Renegade-redhead soixante-sixard. Broadly Liberal but I like boundaries. Blog a bit.
Tavistock, Devon
Joined October 2010
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Crime as measured by the national crime survey is down remember. Yet just walk around any British town or city and organised crime is everywhere around you.
The Lentil retweeted
This is Fadi al-Halsa, a young Orthodox Christian (Rum Orthodox) dentist from Karak, Jordan who only just graduated from Alexandria University's dental school this year.
Instead of celebrating his bright future, Fadi's parents and two sisters are now laying him to rest. Fadi was martyred in the Karak Saint George Church terrorist attack in Jordan.
Timely: we are off to Egypt next week (first time back in nearly 30 years!).
My old flatmate's Dad had his leg shot off fighting the British in Ismailia (but thankfully he didn't bear a grudge against me personally).
Today on @TheRestHistory, a new series on 1956.
We kick off with THE SUEZ CRISIS, which forced on Britain a sombre & depressing truth: you can have a suave manner, perfect tailoring & an immaculately clipped moustache, & still massively screw up
linktr.ee/restishistory
Love a bit of 52:48!
Brazil (Presidential Election, second round), 99.7% counted:
Lula (PT, centre-left): 51.8% (+0.2)
F. Bolsonaro (PL, right): 48.2% (-0.2)
(+/- vs 90.7% counted)
#Brazil #Lula #Bolsonaro
Worth listening to @CLiuAnon on her new book on trauma: hers is a consistently strong analysis on Western PMCification which gets under the skin of our political decay.
I'm definitely no expert on Brazil or its politics but this is interesting. Hope to visit at some point, it's an important and interesting country that's rather passed me by tbh.
I suspect that, when the final decision was made, more Brazilians preferred Lula—who, for all his faults, still represents the old Brazil (coastal, Catholic, Portuguese, SoDem)—over another Bolsonaro, who embodies the newer Americanization trend in Latin America, complete with its neo-Pentecostal craziness.
In a sense, Lula stands for traditional Brazilian culture and mores, whereas Bolso reeks of foreign influence and distinctly un-Brazilian ideas.
The Lentil retweeted
Transhumanism and transgenderism are related aspects of the religion of the tech bros, whatever precisely it should be called. It stresses alienation from humanity and from the physical world, and a desire to transcend both.
If this were a thousand years earlier, they’d be ascetic monks or similar - they also would not be allowed near money or power.
The blurring of the distinctions between male and female and man and machine are both simply the latest consequences of an anti-teleological philosophy of nature that has deceptively cloaked itself in the mantle of science since early modernity. More here: claremontreviewofbooks.com/g…
Absolutely right. He's the perfect PM for a tv vibes-based welfare nation.
The vision is doomed and the next election may be one to lose anyway.
HMG Comms Grid meets National Grid collapse caused by ineptitude of successive UK politicians.
I salute their indefatigability etc etc but we're not going to buy it.
The UK government has advised every citizen to keep emergency supplies of water and long-life food, in order to improve the country's resilience in the face of increasing threats.
Ministers said households should aim to have enough basic supplies to last 72 hours - in case of extreme weather, technological breakdown - or the possibility of "state-sponsored terrorism" by Russia or other hostile powers targeting the UK's infrastructure.
Good analysis of political collapse and inertia through the lens of the rise of anti-fascism.
thenorthernstar.online/2025/…
The Lentil retweeted
If you’ve visited Egypt, you know how annoying vendors and hustlers can be, especially in tourist areas. I consider it part of visiting a developing country, but I have to admit that Egypt takes it to another level.
Recently, though, my Instagram algorithm has been pushing videos of travel bloggers exploring parts of Cairo and Alexandria rarely visited by tourists. They go around offering huge sums of money for products worth mere pennies.
But the videos reveal a very different side of Egypt. Some vendors look startled and hesitate to accept the money. Others outright refuse it. With their almost nonexistent English, they keep repeating, “No, no.” And others even offered the product for free as a welcome gesture.
Honestly, it’s a side of Egypt I had forgotten still existed. Thanks to these travel bloggers, I’m reminded that it does.
They're hoping the whole holding your nose while voting thing will work its magic for another five years.
It might stave off Le Pen again but Eurocentrism has still run out of road.
France, Toluna-Harris poll:
Presidential run-off election
Le Pen (RN-PfE): 70% (+3)
Mélenchon (LFI-LEFT): 30% (-3)
Le Pen (RN-PfE): 57% (+1)
Philippe (HOR-RE): 43% (-1)
Le Pen (RN-PfE): 59% (n.a.)
Glucksmann (PS/PP-S&D): 41% (n.a.)
+/- vs. 05-08 October 2026
Fieldwork: 23 October 2026
Sample size: 2,094
➤ europeelects.eu/2026/06/02/p…
Stopped yesterdayat Morrisons Cribbs Causeway. During Storm Austen, yes, but place was operating on battery power.
Pretty obvious now that prepping makes some sense, not because of Putler but because the grid is not up to snuff and is going downhill fast.
Any acountant will tell you that you need to be *extremely* careful in netting off. This should set of alarm bells.
Not properly recognising liabilities is one of the two pathologies of every financial scandal. (The other is recognising revenue which never turns into cash flow).
When Rachel Reeves changed the headline debt target in October 2024, she did more than tweak an accounting rule.
By switching from measuring public sector net debt (PSND ex BoE) to public sector net financial liabilities (PSNFL), ministers created a channel to spend the same taxpayer money through Public Financial Institutions, or “PuFins”.
Debt is still debt but under Labour’s fiddled measure, spending via a PuFin barely registers against the fiscal rules.
As this excellent report from the Centre for Policy Studies shows, had the old target been kept, the October 2024 Budget would have broken the debt rule by £6 billion. Under the new one, it passed with £16 billion to spare.
Expect next week’s budget to include more examples of this dodge.
cps.org.uk/research/pufins-t…
This ties to the Freakonomics "why did crime fall in the 1990s" chapter.
