Brenda 🇨🇦

Advertisement on CBC news online: “America the beautiful. Plan your trip. Visit the USA” with image of lake and mountains labelled Lake Josephine, Montana.

No. Not happening.

Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.

Hardly.

Ditch the AI claptrap

A lot of Canadians are thinking this, I think

#uspoli #cdnpoli

All My Sons at the Wyndham’s is among the best productions I’ve ever seen. Bryan Cranston, Marianne Jean-Baptiste & Paapa Essiedu lead a breathtaking cast. The acting & staging elevate a brilliant play into something truly extraordinary. Do see it if you can.

Johnson 'hosted Carrie Symonds baby shower at Chequers days before lockdown' The Prime Minister has access to the grace and favour house in Buckinghamshire and used it to recover after suffering from coronavirus

Or this was a factor - www.mirror.co.uk/news/politic...

I’d like to see the lesson plans for this.

Oh my.

James Talarico is incredibly skilled in dismantling Christian Nationalists.

Get this man in the Senate.

I am increasingly of the opinion that people who change menus and look and feel of computer software just so that you know it's a new version should be personally forced to play tech support to my mother for five months.

authors you have the chance to do the funniest thing right now

Stripping rights from refugees today endangers us all tomorrow   When I was 13, I visited a Nazi concentration camp for the first time, confronting my country’s dark history always—and rightly—a bedrock in my growing up.    One image from that visit has stayed with me ever since: a display of prisoners’ personal possessions.    It revealed a world in which those imprisoned were stripped not only of their freedom but of the last tangible traces of their humanity. That systematic erasure was the most important precondition for murdering millions.   Now, as a historian, I know that history does not flow into the present in a straight line, and direct comparisons are rarely appropriate. They certainly are not here.   But history is the one compass humanity has. Too often we choose to ignore it.    The Home Secretary’s proposals for changes to the UK’s asylum system represent such a moment of failure.    Yet the most troubling aspect of Labour’s frantic efforts to appear tough on immigration is not even the historical echoes that taking refugees’ possessions invokes. It is that cost recovery is not the real purpose of the rationale behind it.    The true aim is to appeal to a particular audience—those who take satisfaction in seeing people seeking refuge deprived of what little they have.

It is hard to imagine a more troubling approach to policymaking, and that becomes even clearer when we consider the Home Secretary’s proposals in context.   As of June 2025, there were 42.5 million refugees globally. Over 70% are hosted by low- and middle-income countries. The UK hosts 548,000 refugees; that is 0.78% of the UK population. Around 110,000 people are in receipt of asylum support; that is 0.15% of the UK population.   It is unconscionable that such a small and vulnerable population can be targeted with deliberate cruelty and weaponised for assumed political gain.   And that is all this will ever be. The core miscalculation is believing that adopting these positions will neutralise Reform.    Both historical knowledge and current research show the opposite. Mainstreaming extremist policies legitimises them further and aids only the original. Each step towards Reform’s territory simply gives Reform more power.   But our political discourse has been so degraded over the last decade that many no longer even recognise policies—or the language that frames them—as extreme.    That is how the Home Secretary can speak so casually of desperate people seeking sanctuary as recipients of a ‘golden ticket’ as though the context is Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory rather than countries torn apart by war and starved by famine.

Speak of her ‘moral mission’ to withdraw support, alleging that ‘illegal migration is tearing our country apart.’ And warn of ‘dark forces stirring up anger,’ oblivious to her own role: from the use of blurry, dehumanising images of refugees to spread falsehoods about their impact on communities, to the equally false description of refugee movements as illegal migration.    I suggest the Home Secretary find a mirror if she is keen to understand who is helping turn anger into hate.   Because it is the mainstreaming of far-right talking points that the Home Secretary’s proposals represent that is really tearing our country apart.   For when a policy looks like the far right, speaks to the far right and is hailed by the far right as being far right, it is far right. There is a reason Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is jubilant and speaks of ‘the Overton window having been obliterated.’   This makes a mockery of the Prime Minister’s recent comments on the urgent need to tackle racism. But it also raises alarming questions about the impact this will have on communities around the country, many of which are already deeply divided.    The proposed policies will do nothing for these struggling communities, because their problems simply do not stem from people seeking sanctuary with us. In fact: for as long as politicians focus on immigrants and refugees as the cause of our problems, they will fail to deliver for the British people.   But it is important to grasp the impact of the Home Secretary’s proposals as they carry broader consequences for all of us.

Suggestions for changes to how the European Convention on Human Rights is applied are particularly concerning. Requiring judges to prioritise ‘public safety’—falsely implying refugees pose a threat—would qualify human rights for a specific group.   And once one accepts that human rights can be qualified for one group, one creates tools that can be used against anyone.   So what these proposals really mean goes far beyond asylum policy. This is about the kind of country we will have in the future. If human rights are no longer universal, they become a means for exclusion and control.    That is why stripping rights from refugees today can only enable a system that endangers all our rights tomorrow.    And that is why our historical compass matters and why we have to use it now. Because that compass tells us without doubt that when first they come for one group that is never where it ends. 

Tried to get this published but no luck, so might as well ‘publish’ it here so it’s not a complete waste!

➡️ Stripping rights from refugees today endangers us all tomorrow

#asylum #Mahmood #history #humanrights

That is what we have in Scotland. It is not ideal.

Dark forces may be stirring. But in the darkness, we must light a candle. Refugees deserve compassion and dignity.

Have they mentioned teeth yet? Gleefully punching down is not something I expected from Starmer and co.

Politico: "The vote for Brexit inflicted a GDP blow of between 6 percent and 8 percent in the decade following the referendum — even worse than predicted beforehand, according to U.S. think tank the National Bureau of Economic Research"

Don't imagine this will end up on many Faragist front pages...

NEW: Epstein survivors release the most powerful PSA I have ever seen.

Make this go viral so every member of the House of Representatives sees it.

This is a MUST READ:

"Hell yeah, I'm goated and based" I tell myself as I sit alone in a room talking to my imaginary friend. In another life and time, maybe I'd have been sat with my friends playing split screen and laughing with them, forming memories and bonds.

"You're so cool, buy more stuff!" says Alexa

AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

Next year! On my list!

Blessed be the fruit.

For Zelenskyy it was “you didn’t say thank you/ didn’t wear a suit”

C’mon @mark-carney.bsky.social
A reprimand for the agent and apology to this gentleman are in order

For some reason, the game watchers in my house are not bothered by the font.

YouTube video by Felipe Bustos Sierra NAE PASARAN - Official Trailer

This is worth watching. I bought it on dvd but I think it is available online. youtu.be/VD6d0xKZNRg?...

Have to say I find the proposals to take away the route to permanent settlement of refugees both shocking and repulsive. It's code for 'whatever you do and contribute you can never become one of us so we won't allow you to try.' Racism, pure and simple.

Dyson is a brand not allowed in my house due to his support of Brexit.

I struggle in tolerating my mom’s elderly antics at times.