"Competition is for losers".

This is absolutely insane. The sort of Kafka-esque nightmare you would find in a Philip K Dick book set far in the dystopian future. A window on America tumbling into autocracy. www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

What a mess. Absurd if a regulator couldn’t enforce standards because HMG forgot to overwrite medieval common law. But Kafkaesque to still not know whether Sussex’s guidelines are permissible. And OfS seem to have acted not as a neutral body but in revenge for Stock. wonkhe.com/blogs/eight-...

The Home (now Foreign) Secretary went on TV and told us Palestine Action were so intent on violence towards people they had to be proscribed tout suite. She couldn’t discuss details but they were akin to Nazi militias and jihadi beheaders, honest. No wonder the evidence has to be kept from juries.

Since many Reform voters used to be Tories, they may not see politicians following their lead as a problem. Also underpriced that Nigel is a poundshop Trump, and some portion of his base will relish the debasement of defectors.

Every official US government claim about its campaign of terror should be treated as a lie until proven otherwise.

Colleagues were interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about @qmul.bsky.social's sudden escalation in taking down posters & threatening disciplinary action. It is a great explanation of what's happening & its dangers. Listen from 22min in: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... or clipped: youtu.be/SJGnCrDaCf0?...

Let us bracket for a moment whether you or I would forget whether we had received £140,000 in today’s money from a rich pal who turned out to be a rampant paedophile. The confusion is surely enough to warrant a searching inquiry of who else may have paid him and for what. www.ft.com/content/1728...

This ought to have been the main UK news story from the DoJ’s latest Jeffrey Epstein data dump. Peter Mandelson told Epstein he was “trying hard” to change government policy on bankers’ bonuses at his request, months after Epstein paid thousands of pounds to the then Business Secretary’s husband.

We are Christopher Isherwood, watching neighbours inform on neighbours from our apartment above.

Chris Rufo is so upset about the Minneapolis protests that he is resorting to anti-Nordic racism christopherrufo.com/p/the-curse-...

Another banger from Jonathan Guyer, who's been on the USAID-Gaza beat for a few years. If anyone wonders why I really, really hate Joe Biden and his administration? It's because I had to work for them on Gaza. They're evil, evil people who deserve prison.

The Women, Peace and Security UK Research Network is organising its first workshop. We invite submissions from researchers of all career stages and of any institutional affiliation (or none) based in the UK. Workshop: 19 May Deadline for abstracts: 2 March thedisorderofthings.com/2026/01/30/c...

Symptomatic of a deathspiral comms strategy to put out a line so bad that it implies a Labour government in favour of the nightwatchman state: defence spending, transport infrastructure and the electrical grid, everything else is for you to figure out you parasite.

Complete insanity. And it's a political choice. There should be interest-free student loans for at least a share of the population. That's the rule not the exception if you look at other countries. Graduates are the most important electoral group for Labour. They can demand more from this government

60,000 US soldiers died in Vietnam over a decade, with huge political and cultural ramifications in a society of 216 million (1975). 325,000 Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine in under four years, drawn from a society of 144 million (2024). Really stress-testing authoritarian stability theory.

Matt Goodwin's lies about his background have hopelessly confused Google AI 😉

Further notes on realism and rearmament.

Every morning I wake up with a hollow anger that I have been enrolled, as a university worker, into a long-term objective of “enhancing” AI integration (“where appropriate”) into my undergraduate teaching

This Wednesday!! Come along 😊

Was this partly plagiarized from Elena Ceausescu?

The ostrich strategy. www.lbc.co.uk/article/uk-m...

So we have figures now. Grok created and shared 1.8m sexualised images of women between December 31 and January 8, after Elon Musk promoted the feature on X. Overall, the Grok chatbot generated and posted 4.4m images — 41% were sexualised images of women www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

This brings back bitter memories of when I was in the same position with colleagues at @qmucu.bsky.social a few years back. Absolutely horrible behaviour from Sheffield management.

May have more to say later but just to trumpet that I’m in RENEWAL, and in the same double issue as the Labour Minister who resigned in part over the gendered impacts of the aid cuts and a Labour MP calling for an extra dose of feminism.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags, like a heavy load. Or does it explode? www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

30,000 jobs gone in three years. Before the national insurance increase and the international student levy hits. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pay-spe...

Honestly, encouraging. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/p...

I do enjoy these CCHQ quotes: "Yes another of the people we promoted to extremely important roles is a grifting wanker."

What is the rearview of Iraq in the UK government? It should be that it was a ‘national interest’ disaster on multiple metrics, presumably all the more so given the time/cash lost in building the wrong kind of military. What will cabinet do the next time round? www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

Holy fuck they actually did it

Affirming the western canon against woke cultural Marxism by banning Plato, no notes. dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

If undermining international law while claiming to champion it was a canny bit of realpolitik to prop up a Ukraine plan that will never be implemented, why didn’t the much stronger line on Venezuela from the French scupper it?

Fourteen interventions on twenty-five years of Women, Peace and Security. Open access, free to read. “If an anniversary signals a return, a cycle of remembrance, then for WPS that ritual is in disarray… We may wonder: what sort of party does WPS deserve?” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.

I’m inclined to this take on the seeping spread of ‘good enough’ short-cuts in scholarship, except that we can already see that one of the effects of responsibility discounting when using LLMs is that people are redefining what would have been clear misconduct *as* just unintentional carelessness.

HMG has opted for the worst possible response to gangsterism. By refusing to defend ‘liberal’ order, they alienate natural allies. But by not pleading brute geopolitics they also sacrifice any claim to ‘realism’. While legalistic prevarication just reads as weak to Trump. www.ft.com/content/fed6...

Director of the CIA is in the room but you have OSINTdefender's twitter page up on the screen

Expect to see a lot of this classic Onion headline, from 23 years ago, over the coming weeks.

Hard to know whether a P-5 member of the Security Council should have a view on this sort of thing, or the stated end game of US oil companies profiting from regime change. Perhaps the FCDO can commission an expert study and report to No. 10 in a few months.

Prof Eliot Jacobson: And it's a wrap. The year 2025 came in at 1.47°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline, making it the 3rd warmest year on record behind 2023 (1.48°C) and 2024 (1.60°C), and likely the 3rd warmest in the last 120,000 years.

Mistakes were made, but not by me! www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

IMHO what centrists miss is that Starmer’s “reasonable” persona adds to the loathing. It’s the opposite of the BoJo effect where the clown gets away with murder. There’s something extremely aggravating about someone lying to you through the tut-tutting face of an officious barrister.

Would it not be easier, in that case, for the government to dissolve the people, and elect another?

Adapt or die. www.ft.com/content/52e7...

“Buy our home security package named after someone who was utterly destroyed by a back door break-in he didn’t see coming because he was focused solely on the front door.”

Just in time for the holidays, check out our Conversations piece @paulcinnamon.bsky.social “Unhappy Birthday! Women, Peace and Security at 25” 👉 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... ✨⭐ Featuring a stellar line up of WPS scholars & practitioners👇👇👇

The system works.

remember, every threat is also an opportunity. specifically, for the person threatening you

Look a lot of people were at the Lucifer Foundation's annual Billionaire Vision Brunch in 2011. I didn't talk to all of them. Some of us just find the work the Lucifer Foundation does to be interesting.