Doire

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE MINNEAPOLIS painted on a wall in the style of the Free Derry Corner.

This rules. I love how delighted they all look!

Day after Alex Pretti killing I complained to BBC about presentation of White House statements and evidence as equivalent. Duty of balance doesn’t extend to complicity with clear lies, I said. BBC could and should report WH making false statements as a *fact of the story*. Today I got response …

Journalism on Epstein is a mess.
There are 4-5 journalists (like Julie K Brown and Tara Palmeri) who are superb. Then there are well meaning uninformed journalists who don’t understand their word vomit isn’t helping Survivors. Then there are a large glut of nothing-to-see here clowns.

a man and a woman are standing in front of each other and talking to each other . ALT: a man and a woman are standing in front of each other and talking to each other .

" I'm just a boy, standing in front of a country, asking you to love me'

I dunno, I've never believed a word #Mandelson said. Ever. It's touching if not a teensey wee bit worrying that the Prime Minister is a man of such naivety and innocence that he did. Good to have someone so devoid of cynicism in charge of the country, eh?

The Islands of Strangers man just said he'd never denigrate the contribution of migrants.

Starmer finding that place in a Venn Diagram where he manages to annoy allies without defeating enemies

"Core British values" as in invading other people's territory, torturing, starving, raping and killing them and stealing their stuff. Check.

Screenshot from Sept 2025 when Dancey’s LinkedIn profile showed that he worked as a Political Assistant to Peter Mandelson from 2001 to 2004.

Today’s screenshot shows he was a Political Assistant from 2001 to 2004, but Mandelson’s name has been removed.

Then and now:
Joe Dancey’s Linkedin profile on 18 Sept 2025 and today.
Spot the difference!

[Dancey is Wes Streeting’s partner]

Epstein Co-Owned Venture Fund with Palantir Founder as it Entered UK Government The Russian connected convicted sex trafficker co-owned a fund with Peter Thiel, now embedded in Britain’s most critical infrastructure with the help of Peter Mandelson

🚨NEW Epstein Co-Owned Venture Fund with Palantir Founder as it Entered UK Government

The convicted sex trafficker co-owned a fund with Peter Thiel, now embedded in Britain’s most critical infrastructure, with the help of Peter Mandelson

bylinetimes.com/2026/02/04/j...

Retirement from the House of Lords means you keep the title. Don't think the media have realised this yet about #Mandelson's latest. @samcoatessky.bsky.social
lordslibrary.parliament.uk/retirement-f...

Mandelson’s Fifth Column The British government’s business department exists to undermine democracy.

1. In 2009 I wrote this. I argued that Peter Mandelson's department “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest.”
This thread explains what I saw, and reaches a startling conclusion.🧵
www.monbiot.com/2009/05/04/m...

Starmer: Big boys made me do it and then ran away. #Mandelson

Of course the PM doesn’t have the power to unilaterally remove Mandelson from the Lords. But given it can only be removed via an act of Parliament in government time, Starmer is hardly powerless, indeed he is the only person who can make it happen.

BBC Radio 4 - The Naked Week, Series 1, Episode 4: Spies, Uncanny Ghosts, and Christmas Crackers We recruit a spy, and try to contact Nigel Farage with a ouija board.

When news was brought to the studio floor of Peter Mandelson's appointment as US ambassador during the recording of this, I involuntarily and rather embarrassingly said "fuck" quite loudly on mic. It didn't make the edit. But I see no reason to retract my view.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

100 times this.

Not for the first time.

One thing this election seems to be showing is that the influence of the Indo, Mail etc has declined considerably. Nobody is listening anymore. #aras25

Photo of four different humanoid ceramic figures in white or white and black

Sophie Woodrow, contemporary ceramics artist who creates odd ceramic figures #womensart

I'm self-radicalizing online to become a better gardener and cat aficionado. 🌱😻

Textile artwork featuring a central stylised sun surrounded by small circular representations of orbiting planets, against a dark background

'Solar System' quilt by Ellen Harding Baker of Cedar County, Iowa, US in 1876, she used her textile work as a teaching aid for her lectures on astronomy in the small towns of her state.
Find out more in the 1st @womensart1 book,
'Unravelling Women's Art'....

Shocked by Epstein’s birthday book? That culture was everywhere before feminism | Rebecca Solnit Feminism exposed the ubiquity of child abuse, rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence – and helped fight that culture

I wrote a thing. As someone who survived the 1970s and kept the receipts.

Someone braver than me needs to get a friend, go to a protest, one of you with a 'I support PA' sign and the other hold a UVF flag.

See what happens.

It’s quite easy to cling to free speech absolutism when you are not the target of a promised ethnic cleansing. The “marketplace of ideas” is a legitimising myth for such politics of annihilation, and “debating” ethno-nationalism is nothing more than the gamification of another’s humanity.

Forget armed bodyguards: I need someone to invent an Auntie app. It pairs you with an Auntie (any gender/race) about a generation older than you. They spend the day on the phone with you, tell you not to worry because you’re amazing, and make you give the phone to strangers so they can talk you up

I never want to hear another American joke about the French surrendering quickly. They had an actual resistance.

A screenshot from windy.com

The equivalent of a Category 2 hurricane due to hit County Clare in the next few hours

A poem I wrote to perform at Glastonbury on the anniversary of Sinead O Connor’s death. Today would have been her 58th birthday - a truly great artist - “they buried me, but they didn’t know I was a seed”

Scarred For Life advent calendar door seven: THE TOMORROW PEOPLE, a show with one of the moodiest title sequences of the 70s, and some of the trippiest visuals...

At Guedelon in France, they are building a C13th castle using only C13th techniques. (Do go: it's fabulous.) People often question the usefulness of experimental archaeology.
Well, sometimes it turns out to be handy to have people around who know how to build large early medieval buildings...🤔