John B

letting karl back on the platform sends a pretty specific message that you can just do this sort of thing, and, if you feel especially pissed or threatened, should

In my opinion these people are the real heroes of the resistance to ICE. There’s no credit, no one can talk about their work (because they directly contact vulnerable families). It’s expensive and dreary and neverending. ICE follows them around. But they refuse to abandon their neighbors

Mr Shit Goes to Washington

If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next is both great and relevant for the current era; My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe feels like it should be more than six words but does narrowly qualify

Deleted a post about “what’s your least favorite song” because the vibes are bad enough already.

Instead: what’s your favorite song that has a long title, say at least 6 words long?

Mine: “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” (Pearl Jam)

A diminutive friend of mine went on a drunken bridge-burning rampage while in university halls; a few days later he noticed that someone had annotated his copy of Whatever And Ever Amen with a sharpie

A square marble tile with a shiny metal ball on it next to some papers and a coffee mug.

I'm buying a kitchen and they sent a sample of the marble counter top with a metal ball showing what the sink will be like. Now my desk looks like a 90s 3D rendering tool demo image.

My takehome from this article is that LLMs are great for quickly coding up something you neither need nor really care about

The Greens have learned true Lib Dem dark arts (they are, of course, right about Goodwin

Setting aside everything else going on here, the term "influencer" has become meaningless and should generally be retired by house style guides. "Social media / online personality" or "content creator" or "podcaster" as the case may be, modified with "political," "right-wing" whatever as applicable.

I've been thinking more about Larry Hart since seeing Blue Moon over the weekend, and my conclusion 80 years later is: 1) Rogers and Hammerstein invented musical theatre as a distinct genre 2) Rogers and Hart invented the pop song as a distinct genre 3) Hart would 100% hate both of these being true

Well yes, but those people are bastards, whereas we're the good guys (I think is fundamentally Starmer's position and the reason why he is a Labour supporter rather than a LD)

Thank god Charles Haughey wasn't alive to see people voting for an explicitly not-corrupt party.

If you've spent your life in an environment where everyone working with and then for you is a serious dedicated highly qualified professional who's turned down big money to work for the public good, the idea your trusted advisor might actually be both an idiot and a lying asshole is hard to conceive

It's a finely balanced decision. On the one hand, you have the architect of a strategy that is not working, who could not do this job in opposition *the first time*, and buy the PM breathing space. On the other, moving it would involve admitting that some of the PM's old legal buddies were right.

The BP Texas City thing is another of those. Not so much Deepwater Horizon, that was a management failure at all levels by all of the partners (the Louisiana court judgement showing BP 67% at fault and Halliburton 3% was insanely rigged, but that's the hazard of doing business with Yanks)

Liberals polling in single digits As the right splinters, it's a real possibility

Conjecture: the more you hate the centre-left, the more complacent you are about the rise of the far right. I'm delighted by the idea of a decades-long ALP ascendancy, but I'm also not daft enough to think it's a given johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/liberals-p...

Wonder if "Mitsubishi" here was a bit like "Fujitsu" in the UK Post Office fiasco, ie some foreign mugs who'd bought a dodgy local company and done nothing to fix it? Certainly the dodgy Mitsubishi supervisor specifically named as responsible had the most midwestern Yank name

YouTube video by Fascinating Horror $99 Million in Damages: The "Big Blue" Crane Collapse | Fascinating Horror

Interesting against-stereotypes one here; I'd definitely assume that a Japanese engineering firm by 1999 would be more safety-conscious and generally competent than a US firm www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxg3...

Yeah if you just go to YouTube.com then it'll recommend you a bunch of random crap, whether you have an account or not. But yeah re annoying

People who've destroyed a walled city defended by half a dozen phalanxes with a battleship in Civ I represent!

YouTube video by Evan Edinger The UK Want To Change Your YouTube Homepage

This is one of those ones where, no matter how generally decent someone who is both a) a YouTuber and b) a Yank by upbringing goes, they are going to be a fucking weirdo about the idea that universal public service TV is good www.youtube.com/watch?v=Naru...

Genuinely I assume a lot of the MAGAites don't know - in their mind Jews look like Sturmer cartoons and are called Isaac Finkelstein

Bulgaria loses a president Bulgaria heads for an early election, with its president set to transition into a party leader.

TIL Bulgarian politics is a bit like Irish politics, in that none of the axes have any relevance to global left/right splits (Ireland never let people vote on the corruption/non-corruption side though)
worldisnotenough.org/2026/01/28/b...

YES (from worldisnotenough.org/2026/01/30/b... )

Noa

This is a good bit challahbeloved.tumblr.com/post/8020285...

The NSW ones are good units underlyingly, they were just procured in a deeply stupid fashion (the bit where the NSW government were too scared of a media beat-up to allow procurement staff to fly to Spain and inspect the factory during the COVID departure bans was a particular low-light)

LNER unveils 'Serenza', its next-generation intercity trains - Transport Designed LNER has released new interior images of its forthcoming CAF-built Class 897 'Serenza' trains.

At the risk of being lazy, anyone know how close in spec these ones are to the NSW long-distance CAF sets? transportdesigned.com/lner-unveils...

The most dangerous man in America Understanding Stephen Miller: “Trump’s Prime Minister”

This is good. Importantly, Miller isn't Trump's PM in the "Kier Starmer" sense or even the "Robert Walpole" sense, but rather in the Grand Vizier Iznogoud sense samf.substack.com/p/the-most-d...

How glamour, romance, & aesthetics are essential for an airship revival The Pragmatism of Luxury

This is beautifully stupid londonreconnections.com/how-glamour-...