Labour are dancing to the tune of Reform's cruel agenda on asylum. These proposals, including confiscating personal belongings, will punish people who have already endured unimaginable hardship and will create further divisions in our communities. Plaid Cymru rejects such performative cruelty.

Imagine how far the £2.5billion announced for nuclear today could go if it was invested in energy communities. Community Energy Wales Manifesto: communityenergy.wales/content/publ...

Such an imaginative lead for heritage in Scotland. I saw similar graphic novel artists used to illustrate the Ad Gefrin Anglo Saxon museum in Northumberland in May. A hugely effective new way to communicate archaeology 👏👏 www.digitscotland.com/archaeologis...

One of the government's plans for the NHS is "left shift", taking services from hospitals and placing them in the community. Closer to the residents, more responsive to their needs, cheaper, and faster services. What's not to like? This is not as easy as some think. A short thread: 1/

I’m never quite sure what the ‘woke right’ is, but in my imagination it means someone who includes a land acknowledgement to the local aristocratic landowner in their email signature

Is there a more lying prefix than the "perma" in "permalink"?

The achievable carbon uptake from planting trees is much lower than previous estimates, and even lower than many nations have committed to. New paper by Wang et al. in Science. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪🌏🌳🌲🌐

I hate how successful this would be.

So bizarre to get messages from sheep pharmaceutical suppliers asking me to rate my purchases. Half tempted to go write that the Heptavac vaccine had a lovely strawberry flavour but the blowfly strike protection pour-on gave me a rash.

Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too malwaretech.com/2025/08/ever...

I wrote a short rant about what irks me when people anthropomorphize LLMs: addxorrol.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-no...

I'm seeing a lot of irate reactions to this story but forest restoration is much more complex and unpredictable than this implies. Just because you leave land vacant doesn't mean that trees will suddenly appear, nor the trees that you would like.

Explosive response of the British Medical Association to the Supreme Court's "biologically nonsensical" ruling: "We recognize as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine".

Shower thought: just realised how much His Dark Materials has the same structure as a classic JRPG. First level: you and your cute animal companion sneak into a study! A childhood friend joins your party. Final level: you, your love interest and a motley crew kill God.

When all the cherries finally line up on the slot machine! The black (appearing) lamb on the left is solid colour, guaranteed not extension dominant, guaranteed at least a dilute carrier, and with luck (50% chance but I have a good feeling) homozygous dilute. The girl on the right is fab too.

One of the best example of the incongruousness to Celtic speakers of some anglophone Celticism. To Anglophones: "Dramatic Celtic Word: The Dramatic Celtic Card Game" To Welsh people: Might as well be "Essex: The Card Game"

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... As usual, Green GEN Cymru is repeating the line "New grid infrastructure is urgently required as Wales' electricity needs grow" which is certainly true! But as far as I can tell none of their proposals involve improving the grid in Wales.

Just doing some reading about the design of cryptographic protocols.

my omelas response take is simply that stories in this genre should be known as omelettes

If we want to help everyone who wants to work do so, we should first ask how to reform the environment they face, rather than risk those who can’t work being pushed further into poverty and indignity. 1/3

Fascinating that someone as single-mindedly power hungry as Gavin Newsom was incapable of recognizing that he COULD have become an extremely powerful anti-Trump warlord almost instantly if he’d gone hard in that direction. Instead, he irretrievably shot himself in the dick by starting a podcast.

It's Monday, which is a good day to remember that the data broker industry must be destroyed: gizmodo.com/data-broker-...

The gods are displeased with our leaders and are sending their most disturbing signal tonight

Wales has been screwed over by its own Labour MPs. The 27 Welsh Labour MPs voted to deny Wales millions of £ in the coming years. When I approached them they gave very weak excuses for their actions. Stay with me here because it's a bit fiddly but really matters. [Thread]

Volkswagen is the latest carmaker to announce the return of physical buttons. We’re making progress.

I'm a paid subscriber for a number of independent journalists doing fantastic work that I'm really grateful for, and I will continue to subscribe even though I'm unhappy that they are on substack. But I really hope they will switch to an alternative when they can.

was this sent from Moria?

Everyone who grew up with unrestricted internet access seeing their choice of logo: 🫠

This thread also has lessons for public historians, especially those targeting young(ish) demographics: Video games have profoundly shaped how we collectively understand history. Not just our direct knowledge of past societies, but also the underlying logic of how history *works*.

RIP to the Last Doll.

Did a little thing £100 #DyddGŵylDewiHapus

This is what we want.

Your license fee at work:

I wrote about what the UK is doing here, hopefully in understandable language!

I read an article recently on the BBC about The Sims at 25 (gulp), which spent 2/3 of its length on a "both sides" debate about diversity, & only mentioned Will Wright. So here's a reminder that there were 3 designers on the game. Will, but also Claire and Roxy: blog.23andme.com/articles/two...

THE RESIST LIST IS HERE. Proud my team just started this @resistlist.bsky.social, which will list actions that happened and that are slated to happen.

"I can only hope that more people will see this ecomodernist [manufactured #food] merry-go-round for the distraction it is and will stop invoking technology as a substitute for the real work of building resilient local communities." ⤵️ #Community #Resilience #Localism #Agrarianism #Grassroots

This is great!

This 😢

In this emergency, I think it likely that we are going to need to pitch a very big tent and invite everyone in who doesn't want to live in a dictatorship... www.meditationsinanemergency.com/big-tents-an...

I'll be extremely useful (animal husbandry, slaughter and butcher, basic carpentry, plumbing, medical, mechanical, etc) until I lose my last contact lens, and then not very useful at all.

@Wired has been the Woodward-Bernstein of this moment. (Among diffs from that era: GOP then had Sens/Reps who would stand up to prez. Ditto that era's SCOTUS, with six GOP appointees. Still ruled unanimously that Nixon did not have absolute right to withhold WH tapes from Congress. Quaint!)

"The best study on the subject in my opinion suggests that in the long term, institutions really can’t save us; that civil society and mass mobilization are a more potent check on a backsliding democracy in the long term..." meditations-in-an-emergency.ghost.io/the-nature-o...

Martin Lewis grabbed from his house one day and ordained before he knows what's going on.

1. Patti Smith 2. Holly Beth Vincent 3. Courtney Love 4. Sinéad O'Connor 5. Liz Phair

All my UK friends… sign this

The people who think they are good at everything because they are good at coding are also bad at coding.

My Prospect column this month is on the increasingly feral Lobby and why Labour has little choice but to ignore them www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/691...

Next Monday, 3 Feb at 6.30pm, I'm giving an illustrated lecture at the Royal Geographical Society @rgsibg.bsky.social, entitled 'A Nation of Map Addicts'. There'll be history, politics, art and fun. Tickets available, and it will also be livestreamed for free. Details: www.rgs.org/events/upcom...

Petition to stop referring to the people who attend Davos as "elites".