Thousands of Anglicans leaving out tea and biscuits by the fireside on Thursday night, and then running downstairs in our PJs on Friday morning to see whether the CNC has been. www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/202...

At 5pm today! Come along if you want to better understand the current legal situation for trans people post-FWS.

I think the prohibition on torture is a good thing

This is Starmer normalising departure from the ECHR—that’s not his argument, but his take will give Farage the space he needs to push that. Starmer would do well to remember what happened when Cameron normalised the idea of an EU referendum and gave Farage that space ... www.bbc.com/news/article...

We are very fast approaching the point where you should automatically disbelieve any video below 10 seconds unless independently verified by external sources or bearing sufficient indicia of reliability to cautiously accept.

Some good news. London is meeting legal limits for toxic NO2 pollution for the first time – almost 200 years earlier than predicted – following the Mayor’s "world leading air pollution policies," City Hall announces. The Ultra Low Emissions Zone - and similar policies - really do work.

Got an email. Need to fill out a form about a dog, in preparation for a meeting about a dog.

Realised I needed to do some Church Laundry (like church homework but it's washing altar linens) before going, so I've updated my produce spreadsheet. Last day of September and I've harvested over 400kg of produce from the allotment, and foraged over 100kg.

Emma Watson's naively hopeful, very generous letter to bigoted auntie Rowling: ... (crickets) Billionaire J K Rowling's poisonous transphobic drivel accusing Emma Watson of being overprivileged:

Blocking @danielderhonnda.bsky.social for being some kind of troll. His only post that isn't responding to left-ish posters with some kind of whataboutery is a RIP Charlie Kirk thing. Screenshots available on request but I'm running late so need to stop internetting now and go to the allotment.

Oh look, someone to block.

Things Labour would need to do to get me to ever vote for them again, an incomplete list: - reinstate child benefit - scrap prescription fees - stop ridiculous means-testing of winter fuel payments - bring utilities and trains into public ownership - apologise to Jeremy Corbyn - stop arming Israel

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING SUPPORTED BY BENEFITS YOU ARE ENTITLED TO And in the case of PIP and some other benefits (eg JSA), in a juster society you’d be getting more with less unpleasantness.

I completely reject the author’s thesis that punitive measures against immigrants who are seeking British citizenship (because they have built their lives here), but I’m also a bit alarmed by her implication that claiming benefits is somehow not virtuous. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Unfortunately a lot of the Professional Managerial Class (like me) have been totally alienated by Labour supporting genocide, adopting racist policies, having transphobes run policy and starving disabled people, and won’t be coming back.

... >> even fewer GP appointments >> blame immigrants .... repeat and repeat and repeat. What remains completely unresolved is the actual issue communities face because that issue is not being addressed *at all* through the focus on immigration because immigration is not the root cause of the issue.

... to approach immigration in this way. But of course that is hard to do. So most don't. What this means is an endless cycle of this: issues in communities, e.g. not enough GP appointments >> blame immigrants >> more immigrant doctors leave / fewer new ones come due to restrictive policies >> ...

Nevertheless, this is how *every single key policy* in the UK has been shaped over the last decade. Why do we accept that policy in the UK is being made in this way? Let me say this again: being pro-immigration is the most pro-UK policy approach there is.

In fact: in more cases than not, immigration is actually at least part of the answer to address the real issue. So basically: anti-immigration policies constitute a *double negative* - they prevent addressing the real issues by providing the wrong focus and they likely make the real issue worse.

It’s well known that you pretty much can’t make money from sleeper travel without subsidies. What people sometimes forget is air travel gets subsidies too, just often less directly.

this is combined with the traditional Westminster attitude toward the North, in particular, as a mysterious land of whippets, pies, and prejudice.

also of course they conceive of the working class as white and in traditional professions, rather than multiracial and largely in the service industries.

New Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff 🐕 Margaret talks to Katie Goldin about the anarchist prince who laid the foundations for understanding cooperation in the wild. @margaret.bsky.social @katiegoldin.bsky.social @whysophiewhy.bsky.social www.iheart.com/podcast/1119...

Ya see, here's the thing: I'm old enough to remember the current prime minister doing an Enoch Powell impression a few months back, and I don't think Enoch Powell was a leftist.

Specifically, there are custom preparations of peanut butter that are used to treat children suffering from acute starvation.

A lot of people are making a lot of suggestions here, all of which will take me more time and energy (and in some cases money) than being able to just purchase a pair of trousers that fit, which is something crapitalism has decided I should not be allowed to do.

Current mood: I would like to purchase some allotment trousers for winter that are long enough and warm enough and won't shed microplastics everywhere, but apparently this is unreasonable.

This remains an awful and unfair proposal. For one thing, a lot of people genuinely struggle to find time to volunteer, and for another and more importantly, it’s not volunteering if you’re being compelled to do it!

Is there a running list of names of the disappeared that churches can be praying for? 🕯️

Academics! This book-club stuff is coming our way as well! Really helpful break-down of some of the Frankly Peculiar e-mails you may have been getting in your inboxes (as I have). Hat-tip to @courtneymilan.com for the link.

Migrants already carry out work for their communities, it’s called ‘having a fucking job’ and it’s mandatory because we aren’t eligible for benefits

Meanwhile the govt does nothing to address the underlying reasons for the closures of community spaces i.e. serious underfunding of local authorities

Genuine question; does anyone have good reporting about the ICE resistance in Portland, such that it is? I do know there have been fights around the federal building, as there have been for years.

the world is upside down, the appropriate response to deafening silence in the wake of mass-disabling of our children is to scream at the top of your lungs. That's what Violet was doing on Tuesday. That's not anxiety, that's humanity. /end

that doesn't mean that we're wrong. It's easy to dismiss an act as simple as continuing to wear a mask to safeguard one's health as 'extreme' simply because it is no longer typical behavior. To those who feel this way, I'd ask you to consider the following: sometimes, when 20/

correctly could, without hyperbole, safeguard our future through protecting the physical, cognitive and social health of our children. Until we have these measures in place, many of us will continue to mask to remain safe. Of course, we understand we are in the minority, but 19/

tools to achieve this, we just don't have the will...yet. Far UV-C lights, HEPA filtration, good ventilation, pathogen surveillance protocols are good, actionable ways of keeping a population healthy. This is responsible use of existing technology that if implemented 18/

What we ARE, in fact, advocating for is the implementation of common sense measures that mean that when you walk into an indoor space in 20-damn-25, you can feel confident that the air you breathe is free from pathogens that can cause lifelong or life-ending harm. We have the 17/

people who are 'in the know' wear masks and use other prophylactic precautions in situations where exposure is likely because we've been cursed with the ability to do objective risk assessment (which may correlate with NOT experiencing many cumulative IQ losses...who knows?). 16/

hell out of all of us for taking exception at people who dare to state this truth as being dismissed as 'anxious'. The final thing I want to say on this is that advocating for clean air is not the same as saying 'everyone needs to be wearing masks at all times forever'. The 15/

And then there will be a pilot project, which will be declared a success despite none of the participants being able to prove they aren't actually Stephen Weaselbiter from Basildon. The ones who can access the SaaS at all, of course, since it needs cutting edge Windows and Android technology.

They'll hand a lucrative contract to probably-Palantir, who will snarf all our data from dozens of systems with incompatible formats and protocols and then feed it into a pointless AI. We'll get slowdowns and cost overruns and gravy everywhere.

The odds that this government could successfully implement digital ID are negligible, but they can do immense and incalculable harm trying. Whilst they don't have the procurement competence, or the domain knowledge to safeguard the system, they have plenty of optimism and stupidity.

the thing about safety engineering is sometimes you do have to bang your fists on the table and state that it should not be flame RETARDENT (flammable but with extinguishing chemicals) but flame PROOF for all practical purposes

In a way, it's almost quaint that they seem to think that establishing a college in the city of Oxford is somehow academically notable. I'm not an academic, but I would imagine their chances of accrediting their courses are slim. But it's still a cause for concern.

Post script for UK folks: an offshoot of New St Andrews university, itself an arm of Wilson's CREC churches, is now set up in Oxford. It's a private college, called Selden college, offering undergraduate and post-grad education (according to Companies House).

Starmer wants us all to have ID cards so that people who don’t have a right to work in the UK can not get jobs that they can’t get anyway. It’s theatre. It’s a non-solution to a non-problem, with negative consequences for us all. How about giving *everyone* in the UK the right to work instead? 💚

when people read a post about fascism in tech and treat it as a personal attack on their tech choices, that's a tell that saves a lot of time going forward

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/73... Over 1.6 million votes against enforced digital ID so far. You may wish to sign, or share, or both. I'm all for sensible consensual checks on basic identity of the sort we already have. Not this.

Watching an entire conversation that assumes the current economy is built on production of goods and services rather than charging of rents and speculation, and just shaking my head. Production of goods and services does happen! but in many spheres it's a sort of side effect of speculation.