It is once again The Interregnum. It has always been The Interregnum.

Stephen Miller is basically an uncooked sausage with a tie and a Siegrunen tattoo.

Countryside Alliance ‘inveterate liars‘ says everyone who knows anything about them.

Not acceptable. Authors can and should support translators.

I know it‘s one thing amongst a tidal wave of corruption, but Americans ought to care more about Trump constantly holding state meetings in Mar-a-Lago. It‘s so obviously just another way to shovel tax revenue into his own pockets. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

A Christmas crusade to please the Christian nationalists & evangelicals, Trump must be getting desperate. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Quadruple lock on pensions, only now they get the lowest of the four locks, and the fourth lock is the UCEA annual pay offer

News story warning people not to use AI to help plan their mountain walks. But sure, use it to govern the country.

'Record numbers of Swedish retirees are enrolling in a university run “by pensioners for pensioners” amid increased loneliness and a growing appetite for learning and in-person interactions.' 1/2

It's that day again. Happy anniversary

Relieved that I don’t need to understand ‘skibidi’ as @economist.com tells me it won’t last and didn’t mean anything anyway. From a good piece on slang economist.com/interactive/...

Experimental evidence that students are more likely to contest grades when they are delivered by an evaluator with a female-sounding name. "These findings suggest that women in evaluative positions face disproportionate resistance when delivering negative assessments."

Call for papers: Philosophy through Art, Games, and Fiction think.taylorandfranc... Guest editor: Lisa Bortolotti. Deadline: 31 July 2026. Submit your work! #philsky #philpsy

The mistake I made in buying Youngest Boy a new graphics card was that I also had to buy him a new power supply because of it, and so I have spent some of my Christmas morning doing IT. Triggering.

I had never given a 0% for an assignment until the age of AI. Now, I receive assignments that are written by AI & address none of the requirements of the assessments (because the AI hasn‘t been able to parse the instructions properly).

Woo hoo, a festive offer from a predatory journal awaits me on Christmas day. The Journal of Technology offers ‘ensures peer review within 24 hours and publication within 2 days.‘ so we can be sure of very rigorous standards. I could submit some GenAI bullshit today & be published before 2026.

Going to eat warm strudle, drink nice coffee and enjoy watching my son be excited for probably the last time before he becomes to cool & worldly for Christmas. Merry Christmas everyone.

Santa is clearly getting too much attention today, Donald is angry.

I owe whoever the hell Stephen Kirschner is a heartfelt apology for blackening his name. Of course, I meant to type Stephen Kershnar, who is the real arsehole whose character I meant to attack. Sorry wrong Stephen.

40% of my Google Scholar recommended articles are now about AI. Why? There isn‘t a subject I’m less interested in reading papers about. The only way I could be less interested would be if Stephen Kirchner wrote a paper about how he‘d like to bone an AI in a racist way. Stop making everything worse!

This quote will be used in The Trials. And we will ask all our children to read it in school to Never Forget.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is deeply mediocre at best. He owes his successes to the fact that he‘s a deeply unpleasant contrarian who sucks up to authoritarians. The same traits explain his failures. So, he‘s almost right.

As an inexperienced Lobby Correspondent with no sources inside government, one of the things I realised was that when Tom Kelly was especially grumpy about an issue, it was because there was an internal problem with it, and he knew it. His letter to The Times about why the briefings matter:

Getting into the Christmas spirit with a festive holiday biopsy. Ho ho ho!

Glad to see what is happening to the BBC Written Archive getting a bit more coverage. Can I suggest people use the public consultation for the BBC Charter Review to raise this issue www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/9febe15...

📢 #PoliticalTheory scholars, tell us about the best recent book by a first-time writer in the field 📚 #ECPRPrizes Nominate for the £450 🏆 Political Theory prize co-sponsored by the Contemporary Political Theory journal ⏳ 9 Jan buff.ly/1FHPpmr #AcademicSky #PoliSky

Christmas stuff, Steve. You went in for CHRISTMAS STUFF!!

I could tell so many stories about my 4 years as volunteer curator of Bungay Museum. Most of these fall under the category of ‘things we found damp in 1980s carrier bags placed there by the previous curator’

I don’t believe Andrew did all of that asking for ‘inappropriate friends‘ from Epstein & having sex with young trafficked women, corruption, & terrible behaviour without a whole lot of people enabling it or looking the other way.

Trump‘s regime is going to keep punching us, no matter how diplomatic or sycophantic we are. Mark Rutter calling Trump daddy won‘t help, Kier Starmer giving Trump an invite to dine with the King won‘t help, Keller-Sutter flying to Washington to beg won‘t help, & neither will Zelensky wearing a suit.

America does not need the help of Canada to make Americans and their media look silly.

It should be surprising, but it‘s entirely in-keeping for the billionaire tech-bro class. There are a lot of natalists & eugenicists amongst them & this is the natural extension. Musk is doing similar. Peter Thiel is in on the act. They are all awful.

I don't deny that dogs can sometimes be quite lovely but what I will say is I don't trust their opinions. If a cat recommended me an album it had bought, I'd totally check it out. If a dog did the same, I'd promise to listen to the album, out of politeness, with no intention of actually doing so

Ooh, he 'ominously' reminded a corporation of its legal obligations, what a monster! I suppose, if you're a lawless authoritarian, who knows they'll end up in jail for their crimes, invoking the rule of law does sound scary.

It's spelled 'Matt Goodwin'.

Can confirm, great read.

time we started to retaliate

'agents of the global censorship-industrial complex' - never mind RFK Jr., every single person in the Trump regime has brain worms. Who in their right mind writes like like that? Nobody. Maniacs, the lot of them.

It‘s not like the Turning Point/MAGA lot don‘t know what the people they worship are like. They welcomed Nicki Minaj - who married a known rapist - on that Turning Point stage to lavish praise on Trump - another known rapist. They know these men are abusers & they either don‘t care or they like it.

You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to the Supreme Court

it’s great how most of the English teams in the Champions League has various types of bad injury crises, but we’re all pretending we don’t know why it’s happening

All workers will be manual labourers. All workers will be manual labourers. No service-sector jobs, no teachers, academics, customer support, scientists, doctors, IT workers, architects, etc. The AI future sure sounds terrible for everyone who isn‘t already fabulously wealthy.

Going to get me one of these so I can be like my spirit animal. At the very least it‘ll be more use than GenAI.

Oh god, some right-wing rag has dug up a silly blog post, published by a Brighton Museum *three sodding years ago* & now we are having puce-faced culture wars nonsense about post-colonial Santa. 1) it‘s Brighton guys, what do you expect? 2) it was 3 years ago! Society didn‘t collapse because of it!

"The emails do not indicate any wrongdoing" Astonishing levels of benefit of the doubt going on here to say an email to a convicted sex-trafficker asking for "inappropriate friends" doesn't indicate any wrongdoing. It bloody well does.

The new collective noun for rich farmers is an ‘avoidance’. An avoidance of rich farmers.

via The New Yorker, Ellis Rosen cartoon

I'm reading "still being developed" as Trump having drawn the battleships himself, and given them features like invisibility, a button you can press to convert them into a submarine, and laser cannons that go "PEW! PEW! PEW!"

Cornwall doesn‘t even merit a comedy new name😢. Damned if I‘m going to opt for ‘Powys‘ as a decidedly second best.