'Pee is stored in the balls!'

Setting the volume control to 7 on a tape recorder in order to load computer games.

I have the highest respect for Richard Evans, so this isn't snark, but his old piece on why Trump isn't a fascist - no foreign expansion, not militaristic, no large numbers of uniformed thugs on the streets, the press aren't intimidated - reads differently now. www.newstatesman.com/world/americ...

Would Latin America boycott the World Cup? Would Europe follow suit? Would Afcon follow too? Feels unlikely, but all this feels unlikely.

"international law must be followed" is european for "thoughts and prayers"

America today inverses Gramsci. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the New World is dying, and the Old cannot yet be reborn.

Pretty sure this Valleys plate is intended to be read as 'Where to, butt?' Tidy.

The sheer pace at which the establishment Centre-Right has almost universally shifted towards race-baiting in the past couple of years has been astonishing.

Make a Bond movie academic 'You Only Live Twice': A rejoinder to Nietzsche

War on Venezuela is obviously unjustified, yet it is notable how Jones etc al loudly praised the Chavistas as a model we should emulate, then went completely silent when their programme led to the largest non-war humanitarian catastrophe in decades, and only now talk about Venezuela again.

£28,000,000 ÷ 300,000 = '£90,000 for every Jew'. Apparently. That's one Neymar for every Shul. As an aside, and even ignoring the Jewish control trope, given Jews have been mass murdered just this week, simply for being Jewish, it's money very well spent.

A conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories is still a conspiracy theory. Anti-vaxx is an overwhelmingly home-grown phenomena. Organically emerging from a lot of rich, natural and native fertiliser, you might say.

Wales could do this too, alongside: - Replace Council Tax with LVT, and incentivise councils by allowing rates retention - Zoning, thereby making compliant development legal by default, rather than illegal until approved - allow similar liberalisation for commercial land.

My kids woke up so excited this morning for the first night of Hannukah and now yet again we have a festival where I’m very conflicted about whether it’s safe to take them to synagogue to celebrate. Communities shouldn’t have to live like this.

It is funny that everyone who’s ever said we need a PM who’s had a career outside of politics got exactly what they asked for with Starmer and they haven’t noticed

Enjoyed the discussions around this today. I think part of the issue is everyone is now expected to be a commentator/campaigner, judged on how you come across to The Public, who are somehow separate, simple, and need to be spoken to simplistically.

Ian Hislop was on the private eye podcast last week sometime (I don't want to bash him in particular or a good podcast here but it illustrates the blind spot) and was talking about an office of political responsibility where politicians can't make fantasy claims and I was like "That's you!"

Transport for Wales thinking two train carriages will be enough following an international is certainly an opinion...

I think a lot of the political bias stuff looks like "we are amazed and astonished that people who work at the BBC are people who have jobs in London or Manchester", crossed with "this point of view is very big on Twitter so it ought to also be big on the BBC"....

Predictions this far from a UK General Election are very stupid, but because I am very stupid, I predict that the party who will most benefit from FPTP will be the Lib Dems.

Even putting aside his politics, this is exceptionally impressive presentational skills.

This core fact does get overlooked far too often.

The US has a leadership that can demolish the historic heart of its democracy without warning, while the UK has a leadership that can't act to avoid the demolition of the historic heart of its democracy even with repeated warnings. I'm not 100% certain which is worse.

Another thing with the Labour assumption that the ideology of AntiReformism will motivate voters is that, if true, it'll motivate people to vote for parties most explicitly AntiReform. Bluntly, Labour are trying very hard not to be that.

Plaid's central electoral problem has been that it's too similar to Welsh Labour for voters to switch to them. It may now become Welsh Labour's problem, if Plaid do overtake them.

Some commentators interpret the Caerphilly result the broad Left uniting to defeat Reform, which is good news for Labour, as they'll do that again. If it was just Anti-Reform, then surely they'd have united behind the incumbent party that's won every election since before TV was invented?

That scene of the Welsh BBC correspondent being the only person interviewing Caerphilly's new Plaid AM while the rest of the media interviewed Reform's loser in the background was far too on the nose.

Apropos of nothing, I really do think UK journalists and politicians need some reminding that mass deportation of LEGAL immigrants, particularly those with permanent status, is far more extreme than even Trump's America and would basically place Britain completely on its own among democracies.

The BBC are accidentally running the subtitles to Mrs Marple over the Mercury Prize, and it’s rather wonderful. A few of lines could plausibly have been written by Jarvis.

I'm sure that once we loudly insist on A-Level standard English as a minimum, to block those with the construction skills we need to deliver the growth the government's entire strategy is built upon, the polls will really shift.

A story in three parts

I have a fun thing in my life where my social circle are leftlib urban PMC, half my family are from deep red North Wales and the other half are British Indians and you think “ok you should ALL be Labour’s core vote and you ALL hate the government”

The Fall of the Berlin Wall The Gulf War The surprise Tory win in 1992 New Labour victory in 1997 Welsh Assembly referendum Britpop wasn't an event, but it captured and partly created the anti-elitist, all-inclusive, apolitical pre-millennium zeitgeist.

England really need to get over it

We all agree that things should be legal unless officially banned. Why the hell are we banning anything and everything from being built unless it's officially and individually legalised? After two decades of zero growth, maybe, just maybe, we need to develop in order to develop.

It does seem that the BBC News treats criticism from liberals and the Left as proof of its objectivity and criticisms from the Right as proof of its bias. Given that it's primarily funded by under 50s who lean left, for the benefit for the right-leaning pensioners, this might not be sustainable.

News and analysis of the upcoming by-election, from the Caerphilly Observer.

Violence against women is one of the biggest indicators of terrorism www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Occasional reminder that, if you've been wondering what the big deal is with that 47 borders book that everyone keeps going on about - worried that your cooler friends might work out you haven't read it at all - then it is currently available for just 99p on Kindle:

I wrote a short piece for the Observer on the attacks in Manchester. observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

You don’t actually have to both sides this. The Jewish community in the UK is not the Israeli government. You can just condemn the murder of two British Jews killed in their place of worship and you don’t have to say a single other thing.

Still, at least it is a distraction from spending Yom Kippur contemplating “which of the ideologies that want us dead is behind this attack, and how will it strengthen the other ideologies that also want us dead?”

My very non-Bluesky opinion is that a technocratic government is probably the best chance Gazans have to end their drawn-out genocide and to avoid their ethnic cleansing. Also, Blair is probably the most competent (politically & administratively) person to lead it. I guess I am one of the 200.

And they all denounce the posh Them for drinking latte, because real people know that there are no coffee-shops in Britain outside the M25. Real people, in the real Britain, only drink hot Bovril.

I think there might be a flaw in the 'Nigel Farage is right; don't vote for him' strategy. www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/f9444c6...

Lukewarm political sociology take: On the face of it, the fragmentation of political identity should benefit large parties. They have far more resources to register what issues and messages affect the voting habits of individuals, thereby constructing the coalition of micro-groups.

Badenoch is more prepared to hold Reform to account than Chris Mason is. No other party could have nutty anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists musing about the King's cancer without the BBC interrogating them. Mason couldn't even raise the proverbial eyebrow.