Lance Parkin

He'll vote with the paedo warmongers, except he'll take a firm moral stand when the vote is actively protecting paedos or promoting war, which is 9% of the votes.

‘The Surgeon, the Midwife, the Quack’ Review: Not-Yet-Modern Medicine In Renaissance England, skillful surgeons and herb-dispensing healers competed with charlatan doctors.

Happy to say the @wsj.com still does book reviews. My latest looks at a new read from Dr Alanna Skuse:
🧪🗃️📚

www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Espresso's a different drink from coffee, I leave that to rich experts.

(I fake them, kind of, with my Aeropress).

If the King's brother is no longer a prince, some poxy Boomer politicians, columnists, and gropey professors can lose their cushy jobs they're shit at anyway.

At some point, I crossed the line from coffee snob to coffee ponce.

My coffee is grown by a guy called Arnulfo who lives 2100m above sea level.

The White House did a dishonest y-axis so I fixed their y-axis for them, you’re welcome White House
www.howtoreadthisch.art/lets-conside...

Peter Mandelson issues secret notice demanding press leave him alone – read in full

🚨 This evening, a notice was circulated from representatives of Peter Mandelson, via press regulator IPSO and the Press Association news wire, to all media across the UK

We believe it is strongly in the public interest to publish this memo. This is it in full 👇

AOC on the Kennedy Center: The renaming is completely illegitimate. All they did was screw some nameplates onto the building. That’s coming right off. Enjoy your name on there for a year or two, but that’s getting ripped right out.

Grocery store sign of bagel that reads: pick your own. Part of the sign is obscured to look like it reads: fuck your own

Relax, bread department

I look at a short list of all the things to look forwards to this year, then the litany of things to dread, the disasters, the flashpoints, the transnational crises that have grown inevitable, and I'm just saying: Sheep Detectives better be fucking amazing.

One of the most powerful things I ever heard from a victim of abuse was 'they only need to persuade other men they're not abusers, and they're all great at that'. It's why every woman sees luminous neon warning signs, and men don't see anything.

The onus is on men to believe, look, see.

Like the penny, the slop money beloved by pedophiles now costs more to make than it's worth.

My god. Who ever thought this would happen apart from fucking everyone with a damn brain... What an unbelivable waste of time that has cost us all so much. The contempt I have for these chancers and crooks is immeasurable.

One of the absolute core British values is that we don't bang on about our national values.

They don't mean 'values', anyway, they mean 'assumptions'.

... and he'd have more money than he started with. That's the real dark art.

His ex, MacKenzie Scott, got $38bn in the divorce. She's given away $19bn.

Her current net worth is ... $32bn.

Bezos makes c.$26m a day. He could burn a $1m *an hour*, and buy your house from just today's takings.

Weird and almost universal revisionism today. Even at the time, it was pretty clear that Mandelson wasn't appointed *despite* his dodgy links but *because* of them. Trump's Washington is a dirty swamp. Mandelson was deemed a man able to swim in it. This wasn't a secret. Everybody said it out loud.

NB: This chat up line only works if you are Prince, if you are not Prince do not use this chat up line.

Find the answer by using the @kenwhite.bsky.social principle. Works with most things but it was literally made for this moment.

Exciting news from the latest DWM: the new season 21 boxset includes the full edition of The Adventure Game on which Janet Fielding was a contestant (and which was the not terribly subtle inspiration for my @bigfinish.bsky.social play Power Game) www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/d...

You'll tend to create much better art if you wrestle with unanswerable questions than if you neatly solve wtf is wrong with you.

And I think it's all about introducing new chaos and madness. As opposed to, say, therapy. I kind of wish John Cleese had embraced the occult instead of finding a therapist who cured him of being funny.

If an artist is at the peak of success, what can they do next? What moves do they have?

Gurus suggest new moves. Hey, George, we know you are fluent with a guitar but have difficulty articulating why you fancy that woman ... how about a different subject?

I remember moaning to my mum when I was a teen that the new Queen album (The Miracle, presumably) wasn't very innovative, and her pointing out that if I listen to a Queen album, 'it will tend to sound like Queen', and I have spent 40 years now wrestling with the implications of that.

I think I prefer artists who do what they want and ask their audience to follow (or not) than artists who play their old hits to the delight of their fans, but ... I mean if you're out there delighting people, perhaps that's better than moping at home making difficult stuff.

What is art to the artist? I liked Lynch's description of the art life 'drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, make art'. But I don't begrudge artists with ten years careers choosing to walk away and be happy instead.

Reaching the 'never have to work again' stage has been squeezed at both ends for artists . What artists lucky enough to get there do is always telling.

I like Moore or Lynch's strategy of making what they really want to make, and only that. But it's its own kind of prison, too.

I think there's always been an array of winning positions. A fair number of rock stars bought a stately home and just lived happily and 'reclusively' ever after with their spouse and kids.

He won but it didn't feel like winning.

I don't think it's a leap to imagine a lot of rock stars getting to exactly that place.

Inescapably, it's also the product of a midlife crisis caused by (a) winning the 'game' of comics writing so comprehensively he'd have to create any new worlds he'd conquer, (b) the collapse of his marriage.

It also has a personal meaning for him, an intimacy I've always been aware I don't get near. It does provide 'spiritual support'.