Corner

There is still no coverage in Western mainstream media of the recovery of 67 members of the Abu Nasser family yesterday. Just hours ago, the remains of 20 more victims were pulled from beneath the rubble. Again as I mentioned in my previous post, the corpses of this family remained under the rubble since 10/29/2024 (474 days)

This is what happened with the War on Terror in Britain when Obama took over: there was clearly a decision taken to punt it back to page 17 of the paper, because the whole thing was a shitshow and most of it was indefensible. And the need for quiet here is much more urgent.

Just when the conditions which made serial killing so easy have nearly vanished, they are back!

The Times knows this is what Labour Together is about, because Times staff collaborated closely with Labour Together to do exactly the kind of smeary hate campaigns they’re now bleating about.

It was ever thus. I can recommend Neal Stephenson's essay _In the beginning was the command line_.

Check out @vaughancoop.bsky.social for another group of academic staff who made their own institution.

when life gives you demons, make demonade

and you won't be able to see that that's what's happening.

the park should not be full of broken glass.
you can't just ban children from the play area and call the problem solved.
1) they now have no play area
2) everyone else is still getting cut to ribbons

Morgan, I just don’t understand why you’re so angry about this. Mr Forde will investigate and swiftly confirm that nothing weird happened and everything was above board, just like you say it was. Why, look at you, you’re practically vibrating. Can someone get Morgan a glass of water, please.

Yeah I had to research some of the detail for my day job once, and it converted me into a massive fan of Nat Turner etc. It's such a shame that the US Civil War didn't last another 6 months.

The vast majority of people who "detransition" do so as a result of the transphobia they face from a hateful society.

Hillary Cass, who has access to the statistics on this, claiming the opposite in interviews is an open display of how her review was an ideological effort to a predetermined result.

Nothing but sympathy for Beth Upton. Never did a thing wrong but had her life completely upended, her character assassinated and her bins publicly raked through to the point she's had to leave the country for the crime of simply existing. And still the bigots won't leave her alone.

Not a historian any more but it makes me feel icky. If an off-duty archaeologist (or worse, litcritter) found some unique medieval deeds in an attic of a weekend and sold them for a similar amount to a private collector I would probably feel the same, so yeah I get where you're coming from.

Gabriel Pogrund C @Gabriel_Pogrund X.com The group that helped to get Sir Keir Starmer elected as Labour leader hired lobbyists to investigate the personal, political and religious background of a Sunday Times journalist behind an article about secret donations that funded its work. Labour Together paid £36,000 to Apco, a US public affairs firm, to examine the "backgrounds and motivations" of reporters behind a story before the general election. The aim was to discredit The Sunday Times's reporting by falsely suggesting its journalists might be part of a Russian conspiracy or had relied on emails hacked by the Kremlin. Apco produced a 58-page report including almost ten pages of deeply personal and false claims about Gabriel Pogrund, the Sunday Times Whitehall editor. He and Harry Yorke, the newspaper's deputy political editor, were named as "persons of significant interest"

Labour Together compiled dossiers of Facebook comments by internet randoms and passed them to Gabriel as proof Labour was horribly racist, *while also* running a sock-puppet fact-checking organisation that told the same paper it was insanely racist to say that Labour Together had done that.

🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐅😫

all the coverage dancing around the fact that Starmer has never actually been in charge of anything, which is key to the whole business. He's the front of house guy, the paper owner. He gets stuffed with freebies and sent abroad all the time. His resignation is difficult because its irrelevant.

Anti fascism 101. Sometimes you do indeed get in trouble for it. Nevertheless it remains the right thing to do.

Zack Polanski says Labour has 'thrown in the towel' in Gorton and Denton Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, the Green Party leader believes Hannah Spencer represents 'the future' for Gorton and Denton

Mandatory ID cards. Scrapping jury trials. Calling genocide protesters “terrorists."

There’s a strong authoritarian edge to the Labour Government. With no plan to help people, clearly thrown in the towel in Gorton & Denton.

It's Greens Vs Reform.

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater...

This is what _should_ be on Radio 4.

Looking it up, it might have been John Smiths 1628 'general history of virginia'.

John White painted them, then Teodor de Bry engraved from his paintings for his book 'America'-- and there's another iteration also, can't remember if it was before or after de Bry.

Have you seen how early modern artists drew horseshoe crabs they'd only seen pics of? Added little, then big, claws, to make them look proper. Carcinisation at work.

They are. There's at least two industrial-strength TU legends in that list, probably more.

White man's hand holding a second class post return envelope in the very mouth of a British postbox.

I've just voted the UCU Commons recommendations -- didn't do anything other than that cos up to arse in alligators (in a good cause) at the moment. Here's a picture of my ballot paper earlier this evening for context:

The image appears to be a political campaign-style poster. On the left side, there is a professionally lit portrait of a smiling man wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and striped tie. He is facing forward against a plain, muted background. On the right side and across the image, there is bold text that reads: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? RISHI SUNAK DOESN’T.” Below, in a teal-colored section, it says: “Under the Tories, 4,500 adults convicted of sexually assaulting children under 16 served no prison time. Labour will lock up dangerous child abusers.” At the bottom, in smaller text, it reads: “Based on Ministry of Justice data. Produced by the Labour Party.” The overall design uses contrasting white and teal text on a grey background, giving it the look of a political attack advertisement.

This hasn't aged well, has it?

Sorry, I was being overly obtuse and actually thinking of Der Losung. "Dissolve the people and elect another".

Are they grasping for a Brechtian solution to this?

The USSR may have (in fact, was) been shit for workers in the East, but its existence as a model/threat made the owners in the West throw some more crumbs from the table to 'their' workers, one way or another. This situation no longer applies.

My diagnosis since around 2021 has been that Britain simply *cannot* change, no matter what happens. Its ruling class will never tolerate it. They will never admit what they’ve done, they’ll kill anyone who talks about it and will always choose to sink the whole island below the sea, if pushed.

Everywhere we look, morbid symptoms abound: the state of the British economy; the persistent support for Scottish independence; the grotesque failures of privatised utilities; the absurdities of the housing market and university sector; the backlog in the courts; the asylum hotels and NHS waiting times. The Epstein scandal is at once unrelated to these systemic crises of governance and yet entirely representative. The revelations buried within the files reveal the reality of modern power, which much of the electorate feel even if they could not know. They understand that the system does not function fairly, that power and wealth are hoarded; that capital and politics have fused together. And they are furious about it. The response to this cannot be what it has been: a sense of managed deterioration, the country forced to accept the steady decline of what it holds dear: jury trials, functioning A&E departments, support for disadvantaged children, public safety and so on. There is a danger that all the government is offering is a slightly worse version tomorrow of what was already considered

Remember how I spent the last ten years saying the problem is the Thatcherite consensus going kaboom forever in 2008, and the entire political/media class hunkering down in a defensive circle around its flaming corpse, all guns pointed outwards? The editor of the New Statesman seems to agree.