Pretty sure North Korea does allow people to criticise the government in the way the Mail does.
Retired academic (theoretical linguist). University of Essex/Bangor University. Lives on Ynys Môn. Has lived in Essex, Poland, Edinburgh, Warwickshire, etc. https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/borsl53905/bob-borsley
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Pretty sure North Korea does allow people to criticise the government in the way the Mail does.
He’s a worthy successor to all those who lied for nearly 50 years about Katyn.
It’s news if Putin says something true. Not sure when it last happened.
So Musk was wasting his money when he bought Twitter? And Putin is wasting his money on troll farms?
Man wants to bring about "a fairer, kinder world". Hope he has some ideas for dealing with the world’s dictators, who are neither fair nor kind. But since he worked for the TV channel of one (Khamenei) and recommended the TV channel of another (Putin), I'm sceptical:
What do you plan to go about the world’s dictators, who are neither fair nor kind?
Some get some exercise, while others get on with breakfast:
Berries on Ynys Môn:
2 September 1895 | A Polish woman, Aniela Kolano, was born in Święcice. In #Auschwitz from 1 July 1942. No. 8148 She perished in the camp on 7 October 1942.
What they actually think of each other:
The voice of a non-shadowy foreign organisation.
If this guy thinks only people born in Britain should matter in Britain, he should learn about a guy not born in the US who was able to play a huge role in the last US election because of his vast wealth. I forget his name.
If he thinks only people born in Britain should matter in Britain, he should learn about a guy not born in the US who was able to play a huge role in the last US election because of his vast wealth. I forget his name.
Well, there's a surprise.
Some people aren’t keen on brutal dictators who unleash death and destruction in a neighbouring country. Others think they’re a delight:
Ted Heath condemned Powell. I doubt whether any prominent figures on the right will condemn this.
OTD in 1939 Adolf Hitler began his special military operation to protect ethnic Germans from persecution by Poland. Imagine such a bullshit excuse today
Maybe members of the government could point this out.
'Mushroom Medley´ by artist/photographer Jill Bliss who explores the coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest, creating nature-inspired work #WomensArt #September
‘Foreign far right billionaire incites insurrection’ shouldn’t be that difficult to condemn. It’s a scenario from the world of James Bond.
Brexiteers used to specialise in a polite kind of xenophobia. Now they’re moving on to the crudest kind of racism (although the area between Epping and the sea is a very small part of the country):
Apparently, 35% is nearly 3 times as big as 20%. Farage must have skipped a few maths classes at Dulwich College:
Good piece by @writesbright.bsky.social on how brexiteers went from railing against the awfulness of EU membership to ranting about asylum seekers: open.substack.com/pub/writesbr...
another word for “foreign"
They see "external" as another word "foreign", and hence a bad thing. They don't like foreigners (except for people like Trump and Musk, and probably Orban, and Putin).
"There's not that many black girls playing in the professional game and I'm hoping now I've set a bit of a platform so more young black girls - and boys, of course - can see they can do it too." Good to see her being inclusive.
Very talented teenager: www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricke...
Don’t these people believe in capitalism? If there is enough demand for the kind of bread she favours bread makers will produce it.
Good piece on who exactly some asylum seekers are. It’s not hard to hate people when they are just numbers. It’s a bit harder when they have names and stories. But no doubt some will make the effort: metro.co.uk/2025/08/29/w...
Some important facts:
Morning on Ynys Môn:
Interesting thread:
The Afghan women's football/soccer team, who relocated to the UK to escape the Taliban's removal of female rights, including exclusion from all public life #WomensArt #AfghanWomen
This is where the empty headed Flag shagging leads. Race hate.
Dictators can “get things done.” For example, Putin has got a million Russians killed or maimed in Ukraine in 3 and a half years.
This presumably means that Starmer is our Chernenko, Sunak our Andropov, and Truss our Brezhnev. But I'm pretty sure Truss didn't last as long as Brezhnev.
29 August 1941 | An Italian Jewish girl, Gianna Di Segni, was born in Rome. In October 1943 she was deported to #Auschwitz with her parents Rita and Riccardo. None of them survived.
In Britain, there are now about 45,000 social media influencers “which is roughly the same as the number of dentists”. www.thetimes.com/article/4673...
Morning on Ynys Môn:
This presumably means that Starmer is our Chernenko, Sunak our Andropov, and Truss our Brezhnev. Pretty sure Truss was not in power for as long as Brezhnev:
We had a free and fair election last year. There weren't a lot of those in the Soviet Union in he 80s or in any previous decade of its existence. But if you don't value democracy, that is of no importance.
We had a free and fair election last year. There weren't a lot of those in the Soviet Union in he 80s or in any previous decade of its existence. But maybe they don't believe in democracy at the Telegraph, so that is not important.
Autumn is coming:
I'm all for Reform picking dead people as their candidate for various positions. Dead people don't generally cause many problems: insidecroydon.com/2025/08/27/f...
I guess the cross “appeared” by magic. The almighty moving in mysterious ways again.
Morning on Ynys Môn:
"Each year more than 12,000 Germans from all walks of life sent Hitler letters of praise and sycophantic veneration approaching adoration." (Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949, p.289) Sounds like Trump's ideal state of affairs:
That’s bad.
“Fearing another 1917 moment, more of Russia’s armed service personnel are engaged in monitoring and policing internal dissent than are supporting the war against Ukraine.” engelsbergideas.com/essays/russi...
The ever-eloquent @rafaelbehr.bsky.social pointedly refusing to mince his words on what Farage has done for us. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
"There are over 225 unambiguous ‘wolf’ place-names in Wales" (p.167)
"Wales hosts some of the most diverse communities of fungi in the world, in large part because of the high proportion of the country that is covered by unimproved, marginal grassland, not enriched by Fertilisers." (p.135)
"Some of the oldest hedgebanks, like the gorclawdd in Dinas and some of the ancient cloddiau in Snowdonia, are unsung functional monuments of real antiquity in the landscape, rivalling castles, standing stones and, in some cases, Stonehenge." (p.92)
"... some of the stone walls draped across the hillsides of Snowdonia are among the best preserved and most complex examples of early land division in Europe." (p.83)
"a remarkable sixteenth-century poem from north-east Wales. ‘Coed Marchan’ tells of a group of squirrels that went to London to file an affidavit for the destruction of a woodland – Coed Marchan – near Ruthin" (p.59)
"humans have been intentionally influencing where and under what conditions trees have grown here since soon after the ice receded." (p.51)
"As we come to the end of the Mesolithic period around 4,000 BC, this is a landscape that has already been shaped by the complex interactions of humans, large mammals and trees for a good 6,000 years." (p.46)
"There was no period, either of hundreds or thousands of years, of undisturbed nature colonising the land before humans came on the scene to mess everything up." (p.27)
It explores 7 types of landscape: coed, cloddiau, cae, ffridd, mynydd, rhos, perllan, and sets out some (probably controversial) ideas about what the future could look like. Some quotes:
Just finished reading this excellent discussion of the Welsh landscape, how it has been used since the end of the Ice Age, and how it has been understood by those who have lived in it: amzn.eu/d/2U2K7cj
Morning on Ynys Môn:
To be the candidate for British Prime Minister of both Donald Trump *and* the Taliban is not a pitch that has ever been tried before
The problem with liking a dictator is that once you’ve got a dictator, it doesn’t matter whether you like him or not. You’re stuck with him until he dies (possibly unpleasantly, e.g. Ceausescu) or runs away to seek the protection of a bigger dictator (e.g. Assad):
The problem with liking a dictator is that once you’ve got a dictator, it doesn’t matter whether you like him or not. You’re stuck with him until he dies (possibly unpleasantly, e.g. Ceausescu) or runs away to seek the protection of a bigger dictator (e.g. Assad).
He would have loved to be Frederick II, who was King of Sicily, King of Germany, King of Italy, Holy Roman Emperor, and King of Jerusalem: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederi...
The church of St Mary Magdalene, Battlefield, Shrewsbury, reputedly built on or near a mass grave of those killed in the Battle of Shrewsbury, 1403:
Trump would have loved to be Frederick II, who was King of Sicily, King of Germany, King of Italy, Holy Roman Emperor, and King of Jerusalem: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederi...
More people arriving in “small boats”:
Good piece by @jamesbloodworth.bsky.social on some of the people who are “concerned” about asylum seekers: www.forthedeskdrawer.com/p/going-afte...
Makes you wonder how many of his critics would have ended up in an early grave if Putin hadn’t been liberal, moderate, humanitarian minded and peaceful:
Makes you wonder how many of his critics would have ended up in an early grave if he hadn’t been liberal, moderate, humanitarian-minded and peaceful.
It would be nice to live in a world in which this was no longer relevant except as a guide to an unpleasant world from which we have now escaped. Sadly this isn’t on the horizon:
It would be nice to live in a world in which this was no longer relevant except as a guide to an unpleasant world from which we have now escaped. Sadly this isn’t on the horizon.
Not all nationalisms are the same. Russian nationalism, seeking to subjugate Ukraine, is wholly reactionary. Ukrainian nationalism, seeking to preserve Ukrainian independence, is quite progressive:
Not all nationalisms are the same. Russian nationalism, seeking to subjugate Ukraine, is wholly reactionary. Ukrainian nationalism, seeking to preserve Ukrainian independence, is quite progressive.
This is very low-IQ fascism. Surely other fascist takeovers in history have been a bit more subtle, artful, crafty?
You can the gig here at 3:21:00: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVeE...
You forgot to set out your reasoning. But maybe there isn’t any.
Lavrov’s response 3 times is to insist that Russia has “never, ever targeted civilian sites.” So the apartment buildings and hospitals we see in flames every day and bodies of civilians is all made up apparently. This is who they are - liars and barbarians.
Russia certainly needs a legitimate leader instead of the guy who’s been in power for a quarter of a century with his critics regularly ending up in an early grave:
Change "a preacher" to "six preachers", and this by R.S. Thomas (The chapel) is a pretty good description of the gig:
The mighty Oysterband at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival, apparently their last U.K. show, but as good as ever:
Since I have no idea who you are I’d be foolish to waste any more time on you. So goodbye.
Morning in Shrewsbury:
You present no evidence for your claims, and you could be anybody at all. So goodbye.
It’s the ‘how hard can it be?’ school of politics.
The importance of human rights should be clear to anyone who looks at a country where they don’t have them, e.g. Putin’s Russia.
I can see why you hide behind a silly pseudonym.
A change in government policy is not the government losing control of the country.
Someone should give this guy a picture of Chamberlain and Hitler so that he could display that too to all his admirers:
If someone was jailed for encouraging others to burn down the house of the editor of the Sun, they probably wouldn’t call that person a political prisoner:
When 63% of people have false beliefs about an important topic and only 8% of people know the truth, something has gone badly wrong. But of course for people who benefit from the false beliefs it's all going quite well;
Morning in the Cadnant gorge, Ynys Môn:
Suspect all the apologists for "Lucy" would not be so quick to defend someone who had urged people to burn down their homes.
I doubt whether The Telegraph would be so relaxed if someone took to social media to urge others to burn down the house of the editor of Telegraph.
Then the headline is very poor.
Papers show where they stand by where they do and do not exercise appropriate journalistic scepticism. The Times shows it stands firmly on the Right.
Hard to escape the feeling that some people really want to see a "wave of protests" against hotels for migrants. And if the protests turn nasty and someone gets hurt, they will probably find it understandable:
People in the Far Left used to think the government was losing control of the country whenever there were a few good demos about some matter. Goodwin seems to have a lot in common with such people.
