can’t believe a narcissist is being so publicly humiliated by a reflecting pool

i have said it a thousand times in these discussions: a gatling gun, not a silver bullet. more trees. more green. distributed heat networks. cool hubs. all of this shit.

As we all know, getting a degree means you’re no longer black. The only way to count as black is if you don’t take jobs white people think only white people should be able to get bsky.app/profile/edro...

It's probably time European journalists wrapped their heads around Heat Index (temp + relative humidity). In high humidity, sweating is less efficient, making heat worse, e.g.: Experiencing 35°C in London UK (70% RH) is more dangerous than 50°C in Phoenix Arizona (15% RH)

I think this is broadly true - especially when unions represent workers in a directly affected industry - but I do think there's often this presumption that unions will at all times act in narrow self-interest and I'm not sure that's the case

When you combine stuff like this with the ongoing heat jamboree, anyone talking about abandoning net zero should be laughed out of town as not just unserious but deeply, deeply stupid.

Eric Pickles also an often underrated villain here, even if the charge can ultimately be laid at Cameron's feet

If you asked me, off the top of my head, to name a non-Oxbridge university in England synonymous with excellence in the Humanities - I would probably think of Exeter first. This feels like a very deliberate, targeted and ideological Bonfire of the Humanities

Mildly amused to see people grimly warning that the blood-dimmed tide of populist unrest has swept aside all bonds of civil government and unleashed the power of the Mob on an innocent and unwitting nation because the outgoing New York City Comptroller won a congressional primary.

This is another reason why I think trying to separate out the liberalism/illiberalism dimension from economics is a red herring: Labour's discomfort with the shifting socioeconomic make-up of the electorate and its own base has fuelled its reactionary turn, often exacerbating material inequalities.

“Brussels bureau chief, The Economist and possessor of a special dictionary”

Good work by Sadiq Here's a map of where you can find the water fountains: share.google/XtEOz3I0j9NH... Next step: making it compulsory for all cafes and shops to offer water refills when the temperature rises above 30 degrees

when I find a great Wikipedia page and follow all the links on it to other great Wikipedia pages that's called "turnin' purples"

the tube is a furnace at the best of times, I can't imagine what it must be like when London's in the very high 30s

Lets hope this doesn't become a rolling emergency. But it's pretty unprecedented to have so many regions of the UK at Red Alert status like this, and the UKHSA manual is pretty clear, that these are the starts of failures we will start to see in heat health impact moments like this.

This is not good. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

when people say that there is an entire welfare network for far right cranks that are bankrolled by local car barons and billionaires, what that means is that every university is prone to opening a Center For Freedom Thoughts Studies that focuses on how to ban trans people and put migrants in camps.

Extreme temperatures are expected in the UK this week ☀️🌡️ But what are the rules about working in the heat? unsn.uk/hotweather

with notably rare exceptions, Alan Greenspan is alive and well

Those poor girls :( www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/cour…

anyway Halifax is pretty nice, have a Minster

Same. I am from an immigrant family, marrying an immigrant, teaching immigrant students. It is *incredibly* hard for me not to see Mahmood's policies as a central and vicious betrayal of core values. This combined with Starmer's own rhetoric on the matter thoroughly disillusioned me on them.

a coalition government that explicitly passed legislation to go "actually, the Parliament won't work the way it previously has" to ensure the coalition partners didn't just blow it up

Like the "the war on drugs" Deportation centres will be spectacularly ineffective, wasting insane amounts of public money, causing great human misery, boosting the income of traffickers, and doing nothing to stem the rise of the far right. There are a million better things to spend EU money on

to me this more than anything is Starmer's legacy; it's not a platform he built himself, by any means, but for any prime minister his government's interventions on this have been bad, and for a Labour PM they're unforgivable.

I have not read the book but I do remember someone pointing out that the Lambeth argument for why McSweeney is Like That (if that's what we're talking about) itself being yet more mythmaking because the era of it being a left-wing council had ended well before McSweeney was politically active

As we already know from the Ballymena Reaction Group that helped direct last year's pogrom with street by street house identifications, the PSNI will charge absolutely zero people over this. Ernie and Stephen Johnston and Lisa Miller continue to operate the group on Facebook.

anecdotally a few years back I stopped over in London during a heatwave while travelling home from Austin - it had only been a few degrees hotter there, but between the humidity and the heat being inescapable, waiting around in Victoria coach station was way more unbearable

got to at least start putting air conditioning in care homes, etc, lack of mitigation will be increasingly deadly

The attacks in Edinburgh, in which an armed bare-chested white man terrorised Muslims, leaving five people injured, don't feature on a single newspaper front page this morning. Two tier journalism

pretty much every "discover the networks" thing ends up like this

farscape really is the strongest argument for "make as many of your characters muppets as possible" in sci-fi

I did a roundtable with some PhD students yesterday on the current existential problem of UK tech policy: it doesn't matter how much evidence you take to the table, it doesn't matter how credible the research is, you will have no impact if you don't promise AI will deliver the moon on a stick

In the cold light of delay I feel quite distressed by the active in seriousness of this kind of grandstanding when taken side-by-side with the fact that the Home Office is rolling out technology that is not for for purpose www.wired.com/story/facial...

have argued before that the feedback loop between algorithmic social media and previous forms of news media is worth paying attention to, not just social media alone; this is making a more general argument about individual and social feedback loops, but also worth thinking about

Not every Chotiner interview is a trap for the people taking part, but it is quite apparent by now that his strengths are a) coming in well-prepared and b) asking "okay, what do you mean by that?" and the latter is completely confounding for someone who has Lines To Take they haven't thought about

genuinely one of the most impressive public health results in the UK that I'm aware of

me: am i going a bit far, calling musk a 'classic fascist' with the same core values as hitler? musk: i am concerned about the ethnic purity of the german people

Recurring observation that you had best be very confident in your background checks if you’re looking at a guy who was special forces-adjacent in Afghanistan to run your party

with everything the guy says it does seem like the floating of Carns as leadership material, if it wasn't pure reactionary ideology, was primarily an assumption by Labour MPs that the right couldn't *possibly* attack a ex-military man, which sounds like a fatal underestimation imo

That would be the head MAGA propagandist head-hunting Webb, Trevor Phillips *and* Douglas Murray in under a week. Again: what is it about British political commentators that might attract America’s most comically malignant far right media figure? Is it their deep integrity and attention to detail.

From what I can grasp, Sex Matters' argument seems to rely on the idea that the relevant legislation limiting the scope of the power of police searches actually exists to protect the rights of *police officers* – not just detainees.

This month, in multiple settings, including the AFL-CIO convention, Minnesota's labor movement has been honored and given awards for standing up to ICE. Now trade unionists are among those being targeted by the federal govt, which is citing participation in worker assemblies as proof of conspiracy.

this kind of nostalgia is understandable for, say, the Durham Miners Gala, but it looks very stupid from an MP when the average working class person in the UK is in a hospitality job, in a call centre, or a social care worker

The footballer who scored for Iraq, Aymen Hussein, was detained for several hours by the US and almost denied entry

Al Carns, buddy, the entire point of the GFA is to ensure there is a political, nonviolent path to what the IRA were trying to achieve. what do you think happens if you take that away?

A lot of this chat also seems to be based on the assumption that there hasn't been attempts to share information or hire outside help across US and UK parties, which there absolutely has and the results have been impossible to really draw any conclusions from, as you would expect

It is a bit maddening to see people ignore that there have been social media sites that instituted a "real names" policy, but quickly found it to a) cause lots of problems about what was a "real name" and was difficult to enforce and b) did not actually stop people posting racist rants or harassment

yeah, this is an argument for an earlier, pre social-media Internet, the problem is in part this shit has entirely broken containment

Pratchett recognised, with clear disdain, that it's always about the damn privies.