Judt was cut off from the American intelligentsia and social elite because he wrote a fairly banal essay about how the US and Israel used the smokescreen of partitionism as a mechanism to obscure the colonization of Palestinian territory. Coates wrote a book about the same, but wasn't cut off.

"Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it." - Anthropic's CEO If generative AI matched they hype then I'd agree with him. Using LLMs as if they're AGI is the problem.

Paddington Bear (the film version) and the half-skeletal soul-eating bear thing from Annihilation were made by the same VFX team. They wanted to name Annihilation Bear after a less salubrious London railway station. It's called Homerton. I am not making this up.

MAGA military geniuses are talking about Minnesota protestors like they are the Iraqi insurgency, the Taliban, and the Viet Cong all rolled into one.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: With the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, "Trump has clarified an inconvenient fact—the culture war is an actual war"

Tom Brady picked playing football in Tampa Bay instead of being married to Gisele even though he was already rich and won a lot of rings. he might be Histories Biggest Idiot. He's so lonely he cloned his dead dog

PL non-pen xG difference since start of December (so 9-10 games) 👀

Something enjoyable in the fact that Whitehall were prepared to consider regional devolution and only if it was preceded by nuclear holocaust.

And here’s the best bit: notice how nobody was wrong about anything, at any point moving between these two extremes. They never are.

Watch how quickly and easily the shift is from “Sir Keir is the shit hot, deeply respected flag-molesting authoritarian bastard that Britain begs for” to “This clueless, useless piece of shit could not put his trousers on the right way round while reading an instruction manual for trousers”.

That’s a shame! I thought they were big pals back in 2015 when Burnham agreed to her demand that MPs abstain on the welfare bill that introduced the two child benefit cap www.theguardian.com/politics/201...

So do you think the Labour candidate for Gorton and Denton will be: An ex Labour MP? Someone who works for a Labour MP? Someone related to a Labour MP? Someone who works for or is related to a Labour donor? Someone who works for a lobbyist?

Man, if you asked me to name a hypothetical area where "good enough" doesn't cut it, "airplane safety" would be the first thing I'd say

if CBS and the Washington Post both gut their newsrooms this week, that’s the nail in the coffin for the “just find a nice billionaire and settle down” theory of media preservation

Pizza should have four toppings at most, including tomato sauce and cheese

China is installing renewable generation at a rate “almost two orders of magnitude the rate it is installing new nuclear,” and “is also not distracted much by carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, biofuels, or biomass.”

U.S. would reach 100% renewable energy across all sectors by 2148 at recent pace-China by 2051 Main barriers to the US achieving a buildout as fast as China’s “are social and political, not technical or economic” pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/01/09/u... Paper pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

I am going to whip this article out from now on any time someone says to me "the energy transition IS happening, just not fast enough." Honey, "just not fast enough" doesn't begin to describe the situation. If we don't transition before 2148, we're all going to be dead.

Do Cheap Batteries Today Eliminate the Barrier to Replacing Fossil Fuels for Electricity? Yes E.g., the 11.2 GW/44.7 GWh of battery storage on California's main grid is equivalent to only 0.2 c/kWh-grid-electricity-consumed www.youtube.com/watch?v=clYf...

"Still No Miracles Needed" is out Describes how to solve the climate crisis, and at the same time eliminate air pollution and safely secure energy supplies for all - without using miracle technologies. web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/j... Video www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTDN...

Awesome

Writer W. Somerset Maugham #BicycleBirthday January 25 (1874-1965)

Wild to for a jewish organization to be like "well if mamdani wasn't such a fucking rootless cosompolitan" bsky.app/profile/joel...

It's great if they NOW agree there's a genocide in Gaza and a fascist in the Whitehouse. But a lot of us are quite interested in why nobody "important" was able to understand these plainly obvious facts previously. Maybe if they addressed the reasons for these mistakes, they'd make fewer in future?

I mean, this is the third PM in a row to be elected amid much fanfare about how great they would be, who has absolutely sucked shit and quickly tanked to despised public enemy status. Three looks like a trend, doesn’t it. And it’s not like nobody predicted this one would be terrible.

No argument from me, but before we move on to screwing the next dickhead into the leader’s chair, can we pause and ask: how come Britain’s best paid politics-understanders spent over five years telling everyone who would listen this obviously weird dork was a shit hot political operator?

"going forward, this will be a podcast"

Before this loss against Manchester United, Arsenal had not lost a match where they had scored 2 or more goals in 1,515 days in all competitions. That loss came in December of 2021 also against Manchester United.

Well done Erewash.

This is why we had Jim Crow instead of truth and reconciliation after slavery ended. People are so quick to absolve anyone who pays lip service to changing their mind about human rights violations instead of letting them live with the social consequences of their words

Lol

Unnecessary growth is often caused by the sectors and activities with the highest climate and biodiversity impacts. Sedentary lifestyles, unhealthy diets and cities filled with overtourism and SUVs. The world would work better with the structural recomposition of consumption. yle.fi/a/74-20169421

Man Struggling To Pierce Orange Peel With Fingernail Under Impression He Could Kill If He Had To https://theonion.com/man-struggling-to-pierce-orange-peel-with-fingernail-un-1819579648/

Sorry to import this to bluesky but it was brought to my attention. Rosie Duffield, my MP, is truly morally bankrupt

The defection of Suella Braverman, who was sacked twice from Government in disgrace, spent £700m of taxpayers' money to send four volunteers to Rwanda on a deportation scheme that was then scrapped and has a public approval rating of minus 32 is currently being described as a "major coup" for Reform

[stares directly into the camera]

(A lesser example of this is also Gucci and how people would encourage and entertain his manic episodes, and the way it destroyed people’s lives. And it wasn’t until he got with someone who truly cared for him that he realized he needed help.) www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

But beyond him, there’s been many artists / writers / entertainers who have talked about believing that their creativity is linked to their illness, because it’s what they’ve been sold for so long. Van Gogh is the patron saint of this and it’s all a bastardization of what his struggle was.

So many outlets and sycophants latched onto him. Complex posted about his antics damn near daily — I remember responding to them several times that it was irresponsible. All the fame seekers surrounded and defended his behavior. MAGA saw him an opportunity.

Also, the idea that madness = genius and that the two are inseparable has done incredible damage to the mental health conversation. You could see it with Ye that while his real friends were pushing him back into treatment, the general consensus still remained that it was just part of his genius.

What people do in those manic periods have consequences and there’s no obligation to forgive them. But it doesn’t serve reality to pretend that an illness that often leads to delusions, hallucinations, and has led to people killing themselves and others, is self-contained and “manageable”.

And maybe this is a consequence of not being able to reckon with someone being sick not being an excuse for their actions. Bipolar disorder can turn someone hateful. It can make them suicidal when they’re usually not. It can fracture their personality and make them unrecognizable.

Democracy is an epistemic discipline, it only works if truth can constrain power. Without a faster, more transparent architecture for shared reality, the arc of democracy bends away from substance, through simulation, and toward authoritarianism. Without major action, it's the inevitable end state.

As I've written before, people don’t trust institutions because institutions aren't doing the job. Democracy rests on three pillars: Verification, Deliberation, Accountability, which can be understood as being substantial, performative, and simulated. demos.co.uk/research/ver...

We’ve spent years trying to fact-check our way out of this, and it failed. Democratic decay isn’t about bad information versus good information, it’s about the collapse of the systems that turn information into reality. If every bot and Russian troll vanished tomorrow, the rot would still be there.

Everyone wants to blame the content: misinformation, bots, polarisation. That mistakes catalysts and symptoms for the underlying causes. The crisis isn’t bad information, it's that the very information infrastructure we relied on to create a shared understand of the world had changed completely.

But here’s where the debate usually gets stuck, people mistake the weather report for the mechanic’s diagnosis. Economic stagnation explains the climate, but it doesn’t explain the machine. I've spent the last couple of years thinking about the systems behind the collapse.

This is correct but it still doesn’t make sense until you understand just how tiny the in-group of “everyone important enough to have an opinion” really is, and that it has shrunk to a fraction of what it was even at the start of this century, when it wasn’t exactly broad.

Why does it keep getting nastier, uglier, more cruel and more stupid? Because if we forever block every attempt to change things for the better then we do not block all change: we just ensure that every change will be for the worse.