haha, the post chavistas paid him off in the hydrocarbon equivalent of black tar heroin in return for business as usual.

we rigged up a squirrel feeder in the garden and the squirrels hang upside down to take the nuts then do a backflip on to the nearest branch to eat them.

one thing the Australian, Canadian and Norwegian left had in common was that they were 'relentlessly' anti-Trump, unlike the Prime Minister who had difficulty affirming that Canada was a valid country.

the Mongols managed to establish an empire stretching from modern day Vietnam to Poland, including Baghdad and Moscow (as tributary), leaving behind only dumplings and vague folk memories of horse archery and skull pyramids.

fascinating bit of background here from October. Also impressed by Qatar continuing to carve itself an international role as the place enemies go to talk.

this is kind of existential for NATO.

the US DNI is well-known Putin fan Tulsi Gabbard, who gets to see what we contribute to Five Eyes. It would be unwise to assume at this point that an intelligence relationship with the US is not subject to Russian penetration.

yeah, i'm leaning this way.

fellow Europeans, I think we can confirm from today's events that Greenland is definitely on a list somewhere.

oh, nothing much. Just China eyeing a certain offshore island with a renewed sense of hemispheric entitlement.

many years ago i sent a press release fashioned as a story to the business desk of the MEN and they just printed the whole thing without even contacting me. This process has now been automated.

i get that you have to be circumspect with the mad god emperor of the world's hyperpower and his crazed minions, but has any other government displayed the level of abject, snivelling cowardice in the face of Trumpismo as our own?

guys, "the judges at the ICC are being sanctioned by the USA and can't access their iphones or bank accounts" and "why aren't any countries banning twitter or prosecuting elon musk for owning a site that manufactures CSAM" stories are the same story

Talking Pics TV just had that guy from Mungo Jerry on, who is still rocking that Fred West with a Guitar look.

come January, it'll be five years since I was diagnosed with heart failure. I'm pleased with this milestone since the death rate over that period is 52%, so i beat the odds. So i stride into the next five years, over which period the death rate is a mere 50%. Onwards!

not that surprising. Cultural whoop de doo aside, the basic question is 'do i have confidence in this joint enterprise' and the case for 'yes' is increasingly difficult to make.

we keep hearing about McSweeney and AI. Given the well established tendency for LLM's to confabulate with their eager users, have we considered the possibility that Labour have spent their time in office appealing to imaginary voters? What a way for a major party to die.

interestingly revealing of who is still sticking with the Tories

drunkenly tripped over Bjork at a party in Stoke Newington (she was lying on the floor at the time).

we went to great lengths to insist that Wiliam Joyce - Lord Haw Haw - was a British citizen precisely in order to bring him back to face justice.

apropos of nothing much right now, but the sort of people who move to Dubai make me remember fondly the last chapter of The Getaway.

a million gets you through the door. It's an earnest that you have money to spare. Six million gets you the deal. I bet you'll also be expected to contribute further, as required. Pardons can be revoked you know.

this is interesting since the US supplies and maintains the missiles which carry Britain's nuclear warheads.

having a cheeky vodka in honour of winterval.

odd thing about this whole issue is the fact that much of the private sector does not employ people full time, does not employ them on consecutive days, and through bogus 'self-employment' contracts does not technically employ them at all.

greatest generation update; ex-Marine traumatised in combat on Okinawa may have been both the Black Dahlia perpetrator *and* the Zodiac killer: www.latimes.com/california/s...

AI, show me what an aesthetic battleship might look like.

The United States is shortly to have the world's most vulgar navy.

i hate it when that happens: “It’s like we’ve fast forwarded straight to the end of Reservoir Dogs where everyone gets killed, but without enjoying 10 years of successful government beforehand." www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-mp...

so Epstein used to hang out with Mark Rothko a lot.

it's widely assumed that when Xi Jinping vanishes for a bit, which he occasionally does, that he's off on a bender.

Blazing Saddles!

agents of the law, luckless pedestrians i see you out there, with rage in your eyes and your megaphones

ah, back in the old days when the Sun was a kind of hegemonic malignancy, and people lived in fear of it, accepting that they had to.

this was, basically, the driver of the Anglo-American coup against Mossadegh in Iran in 1952. The president didn't just tweet it out though.

come for the repeated intentional strangulation, stay for the 18 carat gold 'fully functioning' toilet. Ladies, gentlemen and foreign friends: I give you the British Aristocracy. www.itv.com/news/meridia...

never knew that Rob Reiner was the American version of the Scouse Git on Till Death us Do Part.

On the BBC isn't what it was theme, I'm still taken short by Caron Keating grilling Margaret Thatcher about British aid to the Khmers Rouges on a children's television christmas special. Still available on YouTube.

always worth hearing from the people who make your stuff www.equator.org/articles/the...

having a life limiting ailment, i find it helps that our technological overlords are always doing things that make you actively want to die.

not really keeping up these days, but this is a new one on me.

Ross Thomas' The Fools in Town are On Our Side

ah, this might explain a few things

there were margarine riots in Sweden during WW2, due to shortages. Don't know much more about it than that, I'm afraid.

obvious for ages that Trump isn't interested in Taiwan, genuinely surprised Japan didn't realise this.

thing is it's McSweeney who needs to go, preferably to the heart of the sun, and Starmer is just part of that package.

you see, the thing about decadence is that the people who complain about it most *are* the decadence.

Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

shortly before I went to University in 1982 my gran advised me to give up on the pointy head stuff and get an apprenticeship with Michelin Tyres. Really thought that was the last gasp of that approach, but now it comes from a faction in a Labour government.

haha yeah