Herbert Lom and Alec Guinness during a break from filming The Ladykillers (1955)

The heads of Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla all joined Trump at his inauguration. Since then, largely thanks to Trump's Big Ugly Bill, their companies have reaped $51B in federal tax breaks — paid for by huge cuts to our social safety net. This is what oligarchy looks like.

Rubio's entire speech was Christian white nationalism. What else could this mean? It's nothing close to actual history, it doesn't make sense except through the invented history of a "shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry" in the "common civilization" of whiteness.

Just saw that Xing Zhilei, the Chinese DIY influencer, posted an update on his self-built cat town which went viral last year. youtu.be/i1savUPr-yU

2/2. They're part of the Schlemmer Frame Collection preserved by the Austrian Film Archive www.filmmuseum.at/en/collectio...

1/2. Love the fragile beauty and mystery of these single 35mm frames from unidentified early films.

Good evidence to believe authoritarian right may significantly overreach on British public appetite for mass deportations & remigration (esp given the dramatic visual evidence from Trump). BUT also depends on "eıite cues": how media, political voices + online ecosystems legitimise/stigmatise this

This is a marvelous example of whimsy and craftsmanship! A rare Greek askos, made in the shape of a lobster claw. 🦞 Dating back to approximately 450 BC, the vessel was used to hold perfumed oil. 📷 Antikensammlung Kassel #archaeology 🏺

© Rodney Smith

William Scott, Permutations Ochre, 1978 https://botfrens.com/collections/14375/contents/1127843

Lucy Powell MP, Labour’s Deputy Leader, has called on Reform UK’s candidate for Gorton and Denton, Matt Goodwin, to distance himself from "appalling extreme and racist content" shared online by members of his campaign team. Labour brands Goodwin "Farage’s extreme Tommy Robinson-backed candidate."

Reform are now averaging 28% rather than 31% in the Autumn, as @samfr.bsky.social notes & looks at why open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/w... @markpackuk.bsky.social shows it is a real dip in Reform support, not an artifact of Don't Knows moving around open.substack.com/pub/theweeki...

"The Encounter". Johannes Itten. 1916.

Tête dada (Dada Head) painted wood 1918 Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) Switzerland The first of a series of 'dada' heads that the artist completed in the late teens to early 1920s. #art #sculpture #dada #dadahead #surrealism #sophietaeuberarp #switzerland #modernart #modernsculpture #handmade

Yup’ik mask that once belonged to André Breton, from Goodnews Bay, Alaska, late nineteenth to early twentieth century. #tribalart

Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, by African American photographer, composer, author, poet, and filmmaker, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) #art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

It's neither. The World Service was never funded by Dfid, it has always been funded by the Foreign Office.

Gonna write on this in the newsletter tomorrow: the World Service being on the brink is revealing of a broader hole in the United Kingdom's foreign policy, which is this huge gap where 'what is our plan to, you know, *win*?' www.ft.com/tryinsidepolitics

We lost an empire but found a radio station. Much more dismal and depressing if we lose that too.

Sinners has vampires and is more historically accurate than this bullshit

Filming of West Side Story in New York City, by Gjon Mili, 1961.

1/5 Yesterday a Stand Up to Racism stall in Crowborough which was trying to promote a message of solidarity with refugees and put out a message of compassion over hostility on Valentine's day with leaflets, cakes and music was shut down by the far right.

#tcmparty #DoubleIndemnity So damn good, these two

Happy birthday Art Spiegelman 🎂 📷 Roger Ressmeyer, 1986 "The subject of Maus is the retrieval of memory & ultimately, the creation of memory. It’s about choices being made, of finding what one can tell, and what one can reveal beyond what one knows one is revealing."

Art Spiegelman Self-portrait with Maus mask, 1989

Art Spiegelman's front & back cover for Paul Auster's New York Trilogy.

'Le Penseur', 1930 - Hiromu Kira (1898–1991), photographe américain. #photographie #HiromuKira

I had that dream again

The reason these people have been attacking scholars and universities is that they stand in the way of the ahistorical bullshit they need to spew in order to construct white Christian nationalism

A, 🤮. B, the past tense of the verb "to sunset" is "sunsetted."

Many people in South Africa, where Elon is from, died to create a genuinely multiracial polity. They were killed by people who thought like Elon. The people who thought like Elon also lost. Seems their “common culture” of white supremacy wasn’t enough. bsky.app/profile/alan...

We must speak plainly about the agenda Elon Musk & other MAGA leaders are pushing. It’s white nationalism. There’s no room for Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, Native, Jewish or all other Americans in Musk’s monocultural vision. Multiculturalism is superior. We can’t allow Musk & others to end it.

John Singer Sargent A Balustrade, 1906 (The steps of the church of SS Domenico & Sisto, Rome) oil on canvas Ashmolean Museum, Oxford #StairsOnSunday 🎨 #Sargent

Last points: 1) This road doesn't have to end in gulags, death camps and ghettos to get Britain to a really dark place. 2) Where the darkest roads of history ended up always seemed absurd to contemplate to those in the merely cloudy places they started.

If you don't think Restore, Reform, Advance or whomever are capable of - for example - restricting certain child benefits to only the "right sort" of British parents, you haven't been paying attention.

This isn't a purely philosophical or semantic argument about what "British" means. Once you accept different tiers of British citizenship you gain a way to formally discriminate. USSR documents famously had a "5th line" denoting ethnicity. Stalin's nationalist repressions used this as their basis.

👏👏👏

📷 Leonard McCombe 📌🌐 Dublin, Ireland, ca. 1957 #photooftheday #blueskyphotography #photokind

This is what it’s like inside my brain

Jan Švankmajer. Move the setting to Central Europe and turn every character apart from Cathy and Heathcliff into a puppet

🧵

Today, it’s immigrants. Tomorrow, it could be anyone whose identity the administration deems threatening—activists, protesters, political opponents, journalists, anyone on their database.

Laws + Zoomer Historian stand for "total remigration" of "every single one": all ethnic minority in Britain. "Will never have the stomach to do what's necessary" was precisely the wording Laws used when suspended by Reform - he was on candidate's list - for racism to Sunak & myself.

Rupert Lowe tweets his Restore Britain party will vet councillors who want to join - to avoid accepting those who "don't have the stomach" for what needs to be done. His most openly racist supporters say they are "ecstatic". They believe he will set no boundaries at all on overt racism for members

Very glad to hear this. And they should know that any deal Trump announces without Ukraine probably doesn't have even 200 votes in Congress.

A romance cartoon for the @theguardian.com

From Thuringewald 1905 https://botfrens.com/collections/90/contents/25428

NEW: Read this terrific piece @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social for @thenerve.news in which she unpicks Edge.org, the hugely influential 'salon' funded by Epstein & threaded through with race science & eugenics. 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

This isn't something distant or far away. Super-agent & close Epstein ally, John Brockman had huge influence. His 'rockstar' writers, scientists and academics dominated our book pages & broadsheets. We need nothing less than a total revisionist history of the last 20 years. 2/