Gave up on town yesterday (racists). Today exploring the Olympic Park with @sabsldn.bsky.social.
Officially … advocacy for low energy buildings and active travel. In reality, a running commentary on what I’m reading or doing. I also journal (intermittently) at groupbuilding.net. Passivhaus Certified Designer.
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Gave up on town yesterday (racists). Today exploring the Olympic Park with @sabsldn.bsky.social.
Also, the BBC is now behaving like the Mail. Why?
Going to assume that the concerning stillness from Labour is because Mandelson himself is fighting back internally. Thanks for that if so.
Someone Kirk-like will come along, on the basis that he was a symptom along with his shooter.
Worth noting that Kirk didn't have the manners that he supposedly expected from others and was in fact very pouty. His Cambridge Union appearance ended - when he'd lost a talking point on Gaza - with him saying that the UK (all of it) was destined to become a third world hellhole.
I wrote my own Charlie Kirk obituary, and about valuing truth over manners: www.thenation.com/article/poli...
"According to WELT [...] five drones were on a direct flight path toward a NATO base before being intercepted by Dutch Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets. www.politico.eu/article/russ...
“Words…are not value neutral. They can be kinetic, and they can inspire others to act. That act might look like a hateful tweet, a threatening phone call, doxxing a target, harassing their family, or worse. That is not debate. That is the active silencing of it.” open.substack.com/pub/wicziped...
On long range drones: yes, they have a drone production line (or several). So they send drones. If the incursion into Poland was deliberate (still on the fence tbh), then it was a case of 'try drones, see what happens', imo.
Just seen a video of Russian PoWs not even equipped with uniforms. Just the clothes they were wearing when recruited (you guess). It is not going well.
It is frustrating in this time that the sociological tools we have are so modest, and trusted in by so few, and the (negative) patterns of human behaviour so poorly confirmed, given that the harms are so great and pressing.
Some loss of symmetry here. To be fair, he's 80, near as.
Making lists!
The other stones were stolen by the sassenachs is why.
TIL that the core of the Earth is 2½ years younger than the surface purely due to gravitational time dilation. Personally this brings the concept which I’ve always found mind blowing much closer to home and makes it more real. www.science.org/content/arti...
It comes out mixed with bravado, aggression, and a determination not to lose, or to be seen to lose. But the fear is real, I suspect. And should temper some of the rhetoric all around. Anyway, I can't take more news for the moment.
A bit quieter from the Russians last night. But we'll have to wait and see for a few more days I guess. Going to rehearse again the idea that there is real apprehension on the Russian side about (a) 'Western' soft power (that can flip whole populations) and (b) 'Western' hard power too.
Not sure I see the purpose in this shaming. People have to do a certain amount of processing to get to a considered position. Social media gives you snapshots of that only (one reason it is (potentially) harmful).
Again, not an expert, but Polish airspace is open, Ukraine’s is not. Which isn’t to diminish what Ukraine is doing. But you would want to be _extremely_ careful about letting off missiles in open airspace.
This was not free speech, conventionally understood.
It is not good to engineer the anger of others. Something like that.
Shooting other humans, not in self-defence, is not good. I wouldn't ignore the potential for low key violence in political speech-making though, and Kirk's 'Q&A' sessions - where volunteers were humiliated - appear to have been harmful in that way. The US needs to tone it down in all dimensions.
Years of lead, unfortunately.
Mandelson is gone by the morning I hope.
Vetting failure now.
Possibly where this goes?
Which doesn't make what they're doing acceptable; more that one should be cautious with intent attributions.
After all, they've launched 000s of these things and have tried to finesse hitting targets in western Ukraine with circuitous routing, etc. and quite plausible (to my mind) that they could make some mistakes with the programming, at a certain rate.
Just to say, on the basis of no expertise, but anyway; probably best not to assume that the Russian drone incursion was _deliberate_ short of better evidence (a repeat along similar lines would be good evidence imo).
Possibly _all_ of our ethical theory is so wrong that it connects with absolutely no moral facts at all. I think that would be unlucky. It’s a possibility, but this worry lies beyond anything the moral twin earth experiment can tell you about.
There is a certain luck to science. A first go at a theory has to get _something_ right, to get traction, and for theory to become rivalled, and for successful future syntheses of theory. Similarly mutatis mutandis with ethics.
Won’t bore with the details, but the upshot is that the Moral Twin Earth worries are overstated, once you take a fair look at the history of theory (mostly in science). Theories enter into rivalries that are resolved, all the time, but we do not worry about missing referents there.
Got my dissertation to first draft, sent it off for supervision. Background stress levels suddenly halved, perhaps more!
I don't say this often, but if you follow me, I'm asking you to read this: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
at 1st it's funny (Grandpa wants a steak & no one can tell him No & he believes his own nonsense & he's stunned normal people are calling him Hitler, only b/c they didn't have time to build an effigy to burn) but then you realize that we were 1 steak knife from President Noem & it's not funny at all
Well done, Norway. That's progress www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...
Liz Truss shouldn't use the words unleash and dominance in proximity, I feel.
Inflexible tree break in storm.
Welcome to Bluesky @georgiosvarouxakis.bsky.social, the hairdresser's husband & the author (most recently) of The West: The History of an Idea - about which he is interviewed by Philip Oltermann in this timely & informative piece. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...
I was offered a replacement cylinder lock for £200 or one with an internal thumb turn thingy for £300, bargain. Took the £200 one (and now use a key to exit).
The Reform UK conference gives a standing ovation to "special guest" Lucy Connolly, who pled guilty to stirring up racial hatred after she called for asylum hotels to be set on fire with people inside them.
Tally Ho does some serious distance (for the first time?). Great watch. Heinleinian feel to proceedings—conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, etc.—but the whole series of films is very impressive. And relaxing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJEx...
Trying _really hard_ to see London’s protests today as a chance to chat to the 11 yo about democracy & protest.
Pro-genocide counter-protest. Blocking Waterloo bridge, so we’re two bridges down today, thanks for that, in addition.
Also: nationalise school uniforms.
Lucy Connolly, jailed for urging people to set fire to hotels housing refugees, is speaking at the Reform party conference today. All the worst people.
In town. Feel that TfL should just give up on buses on Whitehall and re-route permanently. Protests there are now a feature of most Saturdays; zeitgeist (again).
Yeah this is real. Mike Johnson said Trump was an FBI informant in the Epstein case.
Landlords bring in £56bn per year, but £26bn of that is profit just landing in their bank accounts and doing very little for the economy (except being taxed at lower rates than employees). Great piece from @willdunn.bsky.social www.newstatesman.com/politics/eco...
🇸🇰🇺🇦 Slovakia finally supports Ukraine's accession to the EU, — Zelensky after meeting with Fico
UK 30 year gilt yield, down from the breathlessly reported 5.75%, is now 5.51%. Not that you will hear this from all the journalist accounts who were gunning for Reeves all week. Please share.
Pretty poor jobs figures for the US for August. Only 22,000 added. #TrumpSlump
Asking nicely for the oil to be turned back on.
Doing a week with no workouts (rest) but I do not like it.
Head prefect Nigel.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Nice article on one of the good things the government are doing. Slightly more advanced than my idea of simply giving communities a few grand to have a party (they should do this as well).
If Farage wants to associate with that, let him, and we can point out that he wants to be friendly with people who make calls to "set fire" to "fucking hotels full of the bastards".
Lucy Connolly, let's remember, used the megaphone of social media to say "set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards" and I think it's safe to say that she is not a nice person, whether or not you think it deserves jail time.
I guess so? But wanting big penalties (actual jail time) for small offences seems socially unstable as a way forward, to me.
What line, I could reply. There may be no hard cut off. But look, instead of a conceptual exchange, we're sliding into dogmatic trench digging. That's the internet for you. As I say, let's not add to the misery.
Proportionality of response, effectiveness of response, how wide the net is cast (who prosecutors ignore, who they go after), pattern of offending, the evidential bar that has to be cleared; there's _much_ more to it all than where to draw the line.
It _is_ being under-reported. Someone has done some good work here (the mayoralty and boroughs or schools, I'd guess).
Trying now to think of other ways in which the Linehan guy could have been approached about some edgy tweets. Public arrest does not look like a good way to go about it. Possibly instead: the police tell Twitter and moderators just delete with minimal comment. It's their platform after all.
And everything is now _documented_. And easy to document. That was supposed to bring a new era of citizen journalism, and we do get that, but when every utterance is recorded, well policing follows that, so now filming someone is a way to low key SWAT them, basically.
A transgression is still a transgression, and thinking it excessive that a hammer must fall on every transgression is not to _endorse_ it.
Go see Eddington. It captures (a big part of) the zeitgeist very well. The intense & disproportionate bad feeling that now attaches to minor transgressions, amplified by our amazing data centres.
The internet is already full of misery, so let's not add to it. All I'm seeing there is an expression of hard cases make bad law, Streeting-style. Legislators do want to avoid unintended consequences (like jail time for a tweet). Important not to read extreme bad faith into _everything_.
Agree that the thing with Farage going to America to make common cause with neo-nazis over there about how we regulate the internet over here: amazingly awful, makes him an open target.
Unfair, but never mind.
Since you tend not to remark on something that isn't there, this might get under-reported: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
The DC metro, ironically, is a gleaming showpiece; built to be one.
So the left outside the Labour Party now has five poles, I think * Polanski's Red/Greens * LibDem-ish "mango" Greens (with MPs). * Sultana's personal following * Corbyn's personal following (with assorted fragments of ageing Trot/Tankie left propping him up). * Communalists
I will take the four years we’ve got as a gift, believe me. And then we’re into god knows what crap.
For my part, I think it’s a good government and the best in ages. Perhaps the best we could have in the conditions. I sleep better at night because of them. But I thought that about Brown too. Merit doesn’t count for much in UK politics. It’s mostly conducted as a fictional drama.
Summer of 24 seems to be where the damage mostly happened. Unsure of the reasons. Suspect they just don’t talk enough - about anything - and silence is damaging on its own.
Poor sleep / repeated waking would be another sign, I guess.
I feel I don't train hard enough for overtraining, nonetheless, feel incredibly wiped, and yesterdays' maximum HR was low by about 6-7 bpm, which is meant to be a sign.
They have some seriously shonky urbanism over there.
Patting myself on the back for recognising today’s unzoomed city in 3. Thought South African initially. Requires some local knowledge I would say, so lucky for you if you have it!
Kid delivered to his secondary, first day. A good moment for any parent.
Too many bike rides? Feel a bit shaky this morning tbh.
Labour absolutely cannot go on holiday in the summer and need to start filling the airtime 24/7.
From here. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/it-s-time-...
The tie-lessness of Trump and his coterie has been noted. This photo was August 22. Why?
😎Keep cool - the Passivhaus way! Find out the key Passivhaus strategies employed to keep our homes and buildings cool, and the situations in which additional active cooling might be needed. Passivhaus summer comfort👇 www.passivhaustrust....
My latest cartoon for @theguardian.com books. p.s. I have a new book of cartoons out soon: www.tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2
They might have included a pyramid early on. Also, who knew they were so into swimming pools. All I could think of was ‘somewhere hot and very populous’ and then I went and cheated.
Off to see 'Eddington' and hoping it delivers on the bleak sarcastic nihilism.
"It's done." "Ah yes, but what _sort_ of spells can the characters spend their spell points on?"
Now that I've put a desk and extra shelves in the 11 yo's room, all sorts of further upgrades are unlocked. There's a place to put a dictionary, a calculator, paper, and pens. And I can send him there to _write down_ the elaborate rules for the D&D style games that he invents and burbles on about.
Tbf, he ain't looking well.
'Trump and his granddaughter Kai Trump load the motorcade on the south lawn of the White House in Washington DC on August 30, 2025, as they head to Trump National golf course in Sterling, Virginia' (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)
Not to fuel a rumour, but otoh the emptiness of the Trump schedule plus the White House location will tend to fuel a rumour. Usually he's at least at a golf club for the weekend. rollcall.com/factbase/tru...
She was born under Russian fire. She died under Russian fire. Angelina came into this world in 2022 — during a Russian shelling. Yesterday, Russia killed her and her mother. They were among the dead in a missile strike on Kyiv. Another Ukrainian child who never knew peace.
I don't think we fully grasped yet how important solar will be as an energy source. Great graph @carbonbrief.org based on @iea.org data.
I was shocked when I first saw these results from standard climate models used in IPCC reports: for high emissions, the Atlantic overturning circulation #AMOC shuts down in all 9 models that ran past 2100, and is well on the way to shutdown by 2100. Our paper on that is out today.🧵
Terminal insomnia? I’ve gotten much better at finally getting back to sleep at say 6 am, then keeping it going until ideally 9. Needs an eye mask though.
Rwandan coffee from Vilnius, in support of Ukraine.
