Not the point of this piece exactly but a great example of how chatbot validation could increase polarization www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/w...

Monty Python responses to the troops patrolling our streets are the best responses to the troops patrolling our streets

Is it morally the wrong thing to do? Yes. Is it bad for the country and the economy? Also yes. Will it harm UK students? Also yes. Is it also a bad move politically that will disproportionately harm Labour's own constituencies? Also yes. There is absolutely no reason to do this. Pure destruction.

ME ON A TRAIN: Oh no, I accidentally clicked a video with sound! Oh god, people heard a second of loud sound from my phone. I have torn the social contract. EVERYBODY ELSE ON TRAIN: Shit yeah, train time, time to watch the loudest TikToks

The terror case against Kneecap rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was thrown out after prosecutors missed the six-month cutoff to charge him (by one day). The Tories’ Robert Jenrick & Chris Philp blamed the Attorney General, Lord Hermer — despite the case having nothing to do with him.

this has been a thing among the more stupid members of the British New Right - the idea that the Fabians are secret totalitarian Marxists

…

It’s over for us

Even the truly awful Limp Bizkit acknowledged that there were more than two genders 25 years ago

The most accurate recreation of DS9 I've seen.

I am in a meeting about whether the cemetery board should hire some goats - and one sheep - to mow. This is the best meeting I have ever been in.

someone in a group chat posted a Beth Rigby tweet about a planning application for a new stadium in the west of england, and there was about a minute of confusion as to why she'd felt fit to post about this before I realised it was actually Bath Rugby

Half-expecting ICE to raid the European Ryder Cup team if the US is still trailing before the final day...

British politics was doomed from the day that Gordon Brown was forced by the media to apologize for calling a bigoted woman a bigot *in private*.

"does ACAB include columbo" scheduled to be the weeklong bluesky derail for the second week of november

“Mental health” differences disappear when you ask about “mood” bc conservatives don’t want to use the words “mental health.”

BREAKING NYT:   Trump just fired a U.S. attorney who insisted on following a court order.   Michele Beckwith, the top federal prosecutor in Sacramento, was fired hours after she reminded a Border Patrol chief to abide by court-ordered restrictions on immigration raids.

"Okay. It has your signature on it," Judge Vaala told Halligan, who responded, "Okay. Well."

As of this afternoon, not a single career DOJ attorney has entered an appearance in the case against former FBI Director James Comey. Only the newly-appointed U.S. attorney is listed. That's extremely unusual.

Interesting detail from Epstein Files: When Andrew was flying to **** young girls at Epstein island, Buck House said he was in New York for the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, one of his charities! Elon Musk and Prince Andrew named in new Epstein files

Liberal Democrat south Cambridgeshire council staff have concluded their four day working week trial and now have permanently adopted these reduced hours at full pay 💪🏻 www.bbc.com/news/article...

3/4 of the gardeners who quoted to do some work in our garden offered unprompted a special cash only prices that was 20% lower. Which amused me no end because (1) I would never accept and (2) it should have been 17.7% lower.

I'm seeing so many takes around parts of the "ID card" melange, I have to add a few. It's not about cards. It's about registers. A register is a definitive 'true source' of data, about people, places, buildings, whatever.

I got hit with a rhythm stick at the office last week so I’ve hired a workplace Ian Dury lawyer.

Bloody solar panels, cluttering up the countryside and preventing desertification while providing clean energy and growing food.

If you would like your cat to actually use the fancy designer cat bed you foolishly bought for him, I am pleased to confirm the trick is just to wait for slightly more than five years after buying it, when it will suddenly start being considered for use.

Apparently the NFL wanted her show for free, and thought the value of it for her was the exposure. The NFL has been getting free exposure from Taylor, just from her going to her fiancés games, and she is getting death threats for it. www.yahoo.com/entertainmen...

Time and again Labour seems to think that ID cards, digital or otherwise, are a silver bullet to fix systemic problems. They’re not. 1/4

Remarkable that 3 years ago I was sitting in an MP’s office telling W London constituents that they probably would have to drive to Durham to get their passport in time, and today I’m thinking ‘Best chance of this ID system working is if they give it to the Identity & Passport Service to run it.’

Attention matters. They relieved him of duty pending investigation.

yeah we're into LLMs (Large Lamb-bridge Models)

I have to say, I don't think this is true

Morning walk

We’ve just moved into an old house where the carpet underlay seems to consist entirely of copies of the Times 1965-1970, and it’s kind of reassuring to find the headlines (arms sales to Israel, teachers’ strike, rows about some MP calling another MP a drunken buffoon) are so utterly relatable

www.bbc.com/news/article... (From Mastodon): You know your plan is garbage when Alliance, DUP, UUP, SDLP, and Sinn Féin are all on the same side. With one fell swoop, Keir Starmer unified Northern Ireland (against his BritCard).

I’m honestly kinda morbidly fascinated by this idea. The Gang Reinvents Mandatory Palestine. It’s an idea so bad it goes past so bad it’s genius and right back to being bad.

This High Court judgment confirms what @humanists.uk has long known: faith-based admissions in state schools can result in 'indirect race discrimination'. The government has a duty to fix this. The admissions system should be fair for everyone, not entrench segregation.

SIR MIX-O-LOTL

until there's a Republican congress and a Democratic president, in which case it will suddenly be very important. the country cannot function as a real democracy with corrupt, partisan serial liars controlling the Supreme Court; it has to be the first priority of a new administration.

We don't live in a world anymore where you can do one piece for the Telegraph and an interview with the Guardian + appeal to two different audiences with different messages. Anyone interested can see what you're doing.

Also, people who go "oh but European countries have ID cards and they're fine!", please remember that those ID papers were exactly how the Nazis were able to easily and efficiently round up and murder almost the entire Jewish populations of some countries.

Spotted at @themerl.bsky.social today. #TheArchers

So Starmer is backing ID cards - which I do not like - in order to facilitate this government’s ugly immigration policies - which I also do not like - and in doing so is apparently spiralling down the electoral drain and throwing votes to Farage - whom I do not like? Fan-fucking-tastic.

'You will not be able to work in United Kingdom if you do have digitial ID' says Starmer. As if you don't already need a passport as part of the "compliant Environment". Guess what, people still work on an irregular basis. This is up there with the Tories proposing national service. Idiotic.

Menzies Campbell seems like a thoroughly decent human being who lived a very good life, and it's very sad he's no longer with us. However, thanks to the BBC one of my earliest political memories is this absolute fever dream of a breakdancing hologram of him in a tracksuit. youtu.be/Rh3UlZcRQrY?...

"on a technicality" Not really. A failure to get necessary consents to a terror charge is not a slight error. They are safeguards when a person faces a serious charge. Prosecutors should take such safeguards seriously: this is terrorism law they are using. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/s...

You would assume that anything sensitive held on such a database will be restricted to those who need to access it, but the truth is that, somewhere up the line, an IT person in a basement with a degree in an unrelated field will have admin control over absolutely everything because they know Excel.

Time for me to deploy my expertise from having worked with databases of individuals and their data in the public sector: whatever you might imagine will be happening behind the scenes of a digital ID card, the actual reality of that dataset is going to be an information governance nightmare.

Tuesday.

He's essentially saying 'I didn't agree with the 1993-2016 economic model, and I didn't agree with Boris Johnson's either'. Okay, but you didn't agree with Corbynism either. What is yours, to hope that it turns out that 'the easiest route in every poll' turns out to drive growth?