[snortlaugh]

This op-ed is an important read.

Quiz time! Who - in our democracy - was the last PM to enter No. 10 as the result of winning a general election, and leave No. 10 as the result of losing one? Answer: ❌ Starmer ❌ Sunak ❌ Truss ❌ Johnson ❌ May ❌ Cameron ❌ Brown ❌ Blair ❌ Major ❌ Thatcher ❌ Callaghan ❌ Wilson ✅ Heath (1970 - 74)

At first I thought this was a story about how, in the past, incarcerated kids trained therapy ferrets to assassinate snitches & I don't care to investigate & be disappointed

I remember, when I was 9, the drama & excitement when Margaret Thatcher resigned. No child in my school had known a world where she wasn't PM. We didn't know what it meant but it felt huge & a bit scary. My daughter is 9 & this will be her 7th new PM. She was more surprised we'd run out of cereal.

Do they have to come back?

Thomas House of Dublin exhibiting the pro-human solidarity that all of us should demonstrate.

here’s a tip for the president: simply halt all military aid to israel until they comply with your beautiful deal… you can do it sir…

We are social creatures, hard-wired to give attention to people when we’re in conversation with them. If the person isn’t present, we use some of our mental energy putting ourselves in their place. Doing this while driving is about as bad for attentiveness & reaction time as being a little bit drunk

(PS: using this comment thread to go "okay, but" is not going to work well for you either, I assure you. Yes, Netanyahu should be in prison, just like, as it happens, the US president. Leaping from that to "The Jews" is a problem.)

Nothing terrifies a cult of personality like a personality with a cult.

Like twice a day now I read a headline that makes me remember that time I went to Versailles with my mom, and she looked around and went, “They had it coming.”

Also available for $1.99 at Bookshop! I mean, I'm evil, but I'm not so evil that I'll make people shop at Amazon. 🤣 bookshop.org/p/books/long...

There is no way to translate a billion dollars into pints of milk, gallons of oil, or hours of labour, let alone a trillion. Numbers like this don't tell us that something, or someone, is that insanely valuable. It tells us that the calculator's broken.

The UK Government has moved faster to destroy the online communities of teenagers than it has to limit the power of a foreign white supremacist to launch race riots in the UK's cities and spread child pornography online

When more people watch your name being chipped off behind a tarp than your hillbilly elegy yard party with JD Vance clanging out Happy Birthday on spoons, you may be deeply unpopular.

@doctorow.pluralistic.net has some great posts that go into some of this stuff and have lots of links to more research: pluralistic.net/2026/06/11/l...

"Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes..."

we’re so desperate for good news we've accepted the scaffolding as our wire mother

I’m making my way through the Slough House book series. Just finished Joe Country. Mick Herron’s writing is brilliant and I think the TV show is great also. There are related standalone books which develop the story of minor characters further. Easy to read but also sophisticated. He’s a genius!

One thing everyone can do to hurt the first trillionaire is to stop using the website he uses to foment violence and feel like an intellectual big shot. If you're not even willing to stop using a website that sucks to stick it to a Nazi, you're not willing to do anything. This is a low fucking bar.

This is the only correct response to that thread...

"The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand" Deep Throat / All The President's Men Eternal truth.

If we have to ban under-16s from social media so they don't have to see all the awful shit over-16s are doing, I'm thinking maybe under-16s aren't the problem.

After consulting with my attorney I’ve been advised that what I actually want to say about this would be ill-advised so I’ll just say that he couldn’t possibly be clearer about which side of D-Day he’s identifying with

"If corporations are people, then Mitt Romney* is a serial killer." Stephen Colbert * [or Google, or Buffet, or so forth]

Other than being in Congress, sleep is the only human activity where doing absolutely nothing counts as success.

Entering month 6 of Mamdani's NYC & Robberies are down 11%, Retail theft is down 19%, & Murder is down 21%—all without "Adding 5000 new cops." Instead, he's invested in public safety free childcare, food, and better funded schools. Safer cities come from investing in people—not punishments.

I'm a pretty good multitasker if you don't mind things half done and all wrong.

There is a poem by Annie Dillard that begins with the lines, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." And I think about that a lot.

“A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong – it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them.” @doctorow.pluralistic.net pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/m...

"...And so, kids, that's how the zombie apocalypse started. With a, er, starter so to speak."

Labour has completed its transformation into the party of Weird Victorian Retrogression. Also, when I think of mandatory chemical castration, I think of Alan Turing. Not the British justice system's finest moment.

What if we covered the vehicles in QR codes to malware sites for the drones to look at, taking advantage of lazy visual recognition programming on digital cameras.

The press is supposed to be a vital cog in the machinery of democracy. In Britain, it’s more of a protection racket for some of the very nastiest and most absurdly malicious people in our society.

Austerity, or how to starve your way out of a famine.

Lichfield says trans rights!

Sorry to hear about Jeff Bezos's rocket exploding prematurely. A good technique to prevent that from happening is to try thinking about something you find totally unarousing or even repulsive, like giving workers a living wage or paying a fair share of taxes.

I lived long enough to say this with biblical certainty: this country is gonna get its cocaine no matter what

Here's the serious bit for anyone who'd rather skip the 4000 words of jokes

You know, I was telling people back in the LiveJournal days that books weren't going away because they are a mature archival technology that nobody can delete from your devices or charge you rent on, and that you can pass around to friends. Some people thought I was pretty stupid.

in case you missed this one www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Thanks, Vonnegut. 💜

The idea that there is something to be learned from arguing with ignorant dickheads must have been originated by an ignorant dickhead. We don't have to accept it. There's really nothing to be gained.

The idea of winning votes by running candidates that appeal to bigotry is so obviously wrong-headed. A voter who is going to make their bigotry the priority is just going to vote for the most bigoted candidate. You win by differentiation, not by being the weaker version of an existing flavor.

Toddler update: my husband let her taste his ice cream and she took the ice cream and ran. My husband has tried to bribe her to give it back my replacing it with a biscuit. Anyway now the toddler has an ice cream and a biscuit

And you know, by the devil I do mean the billionaire owners of various social media companies.