Danya Ruttenberg on how to face the horrors now - may all be protected from harm www.lifeisasacredtext.com/p/496b0dbd-a...

Is Starmer next? Have Jenrick's teeth been photoshopped? #Reform #whiteteethsinkships

How is it difficult for anyone to understand this? Thank you, @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Mandelson, in the Kuenssberg interview "suggested that as a gay man he knew nothing of the disgraced financier’s sex life." I've listened to audio of testimony by a *male* victim of abuse at Epstein events. Sexuality and gender are irrelevant here. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Playing a game with a pal: if you imagine the current US administration as a star-field, each star a blaze of corruption, which would shine brightest. And if Noem is on your short list, is there any other sense in which she's bright? Friend and I converging on Vance as the brightest of the worst.

Please read this. The UK political & media establishment is asleep at the wheel. We have made ourselves wholly dependent on a Trump ally for our national security at the exact moment Trump is threatening to invade a NATO ally open.substack.com/pub/broligar...

sound issues on #LUTV as Bryn Law eats a succession of microphones; a brief crunching sound and then the sound disappears. #LUFC pharmaceutical sedatives apparently not available so they're showing him a series of goalless draws from the 2007 season.

Baptism begins w/renouncing Satan & evil: Military incursions and bombings? I renounce them. Big Lie and Insurrection defended by Orwellian propaganda? I renounce them. Masked state agents rounding up human beings and shooting those who protest? I renounce them. open.substack.com/pub/dianabut...

"Well, he would, wouldn't he" - Mandy Rice-Davis www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Looking at the UK Church, and its relative silence over the genocide in Gaza, I'm struck by the way we use that word 'silence'. We use it as if it were singular, when in fact we're talking about a plurality of silences. Silence as action, each silence encouraging another silence.

Labour's "core mission is about creating a fairer and more equal society", says Luke Akehurst. That was believable for folk who grew up with Labour leaders like Wilson, Callaghan, Foot. Now you can only laugh. www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

If you think you should have the right to privacy, consider responding the Home Office consultation on the extended use of Live Facial Recognition. A response tool that @bigbrotherwatch.bsky.social have put together: bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campaigns/st...

leaving X cost me contact with lots of good people; it meant leaving behind good threads (if you leave, retrieve stuff before you go) .. but, I'm glad I left. Better for my sanity, better for my conscience.. If you're still there, please reconsider

Winter flowering cherry (Prunus autumnalis rosea) in #Montrose, #Scotland #nature #naturephotograpy

keep coming back to this. Once US cooperation stops, all those expensive F35s lose strategic value. It was designed to make operation independent of the US impossible. You might keep a few flying for a year or so, but you lose access to the software / crypto keys that make it a functioning system.

"Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence." A fact that's been inescapable for over a century. How on earth has the fossil fuel industry managed to keep a respectable face for so long?

Trump on the Venezuela / Maduro intervention: it was "done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement". Do we know which specific US forces actually did the bombing / kidnapping? If the action was illegal or unconstitutional (surely it was) then who exactly carried out Trump's orders?

Deafening 'nothing to do with us' from European leaders on the bombing of Caracas and capture of Maduro. Starmer's non-condemnatory comment: 'We must uphold international law' while turning a blind eye to a massive breach of it; cynical as it gets. And still stronger than most EU leaders.

my mother died just a few years ago. her older brother fought at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. My uncle. 110 years, and it's just one generation. It's bizarre that so many people accept the delusion that a generation is just c. 30 years.

this is one hell of a 🧵 picking up where @ruthdeyermond.bsky.social pivots to Europe to dish out a dose of realism. It's not just Trump. The US is not going to start being nice to Europe again once Trump's term is done.

The most innocent of moments - a young Palestinian girl filming herself showing her hair clips - is interrupted by Israeli missiles. Yes, they shoot missiles at kids in tents. Don't tell me it's complicated Jana and her brother survived, but the rest of their family was killed

Julie Andrews for me. The hills are going to be alive. I am Trapped in a destiny beyond my ken. I need someone older and wiser but next March will see my X0th birthday. I suspect I'm buggered on that front. Still, warm apple strudels.

I don't this could be better said. And wait till Mike Johnson reads Matthew 25.

Well worth it for the unpaywalled intro alone, on Putin's 'narrative power'. What @ldfreedman.bsky.social says here about Narrative Power is something worth considering in US and UK politics as much as in Ukraine. But read it for Ukraine. samf.substack.com/p/why-kupyan...

Those who predict it in the UK are likewise being dismissed, particularly those who warn of the incipient fascism of the conservative UK Church. Farage and Robinson aren't fools; they know the Christian element of their constituency and they know the pollling.

we all know what it's like to be screwed by non-payment (in this case the artist's partner). Non-artists, there is really no way to 'support the arts' that doesn't involve putting your hand in your pocket. This crowdfunder is nearly there, a fiver from a few of you will do it.

gin ye spik the #Scots leid, or yer lairnin, hae a luik at Linda Bruce's thesis aboot Adult Lairners. Interviewees are pure dead brilliant so they are. Yours, 'Simon'. oro.open.ac.uk/107147/

Wes Streeting compares the BMA strike to doctors marching against the foundation of the NHS. #Newsnight The government 'stuffed the doctors' mouths with gold' back in the 1940s. This time it's the private medicine lobby that's stuffed Streeting's mouth with gold, hundreds of thousands of pounds.

esp. good for Marina Henke (@mephenke.bsky.social) on a three-way split among Trump's goons on state / foreign policy: 1. Techno-Libertarian-Isolationist-Authoritarians (Thiel, Musk etc.) 2. White-Supremacist-Fascists (Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, Vance) 3. Normie Republicans (Marcio Rubio usw.)

The trajectory we're on in the West can be articulated as 'from democracy to authoritarianism' even 'fascism', but much of the debate strikes me as reality-avoidance. The trajectory we're on is 'towards violence'. 🧵 on memorialisation & conceptualisaton versus physicality bsky.app/profile/munr...

For years, on Germany 1919-45, I've made a point of saying 'National Socialism' rather than the Nz word, and 'The leader' rather than the Htr name. It's rarely necessary to use the boo words. I saw that the Nz and Htr words had become 'reality avoidance' rather than reality confrontation.

thinking about church: hit by a wave of sadness Why is it that nobody, inside or outside the church, is ever surprised at horrible behaviour by church leaders.

love this: the composition works as an abstract, both the line and the distribution of light and dark, but there's just enough information in the image to give it a specific location, and there's a sense of the person in the image, who they are. To have all of that in one image is wonderful.

oldie: 2003 I got a semester at the art college in #Karlsruhe. Beautiful city, fountains everywhere. I shot almost everything with old folder cameras, mainly Zeiss Ikons at 6 x 9. This is from the fountain in the big square behind the post office. #streetphotography and #fineartnude all in one

Trump's US National Security Strategy (NSS) for 2025. HT @hcrichardson.bsky.social Bigly 'America First'; multi-swipes at NATO: members going 'non-European'; Nato, EU etc. 'sovereignty-sapping'; pro-Putin so Nato mustn't expand. usw. All very Brexity. Here's an update of Bruce Mackinnon's classic.

killing people is increasingly profitable data from @sipri.org www.sipri.org/media/press-...

Donnarumma & Guardiola Rule 12: Cautionable Offences: Unsporting Behaviour "attempts to deceive the referee e.g. by feigning injury or pretending to have been fouled (simulation)" Tell me how the fake injury / time out doesn't fit this. #LUFC #FA #MOTD @fwaofficial.bsky.social

something has to be done about this or we're in a situation where a team can call a time out whenever they want. #LUFC

Dorigo comments that we can now pressurise the City side and I'm stuck with the mental image of Ampadu with a bicycle pump trying to inflate Haaland. #LUFC

Perri & Darlow, surely time to admit that neither is really up to the Premier League. Even if the only alternative is Meslier. #LUFC

On authoritarianism in the UK. "More people now believe Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules. 43% agreed, while 31% disagreed. Last year, 39% agreed, and an equal proportion disagreed." 38% of Labour voters agreed. www.electoralcommission.org.uk/research-rep...

Introduce yourself with five gigs you've seen Leonard Cohen Richard Hawley Van Morrison Half Man Half Biscuit The Corries

I wrote about a novel approach to tackling misinformation currently being discussed in Wales--and which some say Canada should try, too. What if we made a rule so politicians couldn't lie? www.thestar.com/politics/fed...

on UK Corruption, from @equalitytrust.bsky.social [edit to shorten] equalitytrust.org.uk/evidence-bas...

I bet the techbros are already lobbying for exactly this, it's really just an extension of AI deciding asylum claims. I have zero confidence in this government having the integrity to resist. #Lammy #juries #trials

I thought I was joking .. #OBR

The UK's governmental and administrative machinery taking its usual painstakingly careful approach to the distribution and publication of information. #OBR #HMG

What the hell has Piers Morgan to offer on the subject of the war in Ukraine? #Newsnight