Phil Kendall

What if they constantly want culture war because policy war is complicated and hard and culture war is stupid and easy

Am disappointed that the Fish and Chip van that visits our office hasn't told me I'm in the top 5% of battered sausage eaters.

There's a house in the Peaks that I have apparently looked at 79 times in 2025. Which is shameful. At least they didn't tell me I was in the top 0.01% of 'fans'.

I quite like my Spotify Unwrapped summary every year (mine that is, I couldn't care less about yours!). Apparently there are only 12 people in the world who listened to more Follakzoid than me last year!

I've now had a TopCashBack Unwrapped and a Rightmove Roundup, among others. Straight to Trash.

Harassment, 'untruthful' evidence, and 'unusual' legal questions. Our reporter Xander Elliards looks at nine points from the Sandie Peggie ruling that the rest of the media has left out

America's Weakness, Europe's Strength The 'new' national security strategy is the admission of defeat from a declining country

America's NatSec strategy is an expression of weakness, borne out in its record, 0 from 3, of trying to force a pro-Russian surrender on Ukraine. It has been Europe's strength that prevented this. Much remains to be done, but we should avoid the counsel of despair.

open.substack.com/pub/arthursn...

Bronze plaque saying "A Letter to the Future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. August 2019. 415ppm CO2"

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque:
"This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

my great-grandparents arrived in the UK in the 1890s with nothing.
they sold pickles from the front room window, took in laundry, worked as tailors.
their children were nurses, teachers, salesmen.
their grandchildren were professors, designers, opticians, doctors, magistrates, entrepreneurs.

My dad abhors any negative comments about immigrants. Asked him recently why he’s so strong on it: ‘Because we’re always happy to take the rich and clever ones. Which means it’s not about disliking immigrants. It’s about disliking the poor and vulnerable. And that’s a bad human instinct.’

it might seem surprising that the people who said “look, let trans people live their lives, but i have Reasonable Concerns about sports and toilets” aren’t up in arms about this, but what you have to remember is that those people who said that are liars who were lying

Bit weird, Etsy. Bit weird.

I suspect you have to be quite racist to stand out as "the racist guy" at a boys public school of the 1980s.

We're watching the wholesale burning of every scrap of dignity afforded to trans people in the UK, their rights, their medical services, their employment, their place within society, their bodily functions.

It is a disgrace, and a disgusting stain on the government and media of this country.

"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

1/ The Wall Street Journal reports that the main focus of the US-Russia peace talks is to get commercial advantage for American companies, and personal benefits for individuals linked to the Trump Administration. European officials are said to be shocked by the plans. ⬇️

Kemi Badenoch says welfare spending is unchristian Kemi Badenoch says welfare spending is unchristian

Kemi Badenoch says welfare spending is unchristian

The territories Ukraine holds are Ukraine, you absolute genocidal maniac

The "don't have an extra kid if you can't afford it" brigade get awfully upset when you suggest they don't stay in their £2m house if they can't afford it, don't they?

If you want some good news this morning, I showed my three boys the PM doing the six/seven thing and now they have all stopped doing it.

We are now further away from the theatrical release of Raiders of the Lost Ark (June 12, 1981) than it was from the year it takes place in (1936). We have reached the Indiana Jones event horizon.

Do football ethics matter? To these two they do.

Manuel Älter

This whole interview was basically just an excuse for them to talk about Arsenal lol

Fifteen Years

Properly moving xkcd
xkcd.com/3172/

Founders on LinkedIn still seem to be struggling with the difference between telling people about their humble beginnings and admitting to straight up committing fraud.

In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Nick Clegg, Meta's then-head of global public policy, to better fund child safety work.

💀💀

Newmarket MP Matt Hancock gave a £37bn Covid testing contract to Jockey Club director Dido Harding, who subcontracted it to Grand National sponsor Randox, employer of Tory MP Owen Paterson, whose late wife chaired Aintree racecourse. That's how the Tories handled the pandemic.

To be fair to Nigel Farage, Reform UK has always insisted that the European parliament is corrupt. And now the party has finally provided indisputable proof.