Trying to use less plastic?
Big Oil and the plastics industry are spending billions to make sure everyone else uses more.
“I think what stood out most is the deliberateness and intentionality over the years of pushing plastic into our lives,” said @bethgardiner.bsky.social. “It was such a shock."
This is actually a pretty good summary of where we’re at, and how we got here.
Obscene.
Every senator who voted to confirm RFK Jr owns this tragedy. Every single one.
This is causing despair in academe. (1) We were forced to close during Covid. We had no choice! (2) We're not service providers like a restaurant, we are institutions of state. (3) We did everything we could. (4) This will cripple current students' education.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
This lawsuit seems appalling to me, honestly. I feel for people whose student experience was lousy due to Covid but that's not the fault of universities. "I wanted in-person study." I'm sure you did. Nobody gets what they want in a global pandemic
NEW
How Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence
How a close read of public domain documents show how MoD was commercially colonised by Palantir
By me, at FT
www.ft.com/content/5207...
The US administration’s insanity on vaccines continues to have ramifications across the world – it is not that America will miss out on these potential new vaccines. It is that they simply won’t happen at all. (Or at least they’ll be indefinitely delayed.)
@davidallengreen.bsky.social just wanted to say thanks for this and all your posts, I find them super helpful in navigating the legal scenes of these interesting times. Nice one, cheers and all the best (a fellow villa fan)
Why local journalism matters and why you should subscribe to @manchestermill.bsky.social
A lot going on here and all ugly, but one thing I still can't get my head around is how any British government can do business with Thiel at this point.
Further evidence that neo- liberalism is destroying itself. Privatisation has resulted in less house building, more expensive infrastructure and public transport, generated inter - generational inequality and hollowed out state capacity to respond.
Marginal tax rates for graduates with student loans – add interest and another 6% for postgrads.
£25,000: 37%
£50,270: 51%
£100,000: 71%
Trump’s approval rating has held steady at 40% to this week. This post is right that the majority of Americans should come to terms with the fact that 2 out 5 of their fellow citizens want America to be a less competently run and more corrupt version of 1930s Germany.
This is who we are.
Lord Newby on the damage Brexit has caused:
"Brexit will reduce GDP by 4% over a 15-year period."
"UK-EU trade will fall by 15%."
"Brexit has already had a negative impact on the public finances to the tune of over £40 billion over the period to 2024."
Hannah Arendt did not mince words, did she?
'Totalitarianism replaces all first-rate talents with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.'
From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)
The Palantir Payroll connects the dots between Palantir and Washington, making those ties easier to follow and harder to ignore. It’s built to help voters, journalists, and organizers see who’s connected to whom—and what that means for decisions around data mining and mass surveillance.
Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers.
This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.
Auschwitz took time.
There's a predictable approach to denial that we're already seeing, which I call the Four Pillars of Disordered Doubt, which allows actors to constantly question evidence that don't fit their preferred narratives.
1. The thing about science that these jokers don't understand is that science cannot be vibe-coded.
Whatever its flaws, the point with vibe coding is that you're trying to quickly make something that sorta works, where you can immediately sorta see if it sorta works and then sorta use it.
So important. What they say is not the story. That is never the story. What happened is the story. Write what happened.
1. This short thread is about the issue that dominates almost every aspect of politics, and causes or exacerbates most of our problems: the extreme wealth of a small number of people. Here’s the amazing thing: almost the entire political class aligns with the ultra-rich against the rest. 🧵1/10
‘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...
Compare & contrast. This is Trump’s demand for Greenland. And this is Hitler’s for the Sudetenland.
There is no difference. The language. The unstoppable need to dominate. The megalomania. It’s the same.
And Keir Starmer’s response is appeasement. We are in that moment.
1/
There is no strategy
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
bylinetimes.com/2026/01/15/a...
This newly discovered Iron Age instrument may have been played in the Celtic resistance against the Roman Empire
I largely stopped using X in November 2024. I keep an account there to research the far right (they're all active there, for some reason...)
I'm deleting all of my tweets now - Private Eye reports they will now be used to train Grok, Musk's perverted AI monster. Whether you like it or not. Grim.
