For 'simplification' read 'deregulation' + for 'deregulation' read removing all the rules that protect us from polluted air, water, soil, + just relying on those fine chaps at the corporations to do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts

congratulations to Microsoft on inventing something more annoying than Clippy

Earth's systems are nearing tipping points that could plunge the planet into a "hothouse" regime — but there's still time to prevent that from happening, scientists say. www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

Deregulating the tech-vultures? *These* tech-vultures? What is the EPP smoking?

Looking forward to this event tomorrow! Reviving the Commons: The Civil Commons - Kairos share.google/3aVx0DNdXXCJ...

The further context provided in the (albeit extremely condensed) Netflix Kurukshetra show doesn't make it much better imo. The fight is over mere succession to a throne. Both sides fight dirty, and the result is carnage and permanent erosion of humanity's honour.

Frustrating to hear. I was really starting to think that Zack might be better than I had initially thought. The really sociopathic thing would be for the West to outflank Ukraine in willingness to negotiate with Russia. It simply isn't our place to trade away their existence or security.

It seems pretty risky to tell people they won't see the change they want if they vote Green, given that they already voted Labour and didn't see the change they wanted.

1. This is a thread on freedom, and how easy it is to lose. Over the past 2,000 years in Europe, there have been few periods and places of freedom. For much of the time we lived under highly oppressive tyrannies of various kinds, whether small or grand, local or imperial, secular or religious.🧵

Brings to mind Pascal's wager and Euthyphro's definitions of piety.

Was at a talk on climate and investment arbitration last night and the thought struck me how ISDS is a bit like Wotan's spear in the Ring Cycle - a formidable weapon representing a bunch of world-dominating treaties, which can nonetheless be broken by the fearless!

“authors & publishers who filed a lawsuit against the Sam Altman-led firm have secured access to internal Slack messages… discussing the mass deletion of a pirated books dataset… A NY district court ordered OpenAI to hand over the communications regarding data deletion” futurism.com/artificial-i...

🌎 A healthy planet is a human right. The UN has now made it clear: there's no social justice on a dying planet. Our joint blog w/ @foeint.bsky.social @opportunitygreen.org @ercscot.bsky.social and @koldocasla.bsky.social

Zohran Mamdani polled +40% on men under 30. So we wasted all that time on all those think pieces about how we need a Joe Rogan for the left, when what we actually needed were *policies* for the left.

🔴 MPs are banned from been paid to give 'political advice' - but Lords can. And guess what? Many Conservative shadow ministers in the Lords are being paid by the industries they’re meant to scrutinise. New on Democracy for Sale democracyforsale.substack.com/p/the-lords-...

A District Judge has cleared Tommy Robinson on a terror charge because he found Robinson had a protected belief. How does that pass the 5th limb of the Grainger test? www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crim...

Divide England into smaller parts democratically capable of equality with the non-English parts. End the supermajority core vs remote periphery dynamic.

People use and understand these terms to refer to all political fronts, not just the economic. You can't narrow the meanings of words by unilateral fiat even if that would be more useful, which I don't think is the case here.

𝘗𝘢𝘶𝘭 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯 𝘗𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘮 has a cover and a website! Conceived as a companion to PwJ (Fortress, 2015), this is the first go-to introductory resource on PwP (Fortress, 2025). The publication date is set for 4 Nov 2025, just in time for SBL. www.fortresspress.com/store/produc...

🚨🚨Things are just getting worse. 🧵 www.politico.eu/article/us-a...

Very depressing indeed. I commute and believe me, the last thing that concerns me about this horrific incident is the nationality of the perpetrators.

"More religious societies and cultures where there was a preference for faith over science showed high levels of nature connection." This is nuts. Science *is* the process of paying careful and methodical attention to nature, which faith circumvents more or less by definition.

A thing about royal scandals in the UK - each one adds a new layer of irony to the scene where the horrified Macbeth sees the vision of the line of Banquo's heirs stretching out to the crack of doom.

Counterpoint: In his very online weirdness, Elon Musk is the worst kind of patron least likely to ensure lasting success for the UK Right

Clear lesson in why we should generally mistrust signifiers of honour and rank - there is pressure to spectacularly misallocate them like this.

Essential to have a strong egalitarian alternative to Labour that nonetheless firmly rejects Sultana's position on Ukraine.

✈️ The aviation industry’s message: tax us if you must – just don’t spend it saving lives from climate change. Our CEO writes about how a small proposed levy on luxury flights – to fund climate action – has the industry up in arms. Read our blog 👉 www.opportunitygreen.org/blog/air-pas...

On a related note, here's a pretty exciting paper seeking to apply the principle of unjust enrichment in the valuation of damages in ISDS, to prevent investors from claiming "lost profits" from projects that would have breached the Paris Agreement: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A reminder that the UK’s ban on LGBT people serving in the armed forces was only lifted after a judgment from the European Court of Human Rights. 🔗 www.bbc.com/news/article... via www.bbcnews.com #ECHR #OurRightsAndFreedoms #Article8 #PrivateLife #MeddlingForeignCourt #CreditWhereItsDue

Asylum seekers, housed in hotels in Manchester, are reaching out in their own words to address the concerns of the local community. Please take a minute to read their letter, & share it with the people in your life who need to hear the truth about the people they are protesting.

Keir Starmer shouldn't wait until the likely fiasco of the May local elections. If he has any concern for party and country, he should step aside now, giving his successor as long as possible to undo the damage of his disastrous premiership and restore hope in politics.

Or, you know, public bodies could make decisions lawfully and correctly. Just a thought. What you will not find in this rambling attempted anecdata, btw, is the success rate of JRs, or doing the actual sums on costs. The sort of cherrypicking that, ironically, would give good grounds for a JR.

I am now interested in changing path - to somewhere hopefully where the knowledge I've accrued is useful (and that furthers a worthy cause) but that doesn't require the SQE. To pass the SQE I would need to fall in love with the curriculum so that it no longer feels a chore to sacrifice time to it.

Must read for anyone who cares about HE "Put simply, the technology that OpenAI and co are pushing threatens the very raison d'être of universities. "

"If we fail to protect permafrost ecosystems, the consequences for human rights, biosphere integrity, and global #climate will be severe. The policy implications are clear: the faster we reduce human emissions and draw down atmospheric CO2, the more of the permafrost domain we can save."

Think we need to use more accurate terminology that avoids lending itself to misleading analogies. A good starting point would be to replace "far" with "cruel", because cruelty is an objectively identifiable measure that doesn't move with the Overton window.

Poor helpless things. If only they had some way of averting their predicament...

Unsurprisingly, people who actually have to deal with dead bodies in the water are more reluctant to embrace risky and dangerous methods than grandstanding politicians are.

‘Labour polled 11% in a seat that the party has held for 100 years’ is the headline news this morning. Feels like a headline going to hear a lot in the next year. (Also result - Plaid win - does show that the fissuring of British politics isn’t all to the right)

Three-quarters of Brits support Green Party’s wealth tax, YouGov poll finds www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/three-q...

Who coined the phrase "I make no bones about it"? What possible context could give rise to an understanding that prevarication is somehow a bit reminiscent, if you squint, of how bones are made? And why is the offspring that contains the new bones ignored as mere by-product in this formulation?

Profoundly unserious.

The idea (in the US and UK) that immigration is the central issue of our time is really mass psychosis.

The green deal regulations were already unjustifiably weak when passed. They should simply not be weakened further.

Rather than think about desired destinations, we should instead think about climate change as an emergency - and act now to limit it as much as possible. That demands the rapid phase out of fossil fuels. If we do not do that we are cooked. 4/6 www.technosphere.earth/as-dreams-of...

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

Labour can't even do its Brexit shift competently. Say it was wrong and you can make Farage carry the can. Say it was badly executed, as Labour is doing, and you support his narrative that Leave voters were betrayed. It would be funny - except we'll all have to carry the can for their incompetence.

Nigel Farage has, very clearly, broken parliamentary rules. Will any journalists challenge him on it? Via Private Eye

Can we keep antibiotics working? Yes, but the world needs to follow the EU and the UK | Devi Sridhar

Research by @aprilhayes.bsky.social indicates bacteria exposed to antibiotics alongside a mix of other meds, were more likely to develop antibiotic resistant traits. That's bad news because that's often what happens in sewage. 🧵 1/10 theconversation.com/growing-cock...