Alix Mortimer

Hm, a new very bad thing. And I’ll give you one guess which industry’s fault it is.

I looked into this and the shingles vaccine you can’t even pay for privately until 50. It’s a horrible disease and I’m counting down, where is pushy Big Pharma when you need it.

Treating myself to another covid booster soon and aside from it being a good idea because a family member is having chemo I am genuinely looking forward to that smug not gonna get covid for a while feel. And the shingles one I might save up for like it’s a statement coat or something.

Not sure she realises how damning this is, it’s presented as a kind of “it’s not just me!” I know some of that research and the whole point of BAME vaccine hesitancy is those groups having had worse experiences structurally with healthcare. If you don’t have that problem wth are you doing?

BBC News screenshot with the subtitle "Welcome to the year of the whores. People around the globe celebrate..."

Happy 12-year anniversary to my favourite broadcast subtitle mistake

And a happy year of the whores to you all

Students begin Covid compensation claim against 36 more universities It comes after University College London settled a claim from students there over lost learning in the pandemic.

I feel so miserable about this. Nearly broke myself working 16, 18 hour days during the pandemic. We did everything we possibly could, then doubled it, tripled it. HE is still struggling to get back off the floor, years later. Now another financial punch in the face.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Have you ever once seen the New York Times quote Trump like this?

Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ...

Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups?

Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com:

tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf

What a very interesting thread and contributions, there’s a set of Ealing comedies in here

On the contrary: We've just perfected going downhill very quickly.

I propose to make universal the old policy of the Blackfriars conference at the American Shakespeare Center:

If you do not end your paper on time, you will be forced to exit, pursued by a bear. Literally, a bear will come take your paper from you.

2026 PPE Society London Meeting - The Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society We are pleased to share that, in addition to the PPE Society’s Annual Meetings held each year in New Orleans, the international PPE Society will…

⏰ Call for proposals!⏰

Organisers are calling for full panel proposals, author-meets-critics sessions, or individual papers from those who would like to attend the next annual PPE conference at King's

The deadline for submissions is February 20👇

ppesociety.org/ppe-society-...

The end of the line for Brixton News Pritesh Patel was at the heart of the community for 36 years. Now he's said goodbye.

I think I was Pritesh's last customer on Friday, as his news stand closed for good.

There's not many proper news stands left these days. Sad times for print lovers, and his stand will no doubt be replaced with a cookie-cutter coffee shop.
www.the-londoner.co.uk/closing-time...

Map geek find of the day: what I think is a National Farm Survey map of part of South Devon, carried out during the Second World War, with coloured areas showing boundaries of farms & landholdings.

Stamp in corner = County War Ag

Fascinating history & a guide to land ownership patterns today

The UK was declared measles free in 2017.

Vaccine programs completely eliminated it.

Since then, pro sickness conspiracy theorists and anti science idiots have enabled its return.

As a companion to Snowman On Fire By The Sea very worth enjoying the bonkersness/borderline horror of karneval in Zadar if you have instagram www.instagram.com/p/DUyqxJajlW...

Of course. Why would you invest in soft power?

It just helps in the kind of warfare that:

a) Russia has shown it's actually good at;
b) Russia is waging on the West already;
c) The UK/NATO nuclear deterrent is useless in preventing;
d) Costs a fraction to fund compared to military hardware.

Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry - Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews The Château de Chantilly justifiably billed its exhibition as a landmark show, and for early modernists and medievalists, it was the most anticipated

Art History will continue to be seen as an elitist discipline if the public apparatuses for communicating it refuse to acknowledge the scholarship that has drawn attention to art's role in serving and subverting power.

Read the righteous review by Sherry Lindqiust here. hnanews.org/hnar/reviews...

I think it's wrong to describe the World Service as "soft power". It's actually "info power". And these days that's a very hard form of power indeed.

BBC warns Russia is taking over World Service radio frequencies Russian propaganda is filling the void where the BBC has closed World Service radio services due to cuts

BBC's Arabic radio service in Lebanon closed after 85 years as part of a £28.5m savings drive. 'Just months later, in October 2023, the Russian state-owned Sputnik news agency took over the frequency. Its news bulletin opened with “This is Moscow”, replacing the previous “This is London” intro.' 🙄

The Dutch as outspoken outriders saying blunt things that would be aggressive from Macron or Merz is very funny, everyone leaning into their bit

Thanks for the support! and joining us on this important journey. bsky.app/profile/stpg...

The British Museum has removed the word Palestine from displays about the ancient Middle East following “concerns” by a UK-based Israeli advocacy group.

Read: www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260215-bri...

Kemp didn’t envisage that the police, agencies etc could *be* the civil war. So could *some* fall out from putative US descent into chaos be contained because the red flags are so big? We are strapped to the bonnet, but some actions (French state decouple from Microsoft) are being taken.

And the multiple ways that could/will go wrong for us is basically the message of the book. I don’t know how/whether it complicates things that the US admin is visibly, obviously incompetent, making enemies of its citizens, allowing them to die of diseases, upsetting the international community etc.

GC is essentially about an unstoppable juggernaut of horrors on multiple fronts. We’ve just got to the end of a long passage where he characterises states and corporations as possessing, if they are considered as persons, the Dark Triad of characteristics far more than the average actual human does.

<some text removed due to limit> <My highlight> The US may decline: a civil war could even break out, although this seems unlikely, given its large full-time, well-equipped police force, military, and intelligence agencies. Even if it were to happen, the Global Goliath might be shocked for a few years or even a decade, but it is difficult to imagine how it would trigger a global societal collapse. </my highlight> And the US staying as a stable, coherent society is also not an antidote to our global woes. Remember that it was during the 195os, 60s, and 7os, when elite competition was low and wealth equality higher, that the US built a nuclear stockpile that could destroy the world and had the largest acceleration in its environmental impact. Diminishing returns on extraction remains important and relevant. Yet there is now a new and more dangerous curse: global existential risk. The global system of extraction now creates threats and vulnerabilities which could destroy the whole world. EVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE The most likely fate of the Global Goliath is self-termination. The pressures that have been selected for over time - larger populations, more disease, greater military capacity, and economic exploitation (catego-rized earlier as babies, bombs, bacteria, and barbarism') - may have been evolutionarily advantageous for individual empires, but now underpin the catastrophic risk we face today. Bigger, more interconnected populations mean worse disease outbreaks; stronger militaries mean more damaging arms races; and barbarism is the economic backbone of the systems that produce carbon, weapons, and dangerous technology.

Finally got round to finishing the Luke Kemp Goliath’s Curse doorstopper/synthesis. I wonder how he would word this bit now. It’s @aphclarkson.bsky.social I think who says US chaotic collapse as a trigger of global decline is underpriced, but of course that’s not quite what this book was envisaging.

Genuinely not sure if there is a beef I haven’t heard about aside from today’s main beef..