And Russia is banking on it.

It's not credible the US would fight a nuclear war over Europe if they aren't willing to contribute conventionally.

If a judge makes a decision on their own, only their own biases will influence the verdict. In a jury, consensus needs to be reached.

As far as I can see, this nat sec strategy is far harsher on Europe than on Russia. There is no mention of a threat from Russia or of deterrence, only that "re-establishing strategic stability" is a priority. Europe is cast as a major threat to freedom. A radical, dangerous document.

A truly sinister document.

Like something Dugin wrote www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

“Ireland’s security services have found that the drones at Dublin Airport were large, hugely expensive, of military specification, and that the incident could be classed as a hybrid attack.” From which we are undefended. www.thejournal.ie/drones-dubli...

Overjoyed that my book The Collaborative Constitution @cambup-law.cambridge.org has won The Inner Temple Main Author Book Prize 2025! Great to celebrate with my fellow finalists Sean Coyle, Liron Schmilovitz & @vmantouvalou.bsky.social & the New Author winner Brooke Marshall.

ok THIS might be the most beautiful photo from Mars yet 🧪

Here's Churchill spouting the Illuminati Conspiracy Theory in February 1920. Shocking that he believed this nonsense. Main quote on right

it is crazy that the president is essentially just the project manager for a medium-sized hotel ballroom who tweets things which would yet someone with that actual job fired instantaneously

"Watch what Trump's inner cohort -- in particular, Kushner -- wants to do to Ukraine and what they want to do to Gaza, because it indicates what they want to do to the world at large." www.youtube.com/watch?v=jymh...

who decided to call it Secret Santa when Nondisclosure Claus was right there

In his memoirs, King Hamilton said of his direction in the Gay News blasphemy case: "throughout its preparation, and also when delivering it, I was half-conscious of being guided by some divine inspiration.". Tony Bradney suggested KH could have ended the sentence at "half-conscious" ...

Jurors do get multiple warnings. The temptation to discuss a case with a fellow juror outside the room is also intense. Especially in a very emotive trial. I get it but jurors shouldn’t do it.

The presumption is that the case should only be prosecuted in court. What about the risk of bad actors doing “their own research”?

No, but the conviction was quashed and a retrial ordered by the Court of Appeal because it was an unchallenged experiment: "there can be no doubt that the four jurors were going through the motion of asking questions to that end and apparently receiving answers ...

It seems to us that what matters is not whether the answers were truly from the deceased, but whether the jurors believed them to be so or whether they may have been influenced by the answers received during the exercise or experiment." (Young (Stephen) [1995] QB 324).

'Restaurant' comes from the same French word that gave us 'restore.' This is the reason why there is no 'n' in 'restaurateur.'

What a profoundly nasty person (also we seem to move ever closer to a reproduction of Orwell's description of Winston Smith's trip to the cinema, as the audience cheered images of people killed in the water "then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air")

I regret that, as with “fulsome” and “refute”, in the war for the correct usage of “disingenuous”, we’ve formed a small and shrinking square of a last stand.

The Road to Surfdom

This is fascinating in the sense that the social media companies have managed to create a norm in which we think they can’t and shouldn’t be regulated. I wonder if people thought about cigarettes and alcohol this way once upon a time.

Al Bacio, Andrea! (“a chef’s kiss”). I missed this release at the time. Thank you!

“In days after Alaska, a European intel agency distributed a hard-copy report in an envelope to some of the continent’s most senior national security officials, who were shocked by the contents: Inside were details of the commercial and economic plans the Trump admin had been pursuing with Russia.”

You can devise solutions for individual incentives, for corruption, for power balancing, but if it is the People themselves who are corrupt...you can't fix that. The only solution I see is for the People to relearn the virtue of not touching the stove by virtue of stove-touching.

The core problem is that in a state, something has to be sovereign - in a democracy, it is the people - and you can design and tinker as much as you like but there is no way to design around a loss of virtue in that sovereign entity. If the people keep elected maniacs, no guardrails can hold.

If you think that the 2012 Olympics were the high water mark for the UK, then you were too wealthy to notice the prior 4 years of decline.

Ofc, we didn't actually invade Finland. We "assisted" the new "legitimate government" who "asked" for help after tiny Finland aggressively attacked USSR just as our army was peacefully massed on their previous border in attack formation. Again. Imagine that happening today

OTD in 1939 USSR began to liberate Finland from themselves in the Winter War. It followed denials, a false flag, a bullshit excuse, us deliberately targeting civilians while we took massive casualties we lied about. Imagine that happening today...

“Cutting ordinary people out of the judicial system, weakening the scope of jury trials, and leaning even more upon magistrates and judges, will reinforce a more technocratic system and only deepen public mistrust.” My @theobserveruk.bsky.social column: observer.co.uk/news/columni...

Darn it he’s right

Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior.bsky.social said it best in 2020

They can and do, and not just state actors.

one reason "great power competition" is a bad description of the emerging order is that an interlinked global kleptocracy does not care about national interests or rivalries

“Urbem venalem et mature perituram, si emptorem invenerit.”

🏺 Two things have become clear in researching #Matriarcha: 1) direct evidence of how dangerous birth is – skeletons with stuck at-term babies inside them – goes back many millennia 2) humans/hominins have likely been obligate social birthers for about as long as they've been obligate tool users

The Somersets and FitzAlan-Howards have been around for a while.

Curious how this enjoyably peripheral, not to say frivolous, exchange follows a rather serious point made by the LCJ and reported by Joshua Rozenberg.

EN DIRECT, guerre en Ukraine : le conseiller de la Maison Blanche Steve Witkoff a conseillé la Russie sur la manière de présenter son « plan de paix » à Trump

I've done more than my fair share of jury service - 4 cases in total - and am in favour of it as a direct result of that experience. It works. Feels like an important democratic check (not least) on the power of judges - who, through no fault of their own - must inevitably get jaded by experience.

In essence: juries are important for what decisions they prevent others from making.

The entire world can clearly see that Putin owns Steve Witkoff and yet Witkoff is the one that Trump wants leading the negotiations on a peace deal. If Putin owns Witkoff, and Trump doesn’t care, that means Putin owns Trump - either directly, by proxy, or by stupidity.

Witkoff advised the Russians on how to pitch their Ukraine plan to Trump www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I think that is a little too much but other systems out there and no one says that betrays justice ? a defendent is still presume innocent and the crown still have to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt

Whose side is he on? Whose side are we on? Spoiler alert: We already knew the answers. This just confirms them.

Dutch public broadcaster NOS quits X over disinformation reut.rs/3KpybRU

Rumpole fans are often shocked to learn that it's the source of "She Who Must Be Obeyed."