile

Criticism is an art, not a science, and a critic who follows rules will fail in one of his most important functions: perceiving what is original and important in new work and helping others to see. (1963)

98% of the difficulty using international social media is trying to figure out whether someone is using the Irish "not mad about it" or the internet/US "not mad about it"

I have been looking through the Epstein Files for a few days now and I'm not joking at all when I say that Jeffrey Epstein seems to have disliked the Irish in a racist way

pro tip for fellow journalists: I love sharing information and I'm always happy to answer questions.

Exporting crops during a famine

Weird and almost universal revisionism today. Even at the time, it was pretty clear that Mandelson wasn't appointed *despite* his dodgy links but *because* of them. Trump's Washington is a dirty swamp. Mandelson was deemed a man able to swim in it. This wasn't a secret. Everybody said it out loud.

by 2040, pedestrians and cyclists will leave our homes covered in neon paint like the inexplicable voodoo gang in Joel Schumacher's Batman films, and drivers will hunt us for sport

the crazy thing here is not that the chair of Bord Bia imported Brazilian beef, but that someone who owns and runs an agrifood company was ever appointed to run a state agency for the agrifood sector

of these 16 independents, only four are not "genepool" independents, i.e. they have never been members of a party and left it to become an independent. the four are Seamus Healy, Marian Harkin, Sean Canney and Barry Heneghan

me vs a searchable database

John McGuirk claimed in his WSJ opinion piece that George Mitchell is only referenced twice in Epstein emails, which is untrue. he's also in there under misspellings of his name, including in an email where Epstein says he's picking Mitchell and Ehud Barak up in his jet in 2013

Micheál Martin has posted photos of schoolchildren on X twice since this controversy began

For sure man: Larry Summers, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Peter Mandelson, Bill Gates, and basically every other oligarch, power broker and political bigwig in the western power structure were all taken in by a devious Russian plot to enact the precise policy suite they’ve espoused their entire careers.

Good thing that they're making it illegal to judicially review them, or there'd be more of this.

former college debating knobhead turned professional advocate for Christofascism 👍

Emails show Dublin-based Elkstone CEO Alan Merriman coordinating an investment involving a client, an ex-Israel prime minister and Jeffrey Epstein in a tech startup founded by former Israel Defense Forces officers. www.ontheditch.com/irish-firm-i...

it's crazy that Micheál Martin's first instinct when facing sharp criticism is to pull a "how dare you" as if he isn't of the nastiest, cattiest men in Irish politics

the Micheál Martin one being a fake photo of Epstein with Nigel Farage turned into a fake photo of Epstein with Micheál Martin is incredible

my brother in Christ, you were the Taoiseach less than two years ago

Some people are taking the opportunity to spread false allegations about notable figures in Irish public life, including U2 singer Bono, Taoiseach Micheál Martin and former justice minister Alan Shatter. jrnl.ie/6946548

After a lengthy appeals process and productive discussion with the Blue Sky safety team I will no loinger be sending George Thorogood lyrics to beautiful women on here via DM. Thank you all

If you're not familiar with software development, seeing "lines of code produced" as a metric of quality is like paying a cook by the amount of salt they use.

The Oireachtas Media Committee 🔔 Alan Kelly notes the “disrespect” shown by X in refusing to attend but also takes aim at the “bizarre” and “worrying” conditions requested by other social platforms - he says at least one company said “if three of the four platforms attend, we’ll be there”.

The only route to accepting Mandelson or Andrew's "silly me!" version of events, is to believe that they only ever exhanged sensitive information or access in exhange for cash or favours or sex to one man, and by sheer dint of bad luck it was the one man on Earth whose emails everyone gets to read.

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.

I'm not saying that LLMs or GenAI dont or wont have use cases, but if it were as genuinely transformative and productivity enhancing as advocates claim, it wouldn't need to spend so much money on Facebook ads trying to get people to change their photos into cartoons.

Did Ken O'Flynn ever get around to naming and shaming feuding gang leaders under privilege in the Dáil? www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-n...

It might be worth reminding folks that (now, Deputy) O'Flynn had the lowest attendance at Cork City Council meetings — in the end, even frequently missing the committee he chaired. However, by some stroke of fortune, he was in attendance at this meeting — and raised no objection to the scheme.

when it comes to keeping himself personally indispensable to the rest of the elite, SpaceX is by far Elon Musk's most powerful company, so I welcome his plans to inexplicably merge it with xAI right before xAI becomes his biggest liability

this nonsense has been repeated on X by former Indo news editor Don Lavery. people want there to be an Epstein connection to Irish politics so bad, but they're almost certainly going to be disappointed

It was the Fuck Around of Times, it was the Find Out of times

as well as just showing up in addresses of international firms, a frustrating number of appearances of the word "Dublin" in the Epstein Files are people misspelling the surname of the Dubin family, particularly Celina Dubin, who Epstein appears to have had in his contacts as Celina Dublin

the Chancellor of the University of Limerick sharing a genAI fake photo of Jeffrey Epstein with Nigel Farage. don't worry though, Brigid once told me it's okay for her to spread misinformation because anyone she defames can just sue her

Micheál Martin has been a TD for 37 years. He’s been in government for 25 of those years and in cabinet for 20 of those years. He’s been either Tánaiste or Taoiseach since June 2020. And every time he’s asked to anything other than build a data centre, he acts like he’s just been handed the job

once again furious that it is legal to describe nicotine products as tobacco-free even if the nicotine inside them is 100% derived from tobacco, as is the case for the vast majority of "tobacco-free" nicotine products