Ben Wood /|\🔶️🌿✝️

Universities to lose cash if students claim asylum Crackdown to be introduced next month to stop migrants using tertiary study as a way to stay in the country.

Another day, another headline in Fortress Britain. But this relentless anti-asylum seeker, anti-migrant rhetoric won't reduce the call for higher and higher walls. Suspicion and fear feed on themselves. Politicians are playing with emotions they can't control. Where will this end?

The image shows the cover of the book "Lilith" by Nikki Marmery.

I'm very much enjoying Lilith: A Novel by Nikki Marmery. Its an Eco-Feminist retelling of Biblical history, with Adam's first wife, Lilith at the centre. Its something of a prose poem to the diverse figure of the ancient Near East goddess. 🌿🙏

The dining room is coming along nicely. 🏡

The economy was made for human beings, not human beings for the economy.

Let’s bring water into mutual ownership instead.

Let’s take water out of the hands of both private shareholders and state bureaucrats.

Let customers have a real democratic say over how their regional water network is run and let them share in the water profits through dividends and reinvestments.

2/2 What a bleak vision, bleak because without a baseline of trust between people, the only mode of intercourse between human beings is naked force. Connection dissolves, suspicion reigns. We are in danger of moving ever closer to the small bubbled world of E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops.".

‘This is serious’: Starmer orders move towards digital ID... Scheme aims to tackle illegal immigration and crime despite past concern over civil liberties

1/2 One of the arguments against intensifying ID you rarely hear is the extent to which the introduction of extensive digital borders within the nation state fundamentally erodes social trust. Such a system assumes everyone is a potential alien, scrounger, or fraudster. We're all suspects.

Radical Liberal Summer School - Hosted by the JSMI and the SLF Join leading progressive and liberal contributors from 11-13 August 2025. The Summer School's theme is "Power in the Liberal Tradition".

In August, we welcome Professor Helena Rosenblatt to our first JSMI Summer School. Helena's lecture will explore liberal theories of political power in the work of Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël. Sign up here: www.eventbrite.com/e/radical-li...

I say this as someone whose main stock in trade concerns the use of words and the framing of arguments. But I readily accept (as should more politicians) that there is a world of difference between crafting compelling prose or convincing turns of phrase and actually running things.

2/2 Before he eyes up the big chair, Wes should consider whether he is in fact fixing (or running) things as Health Secretary, or whether he is better suited as a communicator or propagandist. Too much modern government confuses communication with competence, compelling phrases with solutions.

Wes Streeting Wes Streeting said to be eyeing up No 10 - but how will doctors' strikes affect his chances?

1/2 My sense is that Streeting is a politician's politician. Most of his working life he's been in the tiny fish bowl of Labour politics. He has all the vices of career politician: Big on tactics, small on strategy, thinks in slogans. Rarely phikosophises. Great at selling, less good at constructing

Here's a radical idea. Not just a cap on profits, but SEND as a *not for profit* public service, which government provides because it makes for a caring and decent society. There are places where economic values manifestly do not belong. Special Educational Needs is one of them.

Thanks @rcquaker.bsky.social ☮️🕊

Lovely to have you with us @stuartgwhite.bsky.social. 👍✊️

Might this event be of interest @yorkshirebylines.co.uk?

Knowing Jerome, I suspect it was the latter. Here Jerome is offering something like a Christianised version of "otium", the cultivated leisure of the Roman administrative classes (the traditional compensation for their labours in Imperial service). The young Augustine sought the same ideal.

YouTube video by Regenerative Living with Tony Cho How a Small Town in Japan Solved the Waste Crisis

This is very cool. 🈴️🌿

YouTube video by Philip Carr-Gomm Divine Source: Unites Everything and Everyone

#Druidry flows from the source. 🙏

Let's be better than this reply. 🏵♥️

Elon Musk @elonmusk The path to solving hunger, disease and poverty is Al and robotics 10:53 AM 7/30/25 31M Views

Global tax on the top 1% anyone?

Why worry about barbarians at the gates of Rome when they're already making laws in the Senate house? "What times, what customs?!"

Bloody awful doesn't cover it.

A flowing stream

2/2 'In summer the shade of a tree will afford us privacy. In autumn the quality of the air and the leaves strewn under foot will invite us to stop and rest. In springtime the fields will be bright with flowers, and our psalms will sound the sweeter for the twittering of the birds' ♥️🙏

1/2 My favourite letter from Jerome is Epistle 43, where he describes a Christian rural idyll: 'let us, as soon as may be, make for the haven of rural quietude. There such country dainties as milk & household bread, & greens watered by our own hands, will supply us with coarse but harmless fare...'

🙌Happy Yorkshire Day!

🩵There’s nowhere quite like Yorkshire, and it’s a real privilege to represent part of this fantastic region & its people.

💪Being the only Yorkshire Lib Dem MP, I’ll keep working hard to stand up for our communities and push for the investment and support our region deserves.

I fell in love with Yorkshire during undergrad degree at the University of York, and I hope to visit again soon!

On 1 August 2008: Pauline Baynes passed away.

One of Tolkien's favoured artists, her illustrated works include Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and Smith of Wootton Major. Her map of Middle-earth is notable for the amount of extra detail it includes. Photo © Brian Sibley

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Fun Religious Studies fact: The earliest known community who celebrated Lughnasadh as a festival of a dying and rising god were modern #Wiccans who had read James Frazer's "The Golden Bough". That work of Edwardian anthropology had an unnerving capacity to generate religions. 😀

Let's get community land ownership underway. 🏵✅️