Oh yes please!! 💗

Waving or drowning?

It's a good night to read this excellent piece, on the Orban regime's network of financial support for the nationalist right in Britain. For many on the radical right, the tills are about to stop ringing. democracyforsale.substack.com/p/orbans-brits

First cup of tea: This drink Helps me think Helps me float Not sink.

I knew it was bad but really didn’t appreciate it was quite this bad as.ft.com/r/db911dd6-f...

Like… We cannot go ahead and have the World Cup now like nothing is going on. Regardless of what does or doesn’t happen tonight. Countries should simply refuse to send teams. The rest of the world cannot treat us as a remotely normal country after this

A reminder that this is the same "unhinged" war and President the Daily Mail has spent weeks berating Keir Starmer for not joining and following

AOC: “This is a threat of genocide & merits removal from office. The President’s mental faculties are collapsing & cannot be trusted. To every individual in the President’s chain of command: You have a duty to refuse illegal orders. That includes carrying out this threat”

A mind-breaking muddle of news this morning: Humans going further than ever before in space and a lunatic president openly threatening war crimes at home. The sublime and the degenerate. Hard to keep it all in your head at once.

Anyone who contributed to this event - the politicians and journalists who normalised him or submitted to his narratives, around the world - should hang their fucking heads in shame. They've put us in the most dangerous geopolitical situation for a generation and left a people at risk of genocide.

The bases should never have been opened to US use. They should now immediately be closed to them. This is patently the case. It is a military power with explicitly genocidal intent. Given how severe that danger is, the reassurances of its military officials about authorised use are insufficient.

'the overall conclusion is that the scale of deaths in the first wave could have been much lower and the devastating second wave could have been largely avoided' @chrischirp.bsky.social substack.com/home/post/p-...

🧵The Covid Inquiry’s latest reports have made one thing brutally clear: the first year of the pandemic - and especially the second Covid wave in winter 2020/21 - was devastating. Much of that devastation was avoidable. This 🧵: impact on NHS, impact on bereaved, and avoidable harm. 1/19

Our public services aren’t for a secretive profit-hungry US tech firm. Sign the petition to tell the Government to scrap all contracts with secretive US tech firm Palantir. you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/st...

If you go down to the woods today, you're in for a big surprise... most of them are closed off to the public. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Brian McGinnis, a Marine veteran protesting US military action in Iran, was forcibly removed from a Senate subcommittee hearing by police and Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy on Wednesday. McGinnis was treated for injuries and faces charges, according to US Capitol Police.

Trump Attacks Iran. How Operation Epic Fury unfolded… The new Private Eye is out now.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis... Tonight’s treat @imcmillan.bsky.social @jodenn.bsky.social @iansheffield50.bsky.social @ian64.bsky.social
@alqleeds.bsky.social @allanjenkins21.bsky.social
@jaketilson.bsky.social

If I was @zackpolanski.bsky.social, I would be pointing out to the BBC that whatever model they use to justify giving Farage & his boot-lickers season tickets for every BBC show under the sun must surely now treat Green Party politicians in exactly the same way. Might even be one for the lawyers...

"One should not give a poisoner medicine, A conjurer fine apparatus, nor A rifle to a melancholic bore." WH Auden Not to mention the biggest arsenal in the world to a narcissistic attention-seeker.

So presumably this Daily Mail campaign against "foreign-born" voters will quickly be applied to their foreign-born star columnist, Boris Johnson, and their own France-based for tax purposes non-dom owner?

Always well worth seeing/hearing. Will be planning on Tate visit for Emin's show next.

After listening to her autobiography, this is a treat share.google/6CVnVu7saOns... @imcmillan.bsky.social @jodenn.bsky.social @iansheffield50.bsky.social @ian64.bsky.social
@alqleeds.bsky.social @allanjenkins21.bsky.social
@jaketilson.bsky.social

Latest Graun toon www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

It's urgent that we clean up our rivers, for all our sakes. Renationalise! Company Investors are given too easy a ride, they should be investors of infrastructure and improvement not money-grabbing dumpers of ...! Take it back under government control. It's what Labour should be doing.

Early stroll. That skip might be an alien spacecraft. A security light’s cyclops eye. The horizon’s Monday glow. Takeaway menu as letterbox tongue. The tightness of my woolly hat.

I like this tiny poem by Bill Manhire @pacificraft.bsky.social from his forthcoming Carcanet collection Lyrical Ballads.

@januszczak.bsky.social @bendorgrosvenor.bsky.social Loved the horse podcast! Thought you might like to see our own piece of Poland by Wanda Garland - her village with its smoke rising through the trees... no horses though.

Statue

It is absolute and utter neglect to let this come this close to the wire just as the US has let most of its overseas broadcasting shutter.

Look at the beautiful vintage photos of Veeraswamy, and a glimpse of its menus from 1940s and '50s. I hope it is saved. Maybe I should write to the King and send him a copy of my book, which places the significance of Veeraswamy in a broader context. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

xc ll nt st ff Br n! 'm h v ng tr bl w th my b w ls t d y. S rry m nt v w ls n t b w ls! 😁

Well done Bluesky! Drafts are good!

ICE and US judiciary cruelty and indifference - just awful and this is just one case - what of all the others?!

H r ‘ a o m all d ‘O t of hara t r’.

I'm choosing some socks for you in a minute after a quick one with Nora at the Caledonian Hotel.

Sequoia on Harris garden walk

At Darfield Museum; we open at 10!

A recent cartoon for @newscientist.com. p.s. my new book of science cartoons, ‘Physics for Cats’ is out now. Links at www.tomgauld.com

The *things* russians are doing: invading a sovereign state, murdering civilians, creating a humanitarian disaster in extreme cold, abducting children, razing towns to the ground, raping, torturing, looting

Springsteen bringing tears to our eyes

After being held in two of them as a boy, I fought for decades urging America to never again build concentration camps and put human beings in them. It breaks my heart to watch this happen twice now in my own lifetime.

I think this one was from Sex Education S1 time? Or it may have been Normal People

A few years ago, John Lithgow released a book of satirical poems about Trump and his administration. This clip is from one of his readings, and it perfectly shows how brilliant the writing is - and how much his delivery adds to it.

NATO soldiers didn’t “die doing nothing.” They died honoring alliances, defending democracy, and backing the U.S.! In actual fact they died doing what bone spurs Trump never would! Those graves are the answer to Trumps mouth that he spewed in Davos! #SheShed #DefendersOfDemocracy

hard to argue against

‘Terrible things are happening outside… Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return… to find their families gone.’ Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

WORD FACT The Latin word rivus, meaning stream, gives us both “derive” and “rival”: “Derive” literally means “to draw (water) from a stream”. “Rival” literally means “one who shares the same stream”.