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‘I had to learn very quickly’: Reform UK leader, 19, defends council tax rise Party accused of breaking election promise – but officials in Warwickshire say George Finch’s 3.89% rise still not enough to balance budget

Can we have an no-prize Caption Competition for the photo in this article? 😀

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

That was an *interesting* one - the heptalogy author's team inviting him to the premiere of her play and an associated dinner party in 2018 (so well after the revelations of his extra-curricular activities came to light). While it was sent by her team, it's very likely she personally approved.

Meet the New Tories, same as the Old Tories (apart from perhaps a stronger desire to idolise Nigel and Donald)...

Among non-right media, The Mirror is part of Retch plc (whose management are prioritising clickbait + LLM-written articles), i and Metro are owned by DMGT (along with New Scientist [!]), The Guardian has a very small circulation, while BlueSky and Mastodon are tiny compared to X + FB.

Which begs the question of how moderate or even left-of-centre views can reach a wide audience, and fight against the media (in all its forms) pushing the Overton Window even further right: mainstream media is predominantly owned by billionaires, while the BBC is effectively owned by gov.

Many people still listen to the radio in the mornings, which comes complete with hourly news bulletins (delivered either by BBC, Sky [Bauer] or Global), and while physical newspaper circulation is declining, they're pivoting to online subscriptions and replacing journalists with LLMs.

Odd, then, that the right wing passionately hate the BBC, claim it's biased against them, and demand the resignation of anyone who spouts views moderately left of centre. Without the BBC, you'd still have ITV / ITN / Sky reporting the news agenda set by the traditional "dead tree" press.

I wouldn't be surprised if they rule that Federal election policy can override State election policy (but include Ts and Cs that equate to only when the President is Republican) if "election security" and "preventing illegals voting" can be used as an excuse.

IIRC, it's been determined that "Autopilot" detects when a crash is imminent and turns itself off a second or two before impact, likely explicitly so Tesla can disclaim liability by saying it wasn't turned on at the time of the crash.

In reality, it's likely to be sweet FA given his best frienemy controls the DoJ and a significant proportion of courts.

So when was Blair ejected?

Facebook post from BBC Lincolnshire: Dame Andrea Jenkyns says Reform UK should stop taking Conservative defectors to avoid an "establishment takeover". The post contains a photograph of the former Conservative minister, accompanied by a quote: "We don't want the chancers, we don't want those who are trying to save their own skin."

Pots and kettles, or trying to pull up the drawbridge behind her?

YouTube video by Drunken Irish Bard Greenland Is Not Fer Sale 🎵 – A Ridiculous Irish Pub Jig About a Toddler Tantrum

Spotted in my YouTube recommendations...

youtu.be/KOpymCZ0PAU

The Reform pitch is increasingly “the last government was terrible, so we’ve hired everyone who was in it”.

Meet the new Tories, same as the old Tories...

I'm sure the Transvestigators once claimed Kate Mulgrew (Captain Kathryn Janeway in ST:VOY) was a man...

But no-one will do anything, because everyone's too concerned about maximising profits now, regardless of the cost to the workforce, community or environment (short term as well as long term - we've devised plenty of ways to screw it up that don't necessarily involve burning stuff).

7 times Nigel Farage and his new best mate Robert Jenrick fell out The former Tory bigwig has not always been on the same page as his new boss.

So in the least surprising news of the day, Robbie has officially joined The Loony Bin. But his new boss hasn't always been so welcoming...

www.politico.eu/article/7-ti...

Apparently Mercator preferred a sinusoidal projection for comparing relative sizes of land masses - his projection was intended primarily to aid nautical navigation. He was also the first to call a book of maps an Atlas (after the Greek mythological Titan who held the heavens and celestial sphere).

Just reading the captions, he seems to be channelling his BFF across the pond with all that repetition (as well as assuming his base are dumb enough not to remember the political origins of most of his recruits...)

My suspicion is that the Trans community and allies left Twitter and arrived here early but it’s still worth re-upping this for those who left it a little longer:

go.bsky.app/N6Qai5F

...and, of course, Elon's immaturity shining through his deliberate choice of model names: S, 3, X, Y (he wanted S, E, X, Y but Ford maintained a trademark on "Model E")...

Then you read stuff like "Autopilot" disengaging a second or two before a crash so the company can absolve itself of any responsibility, apparently not explaining to customers clearly enough that "Autopilot" is just a glorified cruise control rather than full self driving...

Tesla may be the market leader for EVs and certainly helped popularise them, but from what I've read, they've stagnated over the past few years, with little in the way of design updates, as Elon pours everything into his self-driving experiment (relying purely on visible-spectrum camera vision).

Unfortunately, you'd have to have clear explicit written proof of quid-pro-quo with respect to US government policy to even consider a case under the Emollients Clause, and even then, he'd likely argue it somehow counted as a core function of the Presidency and a 6:3 SCOTUS ruling would concur.

Just rename it The Reject Party and be done with it.

... while over here, you'll find a smaller but more positive and wholesome (well, at least in content posted here!) community. Post over there if you have to for reach, but refrain from reading others' posts / comments. Hang out here to maintain your sanity.

Xitter has been a toxic hell hole for years - even more so since Elmo purchased it and decided moderation was "Woke" and infringed his idea of "Free Speech". Unfortunately, it's still the largest short-form text social network by far, so you'll likely have more reach there...

Photo of a television showing the face of the Elizabeth Clock Tower, London, UK, just as Big Been started striking midnight.

Happy New Year!

r/OutOfTheLoop, question asked by u/Backyxx. What's going on with the Epstein files being "released” if they're still heavily redacted? Idk yall, I want your opinions.

LOOKITSADAM: Answer: There are 8408 pages in the release. 740 pages are at least 50% black by area. 563 pages are at least 99% black by area. Most of the rest are either boring, or hand-picked to target the administration's enemies.

crisblunt: Hi where did these numbers come from? I'd like to cite it in another conversation. I just wanted to make sure it's accurate. Obviously you could have done the math but I doubt that. LOOKITSADAM: I downloaded the files and wrote a script to extract the images out of all the PDFs. Each page was its own image. I then ran an script which spat out the #000000 percentage #FFFFFF percentage, dominant colors, size, etc... https://pastes.io/untitled-paste-80029

Rihannas_nipples: Can you explain what those results mean and how it proves the point? I'm not familiar with code at all LOOKITSADAM: Each image is a grid of pixels. Full black pixels in any given image is rare, especially when it's a photograph or scan of text. Most 'black' in photos has some noise, and isn't perfectly 'black'. Even in a page of text where the text is perfectly black, the image would only be about 20% fully black pixels. Images that have >50% have significant areas full of fully black pixels that are really only possible from intentionally blacking out large parts of an image in post. These are pages where >50% or >99% of the page was intentionally censored.

Interesting analysis of the volume of redations in the Epstein release, spotted on a Reddit Out of the Loop thread: